Category: It Happened to Me

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

Developer Lunch at Sky Dragon in Toronto Today!

Wooden steamers and plates full of dim sum dishes

Once again, it’s time for another Developer Lunch here in Accordion City! This is going to be the ninth in the series of lunches organized by Kristan "Krispy" Uccello, and it will be held at the usual location, Sky Dragon restaurant (on the 5th floor of Dragon City mall at the corner of Spadina and Dundas).

These lunches give Toronto-area developers and other techie types to get together for some delicious dim sum and conversation. I’ve been to several of these, and they’ve always been fun. The bill gets split on a per-table basis, and it’s typically worked out to about $12 a person, and everyone leaves full.

If you’re a developer – and that means anyone who practices or is interested in programming – you should come on over to Sky Dragon and join us for lunch! I’ll be there, and you’ can ask me about anything, whether it’s development, Microsoft, accordions, whatever!

The Developer Lunch takes place today (Tuesday, January 27th) at noon and runs until about 1:30 p.m.. Just look for the tables with the geeks!

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It Happened to Me

The Gnu IS a Real Creature

This article originally appeared on Global Nerdy.

After winning the auction for the Free Software Foundation plush gnu, I hung out in the hotel lobby, checking my email. I talked with some passers-by, and occasionally Richard Stallman, who sat at the couch across from me, cracked the occasional (and very painful) pun.

In these conversations, I was approached by no less than three people who asked me if the gnu – the animal mascot of the Free Software Foundation — was a real creature or a mythical one.

Doesn’t anyone watch Animal Planet, nature shows or The Great Space Coaster (starring Gary Gnu) anymore?

A gnu running through the veldt

They’re real. Here’s the first line of their Wikipedia entry:

The wildebeest (plural wildebeest or wildebeests), also called the gnu (/gəˈnuː/ or /ˈnjuː/), is an antelope of the genus Connochaetes. It is a hooved (ungulate) mammal.

Maybe it’s time to organize a bus trip of geeks so that we can all go to the zoo.

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Geek It Happened to Me

Talking About Blogging at Tonight’s Nature Network Pub Night in Toronto

A glass of beer and a book
Beer and science have always gone together!

This article was originally published in Global Nerdy.

nature-networkI’m going to speaking at tonight’s Nature Network Pub Night here in Toronto on the topic of blogs, how they’ve helped me both do and find work, and how people in the sciences can make use of them.

The pub night is being held at Fionn MacCool’s at University and Adelaide (the full address is 181 University). People will start assembling there for dinner, drinks and conversation at 6:00 p.m. with the presentations starting at 7:00 p.m..

If you’re interested in getting to know your fellow science-types in town or want to catch up with me and talk about blogging, programming, science, accordion playing or anything else, please drop by tonight!

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Geek It Happened to Me

Fun with Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman and Joey deVilla onstage with a plush gnu at the CUSEC 2009 conference

Over at my tech blog Global Nerdy, there’s a story from the recent CUSEC convention that’ll only seem funny (or even make sense) if you’re a programmer who knows about the Free Software Foundation and how they view Microsoft. It’s called Winning the Gnu, and it’s about my winning bid at Richard Stallman’s auction for a plush gnu.

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It Happened to Me

Fogcouver!

I’m flying out of Vancouver this morning to my next stop – Montreal, where I will be speaking at CUSEC, the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference. There, I’ll deliver my presentation, titled Squeezeboxes, Start-Ups and Selling Out: A Tech Evangelist’s Story.

Vancouver has been covered in fog for the past couple of weeks. They’re close to the record number of days of the pea-soup-thick variety of fog, as shown in the photo below:

Photo of Vancouver skyline mostly obscured by fog
Photo by Adrian Eden.Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

I think that this photo needs a teensy bit of editing:

The same photo, but with the Millennium Falcon photshopped in
Click the photo to see it at full size.

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It Happened to Me

Meetup Tonight at The End Cafe

the_end_cafe

I’m in Vancouver for one more night before flying off to Montreal to speak at CUSEC.

I’m meeting up with Boris Mann and the Vancouver Bloggers tonight at 6:00 p.m. at The End Cafe (2360 Commercial Drive). See you there!

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It Happened to Me

Vangroovy Scenery

Hello from Vangroovy! I’m at the Vancouver Convention Center to speak at the Microsoft Techdays Canada conference.

Here’s the Centre, as shown on the web site and postcards. It does look like this in the summer:

Fog-free picture of the Vancouver Convention Center

Here are the photos I took looking out onto the ocean from the Centre this morning:

Vancouver fog

Vancouver fog

Vancouver fog

My hotel is across the street from the Centre, so I didn’t wear a coat today. The doorman looked a bit worried when I passed him, but I said “Don’t worry. Next to last week’s weather in Toronto, this is tropical.”