Month: August 2012

Earlier this week, I posted a blog entry about the Bacon Fest taking place tomorrow in Leslieville. I thought that I would simply attend until I received a Twitter message telling me that they were looking for a judge and asking me why I love bacon.

My responses:

• Bacon works for any meal: breakfast, second breakfast, lunch, tea-time, dinner and midnight snack.
• You can add it to just about any dish to make it better. Bacon is to meals as ice cream is to dessert.
• It’s so tasty that it’s the one meat flavour that vegetarians and vegans work hard to copy

I also told them that I see bacon everywhere and sent them links to these photos:

My responses seem to have won over the committee  and I will be a judge at tomorrow’s Bacon Fest.

Once again, the competitors will be:

• Le Papillon on the Park cooking Green Gate Farms’ bacon
• Waffle Bar and Mr. Spinners cooking Highmark Farms’ traditional-style bacon
• Glas Restaurant cooking Highmark Farms’ wild boar bacon
• Wheelbarrow Farm cooking their own traditional-style bacon
• Ying Ying Soy Food cooking with their own tofu bacon

In addition to competing, they’ll also be selling their bacon-based dishes for you to try.

The bacon-based fun happens this Sunday, August 12th at Jonathan Ashbridge Park (Queen Street East, a few blocks west of Coxwell) and runs from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m..

See you there! (And yes, I’m bringing the accordion.)

…they’re tearin’ up the dance floor Gangnam Style!

Why You Should Hire Me is an article on my tech blog, Global Nerdy, and the title is self-explanatory. If you’re looking for a techie who also has communication skills, I’m your guy.

If you’ve read the article and are intrigued, here are my LinkedIn profile and my resume.

Let’s hope that this photo’s staged.

Have you ever wanted to throw fireball punches, just like Ryu from the Street Fighter games?

If you’re in Toronto this Saturday evening, you just might get your chance to do just that at Super Street Fire.

Imagine playing Street Fighter II, except instead of a joystick and buttons, you actually throw punches. Two fighters enter the ring, take their places on platforms at the opposite ends of this combat ring:

Click the diagram above to see it at full size.

They don motion-sensing gloves, and when the Master of Games yells “Fight!”, they start throwing punches and combos, and this is what it looks like:

Super Street Fire is a project created by the people at the Site3 coLaboratory, one of Toronto’s hackerspaces.  It’s a community project led by Seth Hardy, made up of volunteers from different backgrounds and with different skills: art, engineering, game design, software programming and stagecraft. It’s explained in their video:

Here’s how the Super Street Fire rig works:

The flame effect heads are propane-fed devices that emit a column of fire, or fireball, high into the air. They also dynamically change the colour of the flame so it’s obvious who dealt the blow and who stood there and took it. Flame effects are expressed as two rails, each comprised of eight computer controlled flame effect heads—one rail for the right hand gestures and one for the left. As well as the two rails between the players, there is an outer ring of sixteen flame effects that are triggered by special player move combinations and also controlled by the Master of Games for crowd engagement. The game system is computer hardware and software with an Arduino microcontroller that interfaces with the flame effect head solenoids to regulate both the intensity and duration of the flame.

The custom designed motion-sensing gloves that the players wear are modeled after traditional MMA grappling gloves. Similar to a Nintendo Wii-mote, the gloves contain inertial measurement units that capture a player’s actions. It then wirelessly sends this data to a game server that detects if those actions match one of the pre-trained game gestures. If the gesture is recognized, the game system gives feedback to the player by activating the flame effects.

The Super Street Fire crew is bound for Black Rock Desert in Nevada to take part in Burning Man, but before that happens, they’re showing off their stuff at the Amsterdam Brewing Company (21 Bathurst Street, at Fort York Boulevard) this Saturday night at 9:00 p.m.. Tickets are $10 + $1.24 processing fee — to attend, purchase your tickets online.

Found via Geek and Sundry, via Wil Wheaton.

Derek Powazek and Heather Champ, two people who’ve had a great influence on the social side of the web (in ways that probably affect you), passed through Accordion City last weekend. They stayed at the Gladstone and asked for a local to help them find a place in the neighbourhood to have a little meet-up, and I arranged for one at the ever-reliable Rhino. After following their work for ages — I was reading Derek’s The Fray since the ’90s and have tried (and failed) to make it to the legendary Fray Cafe event at South by Southwest each of the three times I’ve been, I check out JPG regularly, and Heather’s work as Flickr’s community manager and now at Findery is well known — I was glad to finally meet them in person! My friends Katie Hrycak and Andrew Louis also dropped by.

Fun fact: Heather’s Canadian! She’s from Ottawa and went to Guelph for university.

The only disappointment was the Rhino’s bourbon selection (I promised Derek that I’d find a place that served it), which is limited to Maker’s Mark and one other that I’ve forgotten. I know that their strength is their wonderful beer selection, but it’d be nice if they stocked some Woodford or Bulleit.

Katie shot the photo above on Derek’s phone outside the Rhino at the end of our meet-up. After that, it was beers at the Cadillac Lounge, topped off with Dark ‘n’ Stormies at Unit Bar.