Month: April 2011

At the Accordion City Blue Jays’ home opener on Friday (where a newly-invigorated team started with an amazing first inning and proceeded to give the Minnesota Twins a severe 13 – 3 pasting), our Peter Griffin-esque mayor Rob Ford was in attendance. One of the cameras zoomed in on him, and as soon as his mug appeared on the jumbotron, the stadium filled with a resounding chorus of boos. The cameras cut away quickly.

“I thought sports fans would be for the guy,” I quipped to the guy beside me.

“No, not for baseball – it’s technically a ‘hipster’ sport,” he replied, “and opening night is traditionally more of a downtown crowd.”

Making fun of Rob Ford is great sport among the Accordion City citizens who live and work closer to the downtown core, myself included. However, I did write this just after his election:

I’m open to the possibility that Ford could pleasantly surprise us. The thought of Toronto’s service unions – long a hiding place for mediocrity –grimacing at the thought of dealing with a mayor who isn’t so beholden to them pleases this accordion player. As Stewie Griffin might say: “Perhaps the Fat Man might prove to be useful after all.”

I have to give credit where credit is due and give a thumbs-up for Rob Ford for this: he may actually be a better Jane Jacobs mayor than his predecessor, David Miller, whom I liked to Family Guy’s Mayor Adam West.

The issue is the Toronto a la Cart program. It was a pilot project whose goal was to expand the options at downtown Toronto’s food carts beyond barbecued hot dogs. The fact that they’re cooked on a gas grill rather than boiled and that real sausages and not just bland hot dogs are available puts us ahead of many cities, but being limited to hot dogs is pretty sad. For real food cart diversity, you should check out Austin, Texas, whose carts carry everything from hot dogs to pizza to burgers to barbecue to tex-mex to shawarma to oddball-but-tasty hybrids like bulgogi burritos.

An article in the most recent issue of the alt-weekly Eye captures what happened nicely (the emphasis is mine):

That program, after all, has been phenomenally short-sighted and ham-fisted, taking the excellent concept of allowing sidewalk dining options other than hot dogs and twisting it to try and ensure that healthy and ethnically diverse food were the only new options. Rather than throw the street-food industry open to anyone with a good idea, a clean cart and some cooking skills, former mayor David Miller and health board chair Councillor John Filion decided in 2008 that the city should control the industry. In an almost cartoonish example of the left’s counter-productive impulse to not just overregulate but to micro-manage too (see also: garbage bin program), the project ordered and manufactured custom food-vending carts that operators were required to purchase from the city, and the city vetted and approved a select list of vendors who paid high fees to participate. Those vendors had their menus full of health-conscious and ethnically representative dishes regulated closely by the city, and worked at fixed locations dictated by health department bureaucrats.

It’s the sort of “we know better than you” thinking that plagues that sector of the Left that’s over-educated yet under-smart (and which is why I’ll never vote for the NDP), which often leads me to have conversations like this:

Me: So, do you have any post-secondary education?

Over-educated under-smart lefty: Yes! I have a B.A. in Political Science with a minor in Philosophy!

Me: You could’ve just said “no”.

Oh, relax, poli sci majors. I kid because I care.

Mayor Rob Ford disagreed with this course of action back when he was just Councillor Rob Ford in 2008 interview with the Toronto Sun: “I would just open it up and let them sell anything…whatever they want to make money on.”

I would have to concur with him. As long as a cart is clean, sold clean food and met health and other regulations, why get in the way of an enterprising businessperson who probably has better ideas for what to serve than some stuffed shirt in City Council?

Thankfully, the Toronto a la Cart program is going under review this month, and it seems likely that the Mayor and councillors will kill it.

The Eye article I quoted earlier suggests that although Ford’s opponents simply talk the talk of being followers of Jane Jacobs’ wisdom about cities (if you’re not familiar with her work, go out and get a copy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities; it’s a fantastic read), Rob Ford actually walks the walk.

“Cities,” wrote Jacobs, “have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” And that means more than just high-on-ideals low-on-useful-execution governing bodies like David Miller, who was all hair and no head.

The Eye article talks about the Toronto a la Cart program as well as the Mayor’s office’s defence of Reg Hartt, who’s been running a little cinephile movie theatre out of his living room for decades (I used to go all the time). Mayor Miller’s well-meaning but wooly-headed council tried to kill this unique little piece of Toronto, but Mayor Ford’s office brought it back. It’s a worthy read, which closes with this line that’s sure to make some progressives do a double-take:

Ford is one of the only politicians at City Hall whom I have never heard invoke the name of Jane Jacobs, in any context. But at least in a few respects, he is governing in her image.

As much as I disagree with “Mayor Griffin”, I’m going to have to give him points for this one.

(Seen earlier today on High Park Avenue.)

For your lazy Sunday listening pleasure: Canadian hip-hop that’s been getting a lot of play on my sound system…

That Ain’t Classy, by Classified

A great number, and appropriate for the age of overpublicized celebrity excess. That Ain’t Classy is the first single off Classified’s new album, Handshakes and Middle Fingers. I crank this on the sound system at home and in my car, "The Deathmobile":

My Turn, by MisterE

Here’s My Turn, the first track from MisterE’s album, Dusting for Prints:

We, Myself and I, by Shad

I’m really enjoying Shad’s latest album, TSOL, and I’m not the only one – the album earned him this year’s Juno Award for Rap Recording of the Year. We, Myself and I is one of my favourite tracks:

While we’re on the subject of Shad, here’s an underappreciated track from his 2008 album The Old Prince: The Old Prince Still Lives at Home. The track’s great on its own, but it’s elevated to awesome in the video, which pays homage to the title sequence of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air:

Let Your BackBone Slide, by Maestro, with k-os and Shad

The 1989 classic, still sounding great after all these years:

For throughness’ sake, here’s the video for the original version:

One of the “above the banner” stories in today’s edition of the free daily Metro is about a statement that Miley Cyrus made about singers who launch to fame on YouTube and was purported to be a pot-shot at Rebecca Black, the singer in the regrettable but ultimately harmless Friday video.

“It should be harder to be an artist,” said Cyrus in an interview with the Australian newspaper The Daily Telegraph. “You shouldn’t just be able to put a song on YouTube and go out on tour.”

She’s right; it should be harder. It should be at least as hard as arranging to be the daughter of a famous country music artist who released one of the biggest pop/country crossover hits of all time. You should also put in the effort to making sure that your famous celebrity dad moves the family to Toronto when you’re 8 years old, right at the time when the Canadian dollar was cheap compared to America’s, opportunities to get into acting, theatre and television abounded and casting calls in this city were at an all-time high. Posing with celebrity dad for incest-creepy photo shoots in Vanity Fair is completely optional.

The myth of being entirely self-made is nothing new. It’s told in beautiful, almost-poetic form in The Great Gatsby as well as in any given rags-to-riches story, from Horatio Alger’s tales to Jeb Bush, who called himself “self-made” in spite of being the grandson of a big Wall Street banker and senator, the son of a former president and the brother of a president in office. It is fascinating to see the myth retell itself, even in the form of one kid who benefitted from an advantage handed to her by a parent calling out another kid for being in pretty much the same boat.

Malcolm Gladwell should send Miley a free copy of Outliers.

Five years ago, an ambitious project called ICT Toronto was unveiled at the MaRS Centre with great fanfare to local press, policy wonks and businesspeople. ICT Toronto’s vision, which I’ve taken directly from the hundred-page document that they proudly handed out at the launch, was:

There were speeches, starting with well-meaning-but-poor-executing then-mayor David Miller (who bears a physical and psychological resemblance to Mayor Adam West from Family Guy), followed by a string of policy wonks who had never deployed a working piece of technology or tech training, either software or hardware. There were photo ops, business card exchanges, hors d’oeuvres and inexpensive champagne. What was in notably short supply were actual techies. As I wrote back in 2006:

It was easy to spot the DemoCamp gang — me, David, Jay, Sutha, Bryce, Mark — among the attendees, who numbered around 100. We were the only people there not in suits. It certainly looked as though we were there only people there who wrote code for a living. We made sure to mingle and found that most of the attendees seemed to be from the management side of various information and communications tech firms or from organizations that invested in them.

One worrisome thing about ICT Toronto was that in all the speeches given at their launch party, all they did was talk about inviting large international companies to set up in Toronto, and to invite American companies to open “nearshoring” operations here. I remember quipping that they should put up giant posters saying “Toronto: The Bangalore Next Door!” Nowhere was there any mention of boosting home-grown talent, innovations and startups; it was all about Toronto the Branch Office.

In April 2006, they launched with a single-page site, whose text was embedded into a single graphic, guaranteeing that it wouldn’t be properly indexed by search engines. Here’s a screenshot:

Don’t bother visiting the site. It’s gone.

In September of that year, I wrote in an article titled ICT Toronto: I Know What You DIDN’T Do This Summer:

It’s almost five months later, and it appears that not much has happened. I haven’t seen a press release since the one for their launch party, and a Google News search for “ICT Toronto” ends up without any results.

…

In the meantime, Toronto’s techies, without any of the money or manpower earmarked for ICT Toronto have held 4 DemoCamps and a BarCamp, events which have gone a long way to fostering a sense of community and cooperation in the local tech scene. And of course, actually building information and communication technologies, something the suits seem to have completely overlooked.

This is hardly surprising. Silicon Valley was born of good circumstances coupled with the grassroots efforts of ambitious techies doing what they loved, not by government/business fiat. I’d call ICT Toronto a bunch of pointless martini-swilling stuffed shirts, but that’s an insult to martinis and dress shirts, both of which I happen to like.

ICT Toronto’s going to have to do better than produce a glossy report and a party with decent hors d’oeuvres. I hope I’m wrong, but I seriously doubt that they’re up to the task.

After getting smacked about in the blogosphere by me and other local techies, the folks at ICT Toronto reached out and invited us to a few breakfast meetings to discuss how they could better engage the tech community. Mark Kuznicki, probably this city’s best bridge between the local tech scene and government at all levels, reminded us that it was a government initiative run by “grey-haired folks” and unlike we Gen-Xers and Millenials who live in the “Web 2.0″ world, they don’t move in web time. That was fair, and in response, I wrote that they don’t have to move in web time; they just had to move. I held out hope that they’d get off their asses, but kept them on notice:

After a staff reshuffling, ICT Toronto’s outreach vanished, as did any sign that they were doing anything. The last time I bothered even mentioning them was back in February 2008, when I compared the way they saw the local tech scene to the way grandma sees the TV remote:

Quite fittingly, today is April Fool’s Day, 2011 – about three weeks shy of the five-year deadline set by ICT Toronto. The single-page placeholder site they set up five years ago has vanished without ever having been updated, anyone associated with the project has long since been reassigned, and I’ll bet that the subject of ICT Toronto hasn’t been brought up at any of the local tech gatherings in a good long while.

I don’t know where Toronto stands in the ranking of ICT cities today, but if it has any presence at all as a place to do high-tech work, it has nothing at all to do with ICT Toronto. The credit goes not to our policy makers, but to our techies. We’ve got a vibrant scene here, with techies doing what they do, whether they’re in small development and design shops or working at one of the multinationals (in the period since ICT Toronto got started, I’ve done both). We have events of all sizes, from regular meetups and user group meetings at pubs and lecture halls to independent conferences like Mesh, RubyFringe and FutureRuby to tech “camp” events to big corporate gatherings put on by the likes of the Canadian subsidiaries of IBM and Microsoft. We’ve got hackerspaces and the MaRS Centre. In my work as a developer evangelist for Microsoft, I’ve met many students at Toronto’s fine universities and colleges, and they’re eager to crank out the ‘wares, both hard and soft, and they’re bright as all get-out. We have a great community bound together by cooperation, a strong social media scene and good old-fashioned face-to-face meetings. We get stuff done, and the stuff we do travels far and wide.

We are the real ICT Toronto, not those municipal painted popinjays.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.