SWAG: Short for “Silly Wild-Ass Guess”. Used as an initial seat-of-the-pants “guesstimate” for the timeframe of a project. As the project progresses and more information becomes available, the SWAG gets replaced with dates of increasing accuracy.
Category: It Happened to Me
Categories
4th Anniversary!
Four years ago, inspired by my friends Deenster’s and Cory’s blogs, I decided to start my own little blog and came up with the name “Joey deVilla’s Hall of Shame”. While searching the web for some possible site graphics ideas, I stumbled across this image:
Erin Gray (“Wilma Dearing”) and Gil Gerard (“William ‘Buck’ Rogers”) from the TV series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. The only sci-fi show with more seventies-tastic uniforms was Space: 1999.
For those of you who don’t recognize the people in the photo, it’s a publicity still for the old television show Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Seeing this image, I decided on a better name for this blog, which I’ve kept to this day.
Today is the 4th anniversary of this blog. During such anniversaries, it is traditional for the blogger to wax philosophical about blogging and talk about how it has changed his or her life. Normally, I’d indulge, but today’s turning out to be a bit of a busy day both at work and home, so I’ll make do with this laundry list of statistics that I was able to pull together last night.
It’s been a great four years! Thanks to all of you who’ve read, commented and link to me.
The Stats
- 4: The number of years since the first post.
- 4260: The number of posts that I’ve made over the past four years. That makes an average of roughly three posts a day.
- 6518: The number of comments posted to this blog since the summer of 2003, when I switched to Blogware, the blogging platform created and maintained by my employer, Tucows. Before that, I was on Blogger, which didn’t have a comment system at the time. I used an external commenting system, but those old comments are long gone and I never kept count of those.
- 1242: The number of trackbacks this blog has received since the summer of 2003.
- 8.5 million: Number of pageviews this blog has received since the stats package was added to Blogware in February 2004.
- 0: Number of times I have been fired thanks to something I wrote in this blog.
- 1: Number of times I have been hired thanks to something I wrote in the blog.
- 1: Number of times I have been married thanks to something I wrote in the blog. Okay, that’s a bit of a stretch, but before coming up to Toronto from Boston to visit me, Wendy read all my blog entries as a sort of “background check”.
While I was busy celebrating my birthday last Saturday, others were
celebrating the accordion at the 8th Annual Northeast Accordion
Festival in Minneapolis. Dave “Dave’s Picks” Polaschek sent me this scan [244KB JPEG image] of a local newspaper that covered the event (click it to see it at full size):
I haven’t been practicing as much as I should lately. Getting married
and getting Wendy moved in really disrupted all sorts of routines,
wonderful as both were. I’m slowly in the process of resuming all sorts
of things, not the least of which is a little regular keyboard practice.
Living in a condo complicates the matter; prior to getting married, I
lived in a house that was very well acoustically isolated from the
neighbours. I’m quite sure that even at medium volume, all three
adjacent units would be able to pick up the sound of me working on my
rendition of Neil Diamond’s Cracklin’ Rosie.
I can at least keep my keyboard chops sharp thanks to a pair of
headphones and my collection of old-but-trusty synthesizers — a Korg Wavestation A/D rack and a even more old-school Korg Poly-800
that Steph Fox gave to me a couple of birthdays ago. Perhaps I should
take a peek at some software synths as well — I figure my PowerBook
(1.3 Ghz 12″ AlBook, 1.25G RAM) should be up to the task. Anyone out
there have any favourites?
I’m also getting a little more accordion practice now that I’m back to regular attendance at Kickass Karaoke at the Rivoli.
Wendy likes the opportunity to exercise her lovely singing voice in
public, and those who know me know how much I love being on stage.
Last Sunday’s session was a special treat. We got to take Dave from
Chicago over to his first Kickass Karaoke, and I also got a chance to
meet Bob “Let It Bleed” Tarantino,
one of the better and saner voices in the local right-wing blogosphere.
Carson covered mine and Wendy’s drinks as a birthday present to me
(thanks for the Jagermeister, Cars!) and the wind storm kept the crowd
to a minimum, giving me a chance to go onstage often and experiment
with a few numbers. I tried a couple of new ones, including Wheatus’
high school whine-anthem Teenage Dirtbag and the moshtacular Thunder Kiss ’65
by White Zombie. How Rob Zombie can vocalize through an entire concert
using that voice is beyond me; my vocal cords were shredded after that
one.
Categories
Happy Birthday to Me
I turn 38 today!
Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday you sexy accordion playing beast,
Happy birthday to MEEEEEEEEEE!
I’ll be celebrating at Kickass Karaoke tomorrow night at the Rivoli. Feel free to drop by!
Bay Street Video (1172 Bay Street, just south of Bloor), one of Accordion City’s best video stores, not only puts funny comments on post-it notes in their video library,
they also put amusing comments on the sandwich board outside the store.
Here’s what I saw on the north-facing side of their sandwich board
recently:
And this was on the south-facing side:
I’ve got both these photos in a larger format in a photo album — you can check it out in album or slideshow form.
Be sure to check inside the store too — they’ve got a great selection for purchase or rental.
…was worn by karaoke regular “Johnny O”. I shall dub it “Honore de Balzac”, but not for literary reasons…
Categories
Hallowe’en Costumes 2005
Here’s what I wore to Kickass Karaoke on Sunday: “Indigo Girls Fan”.
Wendy says that if you took away the cowboy hat, collar and leash, this
was the sort of thing she wore all through high school:
Wendy and I joined my sister, brother-in-law and nephews yesterday for their Hallowe’en run, which took place in their Kingsway
neighbourhood, on a street heavy with young families. Some of the
houses went all-out, with giant inflatable jack-o-lanterns, faux
gravestones and smoke machines. Some of the houses did such a good job
at being scary that my nephews Aidan (age 4) and Nico (age 2)
refused to go anywhere near them.
Here’s Aidan, in his “George Shrinks in his zip-car” costume.
Nico went as Thomas the Tank Engine:
