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Geek It Happened to Me

Road Trip Diary, Part 4: More Big Apple

Some more photos from the Big Apple! Here’s their pie menu:

08 pie menu

The Big Apple is an apple-shaped three-storey building with an observation deck on the roof. Here’s a shot of Damir beside the Big Apple:

10 damir big apple 1

Here’s a close-up:

11 damir big apple 2

Inside the building is an apple museum. We were all rarin’ to go inside and take photos of the various displays inside the museum, but…

12 closed

Closed! Look at the disappointment on Damir’s face:

13 damir disappointed

I was even more disappointed (look at my sad mug below). “Ain’t that just like an apple,” I said, “tantalizing promises, but you get denied the moment you get close. Now I know how iPhone developers feel.” (Remember, folks – I kid because I care.)

14 joey disappointed

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Geek It Happened to Me

Road Trip Diary, Part 3: The Big Apple

01 big apple sign

When people in Toronto and area refer to “The Big Apple”, we’re usually not talking about New York, but the Big Apple in Coburg, Ontario. It’s one of the must-visit stops on that stretch of Highway 401 that spans the Toronto-Montreal corridor: roadside rest stop, mini-amusement park, apple pie facvory, apple museum and giant apple-shaped building with a balcony on top giving a commanding view of the cars whizzing by.

02 big apple building

There’s no shortage of interesting signs on the grounds:

03 rabbits are wild

Apparently, the Big Apple is about 13,000 kilometres from the city of my birth, Manila:

04 city signs

The place is heaven for people who like pie:

05 boxes of pies

They have a mascot, but no one was running around in the giant apple costume today. Damir and I had to settle for the little statue by the counter:

06 apple mascot

We arrived in the Ford Flex just before a busload of people, which means that we didn’t have to wait for pie:

07 pie crowd

More scenes from the Big Apple to follow!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Geek It Happened to Me

Road Trip Diary, Part 2: The Blogging Rig

blogging rig

Here’s the blogging setup I’m using from within the Ford Flex as we drive to Montreal: my laptop with a Rogers stick and carte blanche to use as much bandwidth as I need to continually post from the road. Damir’s at the wheel, I’ve got my seat moved all the way back, my own set of climate controls and Raw Dog Comedy on the satellite radio. It’s a surprisingly decent work setup; I could get a fair bit done this way.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Geek Life Work

Sacha Chua’s “The Shy Connector”

My friend Sacha Chua is not someone who you’d think of as an introvert, but she is. Hang out in Toronto’s tech scene and sooner or later, you’ll catch one of her presentations, which she does with all with the energetic bounce that is her stock in trade. She considers technology evangelism and outreach not just part of her job, but part of her life. She has hundreds of blog subscribers, Facebook followers and LinkedIn contacts, and her Twitter followers number in the thousands. Despite all her public appearances, blog entries, and vast social network, she’s still an introvert.

There’s a reason the saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” has endured: it’s true (so true, in fact, that Malcolm Gladwell has done quite well for himself telling stories based on this particular nugget of wisdom). Wonderful things arise from opportunities, opportunities often come from connections and the some of the best connections are “weak ties”: those casual acquaintances who exist slightly outside our regular circles and who thus have information that we might otherwise never acquire. For a madly-grinning accordion-playing extrovert like Yours Truly, gathering weak ties is quite easy, and I’ve parleyed many a weak tie into an opportunity.

But what if you’re not an extrovert? Can introverts make the connections that can make the difference between getting by and getting ahead? The answer is yes, by playing to introversion’s strengths, taking advantage of some tools and following the steps in Sacha’s presentation, The Shy Connector, which I’ve included below:

 

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

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Geek It Happened to Me Work

Career Demo Camp Montreal: Wednesday, December 2nd

career demo camp montrealIf you’re a techie in Montreal, you want to attend Career Demo Camp on Wednesday, December 2nd at 6:30 p.m. in the Mont-Royal Centre! It’s part tech career guidance conference, part DemoCamp-style event, and an opportunity for developers and start-ups to get together and learn about the job market, see projects that Montreal-area techies are working on and get to know and network with your local nerds. It’s presented by the Confoo conference (taking place in March 2010) and PHUG and will be hosted by Yours Truly and Jean-Luc SansCartier.

Here’s the schedule:

  • 6:30 p.m.: Intro to Career Demo Camp
  • 7:00 p.m.: Alex Kovalenko – IT Headhunting and Recruiting
  • 7:30 p.m.: Joey deVilla; Better Living Through Blogging
  • 8:00 p.m.: DemoCamp Introduction
  • 8:15 p.m.: DemoCamp Presentations
  • 10:00 p.m.: Networking Session

oh yes its free

The event is free of charge! All you have to do to attend is sign up at Career Demo Camp’s Registration page.

Microsoft Canada’s providing the space – we booked the Mont-Royal Centre for TechDays Montreal for two days (December 2nd and 3rd) and we weren’t doing anything with the space on the evening of Day 1. We decided to offer the space for some kind of community event, and Confoo and PHUG put together Career Demo Camp. I love doing developer community events and was only too happy to co-host.

The DemoCamp portion of the evening needs people to do DemoCamp-style demos: 5 minutes of “Show and Tell” where you show your software, web application or project in action. It’s the only thing you’re allowed to show on the big screen — no slides allowed! The idea is for you to show off your technology in action and inspire us, not to do a sales pitch. Think you’ve got a demo in you? Contact Jean-Luc Sans Cartier or Yann Larrivee and let them know you want to demo at Career Demo Camp!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.

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Geek It Happened to Me

Scenes from TechDays Calgary

I – along with a good chunk of Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team – am in Calgary for the fourth leg of the TechDays Canada seven-city tour. TechDays Calgary is taking place in the BMO Centre on the Calgary Stampede grounds. Wanting to be a good guest, I decided to observe a local custom:

joey devilla

I haven’t worn my flaming cowboy hat in ages!

As far as I can tell, I’m the only attendee who brought a cowboy hat. The only other similarly-haberdashed people on the premises are the Calgary Stampede staff and the washroom signs:

washroom signs

There are a number of Christmas-related events taking place at the BMO Centre before and after TechDays, so the place is all decked out for Christmas:

nutcracker and tree

The isn’t a Santa Claus on site, but we do have IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus delivering goodies:

rick claus

…and Rick’s session has drawn quite a crowd:

ricks room

ricks room 2

Another well-attended session was Introducing ASP.NET MVC, which was delivered by Tom Opgenorth:

tom opgenorth

Here’s the ASP.NET MVC room, already filling up a full 15 minutes before the start of the day:

asp net mvc room from stage

Tom ended up speaking to a room packed to maximum capacity:

asp_net_mvc_session

The people who couldn’t fit into the ASP.NET MVC sessions were still able to catch the proceedings on a monitor outside the room:

asp net mvc overflow

Meanwhile, next door, Developer Evangelist John Bristowe delivered the Practical Web Testing presentation:

john bristowe

And one door over, Adam “Adam Bomb” Carter (the first guy to suggest to me that I get a job at Microsoft) spoke at the Inside the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 session:

adam carter

Here’s a scene from the speaker prep room that reminded me of the Sesame Street song One of These Things is Not Like the Other:

speaker room

“Look! I’m at a conference, watching the proceedings of another conference!”

john bristowe watches PDC stream

And just outside the speaker prep room, Rob Burke and D’Arcy Lussier chat:

rob burke darcy lussier

Things seem to be going well, if IT Pro Evangelist and TechDays man-in-charge Damir Bersinic’s thumbs-up is any indication:

damir_thumbs_up

And down the hall, the Ford Flex featuring Microsoft’ Ford Sync technology awaits some passengers:

ford sync

Someday, arranging for conference wireless will not be an arduous, expensive affair, but in the meantime, we set up these hard-wired internet access stations. Note the anti-bacterial lotion beside the laptop – a sign of these H1N1 times. If I’d had any foresight, I’d have bought a lot of Purell stock:

internet station

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.

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Geek Life

Spider-Man on Chat Rooms

Spider-Man: "I get into costume and boom, I'm the snarky wise-guy. Anonymity's liberating. There should be rooms where people could go to chat using fake identities. They'd spend hours being jerks to each other."

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.