“Accordion Guy’s” Tenth Anniversary

Life (along with those rat bastards at Bell Canada, who’ve bunged up the internet connection at my place until Thursday) has conspired to keep me from blogging here on Accordion Guy for the past little while, which is a real shame for a couple of reasons. For starters, there’s been a lot of interesting stuff going on, and I’m going to get around to posting the bloggable stuff soon. For the unbloggable stuff, you’re going to have to catch up with me in person for a drink.

The other reasons that it’s a shame that I’ve been kept away from blogging is that an important anniversary passed only a couple of weeks ago: the tenth anniversary of The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century. This blog’s first post was made on November 10th, 2001, and between it and the accordion, life hasn’t been the same since.

This blog started as a response to a rapidly devolving situation at OpenCola, the startup I where I worked during the bubble. With the new CTO – a Gollum-like manager who was more wiener than man – reducing my responsibilities on the project down to the about box, I had about 7 hours and 58 minutes each day of nothing to do. So I did some programming on the side and took up blogging to fill the rest of my day. I couldn’t think up a decent name for the blog, so I went with a stupid throw-away name – The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century – with plans to change it once I came up with something better.

(The original host for this blog, Blogger, had a limit on the number of characters a blog’s title could have, so I had to compress “Accordion Guy” into “AccordionGuy” in the title. That got fixed once I moved to Blogware, the second platform on which this blog lived.)

Since that start, all sorts of stuff, good and bad has happened, and much of it has been chronicled here, and it’s paid off in ways that I never expected. I’m glad I started blogging and am still at it a decade later.

This particular past year has been rather life-changing, what with getting separated, getting as close to expiring as I want to get for a good long while (“dying of a broken heart” is no longer an abstract concept to me), the largely-unpublicized reason I left Microsoft (I wrote the official reason here), the non-date gone terribly wrong followed by another gone terribly right, switching jobs, kicking loose women out of my quonset hut at SxSW, moving to Ottawa, girl trouble in varying degrees, flying all over the place (20 flights by the end of the year) and all sorts of other stuff that will eventually find its way into these pages. It hasn’t always been beer and skittles this year, but it’s been an adventure, and that’s the sort of life I’d signed up for.

Whether you’ve stumbled across this blog only recently or have been a long-time reader, thanks for coming along for the ride. There’s still a lot of road left up ahead, and I promise the view will be scenic.