“I fuckin’ love Duran Duran!” he says, but in the video below (shot last night in Accordion City’s Koreatown neighbourhood), I’m actually playing Nine Inch Nails’ Head Like a Hole. Still, a compliment is a compliment…
Category: It Happened to Me
John Philip Green, Pete Forde and I went out one night in Portland to check out Ground Kontrol, an place that’s both bar and arcade devoted to 80’s pinball and video games (I wrote a little bit about the arcade in Global Nerdy). Along the way, we passed by a glowing red neon sign that proclaimed “Jesus is Lord” and couldn’t resist posing beneath it. You know, just in case The Rapture happened that night, or perhaps we might get discovered as supermodels. You never know.
We took the Max, Portland’s light rail system, from the convention center to the stop at Skidmore Fountain. The place’s name is so spot on that it’s downright Dickensian:
The light rail stop at Skidmore Fountain, Portland, Oregon.
Here’s John, posing underneath the sign. Jesus, please send him some venture capital!
John looks like he believes. Testify!
Pete struck a good pose:
Pete: “Dear Jesus, please give me a brand new drum kit…”
And here I am. Yea, though I walk through the valley of darkness, I have no fear, for I have a big honkin’ accordion:
Me: “Yay-us! The power of the accordion compels you!”
Here’s a great shot that New York-based Ruby guy Sebastian Delmont posted to Flickr — it’s of that pre-keynote performance that I did with RailsConf organizer Chad Fowler:
Click the image to see it on its Flickr page
Texas-based Ruby guy Sean McMains took a video of the whole performance:
Photo by James Duncan Davidson. Click to see it on its original page.
Yes, it’s total bias on my part, but one of my favourite moments from last week’s RailsConf conference — the premier conference for Ruby on Rails developers — was playing the intro musical number for the evening keynotes — me on accordion, along with conference organizer Chad Fowler on his ukelele. It’s not every day that I get to break out the accordion in front of an audience of 1600!
Photo by “sd”. Click to see it on its original page.
We took the Radiohead single Creep and changed it from a song about unrequited love and self-loathing to a little ditty about Rails and its creator, David Heinemeier Hansson. Here are the reworked lyrics:
Writing applications
Used to make me cry
But you wrote a framework
So friendly and dryYou’re a supermodel
And I hear you code too
You’re so effing Hansson
David Heinemeier HanssonBut I’m a noob
I barely wrote depot
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here(Falsetto part)
The song’s chords are pretty simple: G – B – C – Cm, over and over, so rehearsing it didn’t take very long. Here’s a video that Aaron Huslage shot during our rehearsal just outside the administrative area:
Here’s the video of the actual performance, shot by one “KeeperPat”:
This makes this the second RailsConf at which someone performed a musical number with the words “David Heinemeier Hansson” in the lyrics (why the lucky stiff did it last year with lyrics about how Hansson was killed by Robert Scoble after a flamewar). It’s a tradition now!
I’d like to thank Chad Fowler for going along with the musical suggestion and for being an excellent musical partner. Maybe we could do it again next year — perhaps a ditty where we mention everyone in the Rails Core Team by name?
What a helluva day. Once I’m caught up with my work, I’ll tell you folks about how I spent the morning and early afternoon: scrambling to replace a stolen passport in order to be able to fly to the States next Wednesday for RailsConf. It’ll be educational: if you ever need to replace a Canadian passport in a hurry, you’ll know how.
9:30 a.m., Saturday May 1st, 1999 — eight years ago today:
“That’s the last of the boxes, Mom!” I said as I walked through the front door of my parents’ house. It was spring cleaning day, and my job was to take junk out of the basement and bring to to Goodwill.
The older British man sitting in the kitchen looked at me with a somewhat perplexed expression as I poured him his cup of tea. He was my sister’s friend’s father, and he had come to pick up his daughter’s belongings. She had no place to store her stuff while she was off in Nairobi, and my sister had volunteered the space.
“Oh,” I said, realizing what he was looking at, “the purple hair. It’s an experiment.”
“It’s…er, jaunty,” he replied. “Really comes out on a sunny day like today. You don’t find it…shall I say, career-limiting, do you?”
“Not really. I’m a computer programmer, and I run my own business with a friend.”
“And your clients?”
“They don’t have a problem with it, either. In fact, I think it reassures them. They’re not just buying our services, they’re also buying a bit of that Wired magazine image, too.”
He smiled, and Mom entered the kitchen.
“Joey, is that accordion in the foyer yours?” she asked.
“Yes it is. Isn’t it a beauty?”
“It’s nice. I didn’t know you played.”
“I don’t. Not yet, anyway. Karl and I are going to try busking on the street today.”
“Really? What will you play?”
“I know some chords to some pop and rock songs. Simple stuff. We’re just going to try it out and see what happens.”
“Who’s going to sing?”
“It might have to be me. Karl seems to know only the lyrics to his own music.”
“You? Sing? Uh-oh…” she said with a smile.
As sensational as the topic of cyberbullying is in light of the Kathy Sierra incident, I believe it’s still the exception rather than the rule. Here are the statistics on threats I have received:
Number of times I have received threats because of my accordion playing on the street: 6 since May 1, 1999, the day I first took the accordion out on the street.
Number of times I have received threats because of my blogging: 1 since November 10, 2001, the day of my first blog post. The threat (a vague one at that) is chronicled in the article At Last, My Blog Lands Me in Hot Water!.
Number of people who’ve taken joy in my misfortunes online: Only one that I’m aware of. She wrote in response to the article What happened to me and the new girl (or, “The girl who cried Webmaster”), one of my weirder moments. Go read the article if you’ve never done so before; I’ll write more about the online schadenfreude later.