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

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.