It’s been a while since I’ve taken one of those silly “Which X are you?” web tests, and the “Which Superhero are You?” one has been making the rounds. Here are my results…
Your results:
You are Spider-Man
|
You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility. |
Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz
I’d probably be more than just Spider-Man — I’d probably be the Rephrasing Spider-Man, as shown below:
[This has been cross-posted to my tech blog, Global Nerdy.]
If you’ve been following the technology blogs over the holidays, you’ve probably heard about Microsoft’s latest “guerilla marketing” move to promote Windows Vista: give some bloggers a free Acer Ferrari 1000 or Acer Ferrari 5000 laptop pre-loaded with Windows Vista to try out. The bloggers were given the laptops and had the option of sending them back once they were done with their review, given them away or keeping them.
This giveaway had an unintended consequence: a ruckus on tech news sites and blogs along the lines of Microsoft is bribing bloggers! What didn’t help are cases like Brandon LeBlanc, the blogger who failed to immediately disclose that Microsoft had given him his shiny new laptop in his initial post about it. (“I had intended to explain where this laptop came from in a more in-depth post,” he later wrote, but by then, his credibility was gone.)
In response to the kerfuffle, Microsoft is asking the bloggers to whom they sent laptops to either return them or give them away once they’re done with their reviews.
To which I respond: “Sure, but did you know I like to review things for a couple of years, just to be thorough?”
Yes, I am one of those bloggers.
A Ferrari 1000 laptop arrived at the office yesterday. I picked it up and thanks to the prior obligation of the deVilla extended family Christmas party, didn’t even to unpack it until late last night. Only this morning did I get a chance to fire it up and take it for a test spin.
(For the benefit of those of you who are hardcore fact-checkers, you can go to the DHL site and enter this tracking number — 7995316991 — to verify that it did indeed arrive only yesterday.)
In the age of sub-$1000 notebooks, the Ferrari 1000 is a luxury model. It boasts some pretty decent tech specs:
Like Porsche Design products — non-automobile items that have been styled following the automaker’s designs that allow you to overcompensate, even if you can’t afford their cars — Acer’s Ferrari laptops have been styled after the designs of Turin’s most famous export. Its glossy carbon-fiber top looks like a Ferrari interior panelling and the bright yellow Ferrari logo smack dab in the middle says “Hey, I paid a premium for this machine”, which is probably right — at the time of this writing, it retails at Tiger Direct for US$2000.
The laptop was sent to me by Aaron Coldiron, a senior product manager at Microsoft and manager of the community and blogger strategy for Windows Vista. I met him back in October at an invitation-only event in Toronto where he an a couple of guys from Redmond showcased some of Vista’s features. They handed out Release Candidate 1 of Vista at the end of the presentation, and I attempted to install it on my desktop computer at the office the following day. The results weren’t so hot, and I chronicled them in the following blog entries:
You’d think I’d be the last person they’d send a laptop pre-loaded with Windows Vista, but that’s what happened. On December 13th, I got an email from Aaron offering me one. Here’s the key excerpt:
It was nice meeting you back in October at the Windows event in Toronto. I was chatting with Claire Rankine on the Microsoft team about getting some hardware out to key community members, and we wanted to include you in this. I’d love to send you a loaded Ferrari 1000 courtesy of Windows Vista and AMD. Are you interested? Hopefully you’ll have a much better experience with this pc than you did with the upgrade experience.
This would be a review machine, so I’d love to hear your opinion on the machine and OS. Full disclosure, while I hope you will blog about your experience with the pc, you don’t have to. Also, you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away to your community, or you can keep it. My recommendation is that you give it away on your site, but it’s your call. Just let me know your opinion on Windows Vista and what you plan to do with it when the time comes.
I wrote him back, saying:
I’d like to try the Ferrari and Vista and try it under what I call “Tech Evangelist working conditions” — that is, my day-to-day routine. That involves:
- Maintaining three blogs — the Tucows blog, Global Nerdy and The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century
- Helping maintain Tucows’ web sites
- Writing technical articles and accompanying demo code, such as the “Duke of URL” (currently in PHP, but I’ll be expanding to C#)
- Doing developer relations with Tucows’ partners and vendors
- Doing work with TorCamp, ICT Toronto and other organizations who a promoting Toronto as a live/work/play hub for technologists
One of the first things I’d load on the machine are the Visual Studio Express kits and XNA Game Studio Express, which has really piqued my curiosity (especially the XBox 360 dev kits, as I am both a developer and an XBox 360 owner).
And in response, he wrote:
I haven’t read any reviews like what you’ve suggested so it should be fun. I’ll get this out to you next week.
And hence I got the machine.
As of Christmas eve, the mail server at work has been rejecting my email password, so I haven’t received the mail that Aaron has apparently been sending out in response to the flack about the giveaway. According to Marshall Kirkpatrick, it goes likes this:
No good deed goes unpunished, right? You may have seen that other bloggers got review machines as well. Some of that coverage was not factual. As you write your review I just wanted to emphasize that this is a review pc. I strongly recommend you disclose that we sent you this machine for review, and I hope you give your honest opinions. Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding of our intentions I’m going to ask that you either give the pc away or send it back when you no longer need it for product reviews.
I’ll email Aaron from my GMail account and see what he’s got to say. But like I said, I can review a product for a very long time.
Okay, it’s not so dirty, and it’s not so secret either: one of the things that keeps me blogging are the perks. A little name recognition here, a couple of books to review there, free passes to wine-and-cheese events, pricey conferences and so on. I simply say up front that so-and-so is giving me free stuff or a free pass and to keep that in mind when reading my review or recommendation.
I’m with Hugh McLeod on this one:
Having both received and given out free stuff in the blogosphere, I’m not sure if I see what the big deal is. I certainly don’t have trouble with it ethically, as long as all parties are being upfront about it. And it seems like they are to me.
My experience with blogger product campaigns tells me that, if you’re just trying to turn bloggers into product pimps, you will fail. But if you see it as a way of starting interesting conversations with equally interesting people, your chances of succeeding are far greater.
While I’ve had Vista installed on my office PC for the past couple of months, it’s been second banana to my PowerBook. For the most part, the Vista-PC combo at work has been relegated to web browsing on another screen while I’ve been using the Mac to do all the real work.
By sending me a laptop with Vista pre-installed, Microsoft has actually managed to get me interested in Vista and giving it a thorough look-see to see if “there’s really a there there.”
So, in summary:
If Microsoft reeeeeally wants me to send the machine back, I will — if Aaron can beat me at an accordion-playing contest, Devil Went Down to Georgia style, to be judged by audience applause. I’d be cool with giving away the machine if I lost in such a competition.
Once again, I remind you that I have another blog: Global Nerdy, with news and analysis of what’s going on in the world of high tech. Check it out!
Photo by David Topping. Click to see the original on its page.
For those of you not familiar with Accordion City, Sassafraz was a restaurant in the tony boutique area of town known as Yorkville. The place had a reputation for so-so food at ridiculous prices (I’ve had brunch and lunch there, and yeah, you can get much better for the money), but that’s not why one went there. It was a big celebrity hangout. Whenever a big movie star was in town on a movie shoot or publicity tour — and that’s fairly often — they often ended up at Sassafraz.
I use the past tense because Sassafraz burned down yesterday afternoon in a five-alarm fire that brought over 40 fire vehicles and called for 135 firefighters. Here are some major news outlet stories on the fire:
And here’s what the online locals have had to say:
My cousin, Malou, is in the restaurant business. She worked in Manila for years, then in New York, and as of March, she’s been working here in Accordion City — at Sassafraz. Naturally, the first thing I did was to call her mobile phone and see if she was all right.
“C’mon,” I said to no one in particular while the phone rang, “pick up…”
“Hello?”
“Hey, Malou, it’s Joey — just checking to see if you’re all right.”
“All right? Oh yeah — the restaurant. It’s okay, I took a sick day today.”
“That’s got to be the best timing ever,” I said, “I’ve already told Mom that Sassafraz is on fire, so expect a call from her any time now. And hey, if you need anything, you know that you can call any one of us.” (The closest immediate family she’s got is in California; the rest are in Manila.) “I’ll see you at the Christmas party if not sooner.”
Whew.
I find it disappointing — but not surprising — at the various online comments expressing near-glee at the news that Sassafraz burned down (one commenter on BlogTO was hoping that the Drake Hotel was next). While I believe that celebrities are generally over-worshipped and overrated, I don’t see see much reason to jump for joy at the loss of a local business, especially one that played a key part in the Toronto International Film Festival, which in turn feeds one of the city’s most high-profile industries, the film industry. Consider also the people who worked at Sassafraz. Thankfully, none of them were injured, but consider that they’re now without a source of income, and we’re deep into the holiday season.
If local indie-hipster hangout 56 Kensington (a charming hole-in-the-wall in the city’s most boho neighbourhood) had burned down, there’d have been a benefit concert with the Barcelona Pavilion as the headline act, and there would’ve been a general call among the local underemployed arts graderati to save an important cultural landmark.
In my opinion, there’s room and need for local institutions of all sorts in this city — from hipster dive bars to Zagat top-rated restos. The sooner we get our collective heads out of our collective asses and recognize that, the better this city will be.
I’ve been a bit on the busy side, what with work — both Tucows and TorCamp related — and the usual hoo-hah that goes along with the holidays, but actual posts are forthcoming!
I wanted to give a quick shout-out and thanks to all of you who attended last Friday’s Blogstravaganza. It was a fun event where bloggers of all stripes — liberal, conservative, tech, religious, secular, news-ish and personal — got together to meet and chat over beer, sub-par pub food, and then later half-decent Chinese food. I’d like to sent an extra special “thank you” to Bob Tarantino, who masterminded the event.
Topics at conversations I heard at the event:
Wendy and I had a bit of “small world” moment when I discovered that one of the bloggers there, Chris Taylor, lives with his lady friend Wanda (later that night, spurred on by Andrew Coyne, the group decided that “lady friend” sounds more spicy than “girlfriend” or “wife”) lived not only in my building but on the same floor. We’ll have to have them over sometime.
James Bow — who I somehow managed to miss chatting with — has a pretty this observation to make, based on the event:
I feel that the Canadian political blogosphere is actually quite special, bucking several trends that we’ve seen develop over the years in the American political blogosphere. Where else would Liberals and Conservatives set aside their differences and work together to organize something that celebrated the spectrum as a whole? And this really is important. I met people on Friday that I agreed with, and I met people on Friday that I disagreed with. I even met one or two people with whom I shared a heated word or two, and yet we were able to smile, shake hands, laugh and talk. Despite how we may lean politically, events such as this remind us that we’re all not that different.
Anyone who still would rather hide under a rock and not get out and meet their fellow bloggers should go take a look at the article I reference in Why the 21st Century is Making Us Miserable.
This morning, I attended a Technology Innovators Breakfast session at the Toronto Board of Trade as a guest of Alicia Bulwik, Project Manager of ICT Toronto. It’s a suit-y affair, held at the Toronto Board of Trade’s dining room, deep in the heart of suitland: First Canadian Place at the corner of Bay and King Streets, the centre of the Canadian financial universe.
This breakfast gathering is one of a new series in which interested parties can “hear Toronto’s industry leaders expound on their own personal success stories – why Toronto is their company’s chosen location to expand their business, and what their forecast is for the next wave of technology.” Today’s speakers were:
By my count, the event was attended by about 100 people, with a good number of IBMers in attendance, and the major banks well-represented. I sat at the ICT Toronto table, joined by a number of the ICT Toronto regulars, including my TorCamp brain trust compatriot Jay Goldman.
I found the event useful — it’s good to break out of the nerd world every now and again and see what the suits — particularly the big players like IBM, Accenture and the major financial institutions — are up to. After all, tech centres thrive when nerds meet rich people. I’d be more than happy to attend another one of these breakfast sessions and learn more.
The following is a transcription of the notes I took during the presentations. If you attended the breakfast and I missed anything in these notes or made a mistake, let me know in the comments!
And before I begin, I’d like to extend my most heartfelt thanks to Alicia Bulwik for inviting us to join the ICT Toronto table at the event. I know that I’ve been critical of ICT Toronto’s early efforts, but I look forward to assisting them reach their goal of making Toronto a world-class centre for high tech.
our technical know-how
only $10 million went to information and communication
technologies firms.
specifically for technology: 0
of the ICT community”
Even Brainhunter’s “B- and C-caliber candidates” are getting
multiple offers.
For them, merely getting a paycheque isn’t enough;
they want interesting, challenging work.
On the hiring side, there’s a high level of specificity
in what companies want: specific skills, experience and
expertise.
an obstacle.
Finding clients used to be a chore for contractors 10
years ago; now it’s a matter of calling up your favourite
recruiters. Companies like BrainHunter also help contractors
with the matter of getting paid — their HireSafe program
managed $30 million in salaries this past month. Contract working
is now a safe, viable option.
“International Business Machines” and the “IBM” acronym.
are in the Toronto area.
Canada’s largest software development facility, with
2,500 people and $350 million in R&D spending.
to transition to become a services company.
proprietary standards, they now want open solutions
built on open standards.
Think of RFID tags, home appliances, shipping containers,
roadways…
Brazil/Russia/India/China — countries)
if it were, we’d see everything in tech being commoditized
and work flowing in one direction only.
different channels, even totally different industries!
doubled in the last year.
coupled with business insight.
right here:
people in the world, and a large portion of
them are here
we have many immigrants with post-secondary
degrees.
students get started
that knowledge and experience don’t get lost when
people retire
ideas and points of view, creativity flourishes.
organization: do they all always have to be
physically located within your office?
it’s possible to simultaneously be partners, competitors,
clients and suppliers.
of them said that the majority of ideas for innovation
came from outside their companies.
and a strong ICT community is key:
do some risk-taking and risk-sharing, and collaborate.
Q [RBC Innovation person] How can the little guys — the 100-man,
200-man shops — “plug and play”, or participate in the ICT sector?
A [Dan Fortin]:
they’re the ones who’ll have more trouble adjusting to a more
collaborative environment, especially if their corporate culture
doesn’t favour collaboration.
to collaborate with.
Q [Power Logic person]: Regarding the earlier statement on how little
angel money is being spent on tech — what can leaders do to change
this situation and increase angel investment? We need that, because
it’s those “skunk works” projects that are the sources of change.
A [Dan Fortin]:
research and development and how to help government understand
the funding requirements for ICT
A [Alizabeth Calder]:
is the “fear factor”: they feel held to ransom by the techies
they invest in.
in a way that business people can understand.
(Commenter: We also need tax incentives to reduce the “fear factor” of
angel investors.)
Q [Person from Ottawa]: How do we get investors past what seems to
be their fixation — that of the “early exit”, where they want to invest in a
technology just to make some quick money and then bail? There seems to be
a low level of interest in actual commercialization, and as a result, the
attention is moving away from technology out of frustration.
A [Dan Fortin]:
through to commercialization is that there are so many stories
about terrific opportunities that eventually don’t pan out.
the $250,000 briefcase, but you held out and walked away with
a $45 one.”
A [Alizabeth Calder]:
had principals that we could look in the eye.
Q [Dave Craig, PricewaterhouseCoopers]: What’s ingredients
is Toronto missing for ICT success?
A [Dan Fortin]:
but I strongly recommend against that. Take the example of
the problem with the Detroit/Windsor corridor, through which
35% of the goods between the US and Canada flow. They did
a 4-year study of the problems, and the end result is
a task force with a 5-year window to make recommendations!
This story was being told by a Canadian Pacific Railway
exec who reminded the audience that once upon a time,
“it took us only 4 years to build a friggin’ railway
across the country!”
take on themselves.
A [Alizabeth Calder]:
without worrying whether or not they’re proprietary.
ICT community to meet each other.
Q [Host]: What do you think of the idea to close the Gardiner?
A [Dan Fortin]:
One of the fun parts of my job at Tucows is coming up with interesting technology demonstrations. Here’s one called the Duke of URL, a little web app that suggests up to 100 available domain names based on a word or phrase that you provide it. You can either visit the Duke of URL page and enter your own word or phrase, or see what the Duke suggests for the following:
The Duke is written in PHP (PHP 5, but it’s compatible with PHP 4) and makes use of Tucows’ OpenSRS API for provisioning and managing domain names. I wrote it to showcase the NAME SUGGEST API call that was recently added to OpenSRS and to demonstrate one possible use. Over the next few weeks, I plan to post the code along with explanatory notes as well as upgrade the Duke to some other possible applications, including mash-ups, over at the Tucows Blog.
If you use the Duke and find a domain name you’d like to buy but don’t know how to order one, drop me a line and I’ll give you a hand.
