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It Happened to Me

The Trick to Assembling the IKEA "Expedit" Bookshelf

IKEA 'Expedit' shelf

I still get an occasional email or comment about my entry about the difficulty Wendy and I have had putting together the IKEA “Expedit” bookshelf. That was last August, and yes, the shelf has been assembled.

As we suspected, the trick is that the last phase, in which you attach the last side to the shelf, is easiest with three people, especially with the 5-by-5 model. The extra pair of hands makes all the difference; when Wendy and I recently helped my sister with three sets of Expedit shelves, the three of us put together all three in less time than it took to put together ours last year.

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

DemoCamp 6.0

DemoCamp Toronto logo

Last night’s DemoCamp was a battle against Murphy’s Law and a stubborn projector which refused to cooperate with the demonstrators’ laptops. It made for some waits between presentations, but at least it wasn’t as bad as Microsoft Live! demo of last November.

I was busy presenting Skydasher and Feedcache and helping host the event with Jay Goldman, so I didn’t get a chance to take any notes. Luckily these people did, so go check out their reports:

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

Journo

Exterior shot of the 'Journo' cafe/magazine store.

While wandering around downtown Accordion City on Sunday afternoon, Wendy and I looked for a place to grab a quick lunch and ended up at Journo on King Street West and Widmer Street. It’s part-magazine store, part cafe and although I can’t quite put my finger on exactly why it seemed that way, it felt more like a Montreal establishment than a Toronto one (the big signs for their Van Houtte coffee certainly made it seem more Montreal-ish.)

It was a warm day, so went opted for a light lunch: a chicken salad sandwich and a pasta salad. The sandwich was merely okay, but the pasta salad was pretty good. In addition to salads and sandwiches, the coffee bar half of the store also has a large selection of cookies and pastries as well as Van Houtte coffees, both brewed and espresso machine-based.

Interior shot of the 'Journo' cafe/magazine store.

The magazine section of Journo is devoted to what you’d expect to find in a decent magazine store: racks of magazines covering all sorts of interests, a selection of local, national and international newspapers and a small but interesting selection of bestselling paperbacks. It seems like a funkier version of stores like Great Canadian News and its sister in Francophone regions, Maison de la Presse. There’s a reason for this, which I’ll cover later on.

Journo also has some offerings that remind you that we’re living in the 21st century. There’s a section devoted to prepaid phone cards, but more interesting is the kiosk where you can download ringtones for your mobile phone and MP3s for your iPod. You can print photos from your camera’s memory chip, too. If you have a Rogers WiFi account (or sign up for one), you can access their hotspot.

The front section of Journo has about six or eight tables. Most of these tables were located indoors, but a couple were on its small street-facing patio, on the other side of a retractable wall. I didn’t check for power outlets near the tables, so I can’t report on their availability.

Detail of the interior of the 'Journo' cafe/magazine store.

I did a little Googling and found that Journo is one of three stores being given a trial run by their owner, HDS Retail North America, a branch of Hachette Distribution Services which in turn is owned by the French media and high-tech group Lagardere. HDS Retail owns the Great Canadian News and Maison de la Presse magazine store chains. (Call me a business nerd if you must, but I sometimes find playing the “who owns whom” game interesting.)

According to this Globe and Mail article, Journo is an experiment. If these gene-splices of HDS’ core magazine store business with a cafe and a download kiosk prove to be successful, the plan is to open 100 Journos in Canada and expand into the United States.

Of note is the fact that the anti-smoking movement and smoking bans played a role in Journo’s creation. The article states that tobacco sales used to be the bread and butter of newsstands and that these merchants are now looking for “alternative revenue streams”, which is bafflegab used by suits that simply means “something else to sell”. In this case, it’s a switch of addictions: from tobacco to coffee.

If managed right, these guys could have a winning formula. In my opinion, the coffee they serve at Journo — Van Houtte — can easily go toe-to-toe against the brewed coffees at Starbucks or The Second Cup. Journo’s food selection has is at least as extensive as Starbucks or Second Cup’s, if not more so, and neither of those chains has a pop fridge for those who don’t want coffee, tea or overpriced designer juice. Books, magazines and newspapers are a natural match for cafes, and like its sister stores Great Canadian News and Maison de la Presse, Journo’s selection is pretty eclectic, especially considering that it’s a chain. On weekdays, Journo closes at 10 (which is comparable with most Starbucks and Second Cups), but on weekends it closes at midnight, well after most other coffee shops and magazine stores have turned out the lights.

They could probably do away with the download kiosk. Phones and MP3 players are too different and change too rapidly for it to be compatible with more than just a handful of models. I think they’d get a bigger bang for the buck by switching to free WiFi and capitalizing off the people who like taking their laptops to cafes; the maintenance costs would be cheaper, and when’s the last time you went to a cafe when there wasn’t at least one person with their laptop pulled out?

They might also do well to get rid of the flat-screen TVs hanging from the ceiling, which show the Pulse24 channel constantly (although with the sound turned down). They detract from the atmosphere, do nothing to lure in customers and are a waste of money.


Next: More thoughts on Journo, Starbucks and its malcontents, “third places” and “cafe coding”.

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It Happened to Me

What Driving Down Highway 101 Was Like

Speaking of Silicon Valley, here’s a photo that captures the spirit of the San Francisco – San Jose drives that Cory Doctorow and I used to make:

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It Happened to Me

My Primary Personality Defect

As I promised in this entry, I’m going to write about my primary personality defect.

It’s cool to say on your blog that those online “What {insert thing here} are you?” tests are passe, but I think that some of them are still fun. One of them is the Personality Defect Test, my results for which are shown below. If you know me, you’ll probably say “Yeah, that sounds like Joey, all right”…


Braggart

You are 85% Rational, 100% Extroverted, 42% Brutal, and 85% Arrogant.

You are the Braggart! Like Muhammad Ali, you would surely tell everyone that you are “The Greatest” whilst bragging incessantly about your intelligence, your skills, and your abilities. You tend to be a thinker rather than a feeler, and combined with your extroversion and arrogance, this makes you someone who probably just LOVES to brag about his accomplishments. Despite this, however, you are a very gentle, tender person and truly care about others’ feelings. You just happen to care more about yourself. Unlike Ali, of course, you are rather rational as opposed to emotional, and you are also much more gentle. But his arrogance and extroversion best reflect the most visible aspects of your personality. But his afro and his penchant for rhyming…not so much. There is not really much to dislike about you, aside from the fact that you can be incredibly annoying, and you probably never shut up about yourself. You may be one of these people who refer to themselves in the third person. If you have a nickname, it is probably one you gave to yourself, because you are too cool for the nickname others have given you–like “doofus” and “shitface”. Your personality defect, in summary, is the fact that you are extremely overconfident, extroverted, and perhaps rather lacking in emotions. YOU ARE THE GREATEST! Or so you keep telling yourself every night as you stare at yourself in the mirror and practically make out with your reflection. Maybe one day everyone else on the planet will agree with your assessment of yourself. Nah, I’m just kidding. We think you’re an arrogant dickhole. But a NICE arrogant dickhole, so no worries.

To put it less negatively:

1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive.

2. You are more EXTROVERTED than introverted.

3. You are more GENTLE than brutal.

4. You are more ARROGANT than humble.

Compatibility:

Your exact opposite is the Bitch-Slap.

Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Hand-Raiser, the Haughty Intellectual, and the Capitalist Pig.

If you scored near fifty percent for a certain trait (42%-58%), you could very well go either way. For example, someone with 42% Extroversion is slightly leaning towards being an introvert, but is close enough to being an extrovert to be classified that way as well. Below is a list of the other personality types so that you can determine which other possible categories you may fill if you scored near fifty percent for certain traits.

The other personality types:

The Emo Kid: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Starving Artist: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Bitch-Slap: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Brute: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

The Hippie: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Televangelist: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Schoolyard Bully: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Class Clown: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

The Robot: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Haughty Intellectual: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Spiteful Loner: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Sociopath: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

The Hand-Raiser: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Braggart: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Capitalist Pig: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Smartass: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

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You scored higher than 99% on Rationality
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You scored higher than 99% on Extroversion
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You scored higher than 99% on Brutality
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You scored higher than 99% on Arrogance

Link: The Personality Defect Test written by saint_gasoline on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Yup, that sounds like me, all right.

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Geek It Happened to Me

Victory! [Updated: Not Quite]

I’m number one! I’m number one!Update: Dang. In Canada. See below for details.

For those of us surfing in Canada, Google automatically redirects to Google.ca rather than Google.com. This blog is the number 1 Google result in Canada, number 4 in the world. For now.

This will only serve to inflame my primary personality defect, which I’ll blog about tomorrow.

(Thanks to Eldon and GadgetMan for pointing it out.)

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It Happened to Me

Pinko Redux

Tara Responds

Tara Hunt responds to my two articles on the name “Pinko Marketing” in the comments, and I respond to her response. Tara’s a friend and the dicussion was civilized, so you’re not going to get any Jerry Springer kicks here. What you will get is each of us explaining our rationales.

Zack Exley Responds

An anonymous commenter — who could be Zack Exley (whom I wrote about in my second post about Pinko Marketing) — writes:

You’re totally misquoting me. I said our online campaign was well run, but that the Dem *field* campaign was generally a mess.

That quote is from my notes, which I typed directly into my computer and formatted for this blog entry.

I’m going to go check out the blogs of other folks who attended that session, but for now, my statements stand. Zack, if that’s you, I’ll be happy to give you rebuttal space here on this blog — email me at joey@joeydevilla.com. If any of you attended the Internet + Society conference in 2004, can you corroborate either Zack’s or my account of what was said at that session?