This year, Unspace is holding another conference for Ruby programmers. This time, it’s going by the name FutureRuby and once again, I’m posting a series of articles that collectively will make a quick little Baedeker about Toronto for the non-locals attending the conference. My hope is that even people who’ve live in this city all their lives will find it useful and entertaining.
Upon arriving in Toronto, you may notice a certain funk hanging in the air. The strength of said funk will vary from block to block and will come from one of two probable sources.
Probable Source Number One: Gene Simmons’ Man-Musk
The first probable source of the smell lingering around town is Gene Simmons. Yes, that Gene Simmons. Gene has bedded many women:
His current long-term partner, Playboy Playmate Shannon Tweed
The woman with whom he cheated on Shannon in that video that popped up on the internet last year
Former live-in partners Cher and Diana Ross
“Over a thousand women”, if his interview on NPR is to be believed
While his Rock God status helped him land the ladies, I believe that what really draws them in his the musky aroma he exudes.
Gene will be in town on the FutureRuby weekend in his capacity as Grand Marshall for the Honda Indy, which will take place around the Canadian National Exhibition, a short drive west of the conference hotel. An event featuring fast-moving, big, throbbing machines needs a grand marshall to match, and who could fill the role better than he?
The Honda Indy will run from Friday, July 10th through Sunday July 12th, and it might affect you in the following ways:
You may be exposed to Gene Simmons’ man-musk.
It may take longer than usual for you to get downtown if you’re flying in from Toronto’s main airport, Pearson International Airport, on Friday. Lakeshore Boulevard, one of the major roads leading into town from the west, will be used as part of the Indy track and will be closed.
You will hear the echoes of race car engines all weekend. It’ll be a constant hum in the background during the day – not too annoying, but I thought you might want to know what that sound was.
Probable Source Number Two: The Garbage Strike!
The even more probable source of the smell is the garbage. As of today, Friday, July 3rd, the strike by Toronto’s municipal workers is in its 11th day. It affects a number of services, including Parks and Recreation, services at City Hall and garbage collection. There little to no smell downtown, but as you go to neighbourhoods where food makes the lion’s share of the trash, such as Kensington Market (where Sunday’s post-FutureRuby party is taking place), it sometimes gets a little ripe.
If the strike goes on for another week and into FutureRuby:
Consider yourself warned about some potential stink.
If you’re from out of town, walking around the city and have some trash, please don’t litter or stuff it into our Saran-wrapped garbage cans; hang onto it and dispose of it at your hotel.
How Will I Get to FailCamp if the Ferries aren’t Running?
FailCamp, one of the events associated with FutureRuby, takes place on the Toronto Islands (Queen City Yacht Club on Algonquin Island, to be precise). The problem is that the island ferries are run by the striking city workers and are out of commission.
Worry not – Queen City Yacht Club has provided the use of the Algonquin II, a launch that can shuttle almost 50 people back and forth between Toronto Harbour and FailCamp.
Manning Publications have a great variety of books on .NET development. There’s the stuff you’d expect, such as books on C#, ASP.NET and SharePoint, but they’ve also produced books on IronPython and IronRuby (not many books on these languages), functional programming is both F# and C# and doing brownfield development and building DSLs using .NET. Many of their books have helped me get up to speed with .NET development, and I’m currently working my way through The Art of Unit Testing.
Another great thing about Manning Books is that they’re available in both paper and electronic form. This is great news for me, as I have disk space aplenty, but I’m running short on shelf space. There’s also the fact that while technology-specific books are useful, their shelf life is rather short. I’ll still buy paper editions of books that are longer on theory and technique, but when it comes to specific versions of languages, libraries or frameworks, I’ll take the ebook version.
One more great thing about Manning Books is that they’re generous with the discount codes. Their discount codes are often for 33% to 50% off the regular price, and they announce them on their Twitter account, @ManningBooks. If you’re looking to build your tech library and save money at the same time, you should follow them.
(Just so you know: Neither I nor anyone at the Developer and Platform Evangelism team at Microsoft have any kind of arrangement to promote Manning’s books. I just like their books, and getting a discounts on them is a bonus.)
SharePoint Saturdays are free events where you can learn about SharePoint from architects, developers, and other professionals who work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (a.k.a. MOSS). Filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & Microsoft MVPs, they’re day-long events covering a wide variety of SharePoint-oriented topics.
There will be three primary content tracks, with each track consisting of five presentations lasting about an hour and ranging from introductory, 100-level content to highly technical, 400-level "expert" sessions. The speakers will represent a broad cross-section of the community and will offer a variety of different perspectives and points of view.
SharePoint Saturday Toronto is a great opportunity to learn, share and network. If you’ve been meaning to learn or expand your knowledge about the SharePoint platform, you should be there!
If you were at last year’s FailCamp, you might remember the best story of FAIL of the evening, which involved warming up some “body lube” in the microwave oven for a little too long, after which hilarity ensued.
Here’s how Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, the originators of FailCamp, describe their vision of the event:
We believe that it’s time to give our personal fail some tough love and talk it out over beer!
Join us for a brief, rousing introduction followed by camaraderie, beer, and show-and-tell. We’ll present a little about failure through the ages, mining your personal suck, maybe some science, pithy quotes from people you may or may not respect, and share some failure stories of our own.
Then it’ll be your turn. If all goes to plan, you may even win in our friendly “race to the bottom” for the most public, most expensive, or most ridiculous Story of Fail.
FailCamp returns next Thursday, July 9th and once again, it’s the warm-up act for Unspace’s Ruby programmer conference (going by the name “FutureRuby” this year), which takes place on the weekend of July 10th through 12th. Just like last year, FailCamp will once again provide a forum for you to share your greatest and most pathetic stories of FAIL, and hopefully how that failure taught you some important lessons and made you a better, wiser, more-careful-with-the-lube person.
Me, presenting at last year’s FailCamp.
Once again, I will be hosting FailCamp. I’ll start the evening with a couple of stories of failure, including a couple of Keyboard Cat-worthy ones of my own, after which I’ll open up the floor to you, the audience, to share your own stories of FAIL. Once we’re all thoroughly embarrassed, DJ Barbi will spin the wheels of steel and we’ll dance our shame away.
There are some tickets left as of this writing:
For FutureRuby attendees, there are 4 free tickets to FailCamp remaining.
For those of you who are not attending FutureRuby but would like to catch FailCamp, there are 19 “Pay What You Can” tickets left.
If you want ‘em, go to the FailCamp registration page and get them before they disappear!
FailCamp will take place at the Queen City Yacht Club on the Toronto Islands (Algonquin Island, to be precise). Your printed ticket stub is good for a free ferry ride from the Toronto docks to the Yacht Club, where we’ll have some finger food, the Yacht club’s kitchen and cash bar will be open, and the evening should be full of surprises.
What better way to close an article about FailCamp than the Keyboard Cat video starring “Pinky, Pet of the Week”?
You’ve got to hand it to ObjectSharp: when they do a parody, they pull out all the stops:
Next Thursday, June 9th – exactly one week from today — ObjectSharp will host Silverlight on the Silver Screen, a presentation on the upcoming revision of Silverlight, Silverlight 3, along with Expression Blend, SketchFlow, Windows 7’s touch technology, Microsoft Office SharePoint System (MOSS), Visual Studio 2010 and Team System. They’ll cover all sorts of things, including:
How to design user interactions with SketchFlow
Integrating rich applications using SharePoint and Visual Studio Team System
Building rich line-of-business applications with Silverlight and .NET RIA Services
Tying together rich media and advertising with the Microsoft platform
Touch tech with Windows 7 and WPF
There’ll be something for you, no matter which of the “Three Ds” – designer, developer or decision-maker – you are!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
31 Days of SIlverlight is a series of blog posts posted through the month of July by Microsoft Developer Evangelist Jeff Blankenburg (yes, the same guy behind the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever, which was covered in the previous post).
For each day in July 2009, Jeff will post [...]
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
The Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever is a new puzzle site aimed at programmers in the same vein as web-based puzzle challenges such as notpron, Rankk and Python Challenge. Created by Microsoft Developer Evangelist Jeff Blankenburg, “TDPE” consists of a sequence of 30 web pages, each one with [...]
There’s a Guelph Coffee and Code taking place tonight at the Albion Hotel. Cory Fowler has the details at the Coffee and Code blog.
[Creative Commons photo courtesy of “macinate”.]
The Ottawa IT Community Awards Night takes place tonight (Tuesday, June 30th), and if you want to attend, you’ve got until 4 p.m. to register!
It’s hosted by these four groups:
OttawaSQL.net
Ottawa .NET Community
Ottawa Windows Server User Group
Ottawa Code Camp
The event will honour the partners and members of the groups who helped make [...]
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Introducing LearnHub
LearnHub’s home page.
If you’re a student applying to colleges and universities and are looking for help with the process, you should try LearnHub. Based in Toronto, LearnHub is a social learning network that helps students to prepare for standardized tests, assists with finding places to study abroad [...]
This may not really be of interest to anyone but me and StatCounter, but earlier today Global Nerdy hit the one million pageview mark for 2009. I’d like to thank all you readers who keep coming back for more; I promise I’ll make it worth your while!
(And if you happen to run web ads, feel [...]
Marc Stiegler
I met science fiction author, software developer and computer security guy Marc Stiegler at the first incarnation of O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference in 2002, but I’d been acquainted with his work prior to that. I’d heard of his programming language called E and had read his science fiction novel Earthweb, whose plot could [...]
Better late than never! Here are a couple of pictures I shot at the Metro Toronto .NET User Group in late May, where I presented my walk-through of ASP.NET MVC, Canada’s Next Top Model View Controller.
Colin Bowern opened the session with some quick announcements about upcoming events as well as other .NET user groups in [...]
The scene at the big communal table at the May 29th Coffee and Code.
There’s a Toronto Coffee and Code this Friday! For details, see the Coffee and Code blog.
Yes, the demands and schedule of my job as Sith Lord at Microsoft have kept me quite busy, but it doesn’t matter because I live in the “Hooray!” zone, as shown in the Venn diagram below:
For more information, see the LifeHacker article titled The Road to Happiness in Your Work Lies in the Hooray! Zone.
Me, presenting at last year’s FailCamp.
My one-slide summary of 
