Month: February 2012

Thanks to Ashwin Panchapakesan for taking a photo from an earlier blog post and making this poster!

Pictured above is why they pay me the big bucks. It’s not the computer science degree, seven years’ work as a developer, ten years as a tech evangelist or my membership in the KISS Army. It’s to break out the accordion at biz dev meetings and lighten things up with a little pop tuneage.

I love my job. It’s very nice work if you can get it.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

But then again, I’m a “have your cake and eat it too” kind of guy. After all, that is the purpose of cake!

Yesterday, I posted a video of an old Family Feud episode featuring the casts of The Love Boat and WKRP in Cincinnati. Seeing this old game show reminded me of another game show from the same era: the Canadian game show Just Like Mom. In Just Like Mom, the goal was to see which of the mother-child contestant teams knew each other the best through matching answers (in a way similar to The Newlywed Game) and in a finale bake-off in which mothers try to identify the dish their child prepared.

Just Like Mom’s second season was hosted by the show’s creator Catherine Swing and her then-husband Fergie Olver. I have vague memories of being creeped out by Fergie, and the video compilation above confirms them: he got way too kissy-kissy with the girl contestants. Watch and squirm as he plants on-the-lips smooches on reluctant girls not even in their teens, in what Encyclopedia Dramatica calls “an alchemical mixture of creepy that remains unmatched today on broadcast television” and “a group think experiment gone awry”.

(I’m surprised that when attempting to silence critics of the online snooping bill, Bill C-30, Vic Toews didn’t say “You can stand with us or stand with Fergie Olver”.)

If he didn’t break statutes on the show, he certainly bent them. It’s tempting to bend the statute of limitations (if it applies) and call the cops on this creep.

Bill C-30 is a pending Canadian bill that gives police and other appointed special investigators to get information from “internet companies” (the bill’s a bit vague on the definition) to give them information about you – name, IP address and other identifying information – without a warrant. On its own, its terms don’t give “The Man” free access to who you are and what you do online, but the resulting law will require Canadian ISPs to build in facilities to allow for “eavesdropping” that’s not unlike what they do in China. Once that capability is built in, the genie will be out of the bottle; or more accurately, the governmental genie will be in all our bottles. As Ivor Tossell puts it in the Globe and Mail, “You can’t bring oil barrels full of honey to the forest and then act surprised when bears show up.”

The video above is from the Canadian television show Rick Mercer Report. One of the regular features of the show is “Rick’s Rant”, in which he does a short polemic on something topical as he walks through Toronto’s “Graffiti Alley” just off Queen Street West. This one does a great job of explaining why Canada’s Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who introduced the bill, is wrong when he said that critics of the bill could “either stand with us or with the child pornographers” (which will someday be used as a classic example of that old high school debating trick, association fallacy).

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Here’s an interesting listen: the isolated vocal tracks from The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter. It sounds like an old spiritual!

Here’s another installment in my series of articles on what I’m playing on my various audio devices at home, in the office and on the road.

Fun’s single We Are Young crosses a number of borders: it plays on SiriusXm’s Alt Nation and got covered in Glee (ugh), switches tempos, brings in Janelle Monae for vocals that aren’t normally part of their oeuvre and bounces between catchy indie pop tune and anthem.

(Once upon a time, I liked Glee. It started quite strong, but started to sag in the second season when they wrapped up stories a little too quickly, after which the storylines became too-transparent excuses to fit in specific songs. That’s all right; I try to keep my TV-watching to a minimum anyway.)

If you could travel back to my DJ days at Crazy Go Nuts University’s Clark Hall Pub and tell me that I’d like a band featuring the guitarist from Blind Melon, I’d probably have slapped you with a glove and said “You, suh, have insulted mah hon-uh! Ah dee-mand satisfaction!”

But you’d have been right: AWOLNATION’s lead guitarist Christopher Thorn used to be in that awful band. That’s the beauty of music: there’s always one more note to play; one more chance to redeem yourself. The video above is for their track Not Your Fault.

With all the travel I’ve been doing lately, “Home is a nice place to visit” is my new catchphrase. I’m fine with that; I figure that if you’re going to have a midlife (“midlife crisis” is the wrong term to use, unless in the line “Best midlife crisis EVER!”), you might as well do the things you love, and for me, one of them is seeing new places, meeting new people and doing new things.

In the process of bouncing about from place to place, I’ve discovered that I can get by with far less stuff. Give me the computing gear in my bag, a camera, my accordion, a decent change of clothes and my music library and I’m good to go. Having the music library (which fits on a portable hard drive these days) wherever I go helps me stay centred no matter where I am, and I’ve got a playlist of songs specifically for travelling. The Wombats’ Jump into the Fog is on that playlist.

Every time I hear the guitar riff from MuteMath’s Blood Pressure, I want to start singing “Stop wastin’ my time / You know what I want” and launch into Spinal Tap’s Gimme Some Money. It’s a great tune for driving down the highway.

My phone is my alarm clock, and it’s currently set to wake me up with the St. Lucia remix of Don’t Stop by Foster the People. If this doesn’t get me out of bed, nothing will.

(Along with M83’s Midnight City, this song seems to be part of the conspiracy to bring the saxophone back into pop music. Remember when songs had to have a sax solo?)