Month: October 2012

TechCrunch, one of the most-read techie news sites, is holding a series of meetups far from their home base in Silicon Valley, and the first stop on their northern tour is Toronto on Monday, November 5th (which also happens to be my birthday). They’re on a mission to find new startups up here, so if you’re “a founder, a college kid, an investor, or a dreamer,” you’re going to want to be at this meetup.

The Toronto venue is the Steam Whistle Brewing Company (255 Bremner, across the street from the CN Tower, Rogers Centre and Metro Toronto Convention Centre South Building), and the event will run from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m..

There are two levels of admission for the TechCrunch Toronto Meetup:

• It’s FREE if you’d just like to attend, mingle and watch local startups do their presentations.
• If you’d like to demo your startup that evening, $1,500 will put you onstage.

This event has the potential to sell out soon, so if you want to go, I suggest that you register now. See you there!

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

I like to see my friends succeed, and one such friend is Miguel Carrasco, a techie whom I had the privilege of meeting during my days at Microsoft. He’s a techie whose life changed in April when he noticed a tingling sensation in his right hand that spread to his entire arm and was accompanied by a tired feeling. These symptoms led him to the hospital, which in turn led him to a health epiphany.

Red rum! REEEED RUUUUM!!!

If you ignore the “axe murderer” face that Miguel’s making for the camera, you’ll see a guy who weighed a trim 170 pounds in August, and who does a 5K run four times a week. This is a dramatic change from the old Miguel circa April, who was 45 pounds heavier and couldn’t make a run five houses past his own.

He’s decided to share his fitness journey on a new blog called Smart Ass Fitness. If you’ve been thinking about making a change in your life and getting into shape, you might find Miguel’s new blog helpful and inspiring.

And remember the golden rule of getting better at anything: consistency beats intensity!

The Red Shirt is one of the great staples of classic Star Trek. They were background crew members of the U.S.S. Enterprise in red uniforms (which meant they were in operations — engineering, security or support), and are remembered by viewers of the 1960s TV series as cannon fodder. As soon as you saw a non-main character in a red shirt join Kirk, Spock ad McCoy in the landing party, you knew that it was likely to be the poor sod’s last mission. They were quick and dirty writing devices for injecting some tension into a story, reminders to the audience that space exploration was dangerous, and they made for some good drinking games.

It turns out that actor Jonathan Goldsmith, whom you probably recognize as Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man in the World”, played a Red Shirt in the episode The Corbomite Maneuver, and he didn’t die!

And now, one of my favourite Red Shirt references, from the first season of Family Guy:

Canadian celebrities pictured at the Thanksgiving table, from left to right: Ryan Gosling, Kim Cattrall, “The Biebs”, Ryan Reynolds, Ellen Page, Drake and “Robin Sparkles”.

It’s the Thanksgiving Long Weekend! In Canada, Thanksgiving takes place on the second Monday in October, as opposed to American Thanksgiving, which happens on the last Thursday in November. As with the American version, there’s a family get-together, traditionally with turkey and the usual accoutrements.

Monday’s a day off, which means that many people are going to be looking for something to do. Here’s what’s open and what’s not on Thanksgiving Monday 2012 in Toronto:

Open

• Public Transit:
  • Both the TTC and GO Transit will be operating on their Sunday schedules
  • Toronto Island ferries will be operating on their fall schedule
• Shopping malls –These malls will be open:
  • Eaton Centre and the Yonge/Queen Hudson’s Bay Company
  • Pacific Mall
  • Square One
  • Vaughan Mills
• Booze: Some breweries, such as the Amsterdam and Steam Whistle breweries
• Most convenience stores (good for fixings, no good for a last-minute turkey)
• Most movie theatres
• Tourist attractions:
  • Bata Shoe Museum
  • Bloor/Yorkville shops will be open in some parts
  • Casa Loma
  • CN Tower
  • Distillery District and its shops
  • Hockey Hall of Fame
  • Ontario Science Centre
  • Queen’s Quay West and its shops
  • Riverdale Farm
  • Royal Ontario Museum
  • Toronto Zoo
  • Yonge Street’s downtown stretch

Closed

• Shopping malls –These malls will be closed:
  • Sherway Gardens
  • Yorkdale Mall
• Tourist attractions
• Most supermarkets
• LCBO and The Beer Store
• Government offices
• Post offices
• Community centres and public indoor pools

Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving!

I’ve seen the old trick where you super-glue a loonie (that’s a Canadian one-dollar coin) to the sidewalk and watch people try to pick it up. This takes it to a whole new level.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Leave it to the folks at someecards to come up with some of the best commentary on last night’s presidential debates:

I put in more effort for that interview to do programming for a really cheesy porn site.

What he should’ve said last night (I know, “would’a, could’a, should’a”) was what he said today in Denver:

We had our first debate last night. And when I got onto the stage, I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney. But it couldn’t have been Mitt Romney—because the real Mitt Romney has been running around the country for the last year promising $5 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy. The fellow on stage last night said he didn’t know anything about that.

The real Mitt Romney said we don’t need any more teachers in our classrooms. But the fellow on stage last night, he loves teachers—can’t get enough of them. The Mitt Romney we all know invested in companies that were called “pioneers” of outsourcing jobs to other countries. But the guy on stage last night, he said that he doesn’t even know that there are such laws that encourage outsourcing—he’s never heard of them. Never heard of them. Never heard of tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. He said that if it’s true, he must need a new accountant.

Now, we know for sure it was not the real Mitt Romney, because he seems to be doing just fine with his current accountant. So you see, the man on stage last night, he does not want to be held accountable for the real Mitt Romney’s decisions and what he’s been saying for the last year. And that’s because he knows full well that we don’t want what he’s been selling for the last year. So Governor Romney may dance around his positions, but if you want to be President, you owe the American people the truth.

His managed the debate much better than Obama did by channeling his inner Sterling Archer.

You probably recognize this as the gesture, which pantomimes speaking on a old phone handset, as the symbol for “call me”:

The Hi-Call Bluetooth glove handset now lets you use that same gesture to make a call:

With a speaker in the thumb, a microphone in the pinkie finger and Bluetooth components and indicators near the wrist, the Hi-Call glove lets you make and take calls using the well-known hand gesture. It’ll be good for a laugh when you demonstrate it in front of friends, and strangers watching you use the glove from a distance will think you’re one of those crazy people who talk to themselves (although Bluetooth earpieces have had the same effect for years).

Here’s Engadget’s video, where they give the Hi-Call glove a try:

The Hi-Call should be available later this month for about $70. That’s a bit steep for something that has some joke value but that I probably wouldn’t use normally; if it were priced somewhere closer to the Moshi Moshi Retro Handset, I’d consider it as a joke gift for officemates.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.