This article also appears in Global Nerdy.
I started my presentation at WordCamp Toronto 2009 yesterday – Better Living Through Blogging — with this slide, which got a lot of laughs. A number of people have requested it, and I’m only too happy to oblige. Here you go: share and enjoy!
Click the photo to see it at full size.
The image comes from a Worth1000 Photoshopping contest – here’s the original.
Adam Schwabe took this photo of me playing a request at the Drake Hotel’s rooftop bar early Friday evening:
I’ll admit it: I like typing out the phrase “assless chaps”. Here are a couple more photos of me showing off said assless chaps in the speaker’s room at Saturday’s Toronto Code Camp (which I wrote about in this post).
Here I am holding up the assless chaps prior to donning them:
…and here I am modelling them for the nerd paparazzi:
This article also appears in Global Nerdy.
Before I begin, let me state that yes, I know that chaps, by definition, have no seat and that the phrase “assless chaps” is redundant. By adding “assless” to chaps, I am simply following one of the golden rules of comedy, namely that adding butt-related humour to anything always makes it funnier.
How I came to end up wearing assless chaps on Saturday started innocently enough. I wrote an article about Toronto Code Camp in which I talked about the sessions I was thinking of attending. One of the presenters, Bruce Johnson of ObjectSharp, saw that I didn’t mention his presentation and tweeted that I’d snubbed him:
Actually, learning WPF was on my “to-do” list, so I let Bruce know that I actually was coming to his presentation. In my tweets to him, I fired off this jokey reply:
I figured that I was at very little risk at having to follow through with this promise. Had this been FutureRuby or perhaps some open source conference, I’m sure my challenge would’ve been answered, but I thought: Hey, this is a conference of Microsoft developers! Yes, they’re a bright and talented bunch, and I like them, but they’re an older, corporate, more buttoned-down crowd. They’d never go for renaming a session from “Data Binding” to “Data Bondage”.
But Bruce and the Toronto Code Camp organizers surprised me:
I was actually impressed. I was even a little ashamed that I’d brought some prejudices about Microsoft developers from the open source world with me, thinking that they wouldn’t be cool enough to handle slightly edgy content. Live and learn.
“A promise made is a debt unpaid,” as the narrator in the classic poem The Cremation of Sam McGee says, so I made arrangements to get my hands on (or more accurately, ass into) some assless chaps. Luckily, Toronto has Malabar. It’s a great costume shop located on McCaul Street just of Queen West, and they’ve been a great source of costumes for years. That’s where the Ginger Ninja and I got our outfits for Cory Doctorow’s steampunk-ish wedding back in October:
Getting the chaps was easy. I walked into Malabar and simply said “I’d like to rent some chaps, please.”
“What kind?” the woman behind the counter asked.
“The S-and-M-ier, the better.”
“I know just the pair,” said one of the guys. “Let me get them from the basement.”
Malabar rocks.
At this point, you’re probably saying, please Joey, for the love of all things holy, tell me that you wore something under the chaps.
To which I’ll answer: “Yes. Yes I did.” I wore my loudest pair of jeans, a pair of striped jeans in crazy colours that I’ve had since my days at Crazy Go Nuts University, back when I used to go to raves. They went well with the chaps, as you can see in the photo below:
I did promise that the assless chaps would be Microsoft-branded; this was fixed thanks to Colin Bowern giving me an “I’m a PC” sticker that he happened to have in his knapsack:
Later in the afternoon, I ran to the store to get a Diet Coke and saw my reflection in the mirrored windows of a neighbouring building. “Damn, I look good!” I thought.
And as proof of their asslessness, here’s a photo of the chaps from behind. Ladies, please control yourselves; I’m already spoken for!
I walked into Bruce’s presentation moments after everyone was seated and regaled them with Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time, spiced up with a little extra butt-wiggling and ending with rousing applause:
…after which I sat down in the front row to catch Bruce’s presentation. It was quite good, and I did learn a lot about data binding in WPF – certainly enough for me to start exploring that aspect of Windows and Silverlight programming. Just as important – if not more so – I learned that the Windows developer community is cooler than one might be led to believe. Both were good lessons.
Photo by David Crow. Click to see the source.
A number of people who know me were concerned that I’d be a poor fit at Microsoft, but I’ve always used the “square peg in a round hole” thing as my “secret sauce”. The research cited in the Time magazine article Why the Office Oddball is Good for Business would suggest it’s a good play.
This article also appears in Global Nerdy.
That’s half-a-versary as in the celebration of something that took place half a year ago. It’s been half a year since I joined this organization:
…and I have to tell you, it’s been quite good.
The two things I value most about my job as Developer Evangelist for The Empire are the freedom and the ability to make a splash. The only working situation where I’ve had even more freedom and control of my destiny was back in the late 1990s at a consultancy that was just me and one other guy, and I’ve never had the reach nor the opportunities that I now enjoy as a Sith Lord.
As a mobile worker, they cover my transportation costs too.
They’ve been pretty cool with my wacky ideas, from my re-appropriation of their image as “The Empire” to the stunt at Richard Stallman’s GNU auction at CUSEC to starting Coffee and Code, a weekly happening that most companies might dismiss as an attempt to loaf on company time.
I’ve been free to inject my offbeat, earthy sense of humour into my work, from celebrating InPrivate Browsing in Internet Explorer 8 to the time I made Bob Muglia – then a Senior VP, now President of the Server and Tools division — run away from me at a Los Angeles rooftop party when I serenaded him on accordion with a song about InPrivate Browsing, sung to the tune of Tina Turner’s Private Dancer:
I’m your private browser
A browser for po-orn
One-handed surfing for you…
And maybe, just maybe, I’ve either helped a software developer get some piece of information or consider using some Microsoft tool or technology. Maybe.
I’ve enjoyed my return to using Microsoft tools and tech, and there sure is plenty of that! It may take me another six months just to be able to say I’ve done a reasonable review of the stuff that I’m supposed to specialize in – the web and mobile spheres — and that’s just a piece of a much larger pie.
I relish the challenges of being an evangelist for The Empire. It’s easy to fling poop at Microsoft, and there are cases where the poop-flinging is warranted. It’s often harder to see that Microsoft is also behind some solid tech that drives our industry and is undergoing an interesting “sea change” in both its tech and its approach.
And most importantly, I enjoy the opportunities to make connections with people, both inside and outside Microsoft, from the students I met at CUSEC to developers I’ve met a various conferences and gatherings to my manager John Oxley and VP Mark Relph and especially with the Developer Evangelism team to which I belong, from:
…I’m very honoured to be “Howling Mad Murdock” for this A-Team.
If you like playing Rock Band and supporting good causes, you’re going to love Rock4theKids, the Rock Band competition taking place on Tuesday night whose proceeds are going to “Sick Kids”, a.k.a. the Hospital for Sick Children.
At Rock4theKids, 15 teams – or more accurately, bands – of all skill levels will compete by playing Rock Band or Rock Band 2. They’ll be judged not only by the machine on their score and playing skills, but also by human judges on their onstage presence, costume and attitude. The judges announced so far are:
Rock4theKids takes place on Tuesday, April 7th at 7:30 p.m. at the Revival Club (783 College Street, at Shaw). This is a 19+ venue; it’s a licensed establishment, so you’ve got to be of legal drinking age to get in. If you’ve always wanted to rock out in front of an audience but don’t play any instruments, this is your chance! I want to see the club packed so that the event is a spectacular rockstravangaza and so that lots of money goes to the Foundation for the Hospital for Sick Children. It’s a great idea for a great cause that promises to be a great night out.
If you want to register your band to compete in Rock4theKids, here’s the signup form. Hurry – the event’s this Tuesday!