Category: It Happened to Me

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me Music

My Morning on CBC Radio’s “GO!”

08 hot or not segmentGO!’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.

01 jeff preps the audience 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.

click here to go to go

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.

07 kate rogers and bandKate Rogers and her band.

kate rogersKate 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.

05 shin plays guitarShin playing guitar.

ShinShin (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.

02 brent warms up the audienceBrent 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.

teodoraTeodora (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.

03 teodora and brentTeodora 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…

04 brentBrent 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.

joeyYours 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.

joey and accordionYours 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:

06 kate rogers and band

After which the show wrapped up and Brent tooks questions from the audience:

09 brent answers audience questions

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.

10 audeince asks brent questions

And before I left, Jeff snapped this photo of Teodora, me and Shin:      

00 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!

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me Music

Saturday Morning on GO!

accordion guy cbc

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.

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me Slice of Life

Slice of Life: Playing Accordion on a Calgary Street Corner

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:

playing accordion in calgary

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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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It Happened to Me Play Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Cory Doctorow’s “Makers” Launch Tonight

makers

My friend (and former officemate!) Cory Doctorow is launching his latest novel, Makers, tonight at the Toronto Public Library at 239 College Street (east of Spadina). The fun happens in the Merrill Collection room, located on the third floor at 7 p.m. tonight. Cory will be doing a reading, taking questions and signing books. There will be books for sale at the event courtesy of our local science fiction and fantasy bookstore, Bakka Phoenix.

Here’s the publisher’s blurb about the book:

From the New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother, a major novel of the booms, busts, and further booms in store for America

Perry and Lester invent things—seashell robots that make toast, Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent entirely new economic systems, like the “New Work,” a New Deal for the technological era. Barefoot bankers cross the nation, microinvesting in high-tech communal mini-startups like Perry and Lester’s. Together, they transform the country, and Andrea Fleeks, a journo-turned-blogger, is there to document it.

Then it slides into collapse. The New Work bust puts the dot.combomb to shame. Perry and Lester build a network of interactive rides in abandoned Wal-Marts across the land. As their rides, which commemorate the New Work’s glory days, gain in popularity, a rogue Disney executive grows jealous, and convinces the police that Perry and Lester’s 3D printers are being used to run off AK-47s.

Hordes of goths descend on the shantytown built by the New Workers, joining the cult. Lawsuits multiply as venture capitalists take on a new investment strategy: backing litigation against companies like Disney. Lester and Perry’s friendship falls to pieces when Lester gets the ‘fatkins’ treatment, turning him into a sybaritic gigolo.

Then things get really interesting.

It should be noted that while 3-D printers of the sort in Cory’s novel are still the stuff of science fiction, simpler versions exist today. In fact, at the Hacklab, where I spend many a working day, we’ve got a MakerBot Industries “Cupcake” 3-D printer that can “print” plastic objects.

Here’s what the Cupcake looks like:

cupcake_1

A computer connected to the Cupcake controls it. The big loop of plastic to the upper left of the machine is the material from which objects are printed. Here’s a closer look at its internals:

cupcake_2

We have a small gallery of objects that were created using the Cupcake:

cupcake_output

If you’d like one of your own, the fine folks at Makerbot Industries would be more than happy to sell you a kit.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

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It Happened to Me

The Ocho (or: Eight Years of Blogging)

8 years ago My home office, late 2001.

It Began With an “About” Box

(The scene: October 2001, in a bland building in a bland office park on a bland street named after a large insurance company in a bland corner of Accordion City.)

“We’ve decided to re-assign you,” said the VP of R&D at the startup where I worked. “The new team will take over for your interface work. You will be in charge of the installer and the ‘About’ box.”

By “installer”, he meant the “setup” program that you would run to install our software onto your computer. As for the “About” box, that’s the little window that pops up when you click the “About this Application…” item under the “Help” menu (or the Apple menu on Macs). They look like this:

windows live writer about box

“Um…would I be doing anything else?” I asked.

“No, that’s it for now, but I expect that we’ll find more for you to do.”

If my new assignment seemed inconsequential to you, you’re right. On a particularly busy day, the task of making sure that the installer was running and that the “About” box has the correct copyright notices would take up a good ten minutes, leaving me a solid seven hours and fifty minutes of nothing to do.

kicking back at the office Me at the office, late 2001.

The change in job responsibilities has drastically changed my daily routine. Once you factored in some time for me to answer email, my actual responsibilities had been taken core of by 9:20 a.m.. A workday that was once busy and challenging had been transformed into a vast desert of idle time.

I had the sinking feeling that as one of the last original employees of the startup who was still there amongst a rising tide of new hires hand-picked by the new boss, my days were numbered. Still, I tolerated the hour’s commute each way to my go-nowhere-do-nothing role to keep my cash flow going while I set up my next opportunity.

I spent a lot of my free time at work learning the PHP programming language and chasing down potential clients. I chatted on IRC with friends who were either working at startups or whose startups had just imploded. I read and occasionally, just for kicks, I’d help the sysadmins do things like tie up ethernet cable or inventory wifi cards.

I also started a blog.

It needed a name, and at the time I couldn’t think of one that I felt was any good. On a whim, I simply decided to call it The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century. It was dumb, and I planned on changing it as soon as I thought of a good one.

Having an outlet like Accordion Guy kept me sane during those last, tedious, will-you-fire-me-already days at the startup. It also kept me sane during those oh-God-oh-God-I need-to-get-clients days after getting sacked and during those long nights when I put in a lot of programming time for those clients later on.

It also had some unexpected benefits. My log entry about the time my deadbeat ex-housemate let a con man into the house for a second time got covered on Boing Boing, and suddenly my readership went from tens to the low hundreds. Getting laid off gave me a fair bit of time to have some adventures, and thus my much-linked-to stories from those early days got more attention through the blogosphere:

The Girl Who Cried Webmaster was a turning point for the Accordion Guy blog: it impressed the powers that be at Tucows, and played a key role in my becoming their Technical Community Development Coordinator (an incredibly wordy way of saying “developer evangelist”). The blog had saved my bacon and landed me a job – and now I was getting paid to blog!

8 minutes ago

Eight Years Later

Today is my eighth blogging anniversary. I’m still blogging happily here at Accordion Guy as well as at Global Nerdy and Microsoft Canada’s Canadian Developer Connection. There’s a chance that I’m Microsoft Canada’s most active blogger, whether blogging personally or in an official capacity. I suppose I can go look that up once my work schedule calms down a little.

Blogging has made my life better. From the more tangible things like the network of friends, acquaintances and contacts I’ve built to the less-tangible “making your life worth living by examining it” effect that blogging often has, it’s become one of the two life-changing hobbies I took up around the turn of the millennium (I’m sure you can guess what the other one is). I can’t imagine not doing it for at least another eight years.

To you, my readers, I’d like to say thank you. I hope to keep entertaining, informing – and yes, occasionally annoying – you for years to come. Thanks for reading.