Month: September 2012

Seen in Kensington Market on Wednesday afternoon.

Wednesday marked the return of Toronto Techie Dim Sum, the regular gathering for a cheap and cheerful dim sum lunch at Sky Dragon restaurant for local techies and their friends. I called ahead and booked the back room, which made the event a little harder to find, but once you found it, it was much easier to walk around, mingle with people at the other tables and catch up with or meet everyone.

Thirty-three people attended, which made for three tables of guests and a lively room. Lunch turned out to be pretty cheap as well — it worked out to about $10.50 a person. Some people who had to get back to work early left “yuppie food stamps” (my favourite term for $20 bills), which meant that Adam (the staffer in charge of the room) and the folks at Sky Dragon got a nice (and well-deserved) tip.

Toronto Techie Dim Sum will be a monthly event, and I’ll announce a date soon. Thanks to everyone who came out!

After lunch, I had a good long chat with a programmer whom I’ve been thinking of recruiting for my startup’s project. We had a nice conversation over ice mochas at Moonbeam in nearby Kensington Market, the official place for deep off-site conversations for HacklabTO members.

With the conversation done, I hopped on my bike and hightailed it to the home office, where I continued to work on the aforementioned startup project, which is building mobile device management systems for enterprises.

I’ll save a full description of what that means for a later time; it should suffice to say that it’s a way for medium to large companies to manage their employees’ smartphones and tablets when they’re on company time, let people use their phones and tablets they way they want to when they’re off the clock, and keep sensitive company information safe. Enterprise software is neither cool nor sexy, which one of the reasons why startups typically avoid that market. However, I wanted my return to building software to involve building something of substance, and uncool and unsexy as it is, enterprise software is how you have a bank balance, how food finds it way to your grocery store, how you can get checked in at the ER and how your flight/hotel package to your last vacation destination got put together.

Later that evening, I got dressed up Gangnam Style…

…to attend the fundraiser bash for Ladies Learning Code. The proceeds from admission to the bash, held on the bottom floor of the Centre for Social Innovation’s Annex location, are going to build their classroom/workshop space, computer lab and mini-maker studio, all of which will be used to help girls and women — who are severely underrepresented in the sausage party of tech — learn about computers, mobile tech, programming and related stuff.

They had a Makerbot 3D printer printing out jewellery for sale, but even more impressive was the 3D printer being built by Panda Robotics, pictured below:

While most of Makerbot’s 3D printers are aimed at the hobbyist who doesn’t mind building something from a kit, Panda Robotics’ is more like a paper printer you’d pick up at Best Buy: ready-built, simple to assemble out of the box, and meant for the general public. Panda’s printer had a rock-solid-feeling aluminum chassis and doesn’t go out of alignment when you sneeze on it. If the Makerbot’s analogue are the Altair 8800 and other kit-based computers of the mid-1970s, Panda Robotics’ is the Apple ][, which went a long way to defining what desktop computers were.

Photo by John Gauthier. Click to see the original.

And yes, I played accordion at the party.

I saw this in Kensington Market yesterday. I may have to send one of these to my friend Nick Small, who named a software creation of his after the Dark Knight.

Here’s punk rock legend (among other things) Henry Rollins with some solid advice. Enjoy, and listen carefully, even if you’re not a young person. They’re words to live by.

Transcript of the Video

Young person, you’ll find in your life that sometimes your great ambitions will be momentarily stymied, thwarted, marginalized by those who were perhaps luckier, come from money, where more doors opened, where college was a given–it was not a student loan; it was something that Dad paid for–to where an ease and confidence in life was almost a birthright, where for you it was a very hard climb.

You cannot let these people make you feel that you have in any way been dwarfed or out-classed. You must really go for your own and realize how short life is. You got what you got, so you have to make the most of it. You really can’t spend a whole lot of time worrying about his. You really have to go for your own. If you have an idea of what you want to do in your future, you must go at it with almost monastic obsession, be it music, the ballet or just a basic degree. You have to go at it single-mindedly and let nothing get in your way. You’re young. That’s why you can survive on no sleep, Top Ramen noodles and dental floss and still look good.

All the people you admire, from Muhammad Ali to any politician, they work and work and work. Your president right now is a man who got where he is through very hard work and scholarships, mainly hard work and application and discipline. If these people can do it, why not you?

We live in very interesting times and, as a young person going into a very turbulent and fragile economy that is going to get better–it’s going to take awhile–, it is easy to lose your moral compass, your decency, your sense of civility and your sense of community. Very easy. You known, things in traffic make you mad. People are getting a little desperate. They might not show their best elements to you. You must never lower yourself to being a person you don’t like.

There is no better time than now to have a moral and civic backbone, to have a moral and civic true north. This is a tremendous opportunity for you, a young person, to be heroic, to be morally upstanding, to be helpful, almost Boy Scout-like, presidential, to be altruistic.

Weakness is what brings ignorance, cheapness, racism, homophobia, desperation, cruelty, brutality, all these things that will keep a society chained to the ground, one foot nailed to the floor. It’s by being strong in the face of all of that, not lowering yourself to it, that’s how you lead. That’s how you liberate others and maintain freedom. You don’t have to beat your chest. You don’t have to wave a flag, but to maintain a high level of decency

And it sounds like I’m a cranky old man, like something you want to rebel against, but really think about what I’m saying. I think I’m right about this. When you look at what real desperation and ignorance looks like, when you have to run from it, like, literally run from it, you don’t want to be that. You want to be that which leads others out of that.

And now more than ever is the time to show these great qualities, to extol these great qualities and to embody these great qualities, which you have. Now it’s time to magnify them, personify them and inspire others with them. And there’s never been a time where they’re needed more than right now.

Last week was a particularly busy one…

Monday

Last Monday was my first full day at the new office, followed by dinner in Roncey at Barque Smokehouse, which may be the city’s best barbecue place. It was me, Mom, a friend of Mom’s and Joel, who was in town to do a shoot of an upcoming Netflix series. I recommend their sampler platter, which gives you ribs, chicken and brisket along with your choice of side. Note how healthy my sides are!

Tuesday

On Tuesday, I attended a presentation at Hewlett-Packard in Mississauga, just down the street from my office. They were showing off some of their server and cloud computing offerings. There was some pretty interesting stuff, and it’s likely that SafeMDM, the mobile device management software that my startup is building, will probably run on it.

At the end of the presentation, they asked us to fill out some evaluation forms where we’d rate various aspects of the event on a scale of 1 to 5, after which they’d use the forms to pick out the winner of the raffle. There were only five of us in the audience, and thanks to the combination of good odds and my generally good luck, I ended up winning the prize: an HP Mini 210 netbook.

People who know me professionally or have read my blog are aware of what I think of netbooks, but hey: I’m not going to turn down free tech goodies! I was more than pleased to claim my prize, which I intend to use in some experiments and arty projects as if it were a Raspberry Pi-type of computer. Here’s my quick and dirty unboxing shot. It’s not as slick an unboxing experience as you’d get with something from Apple (and I’m glad to see that HP is acknowledging that they need to pay more attention to design), but their packaging tends to be better than most other PC vendors’:

I think I let out a pretty loud cry of “Awesome!” when I pulled away the big “Instruction/Installation” book and discovered that my new netbook was a very funky shade of purple:

Here’s what it looks like with the cover open. My only real complaint is that it has one of those French/English bilingual keyboards. I have no beef with supporting French; it’s just that the bilingual keyboard adds a “French quotes” key at the expense of the left Shift key, which is cut down to half the size to accomodate it. I always end up hitting that extra key instead of the Shift key, and it drives me crazy:

It came with Windows 7 starter, which I’ll upgrade when I’m a little less busy:

However, I’ve installed Ubuntu on it as well. Note how well the default purplish desktop wallpaper matches the netbook’s colour scheme:

I really like my new toy!

Yes, I have accordion stories and other amusing what-not, and they’ll all return tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy…Romneypalooza!

The Onion’s Take: Romney Apologizes To Nation’s 150 Million ‘Starving, Filthy Beggars’

“Let me make this absolutely clear: I have the utmost respect for all of the filth-encrusted, lesion-covered degenerates of this nation,” Romney said. “In the coming weeks, I look forward to meeting real Americans in their squalid, roach-infested hellholes in every corner of this country. I promise to stand up for every one of you, even the 47 percent of you huddled together for warmth, fighting your own family members for moldy crusts of bread as you wallow in your own excrement.”

Added Romney, “And I look forward to serving you as your next president.”

I was an army brat, Mitt. I saw military families using food stamps to get by. They sacrifice. You mock them. Shame on you. #RomneyEncore

— Mattison (@Mattison) September 18, 2012

David Brooks, New York Times: Thurston Howell Romney

The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor.

Romney’s comments also reveal that he has lost any sense of the social compact. In 1987, during Ronald Reagan’s second term, 62 percent of Republicans believed that the government has a responsibility to help those who can’t help themselves. Now, according to the Pew Research Center, only 40 percent of Republicans believe that.

The Republican Party, and apparently Mitt Romney, too, has shifted over toward a much more hyperindividualistic and atomistic social view — from the Reaganesque language of common citizenship to the libertarian language of makers and takers. There’s no way the country will trust the Republican Party to reform the welfare state if that party doesn’t have a basic commitment to provide a safety net for those who suffer for no fault of their own.

The final thing the comment suggests is that Romney knows nothing about ambition and motivation. The formula he sketches is this: People who are forced to make it on their own have drive. People who receive benefits have dependency.

But, of course, no middle-class parent acts as if this is true. Middle-class parents don’t deprive their children of benefits so they can learn to struggle on their own. They shower benefits on their children to give them more opportunities — so they can play travel sports, go on foreign trips and develop more skills.

People are motivated when they feel competent. They are motivated when they have more opportunities. Ambition is fired by possibility, not by deprivation, as a tour through the world’s poorest regions makes clear.

If I had a nickel for every time Romney said something stupid, I’d be in his income bracket. #RomneyEncore #47percent

— Nick_Anderson_ (@Nick_Anderson_) September 18, 2012

Paul Krugman, New York Times: The Real Romney

Actually, if you look at the facts, you learn that the great bulk of those who pay no income tax pay other taxes; also, many of the people in the no-income-tax category are (a) elderly (b) students or (c) having a bad year, having lost a job — that is, they’re people who have paid income taxes in the past and/or will pay income taxes in the future. The idea that half of Americans are just grifters is grotesque.

Romney’s almost making me start to miss the Santorum Surge.

— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) September 17, 2012

Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo: Devastating

So the country is divided in two: on one side, the self-sufficient and high-achieving Republicans and on the other side the losers who think government needs to take care of them.

This is the caricature of Mitt Romney, who was born on 3rd base (in Ann Richards memorable phrase), thinks he hit a triple and thinks the broad middle class who’ve relied on government for student loans or social security or anything else are losers who can’t get their act together and take responsibility for themselves. Only this tape says that caricature Mitt Romney is the real Mitt Romney.

I guess the moral is “Don’t rip on the 47% while they’re still in the room serving you drinks” #RomneyEncore

— Mark Critch (@markcritch) September 18, 2012

Matt Welch, Reason: Romney’s 47 Percent Line Is a Common GOP Trope, and it’s Wrong*

This is economic determinism at its worst, going against the very message the Republican Party was trying to sell to the world during its quadrennial national convention last month. Over and over again, we heard speakers there talk about how their immigrant grandparents came to this country, worked hard, built “that,” never asked for a handout, and as a result their descendants have enjoyed the American Dream of ever-upward mobility. What the 53/47 dividing line says, to the direct contrary, is that income status is a permanent political condition, defrocking all Americans of agency and independent thought.

Most people at some point will be part of the 47 percent (indeed, nearly most already are). When my friends and I were comparatively poor, as people often are in their 20s and early 30s, we (for the most part) didn’t “believe” that we were “victims,” didn’t “believe the government has a responsibility” to care for us, and didn’t vote for Democratic political candidates “no matter what.” We mostly took personal responsibility and care for our lives, and acted according to our idiosyncratic individual values and whims.

I should theoretically be the target audience for this stuff. I never took out a federally guaranteed student loan, never enjoyed the mortgage-interest deduction; I worry all the time about government spending and entitlements, and I am not unfamiliar with the looter/moocher formulation. But this kind of reductionism does not reflect individualism (as David Brooks charges), it rejects individualism, by insisting that income tax is destiny. It judges U.S. residents not as humans but as productive (or unproductive) units. (Though as long as people are thinking that way, is there any category of resident less taker-y than illegal immigrants with fake Social Security cards who file income taxes?) And it prematurely valorizes one class of government-gobbling Americans while prematurely writing off another.

I’m millionaire-at-birth Mitt Romney & If you lazy 47% don’t vote for me my taxes might go up 3%.#RomneyEncore

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) September 18, 2012

Dick Morris, Fox News: Mitt Romney is Right

As you read this, keep in mind that former Clinton aide Dick Morris has a history of tax delinquency. The IRS was after him for $1.5 million in 2003, and in 2008, he owed the state of Connecticut over $450,000 — nine times the U.S. real median income in 2011 — in back taxes.

Generalities are always unjust. And painting with broad strokes will do many individuals an injustice. But the fact remains that our electorate is basically bifurcated into those who pay taxes and those who receive benefits.

The danger comes not with the benefit but with the sense of entitlement. Why do so many people feel Romney will be better at improving the economy and yet still plan to vote for Obama? The answer is that they care more about preserving their entitlements than about improving the economy. They have come to rely on political action more than economic growth as the key to their solvency.

Did Romney err in telling it like it is? It would have been better if he had made a forthright, factual statement on the issue. It looks bad for these unpleasant facts to come out in a “gotcha” moment at a videotaped private event. But the fact remains that an Obama reelection would turn the tide psychologically in America from the land of upward mobility through hard work and initiative and toward a country akin to Greece: dependent on government aid in the form of a subsidy and government handouts.

By stating this fundamental truth, albeit off the record, Romney has done a service for which he should be praised not excoriated. It all boils down to what John Kennedy said: There are those who ask what their country can do for you, and those who ask what you can do for your country.

Found via AZSpot. Click to see the original.

Mitt Romney’s running mate has been a little silent, but that’s understandable — he’s got his hands full at the moment.

Bonus Reading: Ayn Rand Fun Facts: Complete with bibliography, because it’s always good to cite sources.