Month: April 2012

Electro swing is a fusion of swing — a jazz style first heard in the 1930s (think Benny Goodman and Count Basie) — and modern electronic music that descended from jazz and the blues, such as hip-hop, drum and bass, funk and dubstep. Here are some samples:

Electro Swing Club is a loose federation of clubs and event organizers who like electro swing and put together electro swing-themed events all over the world. They’ve had Electro Swing Club nights in the places you’d suspect: Paris, London, Prague and Hollywood, but they’ve also had them in Utrecht, Antwerp, Torino, Montreal, Vancouver, and as of a couple of Fridays ago, Accordion City.

Anitra was visiting Accordion City at the time, and she found the Electro Swing Club event at the Gladstone while looking for stuff to do online. She’s a swing dancer and I love electronic music, so it seemed like the perfect evening out. The announcement for the event mentioned that there was a sliding scale for admission, with admission being lower for people who dressed the part. I don’t have a zoot suit anymore, but I still dressed up and took Anitra to an appropriately retro place for dinner: The Lakeview…

…and then it was off to the Gladstone!

In addition to a DJ spinning the electro swing tunes, we were also treated to Rambunctious, Accordion City’s brass jam band made up of a dozen players of various persuasions of horn and a drummer. I know their frontman, Michael Johnson, from Kickass Karaoke — he and I have played together on Istanbul (not Constantinople), with him on trumpet and me playing you-know-what. He even paused for a moment, said “Hey!” and waved my way when he saw me, which is always a good thing when you’re taking a girl out on a date and trying to impress her — and besides, it only helps to perpetuate the myth that I’m connected to everybody. In my line of work, that’s a good thing.

Rambunctious don’t play any set pieces; they improvise. Michael would call out to the audience to give him a name for the next piece, and then someone in the band would start a riff and they’d build on it until everyone was contributing. Michael would make up vocals on the spot based on the suggested title. That night, they ended up performing numbers named “23 Skidoo” (a slang term from the era), “No Love at the Pharmacy”, “Brass Baby”, and the piece I recorded below, “Fish Legs”:

They didn’t just stay on stage either…

…they hopped out into the audience and we had a grand old time.

We were even treated to a solo from the rhythm section: a baritone sax player and a lingerie-clad drummer. I managed to get a clear shot of the baritone sax player, but I’m going to have to disappoint you fans of female drummers in skimpy clothes — I was too far away and my shots are a bit blurry:

Then came the burlesque act. The dancer followed a simple formula: dancing, balloons, cigarette…

…and you know what happens when you press the lit end of a cancer stick to a balloon!

So when are we having the next one?

We need to put together an expedition and chop this sign down! It’s so anti-accordion that it’s drawn upside-down (the piano keyboard should be on the viewer’s left or the player’s right).

Click the photo to see it at full size.

In addition to new office space, Shopify also occupies what used to be the Capital Music Hall. While the office space is largely complete (there are still a couple of rooms that are still getting furnished), the big room — I believe it will eventually be called “The Lounge” — is still undergoing renovation. It was far along enough for us to have an end-of-week all-hands meeting at the end of Friday afternoon.

The photo above shows a view of the north side of the room, as seen from the balcony. The photo below was taken from the same vantage point, but southward:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Here’s a view from the ground floor, looking northward:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

The all-hands meeting took place yesterday afternoon as work wound down. We grabbed a beer or two from the kitchen fridge (Friday afternoon beer is one of the many perks of working at Shopify) and made our way to the Lounge…

Click the photo to see it at full size.

…where Daniel Weinand, Shopify’s Chief Design Officer and Chief Culture Officer, addressed the troops:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

None of the announcements were earth-shaking, but now that the company’s grown to a hundred people spread over two floors in Ottawa as well as people working from Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg, all on many different projects, it helps to have a gathering where we can all get together.

Click the photo to see it at full size.

As I write this, I’m back in my home office in Accordion City. While I do like living in Toronto, I’m a big fan of travel and enjoy coming up to Ottawa and visiting Shopify HQ. It’s a great place, made even better by the people with whom I work: a smart, fun bunch.

And then there are these guys 😉 :

Shopifolks Edward Ocampo-Gooding, Daniel Beauchamp and Willem van Bergen.
Click the photo to see it at full size.

Previous Shopify HQ Entries

• Scenes from Shopify HQ, Part 1: The First Thing You’ll See When You Visit
• Scenes from Shopify HQ, Part 2: The Hot Sauce Library
• Scenes from Shopify HQ, Part 3: Some of the Rooms

It’s the end of the week, and my monthly check-in with Shopify HQ in Ottawa is drawing to a close. I fly home tonight at 9:10 p.m., arriving an hour later at Billy Bishop Airport, after which it’s a quick cab ride home to High Park. I thought I’d share some of my photos of the office before taking off.

This is a relatively new office, but it’s just what we needed. We were running out of space at the old place — it was already cramp when I joined as the 60th employee, and with the acquisition of the mobile dev company Select Start Studios, we’re now at 100.

The two pictures above are our reception area — we look like a real company now!

We’ve got a number of mottos that we live by at Shopify, and this one’s one of my favourites (you could say I’ve been doing this all along): Do things, tell people. Get stuff done and make sure people know about it. This one’s posted on the wall outside our CEO Toni Lutke’s office.

Tobi’s office is one of the more sedate rooms at Shopify HQ. The others, for which we were given budgets to decorate as we saw fit, are a good deal more colourful.

Every self-respecting software development shop understands the need to take a break from work and play videogames. Hence the games room, which features a nice-size TV, proper Street Fighter arcade-style controllers, an oft-used XBox 360 and a less-used Playstation 3.

And yes, a lot of posters catering to Anime fans. Anitra would love this room.

In addition to offices divided by function, we have a number of unassigned workspaces that people can use if they need some extra-quiet space to take a call or get work done. These rooms are themed, with themes determined and then implemented by employees (who were given decoration budgets, natch!). Here’s the Silly Hats room:

It features a fine set of chapeaux and a mirror so you can see how dashing you look when haberdashed:

The music room is one of my favourites:

Nice, quiet, low-lit and decorated with classic album covers, its a good place to get a little coding work done, do a conference call or even record some podcast audio (I’ve done all three).

Cool companies need cool workspaces, and Shopify is — as Outkast would’ve put it — ice cold. While Accordion City is home, I’m looking forward to my next visit in May.

These pictures capture my reaction to this discovery rather nicely. I suppose that’s my inner 14-year-old talking:

Click the picture to hear the Mitt Romney quote.

Lucille and Mitt is the perfect mash-up: Mitt Romney quotes as captions for stills from Arrested Development featuring Lucille Bluth, the nasty, wealthy matriarch who was never made eye contact with a waiter.

Click the picture to hear the Mitt Romney quote.

Click the picture to hear the Mitt Romney quote.

Check out Lucille and Mitt. You laugh! You’ll cry! You’ll want a Bluth Frozen Banana!

The polls for Alberta’s upcoming provincial election — essentially a battle between the right-wing incumbent Progressive Conservative Party and the johnny-come-lately and far-right Wildrose Party — seem to indicate that the Wildrose Party has a pretty good shot at winning. The Conservatives have been in power in Alberta for the past four decades, and with that entrenchment comes the usual corruption, entitlement and sloth. On the other hand, the Wildrose Party, while promising that a new broom will sweep clean and doing some American-style libertarian/conservative campaigning, will also likely bring with them a rather unpleasant brand of social conservatism if some of the more embarrassing statements made by a couple of their candidates (pastors both) have made are any indication.

Hence this video, titled I Never Thought I’d Vote PC, in which voters are encouraged to respond to their Morton’s Fork situation by picking the lesser of two evils:

The video’s “Buckley’s Mixture” theme is best summed up with a quote from one of the young, non-stereotypical Albertans featured within: “Fuck it, I’m voting PC.”

(Note to my non-Canadian readers: In this case, “PC” means “Progressive Conservative”. If you think that name sounds like a contradiction in terms, it’s not as odd-sounding as the Liberal-Conservative Party, which was their name their federal counterpart until the turn of the previous century.)

My internet friend and Maclean’s contributor Colby Cosh has some interesting commentary in his article on the video:

What does it tell us about the state of the campaign? It doesn’t seem to have been bought and paid for by the Progressive Conservatives; it may, for example, have merely been made and shot pro bono, in their interest and with their blessing. But it is hard to believe they didn’t have some hand in it.

…

It’s a risky move. The ad will alienate old-fashioned, loyalist blue Tories who happen to see it. It is not just old fogies in Alberta who like guns and vote for Stephen Harper. And it is not just young people who watch YouTube videos. At the same time, the sentiment that the ad is trying to appeal to is real; I have already talked to strategic voters who are going to cast their first PC ballot out of fear of the Wildrose Party. I’m actually kind of sorry to see them caricatured so brutally.