When we got to Napanee, it was time to fuel up both the car and ourselves, and we did both at the Flying J Truck Stop. We thought that it would be a nice change from the usual fast food joints: a real-life honest-to-goodness place that catered to truckers, without whom our stores, from the most indie retailer in Kensington Market to the biggest of the “big boxes”, would go unstocked.

Here’s a photo of our booth:

The folks who the the Flying J know a marketing opportunity when they see one. That’s why the placemat doubles as advertising for their store specials, which naturally are for accoutrements that one would need on the road: jumper cables, Bluetooth headsets, ratchet wrench sets and energy drinks…

Click the photo to see it at full size.

I remember old restaurants having jukeboxes in the booths. If you’re living on the road, being able to get in touch with your loved ones trumps having music, which is why these booths sport phones instead. I haven’t used a pay phone in a very long time, so I was surprised to find out that local calls are now 50 cents.

Damir went for the chopped steak and mashed potatoes, but I went for the real down-home option: the buffet. I picked out what I thought might be an authentic road meal, based on all those episodes of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives I’ve seen:

• Shepherd’s pie (featuring cut-up beef, not ground meat)
• Macaroni and cheese
• “Oven-baked chicken”
• Sausage and peppers

They’re not going to win any Michelin stars soon, but it was filling.

After lunch, I decided to check out the store. I spotted the audiobook aisle:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

The “Mark Dalton: Trucker/Detective” series caught my eye. Should I buy this on the way back? Let me know in the comments!

There’s no escaping this guy! That smug know-nothing face really needs a solid pimp-slapping:

Of L. Ron Hubbard’s books, I’ve read only two: Battlefield Earth (I considered it so-so at age 14) and Dianetics (ridiculous). My guess is that his pulp titles shown below – Spy Killer, The Great Secret and Under the Black Ensign – aren’t anything to write home about:

Nothing spruces up the cab of an 18-wheeler like a plush white tiger:

And if you’re pressed for space and your truck can’t accommodate the body of a giant cat, you can always opt for the head:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Once again, Damir and I are road-tripping to a TechDays conference. This week, the destination city is our nation’s capital, Ottawa. With the wet snow and being boxed in by trucks (see the photo below), the going’s a little slow:

Here’s a trucker who’s a big fan of just-in-time compilers. Or is it just-in-time manufacturing?

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Every roadside stop on the 401 westbound east of Kingston is closed for renovations, so we’ve just been driving straight through without stopping. We’re just 30 kilometres east of Kingston, where we’d planned to fill up, but the dashboard display says we’re 11 kilometres away from an empty tank at the current rate of consumption.

Shall we chance it?

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

With TechDays Montreal wrapped up – and yes, I’ll post photos from the actual conference soon – it’s time for me and Damir to pack up our stuff, board the Ford Flex and head on home.

As I write this, we’re on Highway 401, just about 100 kilometres east of Kingston. Damir’s at the wheel, we’ve got Raw Dog Comedy on the satellite radio and I’m working away on my laptop (as you can see from the photo above, with my “Bruce Lee as the Green Lantern” desktop), getting info to a couple of just-added speakers for the TechDays Winnipeg conference, which happens the week after next.

I’m actually surprised at how much work I can get done on a laptop while in a car. My dad had some pretty strong motion sickness – even standing on a floating dock made him queasy – and I’ve inherited a diluted version of that malady. I can do stuff as complicated as writing code when on a plane or train, but for some reason, I can’t do it in a car. I can write blog entries, send email and tweets and do some light photo editing while in a car, but felt some motion sickness when I tried a little coding. Maybe I should try bumping up the font size – it might help.

I tweeted about not being able to write code in a car and Ken Rachynski tweeted back that it was a first world problem. He’s right!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The Ford Flex

Here’s the Ford Flex that we drove to TechDays Montreal, parked in front of my building:

Here’s the interior, as seen from the front passenger-side door:

Here’s the back of the Flex, with Damir applying (non-permanent) Bing and Windows 7 stickers to the windows:

Here’s the magnetic bumper sticker we affixed to the back of the Flex:

Here’s the Sync console:

We have lift-off! Here’s Damir getting us out to the open road:

The open road at last!

Little Boxes

Here’s a video featuring some pre-fab houses being moved on the highway to their final destination. It inspires a quick discussion about how we might want to travel down to the TechEd 2010 conference in New Orleans:

Big Apple Videos

Here I am, marvelling at the Big Apple’s pie selection, while looking for people to show Bing in action (I was using a Rogers stick for internet access, which worked quite well).

I was wearing my Crazy Go Nuts University (a.k.a. Queen’s University) Science ‘91 jacket while in the restaurant, which a guy in the corner noticed. He turned out to be from the class of Science ‘90 and had never heard of Bing. I walked him through a couple of demos and he was impressed — “I need to show this to my IT guys!” he exclaimed.

Here’s another video – it’s got me and Damir enjoying the Big Apple’s pie and how “cutting the cheese” onstage at a tech conference can have serious (ahem) blowback:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

In this second video of our Ford Flex road trip from Toronto to Montreal, Damir arrives at my place to pick me up:

(In case you missed the first video, you can watch it here.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

In case you didn’t see yesterday’s blog entries, we spent most of yesterday on a little road trip from Toronto to Montreal. We took nine hours making a journey that normally takes about five, but that’s because we made a number of stops along the way, demonstrating Bing to random passers-by and trying out the Sync technology in a Flex that was lent to us by Ford Canada.

Here are links to yesterday’s blog entries in case you missed them:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: The Blogging Rig
• Part 3: The Big Apple
• Part 4: More Big Apple
• Part 5: Avril Lavigne’s Hometown and My Alma Mater

I did a lot of tweeting from the road as well – go check out what I wrote on my @AccordionGuy twitter page.

Upstream bandwidth wasn’t quite so hot on the road, so it wasn’t possible to post videos yesterday. So I’ll be posting yesterday’s video today.

The Hand-Off

Here’s our boss, John Oxley, Director of Audience Marketing, at Microsoft Canada Headquarters in Mississauga (just outside Toronto), handing the keys to the Ford Flex to Damir with much apprehension:

In the video, John says:

It’s Monday morning and our good friends at Ford Canada and Bing have sponsored my team to go out and highlight technology innovation changes and the impact they’ve had – with Ford Flex, location-based software and Bing – across the country.

I’m about to give this brand new Ford Flex to Joey deVilla and Damir Bersinic to go from here to TechDays in Montreal, to do Coffee and Codes, show it along the way to developers, IT pros and anyone who wants to come by and see how technology has changed.

I’m really excited about the possibilities [but] I’m a little hesitant about giving away the keys to a car…especially to Joey and Damir. But you’ve got to trust your team, and I trust the impact they can have.

You’ll tell me three or four days from now whether this was a good decision or whether it was a lesson that I learned.

Was letting us take a brand new car on a road trip a good idea or a bad one? Let us know in the comments, or email the boss-man directly at john.oxley@microsoft.com.

(Please tell him it was a good idea.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Avril Lavigne’s Hometown

While on the road, we sent out a tweet asking anyone who was near the route we were taking to Montreal if they’d like to catch up with us. We got a message back from our friend Todd Lamothe (who’ll be presenting at TechDays Ottawa next week), who works in Avril Lavigne’s hometown, Napanee, so we decided to catch up with him at the nearby Tim Hortons. What Canadian roadtrip doesn’t include a visit to this venerable Canadian institution?

Checking the Twitter action with Seesmic while enjoying a chicken salad sandwich.

We’re taking the Ford Flex back to Toronto using the same route on Friday – Highway 401 westbound from Montreal to Toronto – so if you’re somewhere on the route and would like to join us for coffee, lunch, an accordion performance, whatever – let me know, either via email or the comments, and we’ll make arrangements!

The Sync has been terribly handy on the trip, functioning as phone dialer, GPS, entertainment system and ever-so-handy, rear-bumper-saving rear-view camera:

My Alma Mater

A stone’s throw east of Napanee is Kingston, home to my alma mater, Crazy Go Nuts University (a.k.a. Queen’s University). After demonstrating Bing to a couple of students at the John Deutsch University Centre – guys from Science ‘12, who were surprised to see a guy in a Science ‘91 jacket – we made our way to Goodwin Hall, the home of the School of Computing.

I couldn’t visit without getting a shot of me beside the entrance to my former home-away-from home:

Note the Clark Hall Pub logo sketched in chalk, just right of me.
I probably spent as much time there as I did at Goodwin Hall.

When I graduated in 1994, the options for departing undergraduates were considerably more limited than they are today. Most of the jobs seemed to centre around banking or insurance. Wanting to do something that was equal parts techie and creative, I opted for something a little more creative and joined Mackerel, a multimedia company that made interactive apps for floppies and CD-ROM instead.

So when I entered Goodwin Hall and saw the poster below, I exclaimed “Why, oh why wasn’t this program available when I went here?”

We were there to make the first steps in getting both Microsoft and Yours Truly back in touch with the Queen’s School of Computing. A quick glance at the staff list turned out to be very surprising: a lot of the professors who taught me were still there!

This was an unplanned spontaneous thing: I made a mental notes of the professors I new and their office numbers and visited each one. It was pretty late in the afternoon and I was lucky to find two.

The first was Dr. Michael Levison, who ran the department in my final year at Crazy Go Nuts University, when I was president of the Departmental Student Council for Computer Science, whose role was to represent the students in meetings with the faculty. Dr. Levison was responsible for a number of important changes in the department’s direction and one of the department’s most trusted advisors. Of the many things I learned from him, I consider the two most important were:

• That technology should work in the service of people, and not vice versa
• The best teachers are great storytellers

Dr. Michael Levison and me.

The other professor was Dr. Robin Dawes, who taught a number of courses that I took – I’m sure a good chunk of what I know about data structures is his doing – and who also dispensed some very good advice to me as both an individual student and as a student representative. Dr. Dawes has always been a favourite with the students thanks to his breezy lecturing style and his penchant for magic tricks, including the show-stopping “flaming wallet trick”.

Dr. Robin Dawes and me.

When I left their offices, I made sure to say “Thank you…for everything.” The lessons I learned from them about technology, its relation to people and the art of teaching technology have served me very well over the past fifteen years. I am forever in their debt.

I’d like to give back to the school that gave me so much (and yes, I send them a cheque every year already). I’d like to drop by next semester and talk to the students about my experiences as a programmer and tech evangelist, make myself available to them as an “industry resource” and reassure them that even a perma-student like myself can make good in the real world. I’d also love to grab a pint or two at good ol’ Clark Hall Pub.

I’m glad we drove to Montreal rather than flew – otherwise, I wouldn’t have had this chance to catch up with my profs!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Some more photos from the Big Apple! Here’s their pie menu:

The Big Apple is an apple-shaped three-storey building with an observation deck on the roof. Here’s a shot of Damir beside the Big Apple:

Here’s a close-up:

Inside the building is an apple museum. We were all rarin’ to go inside and take photos of the various displays inside the museum, but…

Closed! Look at the disappointment on Damir’s face:

I was even more disappointed (look at my sad mug below). “Ain’t that just like an apple,” I said, “tantalizing promises, but you get denied the moment you get close. Now I know how iPhone developers feel.” (Remember, folks – I kid because I care.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

When people in Toronto and area refer to “The Big Apple”, we’re usually not talking about New York, but the Big Apple in Coburg, Ontario. It’s one of the must-visit stops on that stretch of Highway 401 that spans the Toronto-Montreal corridor: roadside rest stop, mini-amusement park, apple pie facvory, apple museum and giant apple-shaped building with a balcony on top giving a commanding view of the cars whizzing by.

There’s no shortage of interesting signs on the grounds:

Apparently, the Big Apple is about 13,000 kilometres from the city of my birth, Manila:

The place is heaven for people who like pie:

They have a mascot, but no one was running around in the giant apple costume today. Damir and I had to settle for the little statue by the counter:

We arrived in the Ford Flex just before a busload of people, which means that we didn’t have to wait for pie:

More scenes from the Big Apple to follow!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Here’s the blogging setup I’m using from within the Ford Flex as we drive to Montreal: my laptop with a Rogers stick and carte blanche to use as much bandwidth as I need to continually post from the road. Damir’s at the wheel, I’ve got my seat moved all the way back, my own set of climate controls and Raw Dog Comedy on the satellite radio. It’s a surprisingly decent work setup; I could get a fair bit done this way.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Damir at the wheel, looking for an opening on the Don Valley Parkway.

I’m blogging and tweeting from the road today! My coworker Damir Bersinic (IT Pro Evangelist) and I have been loaned a Ford Flex equipped with Microsoft’s Sync and I’ve got my laptop hooked up to a Rogers internet stick. The photo above was taken just before noon, when we were on the Don Valley Parkway, right around Richmond Street.

I’ll be posting quite regularly from the road, so watch this space!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.