Google’s Programming Contest

Google has just announced its first annual programming contest!

The objective is to write a program that will do something “interesting” with the about 900,000 Web pages’ worth data that’s Google provides. In addition to writing the program, contestants also have to convince the judges why their program is interesting (or useful) and why it will scale (that is, handle a constantly increasing load of data that grows as the Web grows). The prize is US$10,000 in cash, a V.I.P. tour of the Google facility in Mountain View, California and possibly a chance to run their program on Google’s complete billion-Web-page store.

Google suggest that the programs be written to fit in one of two categories — Systems or Applications. A Systems program would be concerned about the handling of Google’s data (possibly improving storage compression or indexing) while an Applications program is more concerned about the semantics of the data (say, a program that can detect two pages that are nearly identical or can cluster pages by topic or type).

I think I’ll have my hands full with Peek-A-Booty for the next little while, but I know that a least a few programmers read this blog. Guys, get to work!

The Anti-Bloggie Alliance

Nick Mark’s blog, Naked Pope: The Movie, has an even dumber title than mine. He won an Anti-Bloggie award last year for — you guessed it — “Dumbest Name”, and he wants to win it again this year. He’s willing to let me have “Best Heterosexual Blog” and “Weblog of the Millennium” — he just wants “Dumbest Name”. In the spirit of cooperation between bloggers-in-arms, I have decided to join with him in a unified Anti-Bloggie campaign.

So I’m asking you to vote in the Anti-Bloggies and enter Naked Pope: The Movie (www.nakedpopethemovie.com) for Dumbest Name and The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century (www.kode-fu.com/shame) for Best Heterosexual Blog and Weblog of the Millennium. And while you’re at it, check out Naked Pope: The Movie for all your disrobed pontiff reading.

The offer for the cookies still stands, but now you have to vote for both Nick and me.

Tunes

Are “Friends” Electric?

I’m programming and enjoying the music on GRRL Radio (you can see the songs they’ve just played here)..

Right now, they’re playing a wonderful cover of Gary Numan’s Are “Friends” Electric? by The Replicants, a side project made up of members of the post-grunge bands Failure and Tool.

Hey Mister

This is another song I’ve been listening to.

The story behind this delightful little ditty goes like this: a musician who goes by the name of Custom went out to a bar with his sisters. At the bar, he noticed all the guys hitting on his sibs and felt a little bit protective of them. As the night wore on, he himself was flirting with other women and it suddenly dawned on him: he wasn’t very different from the men making advances to his sisters. Duh. From this incident, he was inspired to write Hey Mister. It opens with

Hey Mister

I really like your daughter

I’d like to eat her like ice cream

Maybe dip her in chocolate

and it ends with this line sung over and over:

I hope I never have a daughter

You can check out the full lyrics here and download the MP3 and video here.

This song is full of delicious testorone-glazed sexual eeeevil that it appeals to my inner Scorpiopath. I give it the AccordionGuy thumbs up; this is definitely going in my busking repertoire. You might wonder how a guy who plays sweet accordion waltzes for an artist who writes romantic lyrics like “How long has it been since a boy made me blush?” can also get his jollies from Hey Mister. I blame it on a combination of Catholic school and aspartame.

I remember telling guitarist Neil Leyton how much I love this song and sang the first verse to him. He looked at me as if I had just suggested that cats are just egg rolls waiting to happen (which I think is true, anyway). Besides, how shocked could a guy who plays bass in CJ Sleez’s band really be (for Chrissake, the drummer’s name is “Fuckface“)?

Nominate Me!

I would like an Anti-Bloggie, please.

If the Bloggies are the Oscars of the blogging world, then the Anti-Bloggies are the Sundance Festival. Or the Lapdance Festival. Or the Adult Video Awards. Anyhow, I didn’t stand a chance in even getting nominated into the Bloggies, and Wil “Wesley Crusher” Wheaton’s blog pretty much swept them this year. But with your help, I stand a fair-to-middling chance of netting myself an Anti-Bloggie.

In the Bloggies, you vote in categories such as “Best Canadian Weblog” (Congratulations, Natalie!), “Best-Designed Weblog” (Whoo, what a photo!), “(Best Tagline of a Weblog” Wesley Crusher), “Best Weblog About Music“, “Most Humourous Weblog” and “Best-Kept Secret Weblog“. In the Anti-Bloggies, the categories are “Most Obsessed With Radiohead”, “Most Obsessed About ‘Which X Are You?” Tests”, “Most Distracting Background Image”, “Biggest Stalker”, “Bad Hair Blog” and “Most Insensitive Response to 9-11”.

I’m asking for you to vote for me for “Dumbest Name”, “Best Heterosexual Weblog” and “Weblog of the Millenium”. C’mon folks, after all the hours of fine reading I’ve given you, is it so much to ask? Do you really think that Wesley Crusher deserves more awards than me (after all, even though it took a while, I at least finished school while he dropped out of Starfleet Academy, the little whiny quitter!)? I’ll even sweeten the pot: if you can prove you’ve voted for me (a screen shot of the Anti-Bloggies site with The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century will do nicely) and come over to my house, I will bake you some cookies. Really.

Update (Tuesday, February 5th, 12:50 p.m. EST): Give your “Dumbest Name” vote to Nick Mark’s Naked Pope: The Movie instead. I still want “Best Heterosexual Weblog” and “Weblog of the Millennium”. Vote, dammit!

“Unfinished Business” Week, Part 7

A special hello to some engineering friends

Funny I should mention Wil Wheaton.

His show, Star Trek: The Next Generation had a seven-year run, spanning from 1987 with the rather dreadful premiere episode Encounter at Farpoint (the new city is actually a big space jellyfish!) to 1994 with the pretty decent series finale All Good Things… (Captain Picard dooms, then saves the human race). In a very fitting coincidence, my University career also spans those years, from 1987 with Hey Baby, Why Don’t I Help You With Your Mech Assignment at Your Place? to 1994 with Do You Mind If I Take Off My Pants?. Like the show, I hit my stride in the 3rd and 4th years, there were several cute guest stars, ridiculous costumes and a lot of technobabble. That, and my friend George made smart-ass comments about both the show and my life (the two stand-outs are “It’s not easy being me, but it’s easier than being Joey” and “If Joey does it, it must be sordid”).

I spent a good chunk of my years at Queen’s as a DJ at Clark Hall Pub, a bar run by the Engineering Society. Being a DJ gave me the best seat in the room, all the beer I could drink, opportunities to meet new people (read “women”) and make friends. My university years predate my accordion-playing years, so when I run into old college buddies while busking, they’re quite surprised.

The most noteable run-in I’ve had so far took place before Christmas when Jane “Killer” Buchanan (we called her “Killer” because she’s so laid back — go figure), Chris Hilborn and Chris Evans ran into me while I was playing at the corner of Queen and Spadina. I played some classics off my Clark Hall Pub playlist (You Shook Me All Night Long, Head Like a Hole and so on), and even made some decent coin while doing it. Chris tried to call two other friends whom they’d just said goodbye to — Kristine “Dobber” Dobson and Greg Alexander, but they didn’t answer their cell phone. Too bad; I thought I was in pretty good form that night.

It being almost Christmas, I gave my earnings to Leanne, a very sweet street kid who panhandles at the corner.

So there you go, “Killer”, Chris and Chris — the mention I promised! Hi, guys!

Saturday Night’s Gig

I missed out on playing at a jam at Eclipse while taking care of some programming business with Peekabooty. CVS — the system that keeps our software straight while Paul and I work on different parts of it at the same time — was acting up and preventing me from checking in my changes. Once that was done, it was off to the Art Bar to back Lindi up at a gallery opening for Rannie Turingan’s photos.

They started the show earlier than than I was told it would start, so I arrived a few songs in. Lindi was just finishing Naughtly Little Thing when I walked up to the stage and introduced me as her accordion player, saying I was very cute and that she wanted to wrap me up in a package so she could have Christmas every day. Isn’t she the best? She always says really nice things about me.

Special message to George: you never did that for me when we were in a band together, you bass-playing beeyotch!

Anyhow, it was just her on the Art Bar’s charmingly honky-tonk piano and my street accordion. We did the songs on her new album, some “head” covers — namely Radiohead and Portishead — and even improvised a I-V waltz about watching dirty movies while I yelled out porn titles like In and Out of Africa, Malcolm XXX and Assablanca. Lindi’s improvised lyrics were hilarious.

After the gig, I got to chat with some folks from the audience, including fellow gtablogger Emma Jane. Lindi, her friend Damian and I went to 7 West and had drinks and dessert, talking about serious stuff like upcoming gigs and nonsense like the one time I go-go danced for Electric Circus (hey, they were short some people that night).

I went home after that and worked on some more Peekabooty code until 5 that morning. No rest for the wicked, folks!

“He has too much spare time.”

“You do that? You must have a lot of free time.”

“She must have a lot of time on her hands.”

These well known off-the-cuff remarks are often made about someone who has an “unusual” hobby or interest, especially if it’s of the geeky variety. Recreational hackers, Japanese animation aficionados, model car/train/airplane builders, the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism)/LARP(Live-Action Role Playing) crowds and anyone else whose interests fit somewhere in the Geek Hierarchy. These people catch a lot of flack for spending their free time on passions that don’t appeal to “most people”. I should know; if I had a dime for every time someone’s said that about me, I’d have enough metal to build and launch my very own Orbital Accordion Platform.

There’s a certain selectivity to the kind of interest that gets the “too much spare time” treatment. In our society, which has always viewed intellectualism as suspect (and even more so with the current political climate), hobbies of the mind get short shrift. Sports fans who paint themselves in their team’s colours or dress ridiculously, memorize every player’s stats and spend each Sunday blankly watching TV, belly full of snack food, brain clouded by Lowenbrau, are not categorized as having too much free time. The “I Shop Therefore I Am” crowd, in their vainglorious quests to purchase their way to the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy, don’t get smeared with the label either. In the wake of the shootings at Columbine schools across the States, instead of looking at the jocks-and-popular kids/geeks-and-outcast kids social dynamic, blindly clamped down on the “weird” kids, driving up the already inflated price of being different.

“Just an ambitionless DJ”

This kind of sniping is a pet peeve of mine, particularly because of one incident that took place when I was still in university. At a party, I’d mentioned to a friend of mine that my sister Eileen was coming to visit me. My friend remarked that she could not believe that we “came from the same place”. Eileen had the great academic history (despite being younger, she’d graduated before me), she’d landed at the U.N. in Vienna and New York, and was about to enter a Master’s program in Community Health. I was the perma-student with a checkered track record, too many silly extracurriculars, and in her words, “just an ambitionless DJ,” which was also the way she drunkenly introduced me to people at the party. Yes, Eileen’s accomplishments, while notable — I’m very proud of my little sister — but what I’ve done before and since is nothing to sneeze at either. I’m not going to hang my head in shame because some alcohol-impaired self-appointed personal scorekeeper of mine has decided that I’m not worthy and introduce me to complete strangers at a party as such.

When I confronted her about her remarks a few days after the party, she couldn’t recall ever having said such things and because of that, she couldn’t have really meant it. Bullshit. Drunk people say things they’ve thought beforehand; the fact that she couldn’t remember the incident is a combination of alcohol and the fact that what she thought of me was invisible yet all around her, like the air she breathed or the way you stop noticing the hum on an airplane’s engines after you’ve been in it for a while. This person is one of the lucky few to end up on my thankfully short shitlist.

Vindication

My pal Cory Doctorow, pursuer of hobbies and passions even more obscure than mine, was written a wonderful rant on the truth behind the “that guy has too much spare time” in a posting he made yesterday on bOING bOING.

Bless you, Cory, and bless all you people with “too much spare time!”

“That guy has too much spare time” is one of the most odious, intellectually dishonest, dismissive things a person can say. It disguises a vicious ad-hominem attack as a lighthearted verbal shrug. The subtext of the remark is that the subject’s passions — this remark is almost always directed at someone engaged in some labor of love — are so meritless that their specific shortcomings don’t even warrant discussion. The subtext is that any sane person who considers these passions will immediately see their total worthlessness. To direct this remark at someone is to utterly dismiss their personal fire and so their ability to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy.

It’s a substitute for thought. It’s a uncompromising line between art and junk, between personal enrichment and navel-gazing. Whether it’s directed at some model-train otaku who has reproduced, in miniature, a fantastic landscape that she brings to life with the flick of a switch or an obsessive collector of breakfast cereal packaging whose house is wallpapered with gaudy enticements to tooth-decay, the slur brooks no possibility that the speaker has failed to appreciate some valuable, fulfilling element of the subject’s hobby.

The essay is available in its entirety here.

Working away…

…and bopping along to Perkigoth Radio, whose library sounds a helluva lot like my tape collection during my spiky-haired days of the eighties. So far they’ve played The The’s Uncertain Smile, Yaz’s Situation, The Vapours’ Turning Japanese, Shriekback’s Hand On My Heart, The Lords of the New Church’s Dance With Me and as I type this…Toni Basil’s Hey Mickey? Not gothy, but I’m sure it had the same ironic appeal that Rick James’ Super Freak had for the black-clad club-goers at Toronto’s late Silver Crown (one of my old haunts).

It’s a pity that Perkigoth radio broadcasts only at 56K, which makes it sound like an old AM radio. Mind you, I once spent the summer of ’85 driving a sno-cone truck listening to a radio that had more or less the same fidelity.

I’m clearly putting myself in the “crotchety old man” category by even mentioning these bands and places.

“Despite all my rage I’m still not making a wage”

I’m waiting for a program to finish compiling, and compile time means online test-taking time! Today’s test is “Which Smashing Pumpkins Member Are You?” My results:

you are billy corgan sometimes perceived as an egomaniac, you bring joy to many remaining alt-rock fans. underneath your exterior lies the soul of a dreamer. your fashion tastes may run to the bizarre and your friends may occasionally want to throw things at you, but all in all, you’re a pretty decent person. which pumpkin are you?

Sounds about right.