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Erika Moen’s Comics and Shopify

We Shopifolks like to travel far and wide. While I was off in Minneapolis for MinneBar, my developer advocate teammate David Underwood was in Toronto attending TCAF, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. While there, he met Erika Moen, the comic artist behind the autobiographical DAR ("A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary")…

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and her current comic, Bucko, a delightfully twisted murder mystery:

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When David told her that he worked at Shopify (in fact, he and I started on the same day), she told us that she loved us. And not just by saying so, but also with an autographed comic book, which is now sitting in the Shopifort:

Autographed copy of Erika Moen's

Why does Erika love Shopify? Because she has a Shopify store! She sells her comic books, prints, posters and other art on a store she built with Shopify:

Screenshot of Erika Moen's Shopify store

Go check out Erika’s site, read her comics and buy her stuff! And if you’ve got your own comics (or anything else) that you want to sell online, sell them with Shopify!

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

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“It’s Alive!”: Sheridan College’s 2009 Interactive Multimedia Open House

It's Alive!

This afternoon, I’m going to be at what I consider to be one of Accordion City’s best toy stores: Function 13 (156 Augusta Avenue), a place in Kensington Market that is part tech store, part art shop and part gallery.

I’ll be there for It’s Alive!, an open house featuring the work of Sheridan College’s Interactive Multimedia program. The event is open to all, and judging from some of the stuff I’ve seen on display at Function 13 and from Sheridan, it should be pretty interesting.

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Microsoft Canada and OCAD Announce a Surface Team-Up (or: OCAD Gets a Big-Ass Table)

Sara Diamond and Mark Relph onstage at the Mesh Conference 2009

This morning at the Mesh 2009 Conference, Microsoft’s Mark Relph (my boss’ boss) and OCAD President Sara Diamond announced a Microsoft/OCAD partnership. Microsoft will provide OCAD with a Surface tabletop computer along with software and support (which includes training and courses by Infusion Development, who know a lot about developing software for the Surface).

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We’re providing OCAD with a Surface development unit along with Visual Studio and other developer tools related to building software for it. The Surface will be put in OCAD’s Digital Media Research + Innovation Institute, whose first phase is currently under construction. It’ll be used as a tool within the school’s -disciplinary Digital Futures Initiative (DFI) program, whose goals include establishing a research and innovation laboratory for interactive design, art and digital media.

Sara Diamond, Mark Relph and the Mesh 2009 audience

Mark Relph writes:

Microsoft Surface will help OCAD students, faculty and researchers to apply interactive technology to their work in digital media, art and design.  In conjunction with our partner Infusion Development, we will be directly engaged with teaching students how to harness the power of these new technologies.  This is only the start – in the years ahead we’ll be bringing in our technology and design experts to OCAD to help further strengthen this relationship. Our focus will not just be on the Surface technologies – as we move into a world where the interaction with software will depend on new user experiences like touch, speech and other capabilities it is critical that we prepare the next generation of software designers and experience experts.

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As programmers, engineers and techies, we at Microsoft can come up with all sorts of interesting uses and applications for Surface, but we can’t come up with all of them. We feel that the students at OCAD, who have a strong bent towards design, will come up with some interesting ideas and applications that would never occur to us whose bent is towards geekery. Having worked at a job where OCAD graduates were the majority, I can say from experience that there’s a certain “something” that you get from design-oriented minds that you don’t get from engineering-oriented minds. You can see that “something” in Apple’s products, and it’s something I’d like to see more of from The Empire.

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Apple I Art Photos for Sale

Apple 1 computer, "exploded".

20X200 is selling this lovely photo by Mark Richards featuring an “exploded” view of the original Apple I computer, the predecessor of my first computer, the Apple //e. These are limited edition prints; as of this writing, there are:

  • 76 8” by 10” (about 20cm by 25cm) photos remaining, selling for US$20 each
  • 463 11” by 14” (about 28cm by 36cm) photos remaining, selling for US$50 each
  • 12 16” by 20” (about 41cm by 51cm) photos remaining, selling for US$200 each
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The “Paris Hilton vs. Paris, France” Search Results Meter

paris_hilton_france_gauge

I have a soft spot for tech-meets-art projects, like this one by Tim Schwartz, titled Paris – Physical. The meter is driven by search results for the phrases “Paris Hilton” and “Paris France” and displays an “average result” (their words, not mine) by using an electrical gauge.

Here’s a look at the innards of the project:

Interior of the "Paris-Physical" project

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Great Showdowns (of the 8-bit Era)

Can you identify the ’80s-era games depicted in Scott Campbell’s piece, Great Showdowns (of the 8-bit Era)?

Great showdowns of the 8-bit era