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

Developer Dim Sum Lunch at Sky Dragon!

The Unofficial FutureRuby Guide to TorontoWhether you’re part of the local tech community or a visitor from out of town who’s come in for the FutureRuby conference, you’re invited to the Developer Lunch taking place today at noon at Sky Dragon restaurant in Dragon City Mall.

This is going to be the 14th developer lunch organized by local developer and video-chronicler of local geekdom, Kristan “Krispy” Uccello. They’re not formal at all – there’s no agenda, set discussion topic or presentations – it’s just people who like writing software or who aspire to write software getting together to enjoy a nice dim sum lunch.

The lunch takes place at Sky Dragon restaurant, which is at the top floor of Dragon City shopping mall, which in turn is at the southwest corner of Dundas and Spadina. If you’re a FutureRuby attendee from out of town, that’s a five-minute walk from the conference hotel.

Map picture

For those of you not familiar with Chinatown, here’s what Dragon City Mall looks like:

Dragon City mall exterior

Use the elevator or stairs in the circular tower part of the building to go to the mall’s top floor, which is where the restaurant is located. We expect that we’ll be a big crowd, so they might put us in one of the private rooms in the back – if you don’t see a bunch of geeks in the restaurant, ask the waitstaff for the large group of computer programmers and they’ll lead you to us.

It’s dim sum, which means the food will be tasty, cheap and plentiful. Everybody pitches in equally towards the final bill and it’s typically $12/person including tip.

See you at noon!

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

FailCamp: One Week Away!

FailCamp poster, featuring Sean Connery in his role as "Zed" from "Zardoz"

If you were at last year’s FailCamp, you might remember the best story of FAIL of the evening, which involved warming up some “body lube” in the microwave oven for a little too long, after which hilarity ensued.

Here’s how Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, the originators of FailCamp, describe their vision of the event:

We believe that it’s time to give our personal fail some tough love and talk it out over beer!

Join us for a brief, rousing introduction followed by camaraderie, beer, and show-and-tell. We’ll present a little about failure through the ages, mining your personal suck, maybe some science, pithy quotes from people you may or may not respect, and share some failure stories of our own.

Then it’ll be your turn. If all goes to plan, you may even win in our friendly “race to the bottom” for the most public, most expensive, or most ridiculous Story of Fail.

FailCamp returns next Thursday, July 9th and once again, it’s the warm-up act for Unspace’s Ruby programmer conference (going by the name “FutureRuby” this year), which takes place on the weekend of July 10th through 12th. Just like last year, FailCamp will once again provide a forum for you to share your greatest and most pathetic stories of FAIL, and hopefully how that failure taught you some important lessons and made you a better, wiser, more-careful-with-the-lube person.

joey_presenting_at_failcamp_1Me, presenting at last year’s FailCamp.

Once again, I will be hosting FailCamp. I’ll start the evening with a couple of stories of failure, including a couple of Keyboard Cat-worthy ones of my own, after which I’ll open up the floor to you, the audience, to share your own stories of FAIL. Once we’re all thoroughly embarrassed, DJ Barbi will spin the wheels of steel and we’ll dance our shame away.

There are some tickets left as of this writing:

  • For FutureRuby attendees, there are 4 free tickets to FailCamp remaining.
  • For those of you who are not attending FutureRuby but would like to catch FailCamp, there are 19 “Pay What You Can” tickets left.

If you want ‘em, go to the FailCamp registration page and get them before they disappear!

joey_presenting_at_failcamp_2My one-slide summary of how things went terribly wrong in the movie Deliverance
(The link leads to the “Squeal like a pig” scene from the movie – you might not want to watch at work).

FailCamp will take place at the Queen City Yacht Club on the Toronto Islands (Algonquin Island, to be precise). Your printed ticket stub is good for a free ferry ride from the Toronto docks to the Yacht Club, where we’ll have some finger food, the Yacht club’s kitchen and cash bar will be open, and the evening should be full of surprises.

What better way to close an article about FailCamp than the Keyboard Cat video starring “Pinky, Pet of the Week”?

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

Collector’s Plates

Seen in the window at a shop in Bloor West Village and coming soon to your grandmother’s (or a die-hard Star Trek or M*A*S*H fan’s) house:

collectors_platesClick the photo to see it at full size.

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It Happened to Me

Serious Meat at Hart House’s Pride Weekend Barbecue

This is what ten dollars got you at Thursday’s Pride Week barbecue at University of Toronto’s Hart House:

Paper picnic plate piled with food, "Hart House: University of Toronto" napkin, beer.

It was quite a meal: one beef kebab, one piece of chicken, 4 pork ribs, a slice of bread, roast potatoes, steamed vegetables and salad, all prepared quite well. The Ginger Ninja and I enjoyed it.

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Strike Me Down, and Another Shall Rise to Take My Place

I no longer live in Accordion City’s Queen/Spadina neighbourhood and therefore don’t play there very often anymore. Luckily that doesn’t mean that they’re lacking for the accordion: there was a guy playing a fine little red number there earlier this afternoon:

queen-spadina_accordion_player

Squeeze on, good sir!

Categories
It Happened to Me

All Che Guevara T-Shirts Should Have This Caption

Dark green t-shirt featuring Che Guevara and the text "I have no idea who this is".

Seen at “Diaper-eze”, a baby clothing store in Bloor West Village, in the west end of Accordion City.

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It Happened to Me Work

Hello from Ottawa!

Parliament buildings in Ottawa, with tress in the foreground The view from my hotel room.

I haven’t been to Ottawa in 20 years. The last time, it was to visit a girl, and it ended badly. Every pedicab and rickshaw guy in town was in love with her and wished hot death upon me during my visit, and in the end, she decided that she wanted to be “just friends”.

Months later, a friend would tell me that she paid me a very nice compliment after a horrible experience with some jerk: “There are three kinds of men in the world: scum, art fags and Joey!” It’s nice for the present-day me, but did 1989-me no good.

This time, I’m here on bidniss, doing a presentation on how to code accessible websites, followed by catching up with some friends. Should be fun.