Month: December 2010

Creative Commons photo by Vincent Diamante. Click to see the original.

Worth reading: The New Yorker has a profile of Nintendo’s greatest asset, game creator and the man behind Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto.

An excerpt:

When Shigeru Miyamoto was a child, he didn’t really have any toys, so he made his own, out of wood and string. He put on performances with homemade puppets and made cartoon flip-books. He pretended that there were magical realms hidden behind the sliding shoji screens in his family’s little house. There was no television. His parents were of modest means but hardly poor. This was in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, in the rural village of Sonobe, about thirty miles northwest of Kyoto, in a river valley surrounded by wooded mountains. As he got older, he wandered farther afield, on foot or by bike. He explored a bamboo forest behind the town’s ancient Shinto shrine and bushwhacked through the cedars and pines on a small mountain near the junior high school. One day, when he was seven or eight, he came across a hole in the ground. He peered inside and saw nothing but darkness. He came back the next day with a lantern and shimmied through the hole and found himself in a small cavern. He could see that passageways led to other chambers. Over the summer, he kept returning to the cave to marvel at the dance of the shadows on the walls.

Miyamoto has told variations on the cave story a few times over the years, in order to emphasize the extent to which he was surrounded by nature, as a child, and also to claim his youthful explorations as a source of his aptitude and enthusiasm for inventing and designing video games. The cave has become a misty but indispensable part of his legend, to Miyamoto what the cherry tree was to George Washington, or what LSD is to Steve Jobs. It is also a prototype, an analogue, and an apology—an illuminating and propitious way to consider his games, or, for that matter, anyone else’s. It flatters a vacant-eyed kid with a joystick (to say nothing of the grownups who have bought it for him or sold it to him) to think of himself, spiritually, as an intrepid spelunker. The cave, certainly, is an occasion for easy irony: the man who has perhaps done more than any other person to entice generations of children to spend their playtime indoors, in front of a video screen, happened to develop his peculiar talent while playing outdoors, at whatever amusements or mischief he could muster. Of course, no one in the first wave of video-game designers could have learned the craft by playing video games, since video games didn’t exist until people like Miyamoto invented them. Still, there may be no starker example of the conversion of primitive improvisations into structured, commodified, and stationary technological simulation than that of Miyamoto, the rural explorer turned ludic mastermind.

Read the rest of the article here.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Creative Commons photo by Angela MacIsaac. Click to see the original.

I’m in Calgary for the eighth and final TechDays conference from today until Thursday morning. I’m sure there’ll be something blogworthy while I’m out west, then it’s back to Toronto in time for Thursday’s HoHoTO and other holiday stuff.

I use this trick sometimes. It works pretty well:

Update

Josh Hull informed me via Twitter that the text in the poster above is an adaptation of the poem A Psychological Tip by Danish polymath Piet Hein. I figured that I couldn’t be the only one to formulate this trick after experiencing “flipper’s remorse” one too many times, but I had no idea it had been turned into a poem:

A Psychological Tip

Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,
and you’re hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No — not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you’re passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you’re hoping.

Thanks to looking up Piet Hein, I also discovered the term Flipism, which I sometimes use to refer to Filipino cultural folderol. “Pointing with your lips? That’s a Flipism.”

Thanks for the heads-up, Josh!

A couple of weekends ago, I had the good fortune to being able to stop in and help out at not one but two “hackathons” – programming marathons – where the people taking part were writing software for the common good and which made use of open data. They took place on the same day and were still well-attended, a good sign that the geeks here in Toronto aren’t like the self-absorbed self-interested ones chronicled in Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish. These people gave their time and talent for a good cause and asked for nothing but to be fed – I salute them with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!

Open Data Hackathon

On Saturday, December 4th, Microsoft’s open source initiative guy, Nik Garkusha, organized a hackathon at Microsoft Canada headquarters in Mississauga where developers would work on a project that would be based on Halton Region open data and would serve the public interest.

The event coincided with International Open Data Hackathon Day, an event shared among 63 cities in 25 countries whose goals were:

1. To help raise the awareness of open data and why it matters
2. To help foster communities of techies, active citizens and others who care about open data
3. To have fun using the technology we love to create open data solutions that contribute to the public good

And of course, being a Microsoft event, we also set up an Xbox with Kinect so that participants could take a break, get away from the computer and move about“

Random Hacks of Kindness

Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK, pronounced “rock”) also took place on Saturday, December 4th and stretched to the following day. Think of it as the intersection of developers and other assorted geeks meeting up with tech-savvy do-gooders to develop software to help people and make the world a better place. It’s a joint initiative among Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank, and the actual legwork is done by volunteers who gather to hold hackathons in cities all over the world.

Here’s the story of how RHoK got started, according to Wikipedia:

Random Hacks of Kindness grew out of an industry panel discussion at the first Crisis Camp Bar Camp in Washington DC in June 2009. Panel attendees included Patrick Svenburg of Microsoft, Phil Dixon of Google and Jeremy Johnstone of Yahoo!. They agreed to use their developer communities to create solutions that will have an impact on disaster response, risk reduction and recovery. The idea was for a "hackathon" with developers producing open source solutions. The World Bank’s Disaster Risk Reduction Unit and NASA’s Open Government team joined the partnership and these "founding partners" (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, NASA and the World Bank) decided on the name "Random Hacks of Kindness" for their first event.

I attended as both a sponsor’s representative and judge for submissions at the Toronto RHoK, which was organized with the help of my former co-worker at Tucows, Heather Leson, who’s one of our local Crisis Commons representatives. Joining me on the panel of judges were:

• Stephanie Ashton-Smith from Plan Canada
• Ben Lucier from Tucows
• Will Pate from the World Bank
• Adam Thody from Architech Solutions

This was the first RHoK to take place in Canada and had 52 participants collaboration on eight projects. Our group gathered in rooms on the 4th floor of University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). Worldwide, about 1,000 participants in 20 cities joined in the RHoK project and worked on some kind of software for a good cause, and many of these events were linked together via streaming video.

The RHoK participants had the weekend to come up with a software solution to a “good cause” problem, implement it and present it at the end of the final day. Many of the participants haven’t had much practice presenting, so while some people kept working on their applications, Will Pate gave a quick tutorial on making technical presentations, which I captured in the photo below:

At the end of the second day, we all gathered in the main room to watch the teams present their applications. The session opened with Heather Leson providing the introductions:

…and the Melanie Gorka adding some details…

…and with Melanie done, it was time to start the presentations!

Person Finder

This was the first presentation. At an RHoK event last year, a team had put together a web application that made it simple for people to submit requests for information about missing friends and relatives in a disaster. This team decided to extend its capability by creating a RESTful API for the application, enabling people to develop specialized client applications that would access the original as a service.

Payout to Mobile

In developing countries, farmers often buy cheaper, lower quality seed out a fear of being having their crops wiped out by drought or flood and not having any cash reserves to survive afterwards. If they had access to some kind of insurance for their crops, they could afford to buy better seed and potentially triple their yields.

Payout to Mobile is the technical portion of a solution that allows these farmers to get their crops insured. When a farmer goes to buy seed or fertilizer, the vendor uses SMS to get a set of insurance quotes – “kind of like Progessive” – for policies that get sold along with the farmer’s purchase. If a weather event specified in the policy occurs, the farmer gets a payout.

Population Centres

This was a project that took online population data and turned it into visualizations that would allow disaster planners to better determine appropriate assistance based on population and population densities.

We Are Helping

In a disaster, it’s easy for aid groups to coordinate outside agencies. However, local people who also have the skills to lend a hand (and oftentimes, a better “feel” for the local area and culture) can be left out. This is a classic “access to information” problem, and this application lets local responders self-organize. The people behind this project discussed the possibility of tying this in with other projects being developed at RHoK hackathons, including Tweak the Tweet and I’m Not OK.

Is This Bike Stolen?

Here’s something that would appeal to anyone who’s been a victim of Igor Kenk, Toronto’s notorious bike superthief. This is a web application that lets you check the serial number of a bike you’re about to buy against the Toronto Police’s database of serial numbers of stolen items.

Where Not to Rent

This web application might come in handy if you’re looking for a place to rent in Toronto. It makes use of a Toronto Open Data store that track reports of rental property deficiencies, including the hot topic of the moment: bedbugs! By the time you read this, the app should be live at http://wherenottorent.refactory.ca/.

Tweak the Tweet

This application combs through Twitter in search of actionable data for emergency reponse teams, making use of location tags.

City Budgets

The Toronto city budget data is buried within a monolithic 600-page PDF report and some Toronto Open Data files. This application, inspired by what the British paper The Guardian has been doing with open data, takes all that information and turns them into more comprehensible interactive charts and graphs.

---

We judges retired to our secret chambers and after some deliberation, declared these projects the winners:

• Third place: Payout to Mobile
• Second place: Tweak the Tweet
• First place: Is This Bike Stolen?

We also declared participant Jon Pipitone as the “MVP” of the event for being a leader, participating in more than one project and mentoring people.

If you wanted to find out more about the Toronto RHoK event, check out these other articles:

• Heather Leson’s RHoK Toronto and Global Wrap-Up
• Global News’ report, Hacking for Humanity
• Mark Kuznicki’s Hacking for Good
• Melanie Gorka’s RHoKing Out in Toronto

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Creative Commons photo by Bruno Furnari. Click to see the original.

Deciphering Closing Time

Before you read this, you should read Closing Time, a blog entry I posted a couple of weeks ago.

On my first night of my visit to Montreal a couple of weeks ago, I had a dream after which I woke up in the middle of the night and was unable to sleep. This is very unusual. Although I’m a bit of a night owl, I’m one of those guys who’s out like a light ten minutes after head makes contact with pillow and sleeps like a bear through the night. I become insomniac only when jet-lagged or when things have gone seriously awry.

On the rare occasion that I find myself waking up at oh-dark-thirty and unable to nod off, I find that the most effective fix is not to lie awake and try to sleep, but to do something until I get sleepy enough. That particular night, I fired up the laptop and wrote about that dream in a blog entry titled Closing Time.

Handy Life Tip: If you’re going to lie awake during one of those “long dark nights of the soul”, a Fairmont Hotel, such as Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth, is a pretty nice place to do it.

It never occurred to me that people would interpret it as work-related. Since posting the article, I’ve had a number of friends ask if I’m thinking of quitting my job and shooed away about a dozen phone calls from recruiters hoping to land a prize.

Instead, the article Closing Time and the dream that inspired it were about something a little more personal: it’s that Wendy has asked for a divorce.

I won’t get into the hows or whys of the matter here. Splitsville is a complicated place, and a blog is not the appropriate place to hang up your dirty laundry. It will simply have to suffice for me to say that I love Wendy dearly, and that I wish her all the happiness in the world. If you are a friend of hers, please reach out to her.

Anything I write about breaking up will not be about her, but about me and the question I will be attempting to answer for the next little while:

“So what do I do now?”

My Current Mood

I’m not going to write much about how I feel right now, other than to say that the photo below should give you the general idea.

If you really want to find out more, you’re going to have to do it in person, and drinks have to be involved. And yes, I’m always going to pay for at least a couple of rounds.

The “Don’t” List

I’m a list writer. Whenever I’m working on a big project of any sort, I find that writing lists of end results and then working backwards from them with lists of how to get there very helpful. Hitting the reset button on your life is about as big a project as it gets, so it seemed to me to be the perfect time to make a new list.

I wrote my first list the day after “the talk”. I was still reeling from what had just happened, so I went with an easy one: what I would not do.

I have witnessed first-hand the antics of newly-divorced men:

• “Retail therapy”, especially the classic mid-life crisis purchase: the expensive (and often impractical) sports car.
• Going on serious binges of a-drinkin’ and a-druggin’.
• The $600-a-night habit at “the ballet”.
• One or more instances of the wildly inappropriately young new “rebound girl”.
• Angry, over-the-top rants about the ex.
• Hiring prostitutes and asking them to slap you.

Oh wait: that last one wasn’t real; that’s Don Draper from Mad Men.

I’ve seen friends and acquaintances indulge in the other items on the list. I think I can avoid these fairly easily, but if any of you see me do any of this stuff in a moment of weakness, could you do me a favour and call me out on it?

Location, Location, Location

Wendy’s moving into her own place in a couple of weeks. For the time being, I’ve decided to stay put in our current High Park apartment.

I’m not staying out of any particular attachment to the place. In fact, it’s a big reminder of what once was. Although I’d like to move out, I should probably try to keep the number of major disruptions in my life down to a manageable level. Moving can wait for a little bit. Perhaps I’ll rearrange the furniture to at least make the place a little different.

The time to move will come soon enough. Perhaps I’ll move once the weather warms up. I’ll probably move closer downtown, but still within reasonably easy access to Lake Shore and the Gardiner so that my regular visits to my family’s homes and weekly commute to Microsoft HQ are fairly easy.

I’m open to suggestions for new neighbourhoods to call home. If you have any, I’d love to hear where and why. If you feel so inclined, let me know in the comments.

All That Free Time

“Idle hands,” the saying goes (more or less), “are the Devil’s Xbox.”

I know that especially for the first little while, I’m going to have great swaths of free time in the evenings. The fact that it’ll be the dead of winter and the sun sets early will make those nights seem even longer.

I’m thinking of disconnecting the TV cable (it comes free in my building, so I can’t cancel it). Television is a great de-motivator; watching it, you substitute your own life for those of the people onscreen. With TV, you can while away an evening and have nothing to show for it. Worse still, those evenings easily add up.

In the place of TV, I plan to do constructive, creative, possibly unusual things. Some will be computer-related (I’ve been meaning to take on some kind of ambitious hobby tech project for some time), some will be musical, some will involve me expanding my community role, and some of it will involve hitting the gym a little more often. I’m still fielding ideas for this one, but the point is to not sit idly while the world moves on.

Hitting the Road

I like travel, so when I was job-hunting, I took the opportunities for business travel into consideration. Wendy’s not fond of travel, so when we got married, I adjusted my plans accordingly: business travel became my prime opportunity to see new places and meet new people.

With “The New Normal,” travel is back in the cards. I’ve had a chat with my manager John Oxley to see if I can get slotted for some upcoming work travel opportunities, and it turns out that from January to April, there are a number of potential destinations including Montreal, Seattle, Austin and Las Vegas.

As for personal travel time, I’m mulling over some destinations. I’d made peace with the possibility of never seeing the Philippines again, but I can now go for a visit. It’s been a while since I’ve been to the U.K. and Europe, and I’ve never been to South America, Africa or Australasia. Even Burning Man’s an option again. I’ve got the vacation days, the cash and the frequent flyer points – what I need is a destination. (Suggestions are welcome; feel free to make them in the comments.)

Reconnecting

My friends have all asked variations on the same question: “Is there anything I can do?”

The answer is yes: be my friend. I want to hang out with my friends and reconnect with those whom I haven’t seen in a while. And no, I don’t want to always talk about my own situation; I also want to hear about yours. You’re not boring me with talk about your work, hobbies or kids – I want to hear about that stuff.

My calendar opens up quite a bit after the touring madness of TechDays ends at the end of next week, so if you want to catch up, drop me a line.

Hooking Up

(Ah, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell: where would we be without your fantasy paintings?)

This will eventually happen, either casually or more seriously. I’ve given this almost no thought, simply because this hasn’t been a concern for years.

While I’m not chiseled like the studly centaur in the painting above, I’ve got reasonably good looks, social skills, more than two coins to rub together, more than my fair share of luck and of course, the accordion. I also have a circle of friends, associates and even customers who are already offering to set me up on dates (thanks, but it’s too soon).

For the time being, I’m not going to worry too much about this one.

It Just Got Real

Creative Commons Photo by Kevin King. Click to see the source photo.

There probably isn’t a single First World adult who hasn’t had the idle fantasy about what they’d do if they could drop one or more of their major responsibilities.

What could I do if I weren’t in a committed relationship? Who could I be if I didn’t have these mortgage payments looming over me? Where could I go if I didn’t have these mouths to feed? If I could ditch this job right now, what would be the first thing I’d do?

Where I am now isn’t too distant from those scenarios. I’m about to become single again. I have no kids, no mortgage and no debt. I’m relatively young; they say (well, actually, I say) 43 is the new 33. Those fantasies are now my reality.

As Ice Cube might say: “Shit just got real, dogg.”

An Irish expat explains Ireland’s financial crisis in the best Irish style: with the most swearing you’ll ever see in a business news interview. (Warning: Swearing galore.)

Winnipeg Coffee and Code

Winnipeg was the seventh of eight cities that I’m visiting on the TechDays cross-country conference tour (I’m visiting the next and final city, Calgary, next week). TechDays visits take up the better part of the week, with setup and speaker dinner on the Monday and the conference on Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday is usually reserved for a little get-together of my creation called “Coffee and Code”.

Microsoft tech evangelists John Bristowe and Frederic Harper work alongside Imaginet guy David “Wessty” Wesst at Winnipeg Coffee and Code.

When I was an independent software consultant (from 1998 to 2000), I found working at home all the time to be very isolating. While there’s a lot to be said for the freedom of working on one’s own hours and one’s own terms, the built-in human contact that comes from a traditional workplace is a benefit that you don’t appreciate until it’s gone. So I started working at a laptop-friendly café on Queen Street West called Tequila Bookworm, got the human contact I craved and even made some new friends (plus a friend with benefits, which even with all the ensuing drama was great fun).

When I got hired by Microsoft as a mobile worker, I thought I’d bring back some of that working-from-a-café experience and started holding coffee shop work events that I dubbed “Coffee and Code”. There wasn’t much to it: instead of working at my home office or a co-working space like the Hacklab (where I have a membership) or the Centre for Social Innovation, I’d work at a café. I would announce the location and invite people to join me, either to work alongside me for a couple of hours or just drop by for ten minutes to have some coffee and chat about Microsoft, programming tools, the state of the industry, the weather, whatever. Coffee and Code has been recognized as a Good Idea™ by both local management as well as the folks in “Corp” (Microsoft-speak for the big-shots at the headquarters in Redmond), and it’s helped me stay in touch with computer programmers, help answer their questions and even been a place where they could write software.

Yesterday’s Coffee and Code took place at the Second Cup in Winnipeg’s Osborne Village, which I’m told is the city’s “go-to” neighbourhood. It was decidedly a little slower than most of the Coffee and Code events we’ve had in other cities – typically they get at least a dozen attendees over the five hours – but we did have a couple of people drop by, and the relative quiet let us get some work done.

John looks disapprovingly at my big-ass computer
with decidedly non-regulation decals.

Alycia’s and the King’s Head Pub

The late John Candy and his favourite food.

My coworker Rick Claus suggested that for our last dinner in Winnipeg, we should hit Alycia’s, a Ukrainian restaurant with a reputation for making the best pierogies. “John Candy used to divert his flights to Winnipeg just to have ‘em!” he said.

Alas, when the taxi dropped us off at Alycia’s, we found they’d closed early. The place had its lights on and the “OPEN” sign was hanging in the window, but when we got to the door, the door was locked and we saw that all the chairs had been put on the tables. The cab had already sped off, leaving Rick and I to trudge down the long suburban street in the prairie winter cold to find a warm place to call and wait for another cab to take us back downtown. Guess we’ll have to sample their pierogies on our next visit.

In an almost-filmic moment, a bus going in the opposite direction passed us. Its destination sign read MISERICORDIA in bright orange letters.

“Sounds like the name of a Tom Waits album,” I said. (It’s a hospital.)

We managed to find a convenience store and called a cab. It showed up about ten minutes later, and ten minutes after that, we were at the King’s Head Pub. Not long after that, we had beer and Brit-style pub grub:

The Accordion Guy in his native habitat.

We both had butter chicken for our mains and drank Fort Garry Dark, a nice local brew. Rick ordered curry chips for his appetizer. When I saw that they had scotch eggs, I had to have them for my starter.

Scotch eggs (also called “picnic eggs” and “snack eggs”) are underappreciated British cuisine. They’re hard-boiled eggs, wrapped in ground sausage, covered in bread crumbs and deep-fried. Here’s a close-up view of our food:

The breakfast of champions!

All in all, a pretty nice (if not exactly healthy) end to our Winnipeg trip!