Category: It Happened to Me

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me Music Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Scenes from Last Night’s "Spaghettioke"

Every couple of weeks, Carson T. Foster, host and creator of Kick Ass Karaoke, hosts a karaoke night at The Social, one of the spots that’s making West Queen West an increasingly popular destination. Not only do you get karaoke; you also get spaghetti (meat or veggie) at $2 a bowl and there’s always a chance that Rachel McAdams, who hangs out in the area, will drop by. Wendy and I dropped in early, which gave us a chance to hang out and chat with Carson, which is always interesting and always a pleasure.

I like the crowd at the Social, and Carson’s karaoke night there has an interesting feel to it that I think has been missing from the Sunday karaoke nights — it feels like his nights at the original venue, the Bovine Sex Club, circa 1999 when they were still new. Maybe it’s the crowd (a rather indie rock hipsterish bunch), perhaps it’s the Social’s nice open space; it might even be just having a new crowd to surprise with the accordion. I can’t put my finger on it, but I really like the vibe.

The other thing I like is the projector, which allows the lyrics to appear in large type behind the performer. With my flash turned off and the exposure turned up high, I was able to get some pretty nice arty shots:

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It Happened to Me

Squishy Cow at Chau Chow City

For no reason at all, here’s a Tucows “Squishy Cow” enjoying a little Dim Sum with some of the Berkman bloggers at Chau Chow City restaurant in Boston. Thanks to j for putting it together!

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

"Another Bad Date?"

'Another Bad Date?' poster

These somewhat cryptic posters have been put up all around the Parkdale area of Accordion City (my office is just east of Parkdale). I assume they’re to encourage ho — erm, I mean sex trade workers — to call upon the local constabulary when the clientele cross the line. Does anyone know?

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It Happened to Me

The Fuzzy Experiment

Although I am Asian, a phenotype that often means less facial hair growth than caucasians, like my Dad, I’ve got the same beard power as “The Man”. Maybe it’s a fluke, or perhaps the goatee and splendiferous sideburns are my Irish-American great-grandfather’s gift to me. Either way, shaving is a daily ritual if I don’t want to look like a random thug from a Tony Jaa movie.

I’m going to see if we’re all being lied to by Big Foam. For the next month, I’m going to try shaving without shaving cream. I usually shave after coming out of the shower, and both McSweeney’s and an article on Lew Rockwell.com titled The Shaving Cream Racket suggest that in such situations, shaving cream is completely unnecessary. My skin’s pretty smooth, so the idea of shaving without a lubricating layer of cream doesn’t put icy daggers of fear into my heart.

Today is Day 2, and strangely enough, shaving sans foam seems to make no difference at all. Better still, it’s easier to navigate around the beard and ‘burns. I’ll keep you apprised of my progress.

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

DemoCamp 5: Yet Another Hit!

DemoCamp Toronto 2006 logo

Last night marked the fifth DemoCamp, Accordion City’s monthly gathering of the tech community where we show off our current projects to our peers. It took place at the University of Toronto’s Bahen Centre for Information Technology; use of the auditorium was arranged by Greg Wilson, whom I wish was my prof back when I was a computer science student at Crazy Go Nuts University. By Greg’s count, we had 141 attendees.


The crowd, with about 5 minutes before the start of the presentations. The place was packed by the time presentations began.

Greg expressed some concern at the small number of U of T students present. C’mon, kids — it’s almost summer, some of you a graduating, and right on campus was this great opportunity to see what’s going on in the working world and meet potential employers. Don’t blow opportunities like this!

The presentations were:

  • An announcement by David Crow that we’ve cut a deal with MaRS: they’re letting us use their amazing auditorium space (see the photos in this blog entry) for all future DempCamp gatherings. Three cheers for MaRS!
  • A quick announcement by Tucows’ own VP of Marketing, Ken Schafer, to talk about Interesting, a new feature at the Canadian Internet marketing blog, OneDegree.ca.
  • A Java-based online message board system for Bell Kids Help Phone, presented by U of T students Yang Lu, Jonathan Lung, Yimei Miao and Andrew Reynolds. This is an impressive 4th-year project — not only is it a true exercise in real-world software development, but it’ll also end up actually being used. I wish my 4th-year project was as “real” as this!
  • Super-prolific programmer Chris Nolan.ca (I think he should legally add the “.ca” to his last name) demonstrated RJS templates, a new feature added to Rails 1.1 that makes including client-side JavaScript in web pages easier by letting you code it server-side in Ruby. We had a little religious squabble when an angry Java developer in the audience started ranting about all the hype in Ruby. When the group was asked how many were experimenting with Ruby on Rails and over half the audience raised their hands, he asked “Yes, but are you fulfilled by Rails?” Those of you who aren’t programmers may be surprised to find that yes, we sometimes do get into knock-down, blood-and-guts arguments (and even fights) over programming languages and frameworks.
  • David Janes demonstrated BlogMatrix, his platform for structured blogging and microformats. He demo clearly showed the power of structured blogging and its ability to tie together disparate sources of information into something a little more cohesive and useful; I hope this sort of thing catches on. He also demonstrated a BlogMatrix site built for Toyota Canada proving that yes, DemoCamp projects do get actually paying customers — customers who pay well, in fact.
  • Local Ruby on Rails heroes Pete Forde and Ryan McMinn from Unspace demonstrated some nice Ajax-y Rails-powered UI: Liva Data Grid and Live Search. If you’re developing new-style web applications, you should give this stuff a look.
  • Avi Bryant and Andrew Catton demonstrated DabbleDB and the Seaside Framework for building web apps in Smalltalk. DabbleDB is very interesting to me: it takes spreadsheets misused as databases and converts them into proper database-driven applications. Very clever stuff. This project also deserves mention for being the first app presented at DemoCamp written in Smalltalk.
  • Adam Goucher presented Select Access, a website authentication and authorization package in use at Hewlett-Packard. This project also deserves mention for being the first “enterprise” application presented at DemoCamp.

After the presentations, a large number of the attendees converged on the upstairs bar at Molly Bloom’s for beer, wings and burgers. Greg, I owe you some money for my food and beer!

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It Happened to Me

Parallel Landing at Logan

Here’s the view from the window on our flight to Boston last weekend, just before landing at Logan airport. We were neck-and-neck with the Song jet, which was also coming in for a landing, then pulled ahead. A little closer, and I would’ve been able to watch the in-flight movie on the other jet…

'Song' jet visible off the right wing of my Air canada flight landing at Logan

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Geek It Happened to Me

Drink Your Own Pee Dot Com [Updated]

The marketing team here at Tucows has informed me that domain names are increasing in value. People are forking outbig money for them again. I hear that domain names ending with the word “world” — for example, “pantsworld.com”, “steakworld.com”, “accordionworld.com” — are highly prized.

(If you’d like to know more interesting facts about domain names, Dennis Forbes has written an excellent article on what’s taken and what’s still available.)

I have decided that I have not exercised my domain name registration powers enough. No more!

I have claimed that the Internet would be “over” — not “over” in the non-functional sense, but “over” as in the way acid-wash jeans are — when the domain name drinkyourownpee.com was registered. I have decided that I must destroy the internet in order to save it and decided to register it myself. It’s mine now. Mine! Drink Your Own Pee Dot Com! Whoo-hoo!

(Ahem.)

And now comes the experiment. I’m going to see if I can turn it into a money-maker. There are all sorts of strategies I can try; I’m going to take some for a test spin and see which ones work. If drinkyourownpee.com makes me enough money to take The Missus out to dinner once a month, I’ll consider it a success. I’ll keep you informed of my progress.

(Suggestions are welcome — just leave them in the comments!)

The “It Should Be Obvious, But Just In Case It Isn’t” Disclaimer

I do not, I repeat, do not drink my own pee.

Update: Or anyone else’s pee, you wiseguys.