Category: It Happened to Me

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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.

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

Last Night’s Rails Pub Night

Another sign of Accordion City’s evolution into the next big high-tech centre: the turnout at last night’s Rails Pub Night, a monthly gathering of developers who use Ruby on Rails. From my count, we had 39 people at peak, not to mention 14 squishy cows and one accordion. There was the usual tech banter, but the conversation strayed into all sorts of non-tech areas and The Rhino (the pub where the event took place) was kind enough to let me get away with playing a couple of accordion numbers.

My favourite moment of the night: when I pulled out the accordion and Austin Zielger shouted: “Wait — you’re that Joey deVilla!”

I shot only a couple of photos, and here they are:

The room at peak. Lots of chatter and milling about.


Left to right: Sasha, Samir, Martin and Leigh grab a bite to eat.


Local Nerd Supermodels: yours truly and David Crow. We can’t let David “Pretty Boy” Hansson hog all the glamour shots, can we?


The Brain Trust Shot. Pete Forde (who got Rails Pub Night started) and David Crow (who got Accordion City’s BarCamp and DemoCamp started).

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It Happened to Me

Happy Belated Easter!

Following up a couple of Passover dinners at friends’ places, Wendy celebrated her first Easter yesterday. She seems seems to have enjoyed it. As she wrote, it was a medium-sized gathering for my family: me, Wendy, my sister and brother-in-law, their three kids, mom, two aunts, an uncle, a cousin and her son. Nothing too large…at least by Filipino standards.

Dinner was great: Filipino-style ham cooked by a friend of the family, pancit (noodles), fresh lumpia (spring rolls), bangus relleno (stuffed milkfish), potato salad, a Middle Eastern parsely salad given to my mom by one of her patients, potato-scallion bread from Absolutely Fine Foods, and of course, rice. Dessert was a fruit-topped cake and Smarties-and-vanilla ice cream and blueberry frozen yogurt that Wendy and I made.

Since I posted a day-late comic for Passover featuring a robot, I thought I’d do the same for Easter. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dalek Catholic Mass:

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It Happened to Me

More on PowerPoint Breakups

Vincent Marianiello, on his blog My Hypertextual Life, takes the idea put forth in my article The Breakup Style of PowerPoint (whose name is based on Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint) and runs with it:

PowerPoint slide reading 'I think we need to talk. It's important.'

Go check out Vincent’s “breakup” slides. They have this “funny because it’s true” quality. I know a couple of guys who fit the dumpee’s description perfectly.

(By the bye, Vincent’s not the only one who’s quoted my slides — David Byrne’s been using them as examples of intentionally funny PowerPoint.)

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

From the Archives: The Harness at "Money", May 2000

This Is London

Back in 2000, I made a little extra pocket money with the accordion thanks to a club booking agent named Joa. Joa worked for a club called This is London, a “meet market” for the investment bankers, Andersen consultants and the like, and the women who wanted to hook up with them.

Joa hired me to add strange twists to the evening. Sometimes the job was simply to stand on top of the DJ booth and play Deee-Lite’s Groove is in the Heart (a terribly easy song; it’s got a I-IV pattern in the key of A flat) on the accordion along with the DJ. Othertimes, it was a little mor einvolved, such as the time when she put a beret on me and had me perform a Paris-in-the-twneties version of Fatboy Slim’s Praise You (another easy song in A flat; this one’s got a VII-IV-I pattern).

These gigs never lasted longer than three minutes, after which I was given $100 and asked to promptly leave the club. Although anyone who performed at the club was allowed to enter without forking over the $20 cover — clubs often use ridiculous cover charges as a sort of “class filter” — performers weren’t allowed to be part of the club crowd on the night they performed.

“Nothing against you, Joey darling,” as Joa would constantly remind me, “but there needs to be a wall between artist and audience, you see.”

Since I was effectively being paid $2000 an hour and since my friends were waiting for me at the dance club down the street, I didn’t complain. Besides, the drinks at This is London were ridiculously overpriced and I often overheard banter like “If you stand him on his money, he gets taller.”

Money

In May of that year, Joa called me and asked if I’d like to try something a little different. She also booked acts for a club called “Money” (for an idea of what the club is like, see this photo gallery).

Money’s dance floor had a really high ceiling, over which the storage rooms and offices were located. Someone had cut a hole in the floor of the storage room/office level, through which they often lowered go-go dancers in a harness to swing high above the audience. Joa had come up with the idea to lower me, with my accordion, and have me play along with a DJ tune while suspended above the audience. They gave me a trial run, during which I played along with I Will Survive. Hooking up a microphone to me seemed to be more work than the sound guy wanted to do and the manager wasn’t terribly enamored with the whole accordion concept, so the plan was scrapped. Still, for a brief shining I moment, I got to have my own wire team and I did play accordion in mid-air.

Although nobody shot any pictures of me in the harness, I took some pictures of one of the go-go dancers, who took the harness for a test before I was strapped in. This shot is one of my favourites:

A go-go dancer in a harness held above the dance floor at the Toronto club 'Money'. Taken May 2000.

(The photo also appears in my Flickr set.)