In anticipation of the number of podcasts I’m supposed to produce this year (such as the one I did last week), Ross had the company purchase The Art of the Interview
for me. The Amazon reviews seem to indicate that it’s more of a memoir
than a how-to book, but there’s a fair bit of information that I’ve
been able to glean from it nonetheless. Watch out, Larry King!
Barely a month after that fateful day when Karl and I decided to take our accordions out onto the street and play them in public for the first time, he phoned me with an interesting offer.
“Hey, Joey! How’d you like to play accordion on the radio?”
“What? How?”
“John Southworth’s going to be doing a live session on CBC radio to promote his new album. I did session work on a couple of numbers on the album, and one of them has an accordion. He thought it would be cool to have two accordions backing him up when he did it live.”
“Count me in!”
Karl brought me a copy of John’s then-new album, Sedona Arizona. He didn’t send me an MP3 file: you have to remember that this was a month before the original Napster was released and that I was considered to have advanced home connectivity, what with my 56K modem.
The song we were to play was called Veto Valvoline, a whimsical laundry list-type song featruing words beginning with the letter “V”. We transcribed a chord chart and practiced it ourselves; a day later, John came to practice it with us. We rehearsed in my condo’s gym as the puzzled-looking cleaning staff looked on.
On the day of the studio session, Karl gave me a call with a wacky idea.
“We should dress up for this big event. Suits, ascots, hats.”
“You realize, Karl,” I said, “that we’re dressing up for radio.”
“Aw, c’mon, it’ll be fun.”
So we did, and John and the hosts of the show were rather amused to see these two guys with accordions walk in, dressed like Fuller Brush salesmen. Here’s a photo of us in action:
This
Saturday, Wendy
and I went to the Book City warehouse sale and made out
like bandits, netting about a dozen books for less than CDN$100. I
snagged:
Court
by Mark Twain (a great story, whosepremise got borrowed and mangled by a number of tv shows and
movies)
Neal Stephenson (continuing the Baroque Cycle, which started with Quicksilver,
which I
got for free)
Recognition
by William Gibson (Never got aroundto reading it, no idea why)
Life?
by Po Bronson (I enjoyed his earlierbook,
Shift, and hey, now’s as good a time as any for
a little self-check)
…and finally…
Dictionary
by Marc Okrand.gave me The Klingon
Dictionary
back during our days at Crazy Go
Nuts University. A few months later,
MacDougall,
who needed a copy for his linguistics class (remember,
the Klingon language is a real language designed by a linguist),
borrowed it from me and never returned it. I am pleased to have this
masterpiece again and look forward to peppering my conversation with
gems such as:
targwIj
Ross, the targ ate my weekly report.
veQDuj’oH
Dujllj’e’
Your ship is a garbage scow.
Daghur neH
Struggling only makes it hurt more.
Here’s a little tip: Klingon sentences sound even better
when punctuated with a hearty “beeeyotch!”
When we paid for the books, the cashier, who was sporting the classic
nerd grrrl uniform, took one look at the book and said
“Sweet! I was
jumping for joy when I found out we had this book in stock. Enjoy
it!”
I shall. Qapla’!
Ross was the sound engineer for the Tucows podcast (mentioned here), so he was able to shoot this photo with his phone:
That’s me on the left, and Alain Chesnais, VP of Product Development, on the right.
…and even managed to get some video as well [435K, MPEG-4 file].
Going to Disneyland is one thing; going to Disneyland with Cory Doctorow, Disneyland theme park aficionado, is something quite different. Cory’s encyclopedic knowledge of the work that goes into the design and implementation of Disneyland — imagineering, as they call it — gave me a chance to see Walt’s dream through new eyes and made it fun in a new way. I’ll post that story next week.
In the meantime, here are some grainy pictures that we took at the “Love Tester” while waiting for the Country Bear Jamboree to start. The machine gave us the same rating: “cuddly”. I thought we’d rate at least “teddy bear”.
“Are you sure this machine’s calibrated properly?”
“The ladies beg to differ!”
I spent half the weekend with a mild fever and feeling completely out
of it. So out of it, in fact, that I voluntarily watched both Lake Placid and Scary Movie 3 (the edited-for-television versions, no less) on TBS. Hence I was feeling a bit off my game on Monday and decided not to bring the accordion to the Ruby on Rails Pub Night at C’est What. Unfortunately, I also forgot to bring some Tucows swag — our coveted “squishy cows”, pictured below:
As
the developer relations guy, forgetting the swag before attending a
developer meetup is about the same as forgetting to put on your pants
before stepping out. Next pub night (tentatively scheduled for Monday,
April 17th), there shall be squishy cows. This I promise.
for the Ruby on Rails event itself, it went quite well. Pete Forde, one
of the organizers said that his guess, based on yesterday’s rotten
weather, was ten people, gathered around a long table, would be a good
turnout. He was quite pleased to see twenty-five.
Pete’s company, Unspace,
is a company that develops web applications using Rails. He noted that
some clients are a bit wary of firms that use Rails because of the
“What if they’re hit by a bus?” factor — that is, the fear that no one
else will be able to maintain their applications because they’re
implemented in a framework and a language that doesn’t have the broad
user base of something like PHP, Java or .NET. He’d like to see a
healthy ecosystem of local Rails developers, and given the way
Accordion City is, there should be more than enough work to go around.
I got a chance to meet Austin Ziegler, author of the PDF::Writer module, which makes creating printouts in Ruby dirt simple (see the “Hello World” example in this Artima article to see how simple).
I suggested that he demonstrate it at an upcoming DemoCamp, to which he
replied that his presentation could be demonstrating how PDF::Writer
can be used to make his presentation for PDF::Writer right in front of
the audience — the sort of recursive thing that programmers like.
Of course, David Crow was there. That’s the sign of a tech event worth visiting.
I
met a number of other Ruby/Rails developers there and had a chance to
chat with a good number of them. A number of us, myself included, have
come from the world of developing “enterprise” or “business”
applications using Microsoft development tools and databases, others
are Java guys trying to escape Rube Golberg Machine
coding and some are young enough and lucky enough to star their
programming careers with Ruby and Rails. A couple of us — myself
included again, told some amusing Captain Crunch
stories and other ribald tales of the sometimes-sordid underbelly of
the nerd world. From the looks of it, we all had a good time, and I
think the future of the Rails Pub Night is promising. My thanks to Pete
and the folks at Unspace for putting the event together.
I took this shot while walking around San Francisco’s North Beach neighbourhood with Wendy last month:
