Category: Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

As I mentioned in this post from last week, some jackass helped himself (or herself) to my bike seat from the locked bike room in my building. This morning, I walked my bike through Bloor West Village to Brown’s Cycle to get a new seat.

Bloor West Village

Bloor West Village is the stretch of Bloor Street West — one of the main east-west streets of Accordion City, along which one of our subway lines runs — bounded roughly by Runnymede on the east side and Jane Street on the West side. It’s lined with cafes, restaurants, groceries, bakeries, book shops and other yuppie-centric stores. As a single guy in my twenties and early thirties, Queen Street West was more my scene, but as a married man who’s much closer to 40 than 30, I rather like the vibe of this family and dog-friendly neighbourhood and being right next door to one of the largest parks in the city while remaining a bikeable distance (or a short subway ride, or a near-blip of a car trip) from downtown.

Even Vice magazine, whose target audience is club-going urban teens and twenty-somethings and whose staff are aggressively hipster, has trouble faulting the neighbourhood in their Toronto ‘Hood Guide:

[The Bloor West Village / High Park neighbourhood] is a kind of urban utopia for the middle-upper class. You are basically living downtown but you have a mini-Muskoka in High Park. The houses are old and have style and it’s really safe and community-oriented. It’s also expensive. If you hate the leisure classes and their children, stay away. If you hate trees and fresh air, you are not logical.

Personally, I think it’s a strange conceit for a magazine whose image is that their staff don’t wake up/stop coming down until noon on Monday and don’t have kids, a mortgage or a job that requires much in the way of responsibility or even showing up on time to refer to other people as “the lesiure class”, but the rest of the description is right-on.

Living just east of the stretch of shops and working farther east, I don’t get much of a chance to see Bloor West Village during the day on weekdays, which is a shame. It’s a lively neighbourhood with a mix of activites and people, the sort of place that Jane Jacobs praised in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It was a bit of a treat walking through the ‘hood this morning, even if I had to circumnavigate the bike around a number of strollers, walkers and dogs. I even got a “Hey! You’re the Accordion Guy!” from a high-schooler, even though I haven’t yet busked in this neck of the woods. I just wish I’d brought my camera with me this morning.

Introducing: Suspension!

The guy at Brown’s Cycle took a measurement to figure out what size seat post I needed and asked me if I wanted a suspension post.

“Suspension post? You mean they make seat posts with suspensions?” I asked. Clearly I haven’t been paying attention to bike technology.

He took me to a row of suspension seat posts, which are essentially seat posts with a shock absorber built into them. They weren’t terribly expensive, so I added it to a nice cushiony seat that matched my Trek Calpyso cruiser, and the ride is incredible. Riding on my bike is now like having your bum carried aloft by angels. I highly recommend it.

Who Took My Seat?

It looks as though — knock on wood — that we’ve seen the last of serious snow, which means I won’t have to put up with this for another eight months:

My bike, last winter.

Of course, there are still other annoyances with which to contend. In my case, it’s theft. This morning, when I went down to the bike room in my apartment building, I found that someone had stolen my seat. I’d never gotten around to replacing the quick-release bracket with a permanent bolt. I usually take the seat with me when I leave the bike outside, but I figured that I wouldn’t have to worry about that sort of thing in locked bike room in a nice part of town. Luckily, there’s a security camera near the door; I’m going to have to see if the security guy has the thief on tape.

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Run Off the Road

I reported the theft to the building’s management. The woman who took down my report told me that she was just recovering from a cycling injury. She was biking with a friend in the Beaches area of town when a car ran them off the road. She had to be taken to the hospital for head injuries near her eye, but thankfully there was no permanent harm done.

I’ve only had one incident where a car ran me off the road. I was biking home along College Street when a car full of drunk guys — probably coming from the nearby clubs — deliberately tried to run me off the road. They pulled ahead of me and directly blocked my path, and the guy in the font passenger seat challenged me.

“You on the bike!” he yelled. “How ’bout a game of ‘chicken’?”

I pulled out my cell phone and held it so they could see it. I called out the numbers as I keyed them. “Nine! One! One!” I then called them out: “How ’bout a game of ‘breathalyzer’?”

They peeled off in a hurry. I took a note of their license plate and saw the car dealership name on their trunk. Scarborough. “Scarberia”. It figures: bored kids from “the 905” — the deep burbs.

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101bike.com

While I’m talking about bikes, let me introduce you to my co-worker Mathijs and his blog, 101bike.com: 101 Days to Buy a Bike. Mathijs has recently come to Accordion City from Holland.

Mathijs observes that here in North America, bikes are more of a niche thing, ridden by largely by kids, fitness enthusiasts, the creative class and extreme sports practitioners. Over in Holland, they’re as ubiquitous as cars. As a result, what he knows about bikes is limited to riding them. He started his blog to learn more about bikes and to get in touch with the Toronto biking community.

The blog’s name is derived from the fact that he’d giving himself 101 days to do the research, both on his own and via the blog, after which he’ll buy the bike. As of today, he’s got 91 days to go. Drop by his blog and check it out!

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.

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As

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.