Ah, Montreal, city of nightlife, all-round fun and source of much of my girl trouble when I was a younger man, I’m heading your way next week…
Every young guy from out of town takes a picture of this Montreal landmark sign.
I’m there to help run the TechDays conference and do a presentation at Career Demo Camp. For more details, see my article at Canadian Developer Connection or Global Nerdy.
All I wanted was my dinner. After an early morning flight back to Accordion City from Calgary and enough work to keep me from getting a decent lunch, I was looking forward to a nice dinner with The Missus at Wasabi (1730 Bloor Street West, at Keele), the all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant that had opened a few blocks away from our home.
Wasabi’s menu is not unlike those at other local all-you-can-eat sushi places like Aji Sai. It comprises a selection of sushi, sashimi, tempura, donburi and other things that can be made quickly and cheaply and can provide a lot of bang for your twenty bucks.
It’s the busiest restaurant that’s ever opened at that corner. When we walked in on Friday night, we saw a full restaurant bustling with all sorts of people: groups of young friends having dinner before a night out, many young families with strollers in tow, solo diners who brought some reading material with them, couples out for an end-of-week meal and so on. At first glance, the place appeared to be the next neighbourhood hit.
It took a little while for someone to take our order. We chalked it up to the place’s newness; it often takes a restaurant a little while to work the kinks out of its system during its “shakedown phase” and get a sense of how busy they’ll be. They appeared understaffed, and the the staff they had clearly weren’t used to working in a busy restaurant.
The orders we did manage to get were, for the most part, decent. The seafood tempura was done right, the dynamite roll was tasty and the edamame was well, edamame. After that, no food came to our table for a good while.
After asking around, we discovered that our order had been sent to the wrong table. We were still willing to forgive this mistake and place another order, and the waitress apologized and told us she’d be right back with a notepad. Hey, it’s an all-you-can-eat place, and most of the stuff was the kind that other places can make quickly.
She never came back. A good quarter-hour, complete with a lot of waves to the waitress, has passed without any service. It was clearly time for plan B.
“Enough already. Pizza slice?” I asked Wendy, gesturing to the Pizza Pizza across the street.
“Sure."
We walked up to the front, told the staff that our order had been served to the wrong table and no one had attempted to correct the mistake. Another customer who was standing at the counter said “Yeah, they screwed up my order, too.”
We also told them that we weren’t paying, and walked out. They gave no reply other than confused looks, tilted heads and stunned silence – not even an “I’m sorry". This sort of reaction is the hallmark of complete incompetence and the front-of-house staff treat the place as many similar people do: the restaurant’s just a place that provides a paycheque in exchange for you just showing up.
As we walked towards the pizza place, we ran into our neighbours Chris and Wanda, who were heading to Wasabi to try them out, and warned them away from the place. Consider this blog entry the same warning to the rest of the world: Wasabi is run by scatterbrains, and if you’d actually like some service, go elsewhere.
GO!’s host Brent Bambury gets the audience warmed up before the show.
A little while back, Jeff Goodes, producer for CBC Radio One’s Saturday morning flagship show GO!, emailed me asking if I’d like to do a radio appearance on a show featuring some kind of music-related contest. I said “of course!” and ended up at CBC studios to record today’s episode earlier this morning.
GO!’s producer Jeff Goodes explains things to the audience before the show.
The theme of today’s show was “Spin the Wheel of GO!”, in which Wheel of Fortune- and I Ching-style randomness would supposedly determine what would appear and what would happen on the show. I had a lot of fun doing the show, and you can hear the fun by heading down to GO!’s audio archives, scrolling down to the show marked 11/21/2009 – Spin the Wheel of GO! and clicking the “Play” button.
When I arrived just after 8:30 a.m., I was escorted to the green room, where the indie-folk strains of Kate Rogers and her band could be heard as they performed a number for a sound check. It sounded great and I made a mental note to buy their CD after the show.
Kate Rogers and her band.
Kate Rogers (photo courtesy of the CBC).
I got to meet my fellow guests Teodora, who would be “competing” against me in musical trivia games, and Shin, a guitarist who’d just come to Accordion City from Japan. He would provide music for one of the music trivia games.
Shin playing guitar.
Shin (photo courtesy of the CBC).
At 9:30, after Brent and Jeff quickly gave the audience the “this is how things work on this show” explanation and handed out some prizes to the audience for answering trivia questions, and the recording session began.
Brent warms up the audience.
The first music trivia game that Brent had Teodora and me play was “The Japanese Guitarist”, in which Shin played slowed-down versions of popular tunes on guitar and sang the lyrics in Japanese. I scored half-points for identifying Flo Rida’s Right Round as Dead or Alive’s You Spin Me Round, the song from which Flo Rida took the sample.
Teodora (photo courtesy of the CBC).
I completely failed to identify the second song he played for me as Avril Lavigne’s Sk8r Boi, which I should’ve done, since I played the song on accordion on MuchMusic’s Much on Demand show a few years back.
Teodora and Brent.
Around that time, Katherine Burrell took a seat beside me at the table. She and Brent did a bit on Michael Jackson’s “Secret CIA file”, after which they cut to some music. During that lull, she took a closer look at my accordion, which I was wearing, and ran her hand down its side.
“Did you just stroke his accordion?” Brent asked, incredulously.
“I get that all the time,” I said, with what was probably a smirk. Ah, the things that never make it to broadcast…
Brent Bambury.
The next trivia game was “This Is It”, featuring questions about Michael Jackson. I cleaned up – and surprised myself – with the depth of my Michael Jackson knowledge.
Yours Truly (photo courtesy of the CBC).
The final trivia game was the “Foxy Roxy” game, in which Teodora and I answered questions about British art-rock band Roxy Music. I didn’t do too badly with this one, correctly identifying the Roxy Music single that Bill Murray performed at a karaoke bar in Lost in Translation as More Than This.
Yours Truly on accordion (photo courtesy of the CBC).
I did much worse with my attempt at performing Roxy Music’s Avalon on accordion. I have no idea why – for the most part, it’s a three-chord song that I should’ve been able to squeeze out in even the most drunken of states. I’m just terrible at playing songs in the key of F. Clearly I need more practice.
(I thought I did a half-decent job of emulating Bryan Ferry’s “I just had a good hard shag” vocals.)
I just hope that Bryan Ferry can forgive me for murdering his song.
After that, we had another performance by the Kate Rogers Band:
After which the show wrapped up and Brent tooks questions from the audience:
One of the questions from the audience was “Could we hear Joey do a full song?”, so I gave them the sure-fire number Baby One More Time, which got a lot of applause.
And before I left, Jeff snapped this photo of Teodora, me and Shin:
I’d like to thank Jeff Goodes and Brent Bambury for having me on the show, and all the CBC staff for making me feel welcome. Jeff, if you ever need me for more shows, you’ve got my number!
If you listen on CBC Radio One on Saturdays you’re in for a surprise: Yours Truly will be appearing on the Brent Bambury’s show Go! tomorrow. There’ll be musical merriment of all sorts. Go! broadcasts live at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, 11:00 in Newfoundland.
Rodney Buike took this photo of me on Tuesday evening. I look as if I should be backing up Tom Waits or playing in a cojunto band:
If 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:
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.
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:
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:
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:
The isn’t a Santa Claus on site, but we do have IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus delivering goodies:
…and Rick’s session has drawn quite a crowd:
Another well-attended session was Introducing ASP.NET MVC, which was delivered by Tom Opgenorth:
Here’s the ASP.NET MVC room, already filling up a full 15 minutes before the start of the day:
Tom ended up speaking to a room packed to maximum capacity:
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:
Meanwhile, next door, Developer Evangelist John Bristowe delivered the Practical Web Testing presentation:
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:
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:
“Look! I’m at a conference, watching the proceedings of another conference!”
And just outside the speaker prep room, Rob Burke and D’Arcy Lussier chat:
Things seem to be going well, if IT Pro Evangelist and TechDays man-in-charge Damir Bersinic’s thumbs-up is any indication:
And down the hall, the Ford Flex featuring Microsoft’ Ford Sync technology awaits some passengers:
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:
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.