Last year, for RubyFringe – the offbeat conference for Ruby programmers hosted by the local Ruby heroes at Unspace – I wrote a series of articles about Toronto for people who were coming to the conference from out of town. In the series, I pointed out places of interest near the conference hotel (the Metropolitan downtown) and little tidbits of information that might be useful to an out-of-towner.

This year, Unspace is holding another conference for Ruby programmers. This time, it’s going by the name FutureRuby and once again, I’m posting a series of articles that collectively will make a quick little Baedeker about Toronto for the non-locals attending the conference. My hope is that even people who’ve live in this city all their lives will find it useful and entertaining.

Upon arriving in Toronto, you may notice a certain funk hanging in the air. The strength of said funk will vary from block to block and will come from one of two probable sources.

Probable Source Number One: Gene Simmons’ Man-Musk

The first probable source of the smell lingering around town is Gene Simmons. Yes, that Gene Simmons. Gene has bedded many women:

• His current long-term partner, Playboy Playmate Shannon Tweed
• The woman with whom he cheated on Shannon in that video that popped up on the internet last year
• Former live-in partners Cher and Diana Ross
• “Over a thousand women”, if his interview on NPR is to be believed

While his Rock God status helped him land the ladies, I believe that what really draws them in his the musky aroma he exudes.

Gene will be in town on the FutureRuby weekend in his capacity as Grand Marshall for the Honda Indy, which will take place around the Canadian National Exhibition, a short drive west of the conference hotel. An event featuring fast-moving, big, throbbing machines needs a grand marshall to match, and who could fill the role better than he?

The Honda Indy will run from Friday, July 10th through Sunday July 12th, and it might affect you in the following ways:

• You may be exposed to Gene Simmons’ man-musk.
• It may take longer than usual for you to get downtown if you’re flying in from Toronto’s main airport, Pearson International Airport, on Friday. Lakeshore Boulevard, one of the major roads leading into town from the west, will be used as part of the Indy track and will be closed.
• You will hear the echoes of race car engines all weekend. It’ll be a constant hum in the background during the day – not too annoying, but I thought you might want to know what that sound was.

Probable Source Number Two: The Garbage Strike!

The even more probable source of the smell is the garbage. As of today, Friday, July 3rd, the strike by Toronto’s municipal workers is in its 11th day. It affects a number of services, including Parks and Recreation, services at City Hall and garbage collection. There little to no smell downtown, but as you go to neighbourhoods where food makes the lion’s share of the trash, such as Kensington Market (where Sunday’s post-FutureRuby party is taking place), it sometimes gets a little ripe.

If the strike goes on for another week and into FutureRuby:

• Consider yourself warned about some potential stink.
• If you’re from out of town, walking around the city and have some trash, please don’t litter or stuff it into our Saran-wrapped garbage cans; hang onto it and dispose of it at your hotel.

How Will I Get to FailCamp if the Ferries aren’t Running?

FailCamp, one of the events associated with FutureRuby, takes place on the Toronto Islands (Queen City Yacht Club on Algonquin Island, to be precise). The problem is that the island ferries are run by the striking city workers and are out of commission.

Worry not – Queen City Yacht Club has provided the use of the Algonquin II, a launch that can shuttle almost 50 people back and forth between Toronto Harbour and FailCamp.

Here’s a great scene from a Judge Judy case (never thought I’d write those words) in which a high school student learns about rhetorical questions the hard way: in front of millions of viewers!

And technically speaking, it’s astronomers and cosmologists who find out things about space, and what we think of as “rocket science” is really rocket engineering.

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”?

Creative Commons picture courtesy of Rene Erhardt.

Happy Canada Day! Have a safe and fun holiday, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

Seen in the window at a shop in Bloor West Village and coming soon to your grandmother’s (or a die-hard Star Trek or M*A*S*H fan’s) house:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

This is what ten dollars got you at Thursday’s Pride Week barbecue at University of Toronto’s Hart House:

It was quite a meal: one beef kebab, one piece of chicken, 4 pork ribs, a slice of bread, roast potatoes, steamed vegetables and salad, all prepared quite well. The Ginger Ninja and I enjoyed it.

I no longer live in Accordion City’s Queen/Spadina neighbourhood and therefore don’t play there very often anymore. Luckily that doesn’t mean that they’re lacking for the accordion: there was a guy playing a fine little red number there earlier this afternoon:

Squeeze on, good sir!

Here’s another article that would normally just stay in my tech blog, Global Nerdy. However, it covers the intersection of life, politics and technology, which I think would also appeal to non-techies, which is why I’ve reposted it here. Enjoy!

Marc Stiegler

I met science fiction author, software developer and computer security guy Marc Stiegler at the first incarnation of O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference in 2002, but I’d been acquainted with his work prior to that. I’d heard of his programming language called E and had read his science fiction novel Earthweb, whose plot could be grossly oversimplified down to the summary “Twitter saves the world” (it’s a little bit more than that, but I think it conveys the idea nicely).

Marc’s Final Exam

However, when I think of Marc, what comes to mind first is the final exam that he gave to students at his “Future of Computing” course and published online in 1999. In it, he posed a set of problems and asked them how a specific set of proposed web technologies could be used to solve them. The course and exam have a very strong sense of “technology trumps legislation”, an idea that was surfacing in the late 1990s.

In the exam, students had to pick 5 out of 11 problems that Marc posed and then explain how any combination of the following technologies could be used to solve them:

• Unforgeable pseudonymous identities
• Bidirectional, typed, filterable links
• Arbitration agents
• Bonding agents
• Escrow agents
• Digital Cash
• Capability Based Security with Strong Encryption

(If some of these ideas are unfamiliar to you, don’t worry. They’re not important in the context of this article, and you can always Bing them.)

Here’s a selection of the problems posed in the exam. Remember, this exam is from ten years ago!

1) Searching for a decision analysis tool on the Web, you find a review in which the reviewer raves about a particular product. You buy the product and discover it just doesn’t work. You desire to prevent this person’s ravings from harming anyone else–and you desire to prevent the product from disappointing anyone else.

4) You start receiving thousands of emails from organizations you don’t know, all hawking their wares. You want it to stop, just stop!

5) You wish to play poker with your friends. They live in Tampa Florida, you live in Kingman. This is illegal in the nation where you happen to be a citizen. You want to do it anyway.

6) You hear a joke that someone, somewhere, would probably find offensive. You wish to tell your precocious 17-year-old daughter, who is a student at Yale. The Common Decency Act Version 2 has just passed; it is a $100,000 offense to send such material electronically to a minor. You want to send it anyway–it is a very funny joke.

7) Someone claiming to be you starts roaming the Web making wild claims. You want to make sure people know it isn’t really you.

The Final Question

The most compelling question on the exam is the final one. It required a far more extensive answer than the other ten – so much more extensive that Marc actually suggested that it might be better not to answer the question in the exam, but to at least think about it:

But…if you can answer Question 11 in your own mind, even though you choose not to write up that answer for this examination, then a most remarkable thing will happen: you will walk out of this class with something profoundly worth knowing.

Here’s that final question:

11) You live in North Korea. Three days ago the soldiers came to your tiny patch of farmland and took the few scraps of food they hadn’t taken the week before. You have just boiled the last of your shoes and fed the softened leather to your 3-year-old child. She coughs, a sickly sound that cannot last much longer. Overhead you hear the drone of massive engines. You look into the sky, and thousands of tiny packages float down. You pick one up. It is made of plastic; you cannot feed it to your daughter. But the device talks to you, is solar powered, and teaches you how to use it to link to the Web. You have all the knowledge of the world at your fingertips; you can talk to thousands of others who share your desperate fate. The time has come to solve your problem in the most fundamental sense, and save the life of your daughter.

The final question really stands out. Unlike the other questions in the exam, this one really pulls at the heartstrings, and it sparked a lot of discussion among geeks back around 1999 and 2000, in settings both online and real-life.

Iran and the Final Question

If you follow the American news cycle, the mental distance between North Korea and Iran is a short one; both are countries in the “Axis of Evil” (a term invented by a Toronto guy, by the way) run by repressive regimes and working on their nuclear weapons capabilities. What if we changed the final question’s setting from North Korea to Iran?

Unlike North Korea, Iran’s people have access to technology and communications with the outside world (there’s a recent Daily Show segment in which Jason Jones finds people in Iran who know Jon Stewart’s George Bush “I’m the decider” schtick). They don’t need to have Marc’s hypothetical iPhones delivered to them in care packages; they have things like Twitter and YouTube at their disposal. So I propose another slight modification to the final question: What if we changed the hypothetical hardware into actual working software like Twitter and YouTube?

(It’s another “software, not hardware, is really the trick” situation. Just as we found out in Terminator 3 that SkyNet was really software, it turns out that what might save Iran was social networking software, not portable internet-accessing hardware dropped by parachute.)

With my two suggested changes, it becomes very apparent that we’ve moved from theory to practice. The people of Iran are taking Marc Stiegler’s final exam, and they’ve picked its most difficult question.

Let’s hope they pass.

When missing Republican South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford turned up – he went missing last week, and it was thought he might be hiking the Appalachian Trail – he held a press conference in which he announced that he had been cheating on his wife. FOX News, when covering the story, did what it often does when a Republican does something embarrassing: it mislabelled Sanford’s party affiliation as Democratic in the “lower third” of the screen:

Republican Congressman Mark Foley left in disgrace after being caught sending explicit emails to teenage boys serving as congressional pages. Guess the party affiliation the FOX News chyron assigns to him:

Here’s a FOX News display of the opinion poll results for an upcoming senate race between Democratic candidate Sheldon Whitehouse and Republican candidate Lincoln Chafee. Of course, when a poll showed that the Democratic candidate had an 11-point lead, FOX News “conveniently” mixed up the parties and numbers:

At this point, I feel required to remind you of the titular character’s line from Goldfinger (the novel): “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time, it’s enemy action.” 

Many conservatives felt that John McCain was a little too liberal prior to his landing the presidential nomination, and there may have been a remnant of that feeling in this chyron blooper identifying him as a Democrat. Or perhaps FOX was trying to convince Democratic voters to vote for him:

Here’s Arlen Specter, in 2007, back when he was a Republican. In this shot, he’s questioning Alberto Gonzales about the firings of U.S. attorneys who weren’t “Bushy” enough:

Intershame had the idea for this article a day ahead of me, and they have more FOX News “Democrat” misattributions. How long before FOX News starts referring to people as “Adolf Hitler (D-Germany)”, “Joseph Stalin (D-Russia)” and “Darth Vader (D-Coruscant)”?

The scene at the big communal table at the May 29th Coffee and Code.

There’s a Toronto Coffee and Code this Friday! For details, see the Coffee and Code blog.

Yes, the demands and schedule of my job as Sith Lord at Microsoft have kept me quite busy, but it doesn’t matter because I live in the “Hooray!” zone, as shown in the Venn diagram below:

For more information, see the LifeHacker article titled The Road to Happiness in Your Work Lies in the Hooray! Zone.

My article from a couple of weeks ago, Fast Food Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck, got a lot of reactions from both the “You’re right!” and “You’re dead wrong!” camps (the article on Global Nerdy got a fair number of comments, but the same article on the Accordion Guy blog got a hundred comments).

There’s some evidence to back my theory that netbooks are like Burger King apple pies – that is, they look like laptops, but don’t offer the same capabilities, leading to disappointment, and it’s covered in my article in Global Nerdy titled Like I Said, Netbooks Suck.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Here’s an interesting bit of information for those of you who are reviewing prospective hires: people are more honest on their LinkedIn profiles than they are on their resumes. That’s what LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman said at the Social Recruiting Summit held last week at Google.

It’s understood that people “pad” their resumes. A sizeable portion of the interview process seems to be devoted to determining if the candidate is as good as his or her resume says he or she is. I’ve been in interviews where a prospective employer had a member of the development team to sit in and act as a “bullshit detector”; I’ve also done the same duty when working at companies that were interviewing prospective developers.

I think that Kris “The HR Capitalist” Dunn’s theory about why LinkedIn profiles are more honest is spot-on:

…if you’re truly looking for "what’s up" with a candidate, you need to rely on the LinkedIn profile.  Why is that true?  Because there’s a community of co-workers, friends and past colleagues that always have access to the LinkedIn profile, and there’s no such community with constant visibility to a random resume the candidate sends in, and you have no means to circulate the resume to that type of community to fact check.

Simply put: it’s harder to lie when you’re in front of a group of colleagues who might call you on it.

Kris also talks about how many candidates don’t include the “5 – 6 bullet points that you;re usually used to seeing on the resume” on their LinkedIn profiles. This isn’t the case with me: when I got laid off from my last job back in September, I rewrote my resume completely, starting with my LinkedIn profile, after which I simply pasted the LinkedIn information into a Word document and gave it a little formatting. This approach killed two birds with one stone, affording me more time to concentrate on my (thankfully short – 17 days from my last official day at b5media to my first official day at Microsoft) job search.

I don’t know if it applies in other fields, but in the tech sector, I think that LinkedIn profiles are resumes and that you should based your resume off your LinkedIn profile rather than the other way around. Yes, the social networking aspect of LinkedIn means that you can’t pad your resume as much, but it also means that prospective employers can trust that your credentials are genuine.

This photo from Passive-Aggressive Notes made me laugh out loud:

When it comes to vegans and vegetarians, while I get along with them just fine, I’ve got to side with chef Anthony Bourdain:

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.

If it’s Tuesday, it must be time for Guelph Coffee and Code! See the Coffee and Code blog for details.

Update (Monday, June 22, 12:21 p.m.): If you’re planning on taking your trash to the transfer stations, please note that picketers have been blocking the entrances to the trash transfer depots. I would recommend checking the news before you head out to a transfer station.

It’s on: Locals 79 and 416 of CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees) has called for a strike after the city and the union were unable to come to an agreement on their collective agreements.

What the Press Says

• Posted Toronto (National Post blog): Toronto City Workers on Strike
• Posted Toronto: The Iconic Nature of 18 Sick Days
• Globe and Mail: Toronto City Workers on Strike
• Globe and Mail: Unions Living in Dreamland
• Toronto Star: City Workers Walk; Talks Go On
• Toronto Star: Bad Timing Has Caused Strike

Services Affected by the Strike

Here’s what services are affected:

• Garbage/Recycling/Green Bin Collection
  Cancelled, except in Etobicoke and apartment/condo buildings (including my place!), where it’s contracted out. People are being asked to store their garbage for as long as they can, or drop it off at the city’s garbage drop-off points (see the map below).
• Ambulances/Paramedics
  Still operating, but 25% of paramedics are expected not to work on any given day during the strike. Best not to get injured right now.
• Daycare Centres
  All 57 daycare centres are closed.
• Island Ferries
  All ferries – except the one to the Island Airport – are cancelled.
• Parks and Recreation
  Parks will be open, but there’s no ground maintenance. “Programming”, such as summer camps, classes, drop-ins and lessons are cancelled. City-run golf courses, wading and swimming pools, fitness and community centres are closed. Automated timers aren’t in the union, so splash pads on automated timers are still running.
• Public Libraries
  Branches are still open, except for 5 that use city facilities: Armour Heights, Flemingdon Park, St. James Town, Todmorden Room and Port Union. Branches at City Hall and Metro Hall are open, with adjusted hours.
• Weddings
  Wedding ceremonies at Toronto City Hall will continue during regular business hours. Permits for wedding photos in city parks are cancelled. Wedding facilities in East York, Scarborough and York are cancelled. Only previously scheduled ceremonies at North York Civic Centre will continue.
• Parking
  Parking enforcement continues! Deadlines to pay tickets will not be extended. No new permits will be issued.
• Taxes
  Property taxes still have to be paid on the due dates, but drop boxes in civic centres will no be available. Best to pay them via mail, your bank or drop box in public library (if it’s not one of the affected ones).

Garbage Drop-Off Points

If you need to get rid of garbage, the following locations will take it:

1. Ingram Transfer Station
   50 Ingram Drive (Keele/Eglinton area)
   Open 24 hours
2. Bermondsey Transfer Station
   188 Bermondsey Road (Victoria Park/Eglinton area)
   Open 24 hours
   (I wrote about this place in a 2004 article titled Midnight Trash Run.)
3. Commissioners Street Transfer Station
   400 Commissioners Street (Lakeshore/Logan area)
   Open 7 a.m. – 7 p.m.
4. Disco Transfer Station
   120 Disco Road (Carlingview/Disco area)
   Open 7 a.m. – 7 p.m.
5. Dufferin Transfer Station
   35 Vanley Crescent (Chesswood/Sheppard area)
   Open 7 a.m. – 7 p.m.
6. Victoria Park Transfer Station
   3550 Victoria Park Avenue (Victoria Park/Finch area)
   Open 7 a.m. – 7 p.m.
7. Scarborough Transfer Station
   1 Transfer Place (Markham Road/Sheppard area)
   Open 7 a.m. – 7 p.m.

Click the table below to get a closer look at the table that tells you when it’s time to throw out those condiments. And yes, Hollandaise sauce doesn’t last terribly long.

Happy Father’s Day to all you dads out there! May you never receive the Father’s Day present advertised below:

Seen at “Diaper-eze”, a baby clothing store in Bloor West Village, in the west end of Accordion City.

 The view from my hotel room.

I haven’t been to Ottawa in 20 years. The last time, it was to visit a girl, and it ended badly. Every pedicab and rickshaw guy in town was in love with her and wished hot death upon me during my visit, and in the end, she decided that she wanted to be “just friends”.

Months later, a friend would tell me that she paid me a very nice compliment after a horrible experience with some jerk: “There are three kinds of men in the world: scum, art fags and Joey!” It’s nice for the present-day me, but did 1989-me no good.

This time, I’m here on bidniss, doing a presentation on how to code accessible websites, followed by catching up with some friends. Should be fun.