Category: It Happened to Me

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me

Appearing on YTV’s "The Zone" for "Musical Week"

Back at Crazy Go Nuts University, I used to say that “If this computer craze blows over, I might try getting into children’s television”. The computer craze didn’t fade away, but I am getting my first appearance on tween/teen television a week from now on YTV’s show, The Zone:

For those of you who don’t live in Canada or aren’t familiar with YTV, it’s a Canadian speciality television channel aimed at youth viewers. My American readers might want to think of YTV as the Canadian answer to Nickelodeon. I assumed that YTV was short for “Youth Television”, but the YTV “About” page says this isn’t so (although one should not take the word of marketers or TV executives — and especially marketers who works for TV executives — as gospel).

The Zone is YTV’s flagship “show”: an afternoon programming block featuring some of their more popular cartoons interspersed with segments featuring two PJs (“Program Jockeys”), Sugar (Stephanie Beard) and Carlos (Carlos Bustamente). You can find out some interesting facts about The Zone and its PJs — including the fact that Sugar was the voice of “Rini” from Sailor Moon — in its Wikipedia entry.

Next week is “Musical Week” on The Zone, and through the machinations of my friend Sandra Kasturi (at whose wedding I played back in 2002), I’ll be appearing on it with my accordion. The other musical guests will be a few members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and a local mariachi band, which suggests that the theme will be running from the sublime to the ridiculous. I never cared much for the sublime thing, anyway.

I have to show up at the YTV studios — thankfully only a couple of blocks away from the office — next Wednesday at around two-ish. It should be fun, and I’ll definitely blog the event.

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It Happened to Me

Pictures from the Meetup

Sunday’s meetup was a success — at peak, we were 16 in total, all having good food, good beer and great conversation. My thanks to everyone who came, and special thanks to Tara Hunt for helping me put the whole thing together!

Ross took pictures of the event, covering both the gathering inside 21st Amendment and the accordion performance outside. Thanks, Ross! I put the photos in an album, which you can view in album or slideshow format.


Click the photo to start the slideshow.

Tara wasn’t actually in town to attend the event, but Chris Messina, pictured below, stood in for her and also promoted the event locally. Thanks, Chris!


Click the photo to start the slideshow.

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It Happened to Me

Best Conference Snack Ever

Dove

bars. Yum.

And yes, the actual content of

the Developer

Relations Conference has been not only informative, but in

some cases, downright inspiring, especially the presentation from the

dude from O’Reilly titled Developers Just Want to Have Fun. I’ve been

taking notes for all the sessions I’ve managed to catch and will post

them once I’ve formatted and cleaned them up a bit.

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It Happened to Me

Best Conference Lunch Ever

So far, the Evans Data Corporation’s Developer Relations Conference has been quite good — information-rich presentations delivered by good speakers to a interesting and varied crowd — but I’ll save all the techie/marketing stuff for the technical blog, The Farm. I’m going to report on the more touchy-feely stuff here so as not to bore my not-so-technical readers to tears.

Rather than have lunch in some stuffy hotel conference dining room, they herded us outside to this lovely tent adjoining the hotel. In case you were wondering, it’s springlike (about 14 degrees C) and sunny in San Francisco today. Here’s a photo of the tent:

I was expecting the standard salad-chicken-vanilla cake fare, but was pleasantly surprised by what we actually got:

  • The starter: A sweet salad with boston lettuce, grapes, apples and candied walnuts
  • The main course: duck and polenta with string beans. That’s right. Duck. Polenta.
  • Dessert: a nice custard-and-chocolate chip tart.

This is far better than any other conference fare I’ve ever been served. Mind you, I’m typically at developer cons, and food isn’t often high on the priority list, other than having plenty. I’m sure that “suitier” conferences have food on this level or better, but I’m a grateful geek for getting the “Food Network” treatment here. I salute Evans Data with a filet mignon on a flaming sword for the lunch.

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It Happened to Me

Hello from San Francisco!

I’m currently sitting in a seminar at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in the Argent Hotel in downtown San Francisco. It’s a developer relations conference rather than a developer conference, which means that the event isn’t the “sausage party” to which I have become accustomed, but rather one with a more even male-female ratio.

The Windows/Mac ratio is still heavily Redmond-skewed. Until just now, I thought I was the only guy with a Mac laptop in attendance.

Noting this, I turned to Ross and said, “See? Only Mac in the house. I’ve just established myself as the rebel.”

“No,” he replied without skipping a beat, “you’ve established yourself as bait.”

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It Happened to Me

Notes from the Location-Based Services Seminar / Sausage Party

My more technically-inclined readers might want to check out my entry in The Farm titled Notes from the Bell Mobility/ESRI Location-Based Services Seminar, Part 1. It’s the first of a series of notes I took at a seminar aimed at developers who want to develop location-based applications for mobile devices such as cellphones.

Of course, all this location-based services hoo-hah isn’t worth anything without an actual application for them. Here’s mine.

On the Saturday of Canadian Thanksgiving weekend 2004 — shortly after Wendy and I became engaged — I told her I’d show her what I was rescuing her from and took her to the “clubland” area of Accordion City (the Richmond/Adelaide “meet market” part of town). A small group of us took Wendy out on the town.

For some reason, the male-female ratio was completely off-kilter that night: it seemed as though men outnumbered women 9-to-1 that night. I remember laughing at a remark made by a guy walking past us, who complained to his friend: “It’s all dick!“

Over drinks, we joked that if services like TorontoGasPrices.com existed, there should also be one that reported the male/female ratio at various “meet market” clubs. You probably couldn’t rely on the clubs to report honestly, but you might be able to rely on mobile tracking of people’s cellphones. Participants using this social software would tell the app “I am of gender X seeking gender Y”, and their location would be checked every 30 minutes. People who want to meet people would probably be a more reliable source of information than clubs who simply want to fill their space.

The working title for my application? Sausage Party.

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

Blogstravaganza! (and a bit about echo chambers, too…)


Blogstravaganza in full swing! From left to right: Andrew Coyne, John Bowman, Yours Truly. Photo from A North American Patriot.

Let me begin with a shout-out to all the attendees of last Friday’s Blogstravaganza…

(If I missed you, let me know!)

My thanks to Bob Tarantino and Jason Cherniak for putting the whole thing together. It was good to catch up with old friends from previous gatherings and meet some new ones as well. The success of this event shows that the blogosphere is alive and well here in Accordion City.

It’s also compartmentalized.

Echo Chambers

If you’re a regular reader of this blog or a regular attendee of the GTABloggers gatherings, there’s a strong possibility that many of the blogs listed above will be unfamiliar to you. Likewise, this blog was unfamiliar to the bloggers whom I hadn’t met at previous gatherings of the local Vast Right Wing Conspiracy bloggers, despite recent links from a number of Technorati Top 100 sites and recent mentions in The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and Macleans. One attendee didn’t know who Andrew Coyne was, despite the fact that he’s one of Canada’s highest-profile newspaper writers, while another lamented that Toronto seemed to have more right-wing bloggers than left-wing ones, even though attending a GTABlogger party might make you think the opposite was true.

This sort of thing is to be expected. After all, the term “community” has the same root as the word “common”, as in “sharing some trait or quality”. There’s a natural tendency towards gravitating towards those who share your interests, and in these politically-charged times, towards those who share your politics. There are some advantages to this, not the least of which is that a community can often do what an individual cannot.

This also has its downsides. Consider the “echo chamber” effect, in which the voices of a community serve to amplify voices from within the community and diminish outside voices, forming a self-reinforcing “feedback loop”. This can lead to all sorts of problems, from a “tunnel visioned” mindset to a lack of new ideas within the community to the demonization of other communities based on stereotypes and prejudices.

I think that Bob and Jason did a very good job at attempting to reach Toronto bloggers of all political persuasions. Perhaps it’ll take a few more of these gatherings to bring out more local bloggers whose politics are “centre” and “left”.

Your opinions, please…