Month: July 2011

Here’s an interesting Shopify-powered online store: Tattly. Here’s what the store’s all about, in owner Tina “swissmiss” Roth Eisenberg’s words:

Tattly is a temporary tattoo store for design-minded kids and kids-at-heart. After applying many bad-clip-art tattoos on her daughter, swissmiss decided to stop complaining and take matters into her own hands. Tattly was born. Now, let’s rock the tattoo world together.

The store’s just opened, and they’ve got a launch special called “Everything” — every tattoo currently in their catalog for US$35.

Check it out, and remember, if you’ve got stuff to sell online, there’s a service I can very heartily recommend. Email me if you’ve got questions.

Illustration by Zac Gorman.

I still have days like this. In fact, they happen more often these days.

Creative Commons photo by Shubert Ciencia.

I’m going to be in New Orleans from Thursday evening to Monday morning! I’ll be there on behalf of Shopify to catch BarCamp NOLA, the New Orleans edition of the unconference that’s changing the tech, creative and business worlds and to catch some of the sights, sounds and nightlife of the town whose motto is Laissez les bons temps rouler!

I haven’t been there in something close to 20 years, and my memories of that trip are studenty, boozy, fuzzy and rushed. I purposely set things so that I’d have Thursday evening and Friday during the day to look around — and I’ll be doing so with my co-worker Edward Ocampo-Gooding — so if you have suggestions for anything we should check out, please let me know in the comments!

I’ll close this article with one of my favourite new New Orleans musicians: Trombone Shorty, doing a live version of his song, Backatown. Unfortunately, he’s on tour in Germany this weekend, so there ain’t no catching him while I’m there:

It’s short notice, but I’m declaring it anyway: Shopify is holding another pub night this Wednesday in Ottawa’s ByWard market at Peter Devine’s. Here’s the quick info:

• What: Shopify Pub Night, an informal get-together with people from Shopify
• When: Wednesday, July 13th, from 5:30 on
• Where: Peter Devine’s (ByWard Market, 73 Clarence Street at William)
• Why: To get people together. Show up early and I’ll buy you a pint.

A scene from the last Shopify Pub Night, featuring some Shopifolks: Cody, Clara and Liz.

This is an informal gathering for techies, creatives and businesspeople of all stripes to get together, meet the Shopifolks and talk about programming, ecommerce, startups, design, beer, the weather, music…whatever! It’s about enjoying the summer, catching up with friends and getting to know the local community. And food. And beer. Perhaps a lot of beer.

We’re putting out a special invitation for Ottawa’s local security gurus — this gathering will also be a local security meetup! Hence the photo above, from Hackers. I was willing to suspend disbelief on a lot of things in this movie, from Penn Gilette and Angelina Jolie being infosec experts to "The Gibson", but trying to portray rollerblades as cool? That was just too much.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Simple, low-carb and hey…bourbon!

This one’s for the final flight of the space shuttle program! Europe’s The Final Countdown was a bit too obvious and I used it recently for my departure from Microsoft [5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1], so the song I’m dedicating to Space Shuttle Atlantis is Black Sabbath’s Supernaut, in many forms. Here’s the original:

The lyrics aren’t really about astronautics, but psychonautics, but what the hey. I watched the launch with 1000 Homo DJs (essentially the industrial group Ministry, rearranged) as background music. I think it should be the background music for space launches in general:

The 1000 Homo DJs version had Minsitry’s Al Jourgensen on vocals (under the pseudonym “Buck Satan”). The original vocalist was Trent “Nine Inch Nails” Reznor, whose arrangement with his record label TVT didn’t allow for his version to be released. Here’s the version with “Der Trentster”:

And finally, a 2010 cover by Finnish folk metal group Turisas, who feature an accordion player among their number. I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks that the accordion is a true metal instrument:

Yeah, I’m on it. But I’m sending out invites as they’re made available to me!

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.