This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
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Fo’shizzle my Ballizle: on tonight’s episode of CBC’s news show The Hour, “Strombo”’s interviewing an unlikely pair: the CEO of the company for whom I work, Steve Ballmer, and Snoop Dogg. Alas, they’re taping the segments separately, so there’s no chance of Ballmer and Snoop doing a rap duet called Win and Juice.
The Hour airs on CBC tonight at 11 p.m. Eastern.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
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I was 10 years old when Space Invaders came out, so this photo brings back happy memories:
Click the photo to see it on its original page.
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I’m going to be in Vancouver from the afternoon of Friday, September 11th until the morning of Friday, September 18th. I’m there first and foremost to manage the “Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform” track of the TechDays conference, then to meet up with the local tech community, but also to enjoy the city I fondly refer to as “Vangroovy”.
Here’s what I’ll be up to:
Coffee and Code Vancouver: Saturday, September 12th
My coworker John Bristowe and I will be holding Coffee and Code on Saturday, September 12th from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Pacific time, of course) at the Take 5 Cafe on Granville (429 Granville, near Hastings). We’ll be there to talk about TechDays, The Empire and the tech industry in general – but it won’t just be geeky stuff; we’ll provide scintillating conversation about accordions, the Calgary Flames, deep fried snack foods, “Am I metrosexual or not”, life, the universe and everything. I will have the accordion with me, so tunes are definitely on the menu!
You can register for Coffee and Code Vancouver on its event page.
TechDays Vancouver: Monday, September 14th – Tuesday, September 15th
TechDays is Microsoft Canada’s cross-Canada tour, where we highlight what you can do with currently-available Microsoft tools and tech that you probably aren’t doing yet. We take the content from the infinitely more expensive TechEd North America conference (admission fee USD$2000), update it, and have local techies present it near you at a price you can afford (CAD$299 if you caught the early bird rate, CAD$599 otherwise). You get great content at a great price, and we get to make contact with tech communities across the country. Think of it as “Geek Global, Spend Local”.
TechDays Vancouver will be happening at the Vancouver Convention Centre, which is also the venue of…
Demo Ignite Camp: Monday, September 14th @ 7:00 p.m.
Since we had the Vancouver Convention Centre booked for two days, it meant that we had these big rooms lying fallow on the first night. I wanted a pajama party for accordion players, but since that idea got nixed, I called on Boris Mann and suggested we hold a DemoCamp-style event. The end result: Demo Ignite Camp!
Thus far, we’ve got 5 out of 8 presentation slots filled:
- Joey deVilla’s Ignite Presentation: Do the Stupidest Thing That Could Possibly Work.
- Avi Bryant will demo Clamato, a Smalltalk dialect that operates within the JavaScript runtime.
- Dima Berastau will demo RestfulX, a RESTful framework for Flex and AIR applications.
- Carson Lam will demo TransitDB, his Vancouver transit information web app, which won the PHP FTW competition earlier this year.
- The folks from Ayogo will present their iPhone games built using the PhoneGap cross-mobile-platform framework.
I’m more than happy to drop my Ignite presentation to make room for a demo or Ignite by someone local. I’m already hosting, and Demo Ignite Camp is about the Vancouver tech scene, not me!
For more information, see the Demo Ignite Camp event page.
Launch Party Vancouver, Wednesday, September 16th
My fellow TechDays coordinators and I will be attending Launch Party Vancouver, which is:
…a lively mixer for the city’s brightest entrepreneurs, tech junkies, and bloggers, who are doing it, have done it or want to make their ideas happen here. The goal of the event is to connect BC’s growing community of Internet and new media leaders with investors and other trailblazers across Canada and abroad.
Founded by local entrepreneurs, LPV is not your typical networking event. There are no presentations or panels to be found. But what you will discover are the individuals responsible for making Vancouver one of the greatest start-up cities in Canada. Every event features local, early stage new media companies strutting their stuff and sharing their ideas with the community.
It’s happening at Circa Resto Lounge from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.; tickets are available via EventBrite.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
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Anthony Suarez suggested a possible upside to Disney’s purchase of Marvel: there’s potential for a really interesting sequel to the game Kingdom Hearts.
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My spider-sense is tingling, and not in a good way: Disney is buying Marvel Entertainment (yup, that Marvel, as in Spider-Man, the X-Men and so on) for $4 billion in stock, acquiring the rights to all their characters. Soon we’ll see the cast of High School Musical as the newest young mutants to join Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters and a Marvel Team-Up featuring Spider-Man and the Jonas Brothers.
I feel like this:
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
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Two things we need to bring back into style: go-go boots and multi-coloured keyboards.
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What happens when a girl from a l33t family brings a n00b boy home to meet her parents?
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
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Welcome to the second installment of The Unofficial FutureRuby Guide to Toronto! This is a series of articles aimed at showing out-of-town attendees of the upcoming FutureRuby conference around our fine city. (It’s useful even if you’re not planning on attending the conference).
In case you missed the previous installment, it’s here:
You might find last year’s Toronto guide for RubyFringe attendees useful as well:
This article will give you a quick run-down of all the conference and party venues: where they are, what they’re like and how to get there.
Conference Hotel: The Metropolitan Downtown
FutureRuby will take place at the Metropolitan Toronto Hotel, where RubyFringe took place last year. If you attended RubyFringe, it’ll be a happy homecoming. If this is your first conference at the Metropolitan, you’re in for a treat.
As I wrote in last year’s article series on RubyFringe, Toronto has two Metropolitan Hotels, and they’re a short distance from each other. FutureRuby’s venue is the Metropolitan Toronto, whose address is 108 Chestnut Street, which is behind City Hall, on the edge of Chinatown. If the hotel entrance looks like the photo above, you’re in the right place.
The other Metropolitan Hotel is the Metropolitan Soho, located at 318 Wellington Street West. If the hotel looks like the photo to the right (click to see a larger version), you’re in the wrong place. Both are owned by the same hotel chain. The Soho is the hip, swanky one near the club district and the Toronto one looks more like a traditional hotel and caters to both business and Chinese clienteles.
(In this article series, whenever I refer to “The Metropolitan”, I mean the Metropolitan Toronto.)
The conference setup at the Metropolitan is pretty nice. The conference hall is in the basement, fits the conference’s numbers nicely, and the entryway to the hall is stocked with water, coffee and ice tea throughout the day. There’s a continental breakfast just outside the hall before the conference starts, and the lunch food is excellent – it’s the best conference lunch I’ve seen at a developer conference, with the notable exception of the Fall 2006 Ajax Experience’s venue, the Westin Boston Waterfront, and that conference cost over twice as much. Of particular note was the Chinese lunch, which wasn’t a surprise – the hotel’s main restaurant is Lai Wah Heen, a Chinese restaurant, and it’s a popular venue for Chinese weddings (I’ve been to a couple here, and the food was great).
The hotel is situated right in the middle of town, which puts it a stone’s throw from a number of places. I’ll write more about these places in a later article.
You might also want to see my article from last year, Getting from the Airport to the Hotel.
FailCamp: Queen City Yacht Club
FailCamp will take place at Queen City Yacht Club on Algonquin Island, one of the Toronto Islands. The Toronto Islands weren’t always islands – once upon a time, they were a peninsula jutting out from the mainland from east of downtown, but a big storm in the mid-1800s separated them from the rest of the city. Most people get to the islands via ferry or water taxi.
The current strike by city employees means that there is no ferry service to the island, but that’s not going to be a problem. Queen City Yacht Club has its own launch – they call it a “tender” – that can carry just under fifty people at a time.
The launch typically picks people up from the dock just east of Queen’s Quay Terminal (207 Queen’s Quay West, the building pictured to the right). If you’re facing the front of this building, the dock is just to its left. I don’t know the exact details, but if you’re going to FailCamp, I suggest arriving at Queen’s Quay Terminal early, going to the dock to the left of the building and looking around for FutureRuby people or signs; I’m sure they’re going to take care to make sure that they’re really obvious.
I believe that the launch will be running continually throughout the night to shuttle people between Queen City Yacht Club and the mainland, but there’s a water taxi nearby, just in case.
The venue will be Queen City Yacht Club’s house clubhouse (pictured above), a large place with a nice large outdoor deck overlooking the water and the city. It offers some great vantage points for taking photos of Toronto. There’s a large barge permanently moored to a nearby dock; it’s also a good place from which to shoot photos or just stare at the lake.
Unlike the other FutureRuby events, you should bring some money for drinks and get a bite to eat before FailCamp (your FutureRuby registration fees cover the food and booze at the other events). The Yacht Club’s bar will be open during the event; I recall that they generally have pretty good beer on tap. As for getting food prior to FailCamp, there are lots of places near the Metropolitan Hotel and in the Queen’s Quay Terminal building.
Friday Night’s Party: Unspace HQ
Unspace’s offices are the venue for FutureRuby’s official opening night party. It’s located above the Lululemon store, which functions as both a store for sportswear and a temple for whatever religion is practiced by skinny blonde women in yoga pants. Apparently the store also sells clothes for men, but I reckon that a guy wearing a Lululemon logo is asking to have his manhood challenged, A Boy Named Sue-style. Unspace’s door is just to the right of Lululemon and leads to a steep set of stairs leading up to the third floor. I’m sure that there will be FutureRuby officials outside to make sure people find the place.
Unspace is located on Queen Street West (342 Queen Street West, to be precise), a long-time destination for people looking for someplace cool to go. Mike Myer’s character “Dieter” from his recurring Sprockets skits on Saturday Night Live was based on a real guy named Dieter who waited tables at The Rivoli (“Your order is boring me. I shall dance now”), a popular bar on Queen West. Perez Hilton needled Will.I.Am from the Black Eyed Peas and got (justifiably) clocked here. I’ve had many busking adventures on this street. It’s a fun, lively place.
Unspace has a gorgeous office, with exposed brick walls, a vintage pinball machine, Pete Forde’s “I am a villain in a classic James Bond movie” office and a large rooftop deck that’s been the venue for a number of excellent parties.
Saturday Night’s Party: Pravda Vodka Bar
Saturday night’s festivities will happen at Pravda Vodka Bar (44 Wellington Street East). This is the one party venue for which my first-hand knowledge is lacking owing to these factors:
- I’ve been there only once
- It was fairly late in the evening, the bar was packed, and I was already quite crispy from drinks at Biff’s, a nearby French restaurant with a lovely bar of its own.
I do remember a pretty good selection of vodkas. That’s to be expected; it is a vodka bar, after all. I had a couple of fingers of the Polish stuff straight up – the kind with a blade of grass in the bottle – and a pretty dirty Dirty Martini (a Martini seasoned with not just an olive, but olive juice).
I have vague memories of the room: lot of red velvet, gold trim and pre-Glasnost kitsch, a contradictory mash-up of imagery of from the Russian Revolution and a set designer’s ideas for a stage adaptation of Anna Karenina. It made a nice backdrop for the crowd, who were by and large ranged from twenty-somethings in clubwear to forty-something well-dressed professionals. I remember dancing and playing the accordion along to the DJ, who was playing Deee-Lite’s Groove is in the Heart (a song which turns twenty this year!).
The Saturday night party is the “dress-up night” of FutureRuby. Bring something nice and nightclub-appropriate!
Sunday’s Party: The Boat/Hotshot Gallery/Augusta Street, Kensington Market
Kensington Market is where the closing party will take place. It’s a lovely mishmash of secondhand clothing stores, fresh food markets, quirky shops and restaurants, patios and people’s homes. Here’s a slideshow of shots I took in Kensington Market last year; it should give you a “feel” for the place:
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
It’s the home of a couple of great nerdy places, too:
- Function 13, a funky store catering to arty nerds, with lots of books on design and design-oriented technologies such as Processing and Flash (maybe I should see if they stock Silverlight books, and help them if they don’t). It’s also where a lot of people take lessons on multimedia programming.
- HacklabTO, Toronto’s very own hackerspace, where local nerds work on both software and hardware hobby projects, and where I sometimes work. It’s the home of the famous laser that does etching, cutting and even music playing.
The final party of FutureRuby will take place on a stretch of Augusta Avenue in Kensington Market. Augusta Avenue. Known venues for this street party will include:
- The Boat (158 Augusta Avenue), a Portuguese restaurant that also doubles as one of Toronto’s best “secret” party spots.
- Hotshot (181 Augusta Avenue) a gallery owned and run by my friend Karlen Chang, a spot that serves both excellent coffee and visual art.
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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!
My one-slide summary of how things went terribly wrong in the movie Deliverance
(The link leads to the “Squeal like a pig” scene from the movie – you might not want to watch at work).
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”?
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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 a puzzle that when solved will take you to the next one. Each puzzle provides the necessary hints to solve it, although some of the hints are tucked away in not-so-obvious places. Some puzzles can be solved with a little programming skill, some require a little knowledge of computer programming theory (although a little Binging will do) and some can be solved with a little logic and lateral thinking.
Jeff has offered a prize to the first fifteen people who complete the The Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever (only those who complete it will know how to prove it). Judging from the Twitter account for “TDPE” and tweets with the #TDPE hashtag, not all the prizes have been claimed yet.
I managed to power through the first 29 puzzles while watching Ghostbusters on TV yesterday, but the very last one has me stumped. As others who’ve been flummoxed by this problem have said on Twitter, I’m sure I’m overthinking it.
Can you beat the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever? I’m sure you can, but you might want to do it after work. Let me know how you’re doing in the comments!
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I think we’ve got an early contender for the title of “Weirdest Videogame of 2009”: Muscle March for the Nintendo Wii. As if the game weren’t weird enough, the trailer below ramps up the weirdness by presenting it in that oh-so-Japanese style with epilepsy-inducing jump-cuts and a hyper-enthusiastic Japanese TV announcer:
[Found via Waxy.org.]
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