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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me Slice of Life

Slice of Life: Playing Accordion on a Calgary Street Corner

Rodney Buike took this photo of me on Tuesday evening. I look as if I should be backing up Tom Waits or playing in a cojunto band:

playing accordion in calgary

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods Play

“Hey Jude” Flowchart

The lyrics to The Beatles' "Hey Jude", in flowchart form.

…and if you were wondering: oh yes, I do own the deluxe edition of The Beatles: Rock Band:

Photo: My little red accordion, dwarfed by the box for the deluxe edition of "The Beatles: Rock Band"

Categories
Geek It Happened to Me Slice of Life

Slice of Life: Me and Steve B.

I bought a fuzzy “Cat in the Hat”-style raver hat with a Canadian flag pattern on a whim earlier this year, thinking that I’d probably find a pretty good use for it some day. That day, it turns out, was yesterday, where I turned it into what I believe was yesterday’s only Steve Ballmer photo-op with a non-management Microsoft Canada employee:

Joey deVilla and Steve Ballmer, wearing Joey's Canadian flag raver hatPhoto by Barnaby Jeans.

Yesterday was a busy day at the Harbour Castle Convention Centre, where we had an all-day Steve Ballmer-rama. In the morning, Steve keynoted an event showcasing Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010 for the media, key customers and partners. This was followed by an employees-only “town hall” where Steve did a short presentation followed by a Q&A session. On a whim similar to the one that led me to buy it, I took the hat (along with the accordion) along with me.

Following a suggestion from my co-worker Damir, I arrived very early for the town hall, grabbed a seat by the stage and donned the hat. When Steve made his appearance, he did so in classic Ballmer style, running and whooping, high-fiving people as he made his way to the stage. As soon as he saw me, he yelled “Hey!”, put the hat on and posed with me for the photo above.

I’d made a decent splash at Microsoft in my first year, and I’d been wondering if I could match it in my second, which began on Monday. This isn’t a bad start.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Categories
Geek

Portable Computing in the “Mad Men” Era

Are there any computers available today that come in that particular shade of blue, with matching chair?

1960s computerClick the photo to see it at full size. Photo courtesy of retrofuture.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Categories
Geek Play

Actually, This Explains a Lot

Suddenly, Star Wars makes a lot more sense…

r2-d2_with_cat_inside

[Thanks to CaptainMarvel for the pic!]

Categories
It Happened to Me Slice of Life Work

Slice of Life: Conference Call

Here’s the view from a conference call I participated in on a recent sunny day:

conference_call

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me

Slice of Life: Playing Accordion at HoHOTo

playing_accordion_at_hohoto_aug_2009

Heather Leson, with whom I used to work at Tucows, snapped this photo of me breaking out the squeezebox at Tuesday’s HoHOTo charity event.

HoHOTo is the second edition of the HoHoTO (pronounced “Ho Ho Tee Oh”) party, which was a charity event that took place close to Christmas (hence the “Ho Ho”) and was very quickly organized after a few people had a little discussion on Twitter. No giant planning committees, no long meetings in windowless boardrooms over bad coffee and stale donuts, no big media marketing campaigns – just a group of dedicated volunteers and community leaders, a modicum of social media savvy, some fast-moving sponsors (including my employer, Microsoft Canada) and a club willing to let use their space on short notice.

Although it’s nowhere near Christmas, the event’s name has a lot of goodwill and the website already exists, so why not simply change the capitalization and pronunciation? And thus HoHOTo (pronounced “Ho HOT Oh”) came into being.

One again, it was organized largely by that chunk of the local creative class comprising both techies and marketing types. The event was a double success in raising over CAD$10,000 for the Daily Bread Food Bank and being a great evening out as well.

I saw camera flashes galore at HoHOTo, and a number of those flashes ended up as pictures on Flickr.