Category: It Happened to Me

We had an even-crappier-than-usual experience flying to Boston on American Eagle, but I’m too busy to write it up right now. Luckily for me, Wendy’s written up her impressions of the whole thing.

Thanks to the articles about the Japanese bag of Doritos featuring the ‘Taits-Kun’ (“Tights Guys”) characters in some hot foot-on-nards action, this blog is now one of the top results for denki anma on both Google and MSN Search. As I found thanks to some commenters and a little Internet searching, “denki anma” literally translates from the Japanese as “electric massage” and refers to the act of holding a person’s ankles as they lie prone, stepping on that person’s crotch and shaking your foot from side to side.

If you really want to get creeped out, here’s a Japanese Google search for “denki anma”. Many of the links aren’t safe for work, and I remind you that you might come out a different person just by looking at them. There are days I’m certain that the Japanese make this sort of stuff up as part of a “who can freak out foreigners the most” contest.

Perhaps I should adopt “Denki Anma!” as a videogaming battle-cry, in the same sense as World of Warcraft players use “Leeeeeroy Jenkins!”. At the very least, I feel that I should post signs all over the office that read “Employees must wash hands after using the internet”.

In case you missed the articles about the Japanese Doritos, here’s the first one and here’s the follow-up.

In addition to being Bastille Day, it is also the third anniversary of my joining Tucows as its Technical Community Development Coordinator. So far, in the course of this job, I have:

• Held one job title — Technical Community Development Coordinator — the longest title in the company
• Worked in two departments: Research and Innovation under “Boss Ross” Rader until recently, and now “Looking for a rhyme” Ken Schafer in the Marketing department
• Occupied three desks, two in the downstairs section, and now I’m upstairs
• Gone on four business trips, during one of which I met Wendy
• Appeared on TV five times as an employee of Tucows
• Written over six…teen hundred blog entries on Tucows Farm
• Explained that the company is more than just “the shareware site” seven gazillion times

Three years later, I’m still enjoying it here. The place still passes the “snooze bar test” — the only reason I ever hit the snooze bar on the alarm clock on a workday is because I was up late the night before and not because I’m dreading another day at the office. At the start of year four, my job’s going to go through some interesting changes not only as a result of my changing departments, but also because of some exciting changes all ’round — not just within the company, but also our neighbourhood, the Toronto tech and creative communities and in our industry. It’s going to be an interesting time, and I’m glad to be here.

From the “I’ve been meaning to post this for ages” file: when I went to Chicago for RailsConf, I had a free evening with which to catch up with my friends Dave and Rob, who live there. I’ve known Dave for nearly two years and met him through Wendy; I’ve known Rob since 1989 — it’ll be seventeen years this fall, Rob! — when I met him as a wet-behind-the-ears frosh at Crazy Go Nuts University. Both played roles in our wedding — Dave as a “bridesman” and Rob as a candle sponsor.

Dave pciked me up from the airport and took me to his neighbourhood, where we caught up with Rob and then engaged in that most venerable of rituals: drinking lots of beer. We spent most of our time at Resi’s Bierstube, where the beer selection was quite good and the nice bartender kept giving me Jagermeister-like shots in exchange for accordion music.

Here’s my favourite photo of the evening, a shot outside Grizzly’s Lodge where we had dinner:

Click the photo to see a larger version on Flickr.

Yesterday, I got some email about something called the Canadian Tech Mob, a grassroots movement to raise the profile of Canada’s presence in the tech sector. The first step they took was to form a webring, to which I added my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century and my professional blog, Tucows Farm. As their site implores, “if you are a blogger, entrepreneur, VC, or other member of the Canadian Tech ecosystem, we hope you will join with us to support the “spilling” of the secret of the Great White North . Let’s show the world what Canada is made of!” As one of the team who helps out with the DemoCamp effort and other initiatives to boost our local tech scene, I’m more than happy to support this effort.

If you’re a techie with a blog, why not join their webring? You can join by clicking here.

I’ll do one better than simply join the webring: I’ll provide a nice attention-grabbing graphic — a remix of the first issue of Marvel Comics’ premier Canadian superhero team, Alpha Flight!