A large, thick bubble-wrap-padded envelope arrived for me at the b5media office. As you can see in the photo of the label below, it’s from HarperCollins publishers:

I opened the envelope to my surprise, here’s what was inside:

I was stunned: it’s the much-anticipated Anathem, the upcoming book by T3H DR4K PR1NC3 0F H4X0R F1C7I0N (that’s “1337-speak” for “the dark prince of hacker fiction”), Neal Stephenson. Stephenson has been rather quiet about this one, saying little about the book beyond this oft-bandied-about hint in Gretta Cook’s LiveJournal:

It’s set on another planet and has aliens and so on. It’s really about Platonic mathematics, but he needed the aliens and space opera-ish elements to spice it up a little bit, just like the pirates kept people engaged in the Baroque books.

The Press Release

Here’s what the press release included with the book has to say:

NEAL STEPHENSON WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR INTERVIEWS OUT OF TORONTO OCTOBER 30TH

From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle comes a new stand-alone novel that marks a return to science fiction — the very genre that is Neal Stephenson.

Stephenson’s first new novel in four years, Anathem, derails a young monk’s quiet life behind the walls of a 3,400 year-old monastery with a world-wide catastrophe.

Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of the monastery — a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians. There, he and his cohorts are sealed off from the illiterate, irrational and unpredictable “saecular” world, an endless landscape of casinos and mega-stores that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, dark ages and renaissances, world wars and climate change.

Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides it is only these cloistered scholars who have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his friends, mentors and teachers are sent forth without warning into the unknown.

Anathem confirms Time magazine’s assessment that “Stephenson has a once-in-a-generation gift: he makes complex ideas clear, and he makes them funny, heartbreaking and thrilling.”

The Soundtrack (or: Hey! I know that guy!)

The book comes with an audio CD, whose “liner notes” are on the very first page of the book:

Here’s what the “liner notes” say:

IOLET :: Music from the world of Anathem

Track 1: Approximating Pi (6:53)
Track 2: Thousander Chant (5:29)
Track 3: Proof Using Finite Projective Geometry (4:04)
Track 4: Cellular Automata (5:29)
Track 5: Quantum Spin Network (5:49)
Track 6: Sixteen Color Prime Generating Automation (11:23)
Track 7: Deriving the Quadratic Equation (4:29)

Performers
Jeremy Bornstein - David Krueger
Mark Powell - Adam Steele
David Stutz - Thomas Thompson - James Whetzel

In order to conform to the practices of the avout, this disc contains music composed for and performed by voices alone.

One of the performers’ names jumped at me off the page: David Stutz. I had the pleasure of meeting David first on the Microsoft campus and again at various conferences dedicated to “peer-to-peer” technology. I remember talking not just tech with him, but also about music and our respective arenas musical performance — me with playing with rock bands and as a busker, him with baroque and choral ensembles. A quick check of his personal site confirmed that the David Stutz in the liner notes and the David Stutz I know are one and the same.

Why’d I Get Picked for an Advance Copy?

I suppose that I got the promo package because this blog is on the first page of Google results for the search phrase “Neal Stephenson Toronto”. That’s thanks to my attending his reading back in 2003 and winning a copy of Quicksliver and a chance to hang with him backstage. It’s covered in these three articles:

• Preview: The Clown Prince of Accordion Playing meets The Dark Prince of Hacker Fiction
• Questions and answers with Neal Stephenson
• More notes from the Stephenson Q&A

When Does the Book Come Out?

The publication date is September 13, 2008.

Does the Book Have a Website?

The press release says there’s supposed to be one at anathembook.com, but it doesn’t seem to be set up yet.

Am I Going to Ask to Interview Stephenson?

Interviewing authors isn’t normally my thing, but why not? I’ll let you know what happens.

C’mon, Joey, How About Just a Little Taste of the Book?

Why not? I think reproducing the first page falls under Fair Use:

“Do your neighbors burn one another alive?” was how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with Artisan Flec.

Embarrassment befell me. Embarrassment is something I can feel in my flesh, like a handful of sun-warmed mud clapped on my head.

“Do your shamans walk around on stilts?” Fraa Orolo asked, reading from a leaf that, judging by its brownness, was at least five centuries old. Then he looked up helpfully, “You might call them pastors or witch doctors.”

The embarrassment turned runny. It was horrifying my scalp along a spreading frontier.

“When a child gets sick, do you pray? Sacrifice to a painted stick? Or blame it on an old lady?”

Now it was sheeting warm down my face, clogging my ears and sanding my eyes. I could barely hear Fraa Orolo’s questions: “Do you fancy you will see your dead dogs and cats in some sort of afterlife?”

Orolo has asked me along to serve as amanuensis. It was an impressive word, so I’d said yes.

He had heard than an artisan from extramuros had been allowed into the New Library to fix a rotted rafter that we could not reach with our ladders.; it had only just been noticed, and we didn’t have time to erect proper scaffolding before Apert. Orolo meant to interview that artisan, and he wanted me to write down what happened.

Through drizzly eyes, I looked at the leaf in front of me. It was as blank as my brain. I was failing.

Related Reading

Anathem and the Long Now: “Neal Stephenson’s new novel, ANATHEM, germinated in 01999 when Danny Hillis asked him and several other contributors to sketch out their ideas of what the Millennium Clock might look like. Stephenson tossed off a quick sketch and promptly forgot about it. Five years later however, when he was between projects, the idea came back to him, and he began to explore the possibility of building a novel around it. ANATHEM is the result, and will be released on September 9th, 02008.”

Anathem’s page on Amazon.com: ” Fraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside “saecular” world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent’s walls. Three times during history’s darkest epochs violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community. Yet the avout have always managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe, becoming out of necessity even more austere and less dependent on technology and material things. And Erasmas has no fear of the outside—the Extramuros—for the last of the terrible times was long, long ago.

Now, in celebration of the week-long, once-in-a-decade rite of Apert, the fraas and suurs prepare to venture beyond the concent’s gates—at the same time opening them wide to welcome the curious “extras” in. During his first Apert as a fraa, Erasmas eagerly anticipates reconnecting with the landmarks and family he hasn’t seen since he was “collected.” But before the week is out, both the existence he abandoned and the one he embraced will stand poised on the brink of cataclysmic change.

Powerful unforeseen forces jeopardize the peaceful stability of mathic life and the established ennui of the Extramuros—a threat that only an unsteady alliance of saecular and avout can oppose—as, one by one, Erasmas and his colleagues, teachers, and friends are summoned forth from the safety of the concent in hopes of warding off global disaster. Suddenly burdened with a staggering responsibility, Erasmas finds himself a major player in a drama that will determine the future of his world—as he sets out on an extraordinary odyssey that will carry him to the most dangerous, inhospitable corners of the planet . . . and beyond.”

Ask Neal Stephenson questions about Anathem: A Boing Boing article that says: “For a limited time only, fans have the chance to ask Neal Stephenson questions about his upcoming novel ANATHEM (though, of course, he may or may not answer…). Questions and answers will be on an online video that will be released before ANATHEM goes on-sale September 9, 2008.” It links to this blog for Eos Books, the sci-fi imprint of HarperCollins.

Click the photo to see the “Accordion Idol” belt buckle eBay page.

Stay thirsty, my friends!
Click the photo to see its Flickr page.

For reference, here’s a pic of The Most Interesting Man in the World:

I’m already greying quite nicely, so I can expect Dos Equis to come a-callin’ any day now…

Photo by Libin Pan.
Click the photo to see its Flickr page.

Simply put, this conference pulled down my brain’s pants and blew my mind.

Here’s a wide-angle photo, which is going to be known as the “We Are RubyFringe” shot:

Photo by Kieran Huggins.
Click the photo to see a larger version.

I’ve posted my notes from Day 1 over at my tech blog, Global Nerdy:

• Day 1 Notes, Part 1
• Day 1 Notes, Part 2

There’s more over here at the Unspace article, We Are RubyFringe.

I’ll post my Day 2 notes later on. I’ll also post a summary here — there was a lot of stuff at this conference that applies to more than just geek life, namely the bits about failure and eschewing the mainstream.

Photo by Libin Pan.

Here’s the crowd at FAILCamp, the gathering that Hampton Catlin and I hosted, where people shared their stores of personal and professional failure — and sometimes even the lessons learned. This was taken early in FAILCamp; later on, the room was packed quite nicely:

After FAILCamp came the kickoff party at the open space on the upper floor of the Amsterdam Brewing Company. Here’s the RubyFringe logo projected against the back wall:

The opening act was Katie Crown, who had a charmingly oddball stand-up routine, which included her taking song suggestions from the audience and turned them into slightly-different version that were in the public domain (for example, she turned Who Let the Dogs Out into Who Released the Canines) and even invited me to join in with the accordion and help her out. We ended up creating public domain versions of Welcome to the Jungle and Gigantic:

Here’s the crowd at the Amsterdam taking in Katie’s routine:

The second act were We Take Lovers, who put on a great show with their indie-rock sound. They’re shopping around for accordions, so I was pleased to “talk shop” with them.

Today is day one of the conference; tonight we’re off to West Queen West to descend on the Drake and Camera!

In case you missed them, here are the other articles in this series:

1. Where Did All the Cigarettes Go?
2. Getting from the Airport to the Hotel
3. Boozin’ in Accordion City
4. The Lay of the Land, Part 1
5. FAILCamp
6. The Best Damn Cookie in Town
7. Active Surplus, a.k.a. Hardware Nerdvana

In The Lay of the Land, Part 1, I covered some areas close to the hotel. In this article, I’m going to go over some of the interesting areas to the west: Chinatown, Kensington Market and Queen Street West.

Chinatown

The interesting neighbourhood that’s closest to the Metropolitan Hotel is Chinatown. From the hotel, all you have to do is walk to Dundas Street and hang a left and starting walking westward along Dundas. Things will start out a bit sparse, but as you cross University Avenue, there’ll be more to see. Continue westward and the concentration of Chinese restaurants and shops will increase until you reach the corner of Dundas and Spadina, the heart of Chinatown. Chinatown stretches north to about College Street, south to Sullivan, and west to about Denison.

As you might expect, Chinatown is lined with a lot of Chinese restaurants, although you’ll also find a lot of Vietnamese places, with a little Thai and Japanese thrown in for good measure. You’ll also find a lot of grocery stores with sidewalk stalls carrying fruits and vegetables. There are also some cheap clothes in the mix: if you need some plain T-shirts, there are plenty of places that carry them in many colours, 4 or 5 for a mere $10.

If you find yourself with the late-night munchies, Chinatown is the solution to your problem. A good number of the restaurants cater to the late-night crowd; many close as late as 5 a.m. on the weekends, and at least a couple of the Vietnamese places run 24 hours.

Kensington Market

Getting to Kensington Market is easy: just walk west on Dundas from the hotel for about ten minutes and go one block past Spadina, then turn up Kensington. You’ll be in Kensington Market, an area that blends alternative and counter-culture stores, traditional food markets, international restaurants and offbeat bars. Here’s a map of the area:

If you’re looking for stuff that you’re not going to find at the mall, this is the place to go.

For more about Kensington Market, see its Wikipedia entry and this Globe and Mail story (with video) of Dr. Richard “Creative Class” Florida paying a visit to the Market.

You can also take a little photo tour of the Market through the slideshow below:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Queen Street West

Check out this map: it shows the way from the hotel to the corner of Queen Street West and University Avenue, followed by a long stretch west. If you’ve got the time, it’s a very interesting walk — about 4 kilometres (two and a half miles) of one of the more interesting streets in the city. Things will start off a little more gentrified and no more edgy than the Hot Topic store in your local mall, but as you progress westward, the stores, bars and restaurants get quirkier, and you’ll see the “creative class” types who make Queen West their home. If you don’t feel like walking, you can always check out the scenery via streetcar.

Once again, I direct you to Wikipedia for a description of Queen Street West and its OurFaves page for some locals’ recommendations.

And There’s More!

I haven’t yet told you about Little Italy on College West, the Annex, that stretch of Baldwin Street with all the restaurants, the Beach(es), Mink Mile, Greektown, Koreatown, Roncesvalles, High Park and a lot of other places, but I hope that I’ve given you a good start. If you’re at the conference and have any questions about the city, feel free to ask me or any of the other locals — we’ll be happy to help!

See you at the conference!

The previous articles in this series are:

1. Where Did All the Cigarettes Go?
2. Getting from the Airport to the Hotel
3. Boozin’ in Accordion City
4. The Lay of the Land, Part 1
5. FAILCamp
6. The Best Damn Cookie in Town

This article will cover Active Surplus, a long-time resident of Queen Street West and a surplus electronics-and-gear store like no other. It’s a short walk away from the Metropolitan Hotel and well worth a visit.

If you’re a mad scientist, electronic hobbyist, artist, looking to get your stereo hooked up or even getting stuff for your wedding, I recommend taking a look around Active Surplus on a regular basis. A fixture of Queen Street West since my high-school days (the early 1980s!), Active Surplus is a warehouse filled with bins of all sorts of gadgets, gears, cables, adapters, speakers and all sorts of electronic and mechanical stuff that you’re just not going to find at Best Buy or Radio Shack, especially at their prices.

Active Surplus is located at 347 Queen Street West — here’s a Google Map showing you the way there from the Metropolitan Hotel.

Here’s what it looks like once you climb up the stairs leading into the store:

They’ve got all sorts of cables: audio, video, computer…

…and there are power strips and extension cords aplenty, all going dirt cheap:

They’ve got a row of interface peripherals — mice, trackpads and keyboards, including this water-resistant flexible USB keyboard:

…and there are all sorts of electric motors and pumps, from those for small aquariums to those for light industrial purposes:

You can unleash your inner security officer with one of these surveillance cameras:

Or perhaps it’s your inner meter maid you want to unleash with these assemblies from decomissioned electronic parking meters:

They’ve got a section of bin devoted to digital camera and card goodies. They’ve got all kind of card readers going for very low prices:

If RubyFringe turns into that kind of party, you’ll know where to buy electric trimmers:

Active Surplus has a good stock of pens, for those of you who like taking notes by hand:

They have a few bins of sunglasses as well as 3-D glasses:

Need to cordon off an area so that you can do CSI-style investigations? They’ve got police barrier tape:

They have a seemingly endless supply of stickers and adhesive-backed mini-mirrors:

I have no idea what this glass thing was originally for (bedpan?), but I’m sure all of you who listen to jam bands saw this and thought “bong!”:

Here’s a portable toilet, suitable for camping. I love that they felt it was necessary to say that you’re not supposed to try the in the store:

And last but not least, they’ve got “Baby Legs”, which are described as “young padawan parts, thanks to Darth Vader.”

This is the sixth installment of Joey’s Unofficial RubyFringe Guide to Toronto, my guide to Accordion City for attendees of the RubyFringe conference as well as people just curious about this place.

In case you missed the earlier articles in this series, they are…

1. Where Did All the Cigarettes Go?
2. Getting from the Airport to the Hotel
3. Boozin’ in Accordion City
4. The Lay of the Land, Part 1
5. FAILCamp

In this article, I’m going to talk about a little detour you might want to make for an extremely delicious cookie (and other snacks).

If you’ve ever gone walking around Paris looking for a quick bite to eat, Le Gourmand will give you a sense of deja vu. It’s a cafe that doubles as a somewhat pricey mini-grocery that carries gourmet food. They make excellent coffee and hot chocolate (you even get a choice of two of French chocolate mixes), delicious sandwiches, a nice bowl of steel-cut oatmeal with fruit, but most importantly, cookies to die for. Hell, they’re cookies to kill for.

The chocolate chip cookie (pictured at the top of this article) is a nice and large, which makes it crispy at the edges and soft and chewy in the center. The dough is rich, flavourful and packed with very good chocolate chips. I might actually keep my bike right by the conference to do a cookie run during the mid-afternoon lull.

Photo courtesy of SpotlightToronto.com.

If brownies are more your speed, Le Gourmand also has the Nookie Cookie, which is a brownie-like drop cookie dusted in icing sugar. It’s enough to make Dr. Atkins spin in his grave, but it’s throwing off your low-carb regime for this treat. Pair this with one of their black coffees, and you’ve got a nice civilised mid-afternoon snack.

The nearest Le Gourmand branch is at 152 Spadina, a little under a block south of Queen Street, not far from the Unspace office. Here’s a Google Map showing the way to Le Gourmand from the Metropolitan Hotel.

If you’re going to exploring around town beyond the general area of RubyFringe, there’s another branch of Le Gourmand at 20 Bloor Street East, just east of Yonge. If you’re going to be looking around the Yorkville area of town, be sure to pass by.

In case you missed the earlier articles in this series, I’ll list them here:

1. Where Did All the Cigarettes Go?
2. Getting from the Airport to the Hotel
3. Boozin’ in Accordion City
4. The Lay of the Land, Part 1

In this article, I’m going to cover FAILCamp.

The first event of RubyFringe is the only one that’s open to anyone, whether or not they’re attending the conference itself. It’s FAILCamp, a gathering where we’ll share stories about and lessons from failure. It will take place at The Rhino Bar and Grill (1249 Queen Street West, just west of Dufferin) and runs from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.. Once again, you don’t have to be a RubyFringe attendee to catch this one. Admission is free, but you’ll have to buy your own beer.

Here’s a quick description of the event, as written by its originators, Amy “Slash7″ Hoy and Thomas “Scriptaculous” Fuchs:

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.

I believe that the original plan was for Amy and Thomas to host the event as a dry run for a much larger FAILCamp event taking place on the 26th in Philadelphia. Circumstances have arisen and they will be unable to make it to Accordion City this weekend. While this fits with the theme of FAILCamp, it hasn’t stopped it — instead, two new hosts have stepped up to fill in for them:

• Hampton “HAML” Catlin, who very well might be the best Ruby hacker in town, and
• Yours Truly, who very well might be the worst Ruby hacker in town.

Hampton’s going to provide a lot of insight and programming know-how to FAILCamp. Me? I’m going to be responsible for innuendo-laden stories of personal and professional failure peppered with gratuitous Zardoz references.

As for the Rhino itself, it is truly pub with a “neighbourhoody” feel. Where many places are content to be mere endpoints in the Anheuser-Busch/Molson-Coors supply chain, the Rhino is what some sociologists call a “third place”, a neighbourhood gathering point for all kinds of people, from the locals who’ve been in the Parkdale area since it was a more rough-and-tumble place to the artsy and musician types who moved into the neighbourhood to the geeks who use it as the venue for the monthly Rails Pub Nites and Ajax Pub Nites. Even though the neighbourhood is gentrifying in a manner similar to New York’s Lower East Side or certain parts of Brooklyn, The Rhino has managed to remain pretty much douchebag-free and inexpensive, unlike a number of the other pubs in the area.

The only way in which The Rhino gets fancy is with their beer menu. There are about 200 beers on the menu hailing from a few dozen countries, and they’re generally well-stocked and priced in the 5 to 7 dollar per pint/bottle range. Be sure to try the locals: their own lager, as well as Mill Street, Wellington and Creemore Springs.

• FAILCamp’s Facebook page
• Rhino review at Toronto Bits
• Rhino review at Martini Boys
• Rhino write-up at Toronto Life
• Google Map showing the way from the Metropolitan Hotel to The Rhino
• Map showing the public transit route from the Metropolitan Hotel to the Rhino

Damian Conway, Perl expert extraordinaire, Open Source luminary and long-time friend of the Toronto Perl Mongers, will deliver — free and to the public — one of his signature tour-de-force completely insane talks that is…

• 1/3 high-end IT,
• 1/3 showmanship,
• and 1/3 peyote-fuelled hallucination.

Tonight will be the world premiere of a new talk, which goes under the title of Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…Made Easy.

As with the fanciful titles of his other talks, it’s hard to tell what it’ll actually be about, but having seen a couple of his presentations, I can guarantee that it will be a slightly-askew look at technology done in an engaging and hilarious fashion. Better still, you’ll be the first to see this presentation, which is a dress rehearsal for the O’Reilly Open Source Conference taking place later this month in Portland, Oregon.

Best of all, unlike the people at the Open Source Conference who’ll have to shell out something in the neighbourhood of $2000, admission to this event is absolutely free. (They will be taking up a collection for Damian in order to provide him some sort of honorarium for his doing the presentation, and some of the DemoCamp money is also going to Damian).

If you’d like to catch this event (I’ll be there), it’s tonight at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology, which is on 40 St. George Street (just north of College), right in the middle of the University of Toronto campus.

As I like to say for this sort of event: be there and be square!

For those of you steeped in internet and pop culture memes, Sean has an XKCD-style comic that explains his platform. Those of you who aren’t so much into that sort of stuff should visit his regular site.

He’s not asking for much: if he can get 3000 people to each donate a little bit over eight dollars apiece, he can make his goal. I’m not a U.S. citizen, so I can’t donate, but I can influence. If you’re a U.S. citizen and want to fix some of the damage in Kansas, this is your chance!

Here’s an amusing set of photos on Flickr: snack foods whose names sound like sex acts.

[Found via The Triumph of Bullshit.]

Just a small sample of the people that make Toronto’s tech community great.

This week is going to be a week unlike any other in the Toronto technology scene: a week of events created not by municipal groups, large techno-conglomerates or industry think tanks, but by small groups of passionate individuals who enjoys working with both people and technology.

These events don’t have the benefit of major sponsorship or media coverage, nor will they be lining their organizers’ wallets. They’re events put together by amateurs in the original sense of the word: people who do it not for profit, but for their love of their craft, in the hope that both the attendees and even the field itself will be advanced from insights, understanding and knowledge gained by gathering together and exchanging ideas.

It’ll be a busy week for me. I’ll not only be attending these events, but I’ll also be MCing two of them as well. I’ll be posting reports from these gatherings here — keep watching this blog!

DemoCamp 18: Tuesday July 15th, 5:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. at Supermarket

DemoCamp 18 is the eighteenth gathering of the bright lights in Toronto’s software development community where we show each other our projects in action. DemoCamp has grown from a gathering of a couple dozen in late 2005 to a meetup of hundreds at locations like the MaRS Centre and the Toronto Board of Trade and was voted “Toronto’s Best Unconference” earlier this year by BlogTO. It’s given many local software people the chance to showcase their work, meet other people in their field, make connections, get jobs and even get venture capitalist funding (that’s what happened to b5media, for whom I work).

I’m one of DemoCamp’s stewards and will be co-MCing DemoCamp.

You can see the schedule of events for DemoCamp 18 at the DemoCamp.info site. This event’s tickets — a good number of which were free, the remainder going for five or ten dollars — got snapped up within hours of becoming available.

Damian Conway: Wednesday, July 16th, 6:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. at the Bahen Centre, U of T

The Perl programming language has been given the nickname “the duct tape of the internet” because of its importance in the development of the early web. Damian Conway is its most eloquent spokesperson and a speaker who can turn the dryest of academic lectures into a brain-tickling comic monologue that delivers both laughs and technical insight.

On Wednesday, Toronto will play host to the world premiere of his new talk, titled Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces… Made Easy. The event will be held at the Bahen Centre at the University of Toronto and it will be free of charge. For more details, see its Upcoming page.

FAILCamp: Friday July 18th, 4:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. at The Rhino

I’ll let the FAILCamp creators, Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs do the talking:

“My reputation grows with every failure,” wrote George Bernard Shaw in a letter to fellow author Frank Harris. A healthy attitude towards the natural state of humanity, if you ask us.

We all know failure: public, private, large, small, free or costly, embarrassing or funny or poignant (or all of the above). We have all experienced what our friend Patrick has called “the beautiful rainbow of Fail.” And we tend to stuff it in the closet, keep it under wraps, don’t-ask-don’t-tell or any other number of hidey clichés that poor, beautiful rainbows should not be subject to. 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 comraderie, 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.

Also, did we mention beer?

For more details, see FAILCamp’s event page on Facebook.

RubyFringe: Friday July 18th - Sunday July 20th at the Metropolitan Toronto Hotel

Finally, the upcoming weekend belongs to RubyFringe, the “deep nerd tech with punk rock spirit conference”.

“RubyFringe,” says its site, “RubyFringe is an avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging Ruby projects and technologies. We’re mounting a unique and eccentric gathering of the people and projects that are driving things forward in our community.”

I’ll be MCing the opening night’s events at the Amsterdam Brewery. Alas, tickets are sold out!

Workstation by “striatic”.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

GORBACHOV: THE MUSIC VIDEO - BIGGER AND RUSSIANER from Tom Stern on Vimeo.

The video’s director, Tom Stern, has this to say:

I did this video for a Russian Metal Band called ANJ. It is pretty crazy. When I saw the lyrics it seemed to be an earnest tribute to Mikael Gorbachov (that’s how the Russians spell it), so I was a bit confounded about what the video concept should be, but then I had a brainstorm to take it way over the top and I think it was just the thing. Suffice to say it’s half Russian History allegory as told through an old zombie movie made in the Soviet Union, and half animated Soviet Propaganda posters.

Want to know more about the band ANJ? Here’s their MySpace page.

The new law, as explained by the Blue Man Group.
Click the illustration to see the original article.

Flint’s new interim Chief of Police, David Dicks, announced that Flint police will start arresting people wearing saggy pants that expose underwear or bare bottoms. “Some people call it a fad,” he is quoted in the Detroit Free Press, “but I believe it’s a national nuisance. It is indecent and thus it is indecent exposure, which has been on the books for years.” In a deprtmental memo released in June, he said “This immoral self expression goes beyond freedom of expression.”

The penalty for this crime: 93 days to a year in jail and/or fines up to $500.

My favourite line in the article is from 18-year old Senita Abrams of Flint, who said “I think it’s cute when boys sag.” She may or may not have been talking about pants.

Here’s the hip-hop version:

And here’s the big beat/’60s jazz-funk version (I rather like the tune):

The back-scratching reminds me of the song Bear Necessities from the film The Jungle Book, where Baloo explains his philosophy of life to Mowgli. It’s the spiritual ancestor of Hakuna Matata:

If work won’t provide me with a Mac laptop, I may end up just buying one myself. The refurbished ones are available at pretty good prices.

In case you’re too young to get the reference in the Paris Hilton photo, here’s the original — it’s a still from a scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s:

While biking on the way to work this morning, I saw this felled tree at the corner of Dundas and Golden:

Police cordoned off the street and people from Accordion City’s public works department were working out how to remove the tree without crushing the van pinned under it:

Here’s a closeup of where the branch split from the trunk:

I’ve seen all sorts of things bearing the Hyundai brand, but I had no idea they made accordions (or other musical instruments)! Better still, their C-level execs seem to “eat their own dog food”: here’s a video of Mr. Kim, president of Hyundai Music Corporation, playing When the Saints Go Marching In on a green Hyundai 12-bass piano accordion:

[Thanks to chiamattt -- owner of the blog smokehard -- for telling me about Hyundai accordions!]