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Geek It Happened to Me

Notes from FacebookCamp, Part 1

Caitlin O’Farrell at the podium at FacebookCamp Toronto
Facebook’s Caitlin O’Farrell gets the ball rolling at FacebookCamp Toronto.

Accordion City loves Facebook — we’ve got 725,000 Facebook users (out of a population of around 3 million), and until recently, we were the number 1 city in the world as far as Facebook users go.

It’s not just ordinary Toronto Facebook users who are in love with social networking site; Torotno developers are also interested, if last night’s attendance at FacebookCamp Toronto — 450 to 500, depending on whom you ask — is any indication. This gathering of developers interested in writing applications for Facebook — the first of its kind held outside the U.S. — attracted so many people that they had to change the venue three times before landing a place big enough to accomodate everyone: the MaRS Centre, a centre for promoting high-tech and biotech research in Toronto. Even with the MaRS Centre’s large auditorium, set to seat over 400 people, they set up a spill-over room with simulcast video to handle all the attendees.

My first set of notes from last night’s presentation is up, and you can read them on these blogs:

Wayne “Bunnyhero” Lee gives the thumbs-up beside a sign showing FacebookCamp’s sponsors
Wayne “bunnyhero” Lee approves of FacebookCamp’s sponsors.

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

Scenes from the High Park Organic Market

The High Park Organic Market has become a Saturday morning ritual with me and the Ginger Ninja. We set out for the market — located beside the Grenadier Restaurant, a nice ten-minute walk south of Bloor Street — to buy vegetables to turn into a salad or stir-fry from lunch, as well as some homemade bread and cake loaves.

I took these photos during our shopping trip yesterday.

Broccoli and cauliflower

Eggplants

Green onions

All the fruits and vegetables in the market are organically grown on smaller farms, and many are grown locally. This usually means that what you’ll find at the market is fresher and often tastes much better. We once bought some locally-grown garlic that was very flavourful — the kitchen filled with the smell of fresh garlic after we’d only cut the garlic; we hadn’t even cooked it yet.

Peppers

Tomatoes

Turnips, beets and garlic

It’s not just fruits and veg, they’ve also got homemade bread, cakes and pies. We’re really fond of the banana-chocolate chip loaf.

Loaves and pies

The High Park Organic Market is open through the summer:

  • Friday 12 p.m. -7 p.m.
  • Saturday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
  • Sunday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Broccoli

Zucchini

Categories
It Happened to Me

A Fortnight Without Caffeine

How to Spot the Coffee Addict


Back during the dot-com bubble, I worked with a programmer who liked to experiment with caffeine.
When he wasn’t wasting time and money with interesting computer science theoretical esoterica that didn’t quite pertain to us releasing software on time and on budget, he would try to see how much caffeine he could jam into his system.

Of his caffeine-seeking exploits, the Ultimate Venti incident stands out in my mind. One hot summer afternoon, he convinced the Starbucks on Yonge just north of Bloor — the one that used to be a book store — to serve him a Venti made with 10 additional espresso shots. He took it back to the office so that he could drink it in front of us.

Half an hour later, he was more hopped up that a hornet’s nest that has just been used as a pinata, and unable to focus on anything for more than a minute or so. The work he did that day was fast, furious and completely pointless: most of it was tweaking his system (pun intended) — downloading new desktop backgrounds, checking mail waaaay too often, recompiling various utility programs and so forth. He crashed a couple of hours later on one of the nearby couches, treating us to some world-class snoring.

Man with 4 syringes stylised to look like cola cans, all injecting into his head. Syringes have the labels “acid”, “sugar”, “caffeine”, “hype”

As for me, while I do like coffee, my preferred caffeine delivery system is Diet Coke. In the tradition of the great programmer J. C. R. Licklider, who liked to start the day with a Coke, I did the same, just with the diet version. On a mellow day, I might drink two cans’ worth; on a very busy high-stress day, perhaps 6. Such a habit is costly if you buy cans straight from the machine; I preferred to buy two-litre bottles and keep in the fridge (luckily, we’ve got three at work, and I like to keep the ice trays stocked).

My bed at the sleep lab


My appointment at the sleep lab
was, if you’ll pardon the expression, my wake-up call.
“Don’t take any caffeine for at least 24 hours before your sleep lab session,” I was told. I decided to go without caffeine a full 48 hours beforehand. A mere six hours before my session, I was deep into one skull-crusher of a headache and went crawling to Maria, the keeper of the office’s ibuprofen supply for help.

“I really must be caffeine-dependent,” I told her, “I need three hits of Advil.”

Although I got a good night’s sleep at the lab, I was so caffeine-deprived the next day that I fell asleep shortly after dinner the next day.

Bubbly water

For the past 2 weeks, I’ve stayed away from caffeinated beverages. The only liquids that have gone into my drinking mug at work — a pint mug given to me as a gift from the bartender at the Dubliner’s Pub in Osaka — are:

  • Ice water
  • Sparkling water
  • My fakety-fake Italian sodas: four-fifths sparking water, one-fifth fruit juice

Aside from an initial couple of days of feeling slightly more tired, avoiding caffeine plus trying to get a little more sleep hasn’t been that big a shock to my system. I was never one of those “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my first coffee” type of people, so as far as I can tell, there’s been no noticeable change in my behaviour.

In fact, when Leona found out that I’m off caffeine for the next little while, she exclaimed “Why didn’t you tell us?”, in the same tone of voice one uses for the question “Why didn’t you tell us that you quit crystal meth cold turkey and took up collecting butcher’s knives as a hobby?”

But really, I feel fine.

Categories
It Happened to Me

It’s Due for a Comeback, You Know

The scene: The kitchen at the house party at Mark Kuznicki’s house last night.

Gainborough’s painting, “The Blue Boy”

Dude 1: So, have you picked a name for your kid yet?

Dude 2: Not yet. Good thing it’s months away. I am taking suggestions, so if you’ve got any, I wanna hear ’em.

Dude 1: Well, I’ve got a great one for a boy…

Dude 2: And it is…?

Dude 1: You’ll love it: Fauntleroy.

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

Help Identify This Plant!

Plant we can’t identify

While walking a friend’s dog in the Swansea neighbourhood (that’s the residential area south of Bloor between Runnymede and Jane), the Ginger Ninja kept seeing these plants near the edges of many people’s lawns. She wanted to know what they were. Any gardeners or botanists out there care to help?

Plant we can’t identify

While the dog we were walking — Rufus — is an especially good and friendly dog, he was of no help whatever in identifying the plant:

Rufus, our friend’s dog

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

Toronto Moving Companies: I’m Still Getting Comments [Updated]

A Chevrolet box vanLong-time readers of this blog will remember an article titled At Last, My Blog Lands Me in Hot Water!, in which local moving company Quick Boys attempted to threaten me into removing comments about their service. Those comments were in response to a one-line blog entry in which I asked the readers for recommendations about Toronto moving companies. The ensuing commentary across the blogosphere ended up giving the story a high Google ranking on searches for “Quick Boys”; even today, some of the posts about their thuggery are still on the first page of Google results.

(By the way, Quick Boys, I’m still waiting for my apology.)

What’s interesting is that the original blog entry, Anyone Know any Good Toronto Movers?, is still getting comments from readers relating their (mostly bad) experiences with moving companies. The last comment the article got came in yesterday, and it was about a bad experience with Yellow Moving Company. The resulting article about Quick Boys’ vaguely threatening phone call received comments as late as February of this year, the last comment being about how someone had to call the cops on Quick Boys.

It amazes me how moving companies can stay in business even though so many people have such bad experiences with them. Is it because people don’t use them very often? Is it because of the unfortunate collision of relatively unskilled labour meeting your prized possessions? Is it because it’s an attractive business for unscrupulous people? Or are they perceived as being bad simply because moving is a stressful experience for many people?

Let’s keep the conversation going, fellow Torontonians. Feel free to report any experiences and reviews of Toronto moving companies, good or bad, in the comments.

Categories
It Happened to Me

You’re Bummin’ Me Out, Man

Elevator down button

Photo by Will Pate. Click to see the original.

When I got onto the elevator in my building this morning, an older man and woman were already in the car, discussing the repair work being done on the building, which is showing its age. When the woman left at the ground floor, the man turned to me.

“Young man, when you’ve lived in this building for a while, you see the same people, year after year. They get older, and you see it — they’re going down, down, down.”

As he said “Down, down, down,” he pantomimed a falling leaf with his hand.

“Well,” I said as I shrugged, “it eventually happens to everyone.”

“That,” he said as he left, “is the only good thing about it.”

You know how to bring down a room, big guy.