Category: Uncategorized

Yeah, I’m on it. But I’m sending out invites as they’re made available to me!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

To use a quote from The Simpsons: “It’s funny because it’s true.” While Apple stuff is pretty neat, I sometimes get that feeling that they see all programmers who don’t work for Apple as barely-tolerated, not-really-trusted “fourth-party developers”.

This comic was created by Manu Cornet, the artist behind the comic org charts of the big tech companies.

Update (Thursday, July 7th, 2011): Wow, there’s a lot of butt-hurt going on about this comic. Remember: it’s the comic artist’s opinion, not mine, and secondly, for the Apple fans — you do know that I work at Shopify, which has more Macs on display than the local Apple store and my desk look likes this, right?

The Checklist

Grill? Check!

Accordion and party-sized Jack Daniel’s? Check!

Go-anywhere stove/oven combo? Check!

Bourbon and favorite draaaankin’ mug? Check!

Death-defying stunt crew, ready to lead their audience in a chant about meat? Check!

Bacon strips? Check!

Documentarians to record this day for posterity? Check!

Shopify guru with emergency equipment at the ready? Check!

Very well then…bring on the VIP guests!

The VIP Guests

On Saturday, the gentlemen from the hit YouTube series Epic Meal Time came to Shopify to do what they do best: cook an epic meat-laden cardiologist’s nightmare of a meal, quaff whiskey and beer in Brobdingnagian quantities, create a ruckus and shoot a video of the proceedings.

If you’ve never seen an episode before, here’s a taste: the Breakfast of Booze episode, which takes the most important meal of the day and turns it into the most important meal of your life, however shortened it may be after eating it:

Epic Meal Time debuted less than a year ago, in October 2010. In their brief existence, they’ve gained a mass internet following. When we walked about town with them as they went to buy supplies for their video shoot, they were stopped several times by fans who recognized them. If you check their YouTube channel, you’ll see that their videos typically have at least 2 million views. Their most-viewed video is the TurBaconEpic Thankgiving episode. Not to be outdone by a mere turducken — that’s a turkey stuffed with a duck, which in turn is stuffed with a chicken — the Epic Meal Timers went all out and created a dish that they described as "a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig". Wrapped in bacon, of course.

In addition to their popular show, Epic Meal Time have a collection of popular T-shirts which they sell through their Shopify-powered store:

The Setup

The Shopify office functioned as their studio, lounge, bar and playground for all of Saturday. In the afternoon, our boardroom functioned as the writer’s bullpen, where they brainstormed and crafted the general arc of this particular episode:

Our kitchen functioned as their prep kitchen (that’s Anna from Shopify; we blurred out the non-bacon ingredients, because we don’t want to give away the theme of the show before it’s released):

…while our roof functioned as the main kitchen. Here’s it is at the start of the afternoon, still pristine and with the camp stove/oven and the first grill in place:

The first grill was completely non-functional, so we went with plan B: a quick run over to Shopifolk Julie’s place to borrow hers. With the backup grill set up, the cooking could begin in earnest (yup, we’re blurring out the food — we don’t want to spoil the surprise):

As for the camp stove/oven, the Epic Meal Time wizards used it to perform their saucery:

The Waiting

While Epic Meal Time videos are typically five minutes or less, it takes hours to prepare an entire zoo’s worth of meat. So we had to kill time while the Epic Cooking Crew did their thing.

The Epic Meal Time crew took to our Nerf weapons like bacon to maple syrup:

Let’s get a close-up look at Harley:

RELOAD!

We threw a little rooftop party:

Muscles Glasses gave our Chief Platform Officer "H-Fizzle" some "bro" pointers. Attention body spray manufacturers: here are your next spokes-bros!

While on the roof, I helped get the Stunt Double Circus performers, who were doing their usual Saturday act on the street below, to get their audience to chant the Epic Meal Time battle cry: "Bacon strips! Bacon strips!"

We played bowling on the Kinect:

Harley indulged in a little Street Fighter:

We made a run to the liquor store:

In the meantime, the cooking crew worked hard into the night.

The Shoot

At long last, the food was ready and now it was time for the final shoot. Our boardroom became the Epic Feeding Trough:

While the arts and crafts section of the show (you’ll have to watch the video when it comes out to get what I mean) was shot in our kitchen:

We got to hang out during the shoots, just as long as we were out of the way and very, very quiet:

The Aftermath

With the shooting completed, there was only one thing left to do: eat their creation! Being Epic Meal Time, they cooked epic amounts of Paleo Diet-friendly food, and there was more than enough for the two dozen people who stuck around. There are three reasons there are no photos of all of us eating:

1. I don’t want to spoil the episode by giving away the theme.
2. I was so hungry (it was 11:00 p.m. before we got to eat) that I couldn’t be bothered to snap photos.
3. We were all so hungry that the way we ate wasn’t very pretty.

In lieu of pics of the dinner, I present the next best thing: the "Friar Tuck" vignette from the cheesy 1960s cartoon series Rocket Robin Hood. It’s pretty much what we looked like:

The Apres-Aftermath

With the shoot completed, the food consumed, the office cleaned and vacated and the Epic Boys showered and de-greased, it was time for a night of celebratory clubbing. Bottle service and Shopify-branded accordion poses for everyone!

Even in the dead of night, in the darkest of clubs, Muscles actually keeps the glasses on:

The Conclusion

We’d like to thank the Epic Meal Time folks for coming down to the office, using our space as a location, feeding us and of course, for using Shopify to sell their swag! It was great hanging and pigging out with you guys.

Keep an eye on Epic Meal Time’s site — the episode shot at Shopify will be up in a few weeks.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

One of the technologies mentioned in Bruce Sterling’s 1989 novel Islands in the Net (here’s its Wikipedia entry) is the watchphone. Worn like a wristwatch (remember those?), the watchphone was a personal computer that you carried about everywhere and functioned as many things, including timepiece, mobile phone, personal organizer and keys to your house. Today’s smartphones are used in pretty much the same way, and in some cases, in ways that Sterling didn’t anticipate. The two big differences between watchphones and real-world smartphones are:

• We don’t wear them on our wrists. They’re more like the pocket watches of old.
• We don’t use them like keys…yet!

The New York Times article Tools of Entry, No Need for a Key Chain shows we may be striking that second item from the list above soon:

• Schlage – you’ve probably seen that brand name on a lock or one of your keys – has the LiNK system which lets you control access to your house either via the internet or smartphone. The article mentions a real-life example where someone let a friend into his house by unlocking the door remotely from his office.
• Daimler-Benz has the mbrace app (available for iPhone and BlackBerry), which lets you remotely unlock and lock your Mercedes’ doors with your smartphone.
• Zipcar has similar apps for the iPhone and Android.
• GM has an app for remotely starting your car and locking/unlocking its doors.

Right now, using your smartphone as a key isn’t as simple as using an electronic key fob or one of those magnetic keycards that you see dangling from white-collar office workers everywhere. You often have to unlock your phone, launch the app, then press the correct button or buttons to unlock a door. NFC (Near Field Communication) chips, which are starting to appear in smartphones will make it easier to use phones as keys, but it’ll be a couple of years before they’re commonplace.

There are also some issues that we’ll have to deal with in a world where smartphones are keys:

• What happens if your phone runs out of power?
• What happens if you phone gets stolen? Unlike keys, your phone will be able to unlock your door from anywhere.
• What happens in a network or power outage?

It’ll be interesting figuring this stuff out in the next couple of years.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

I’d like to wish my American friends a happy 4th of July! Have a safe and happy holiday, and please enjoy this Independence Day-themed version of everyone’s favourite musical cat meme.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Screen capture of a Google search for Fitbit profiles containing sexual activity.

Don’t bother Googling for "sexual activity" site:fitbit.com anymore. Earlier today, using those search terms would’ve given you the profiles of Fitbit users who were both sharing their activity logs and counting sexual activity as part of their calorie-burning efforts. As of this writing, Google seems to have acted in the interests of privacy by not returning any results for those terms. (Bing, on the other hand, returns ten results as I write this.)

A Fitbit device.

The problem comes from a design decision that probably made sense in the abstract, back when they were designing the software. Fitbit lets you set the privacy levels of various section of your online profile individually. Fitness goals are one section, activities are another. Many people are a bit self-conscious about their weight and naturally set their fitness goals to “private”.

At the same time, many people want to announce to the world that they’re working out. Since that’s not the sort of thing most people are embarrassed about — in fact, it’s something some people like to brag about how often they go to the gym — it’s not too surprising that they set their activity log to “public”.

Finally, there’s the ability to manually enter activity data. Most people won’t wear the Fitbit all the time, but want to count every calorie burned. Manually entering activity data lets you count those activities when you’re Fitbit-free towards your calorie burn. Among those activities is sex, which burns far fewer calories than you’d think.

Combine all these factors and you have situations where your user profile hides your target weight, but shows all those intimate encounters that you faithfully logged — not out of braggadocio but the simple desire to count every last calorie expended. The saving grace is that since Fitbit is a health program, most people’s descriptions of their sexual activity in their Fitbit logs sound rather clinical. Most of the descriptions are more along the lines of “light kissing” and “vigorous activity” rather than “OMG PILEDRIVER” and “What what in the butt”.

A (slightly doctored) Fitbit activity profile.

For software developers and designers, this is an object lesson in unintended consequences and privacy. The fact that Fitbit gave users control over the privacy settings of various parts of their profile shows that they were designing with their users’ privacy in mind; it’s just that the implementation didn’t account for the fact that some activities may be private. I wonder how they’re going to redesign around that problem.

For users, the lesson is that you should check your online profiles regularly. Just as you look in the mirror before you leave the house (well, some people do), you should make sure that you’re presenting yourself to the online world in the way you want.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.