I recorded 4 in-between-show segments for the YTV show The Zone‘s “Musical Week” with my accordion this afternoon, and they went quite well. The hosts, Sugar and Carlos, are just as warm and friendly as they are on TV, as were the staff and crew. If you’ve got access to a TV set between 4:00 p.m. and 6 p.m. tomorrow, tune in to catch some accordion action.
I never understand the twisted logic of many retail stores’ “no cameras” policies. They don’t make sense within the context of a place that is open to the public, even if it’s not publicly owned.
A couple of years back, I caught heat from IKEA for taking a snapshot of some of their toys, Urban Outfitters has given me heat for seeing what I look like in a hat with a self-portrait and someone at a Home Depot once thought I was dictating prices into a portable tape recorder (I was actually talking to Cory using the then-new walkie-talkie feature of my cellphone).
The last such incident of this sort took place last summer at the Runnymede and Bloor branch of the retail book chain Chapters, where I saw my friend Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series of books on prominent display. I often carry my camera with me and decided to take a photo to send to her.
“Excuse me, sir,” said a young woman in a golf shirt with a Chapters logo, “but you’re not allowed to…hey, don’t I know you? You’re the guy from the party with the accordion!”
After some brief re-introductions, I told her that I knew Diane Duane and have actually met gone out drinking with both her and her husband, Peter Morwood, she decided that it would be all right — “just this once” — to take the photo. The photo’s since been sitting in my “to be blogged” folder for some time, so here it is at long last.
This is yet another preamble for yet another story that Boing Boing caught first. I thought it was still worthy of blogging since Diane is a friend and I thought it would be nice to promote her work.
The first two volumes of the Feline Wizards trilogy drew a sizable
audience, but not enough to convince Diane’s publisher to pay her to write book three. Over the years, an anxious audience has demanded a conclusion to the series, so back in December, Diane posted an open question to her blog: would her readers support her if she finished the trilogy without a publisher?
The answer’s been a resounding yes — one reader’s even gone so far as to offer a $1,000 matching grant to Diane toward the completion of the book.
For more details, see Diane’s entry about the subject in her blog, Out of Ambit.
While undergoing dialysis at the hospital yesterday, Dad slipped and fell backwards landing on his head, knocking him out and fracturing his skull. He’s currently in the intensive care unit at St. Joseph’s Health Centre and is conscious but confused due to some internal bleeding in his brain. The last diagnosis of which I was aware is that he has a subarachnoid hemmorhage, which to this layperson sounds like pretty bad news. Today’s CAT scan should provide more information.
Wendy and I visited last night, and as soon as I finished whatever work I can’t take with me, I’m headed back to the hospital. I don’t know how many times I’ve asked for your best wishes, prayers or moving the coffee table for better feng shui, but if you can spare some, they’d be appreciated.
As one might expect, non-work-related blogging may be a bit light for the next couple of days. Be well, everyone.
If you want to see my photos and video from last night’s DemoCamp — that’s the monthly gathering in which developers from the Toronto area demonstrate their current projects in action in front of an audience of developers, product managers, venture capitalists and other people interested in what our local techies are creating — you should go take a look at this article in Tucows Developer.
Click the photo to go to the Tucows Developer article on DemoCamp.
Albert Lai is the CEO of BubbleShare, a
software company that makes a web application bearing the same name. Albert’s and my path have crossed time and again ever since I graduated from Crazy Go Nuts University and entered the working world. We first met eleven years ago during the interactive CD-ROM boom at Mackerel Interactive Media, when he was still in high school and doing an internship there. We later met at during the P2P boom in 2000/2001 when we lived at the same Fillmore/Fulton townhouse complex in San Francisco and were working at our respective peer-to-peer projects (I was at OpenCola, and I can’t remember where Albert was working). We’ve recently crossed paths again, this time during the Web 2.0/web services boom, and BubbleShare is his project.
BubbleShare is a pretty nice photo-sharing web thingy, with the annoyances of many photo-sharing web thingies excised. You don’t have to register to start posting photos online, nor do you need to download software or pay a monthly fee. Photos on BubbleShare can be annotated with comments and even audio. It makes it easy to send email that says “Hey, look at my photos” to your friends and family, and it’s set up so that even the least technical of them — for most people, it’s “my mom”, but in my case, it’s Dad who’s the most technologically hopeless — can click a link and see your photos.
BubbleShare’s holding a contest and the company for whom I work, Tucows, is lending a hand. Click here for the details, and find out how to win some prizes. One of the prizes is an iPod Nano, and who knows — maybe my iPod Nano-luck will rub off on you.
Dad’s having angioplasty today. Wish him luck!
In addition to enjoying some unseasonably warm weather in San Francsico (21 degrees C / 72 degrees F) at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference, I also won the door prize in a random draw: a white 4GB iPod Nano, pictured to the left. Wendy gave me a 2GB model in black for Christmas, so her present “boomeranged” back to her (I kept the earphones and cables I’d already used and gave her the new ones). After years of not having owned a personal stereo, my last one being an old Discman in 1999, our household is yet another in the Order of the White Earbuds.
I wiped the old one clean of my tunes — currently a lot of indie darlings such as The Decemberists, Vitalic, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Danielson Famile and Ratatat, as well as some Johnny Cash and AC/DC — and she’s loaded it with 80s music and a lot of earnest-sounding women singing and playing acoustic guitar. Lilith Fair sense…tingling!
We sweetened the deal by buying her a new iPod case at the San Francisco Apple Store at Market and Stockton. We arrived there last Wednesday a little before the store’s opening at 10 a.m. and already more than two dozen people were waiting to get inside. And to think that in the mid-nineties, there was a time when it seemed that you couldn’t give Apple stuff away.
The other Apple windfall from Christmas came from Wendy’s parents, who gave us an iSight camera to hook to our Macs, so things like video chats with the in-laws and me performing strip shows in exchange for items on my Amazon.com wishlist are in my future.