If you listen on CBC Radio One on Saturdays you’re in for a surprise: Yours Truly will be appearing on the Brent Bambury’s show Go! tomorrow. There’ll be musical merriment of all sorts. Go! broadcasts live at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, 11:00 in Newfoundland.

Rodney Buike took this photo of me on Tuesday evening. I look as if I should be backing up Tom Waits or playing in a cojunto band:

If you’re a techie in Montreal, you want to attend Career Demo Camp on Wednesday, December 2nd at 6:30 p.m. in the Mont-Royal Centre! It’s part tech career guidance conference, part DemoCamp-style event, and an opportunity for developers and start-ups to get together and learn about the job market, see projects that Montreal-area techies are working on and get to know and network with your local nerds. It’s presented by the Confoo conference (taking place in March 2010) and PHUG and will be hosted by Yours Truly and Jean-Luc SansCartier.

Here’s the schedule:

• 6:30 p.m.: Intro to Career Demo Camp
• 7:00 p.m.: Alex Kovalenko – IT Headhunting and Recruiting
• 7:30 p.m.: Joey deVilla; Better Living Through Blogging
• 8:00 p.m.: DemoCamp Introduction
• 8:15 p.m.: DemoCamp Presentations
• 10:00 p.m.: Networking Session

The event is free of charge! All you have to do to attend is sign up at Career Demo Camp’s Registration page.

Microsoft Canada’s providing the space – we booked the Mont-Royal Centre for TechDays Montreal for two days (December 2nd and 3rd) and we weren’t doing anything with the space on the evening of Day 1. We decided to offer the space for some kind of community event, and Confoo and PHUG put together Career Demo Camp. I love doing developer community events and was only too happy to co-host.

The DemoCamp portion of the evening needs people to do DemoCamp-style demos: 5 minutes of “Show and Tell” where you show your software, web application or project in action. It’s the only thing you’re allowed to show on the big screen — no slides allowed! The idea is for you to show off your technology in action and inspire us, not to do a sales pitch. Think you’ve got a demo in you? Contact Jean-Luc Sans Cartier or Yann Larrivee and let them know you want to demo at Career Demo Camp!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.

I – along with a good chunk of Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team – am in Calgary for the fourth leg of the TechDays Canada seven-city tour. TechDays Calgary is taking place in the BMO Centre on the Calgary Stampede grounds. Wanting to be a good guest, I decided to observe a local custom:

I haven’t worn my flaming cowboy hat in ages!

As far as I can tell, I’m the only attendee who brought a cowboy hat. The only other similarly-haberdashed people on the premises are the Calgary Stampede staff and the washroom signs:

There are a number of Christmas-related events taking place at the BMO Centre before and after TechDays, so the place is all decked out for Christmas:

The isn’t a Santa Claus on site, but we do have IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus delivering goodies:

…and Rick’s session has drawn quite a crowd:

Another well-attended session was Introducing ASP.NET MVC, which was delivered by Tom Opgenorth:

Here’s the ASP.NET MVC room, already filling up a full 15 minutes before the start of the day:

Tom ended up speaking to a room packed to maximum capacity:

The people who couldn’t fit into the ASP.NET MVC sessions were still able to catch the proceedings on a monitor outside the room:

Meanwhile, next door, Developer Evangelist John Bristowe delivered the Practical Web Testing presentation:

And one door over, Adam “Adam Bomb” Carter (the first guy to suggest to me that I get a job at Microsoft) spoke at the Inside the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 session:

Here’s a scene from the speaker prep room that reminded me of the Sesame Street song One of These Things is Not Like the Other:

“Look! I’m at a conference, watching the proceedings of another conference!”

And just outside the speaker prep room, Rob Burke and D’Arcy Lussier chat:

Things seem to be going well, if IT Pro Evangelist and TechDays man-in-charge Damir Bersinic’s thumbs-up is any indication:

And down the hall, the Ford Flex featuring Microsoft’ Ford Sync technology awaits some passengers:

Someday, arranging for conference wireless will not be an arduous, expensive affair, but in the meantime, we set up these hard-wired internet access stations. Note the anti-bacterial lotion beside the laptop – a sign of these H1N1 times. If I’d had any foresight, I’d have bought a lot of Purell stock:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.

The Bloor Cinema, located in the student-bohemian neighbourhood of Accordion City known as The Annex, has been a city institution since the turn of the previous century. It started out as a vaudeville theatre, became a cinema, then an “adult film” venue, and now it’s a repertory theatre and home to second-run films, Rocky Horror nights, independent cinema, art films, foreign films, film festivals and special projects like the The Pee-Wee Herman Picture Show. I’ve had many nice dates there (contrary to legend, I do have dates that do not end in police action or crisis counselling), the most recent of which were with The Missus.

Local blog BlogTO posted an article today pointing to the documentary film titled The Bloor, which chronicles the life of this Toronto cultural landmark. It’s been posted to YouTube in two parts, which I’ve posted below. It’s good lunchtime viewing.

My friend (and former officemate!) Cory Doctorow is launching his latest novel, Makers, tonight at the Toronto Public Library at 239 College Street (east of Spadina). The fun happens in the Merrill Collection room, located on the third floor at 7 p.m. tonight. Cory will be doing a reading, taking questions and signing books. There will be books for sale at the event courtesy of our local science fiction and fantasy bookstore, Bakka Phoenix.

Here’s the publisher’s blurb about the book:

From the New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother, a major novel of the booms, busts, and further booms in store for America

Perry and Lester invent things—seashell robots that make toast, Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent entirely new economic systems, like the “New Work,” a New Deal for the technological era. Barefoot bankers cross the nation, microinvesting in high-tech communal mini-startups like Perry and Lester’s. Together, they transform the country, and Andrea Fleeks, a journo-turned-blogger, is there to document it.

Then it slides into collapse. The New Work bust puts the dot.combomb to shame. Perry and Lester build a network of interactive rides in abandoned Wal-Marts across the land. As their rides, which commemorate the New Work’s glory days, gain in popularity, a rogue Disney executive grows jealous, and convinces the police that Perry and Lester’s 3D printers are being used to run off AK-47s.

Hordes of goths descend on the shantytown built by the New Workers, joining the cult. Lawsuits multiply as venture capitalists take on a new investment strategy: backing litigation against companies like Disney. Lester and Perry’s friendship falls to pieces when Lester gets the ‘fatkins’ treatment, turning him into a sybaritic gigolo.

Then things get really interesting.

It should be noted that while 3-D printers of the sort in Cory’s novel are still the stuff of science fiction, simpler versions exist today. In fact, at the Hacklab, where I spend many a working day, we’ve got a MakerBot Industries “Cupcake” 3-D printer that can “print” plastic objects.

Here’s what the Cupcake looks like:

A computer connected to the Cupcake controls it. The big loop of plastic to the upper left of the machine is the material from which objects are printed. Here’s a closer look at its internals:

We have a small gallery of objects that were created using the Cupcake:

If you’d like one of your own, the fine folks at Makerbot Industries would be more than happy to sell you a kit.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Here in Canada, “Kraft Dinner” is the brand under which Kraft Macaroni and Cheese is sold. Macaroni and cheese is one of those tastes of childhood, and being cheap and easy to prepare, “KD” is a staple of university student life. Back in university, a number of us enhanced the dish by adding all sorts of things: ketchup, mustard, hot dog slices, tuna and so on. I liked putting a couple of strips of bacon on mine, because there’s little that bacon can’t enhance.

The people at Kraft must have noticed these enhancements since they’ve release a series of microwaveable Kraft Dinner meals with different flavours such as Alfredo, “Extreme Pizza” and SPicy Szechuan. Being the kinesthetic sort when it comes to food, the Ginger Ninja and I decided to buy a couple of flavours and give them a taste.

The verdict: avoid at all costs. These Kraft Dinner variants aren’t junky-good in the way that original Kraft Dinner is. They just taste awful and have looks that match. Here’s what “Extreme Pizza” looks like:

“Extreme Pizza” is a very bad blend of that Velveeta-esque Kraft Dinner cheese with a low-grade tomato sauce reminiscent of the gunk they put on Chuck E. Cheese pizzas (I know that taste; I have young nephews).

Spicy Szechuan is even worse:

It tastes like an attempt to blend Kraft Dinner cheese with the flavours of soy sauce, Chinese five-spice and peppers. If the Long March had a taste, it would be this.

Note that they use different noodles for different flavours; it’s the one bit of culinary artistry that went into them. Different sauces call for different noodles – for example, you don’t serve capellini with a thick meat sauce – and each noodle in this series of Kraft Dinners seems chosen to convey the culinary horror perfectly.

If you must eat these, I would suggest Listerine as a pairing: Listerine Original for the Extreme Pizza, and Listerine Mint for the Spicy Szechuan.

November 11th is Remembrance Day in Canada, the day we commemorate the sacrifices made by our armed forces during war.

In the days leading up to and including Remembrance Day (the official period starts on the last Friday of October), you may see people wearing poppy pins like the ones pictured above on their left lapels. Poppies became associated with the war dead during the time of Napoleon when it was noted that they bloomed in fields where battles had taken place. This association was cemented when Canadian soldier and doctor John McCrae wrote the poem In Flanders Fields:

Here’s the text of In Flanders Fields:

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow,
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

My home office, late 2001.

It Began With an “About” Box

(The scene: October 2001, in a bland building in a bland office park on a bland street named after a large insurance company in a bland corner of Accordion City.)

“We’ve decided to re-assign you,” said the VP of R&D at the startup where I worked. “The new team will take over for your interface work. You will be in charge of the installer and the ‘About’ box.”

By “installer”, he meant the “setup” program that you would run to install our software onto your computer. As for the “About” box, that’s the little window that pops up when you click the “About this Application…” item under the “Help” menu (or the Apple menu on Macs). They look like this:

“Um…would I be doing anything else?” I asked.

“No, that’s it for now, but I expect that we’ll find more for you to do.”

If my new assignment seemed inconsequential to you, you’re right. On a particularly busy day, the task of making sure that the installer was running and that the “About” box has the correct copyright notices would take up a good ten minutes, leaving me a solid seven hours and fifty minutes of nothing to do.

Me at the office, late 2001.

The change in job responsibilities has drastically changed my daily routine. Once you factored in some time for me to answer email, my actual responsibilities had been taken core of by 9:20 a.m.. A workday that was once busy and challenging had been transformed into a vast desert of idle time.

I had the sinking feeling that as one of the last original employees of the startup who was still there amongst a rising tide of new hires hand-picked by the new boss, my days were numbered. Still, I tolerated the hour’s commute each way to my go-nowhere-do-nothing role to keep my cash flow going while I set up my next opportunity.

I spent a lot of my free time at work learning the PHP programming language and chasing down potential clients. I chatted on IRC with friends who were either working at startups or whose startups had just imploded. I read and occasionally, just for kicks, I’d help the sysadmins do things like tie up ethernet cable or inventory wifi cards.

I also started a blog.

It needed a name, and at the time I couldn’t think of one that I felt was any good. On a whim, I simply decided to call it The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century. It was dumb, and I planned on changing it as soon as I thought of a good one.

Having an outlet like Accordion Guy kept me sane during those last, tedious, will-you-fire-me-already days at the startup. It also kept me sane during those oh-God-oh-God-I need-to-get-clients days after getting sacked and during those long nights when I put in a lot of programming time for those clients later on.

It also had some unexpected benefits. My log entry about the time my deadbeat ex-housemate let a con man into the house for a second time got covered on Boing Boing, and suddenly my readership went from tens to the low hundreds. Getting laid off gave me a fair bit of time to have some adventures, and thus my much-linked-to stories from those early days got more attention through the blogosphere:

• Stagette
• The Accidental Go-Go Dancer
• That Syd, What a Mensch!
• The Star-Spangled Banner and Anal Sovereignty
• Now It Can Be Told (or How I Landed My New Client)

The Girl Who Cried Webmaster was a turning point for the Accordion Guy blog: it impressed the powers that be at Tucows, and played a key role in my becoming their Technical Community Development Coordinator (an incredibly wordy way of saying “developer evangelist”). The blog had saved my bacon and landed me a job – and now I was getting paid to blog!

Eight Years Later

Today is my eighth blogging anniversary. I’m still blogging happily here at Accordion Guy as well as at Global Nerdy and Microsoft Canada’s Canadian Developer Connection. There’s a chance that I’m Microsoft Canada’s most active blogger, whether blogging personally or in an official capacity. I suppose I can go look that up once my work schedule calms down a little.

Blogging has made my life better. From the more tangible things like the network of friends, acquaintances and contacts I’ve built to the less-tangible “making your life worth living by examining it” effect that blogging often has, it’s become one of the two life-changing hobbies I took up around the turn of the millennium (I’m sure you can guess what the other one is). I can’t imagine not doing it for at least another eight years.

To you, my readers, I’d like to say thank you. I hope to keep entertaining, informing – and yes, occasionally annoying – you for years to come. Thanks for reading.

While biking down to the Hacklab (which I use as a day-to-day workspace) on Dundas Street West this morning, I noticed this ad at the Landsdowne bus stop’s shelter:

“My Neighbour Jerks My Chicken” might sound like the sort of situation that would make for a pleasant freshman year in a dorm, but in this case it refers to the Jamaican style of cooking in which you dry-rub meat with jerk spice. It’s pretty tasty, and I recommend trying it if you’ve got a Jamaican restaurant in your neighbourhood.

Speaking of restaurants in your neighbourhood, that’s what these posters are all about: encouraging you to support your local businesses. There are plenty of great ones around my place – Sweet Flour, My Place, Bloor Meat Market and Crema Coffee come to mind – and I’m sure that there are plenty of businesses in your ‘hood that deserve your business.

If you look closely at the bottom of the poster, you’ll notice that they were sponsored in part by Tabia, the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas:

A little farther east on Dundas, I stopped to take a picture of a less racy poster in the series:

Since it’s both Guy Fawkes Day and my 42nd birthday, I should download Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony; it’ll let me celebrate both since it’s both a videogame and an excuse to blow up buildings:

This afternoon (Wednesday, November 4th) from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Atlantic time, I’ll be holding a Halifax edition of “Coffee and Code” at Just Us Cafe on Barrington (1678 Barrington). My coworkers Damir Bersinic and Rodney Buike will be joining me. Come on down and chat with us about Microsoft, the tech industry in general, the job market, accordions, whatever!

(If you’re a developer who’s interested in building a cloud computing-based application on Windows Azure, you might want to come down for this one, as I might have an offer that you might find difficult to resist. Just sayin’.)

There may be plans for dinner and accordion-and-beer-fueled mayhem this evening, so if you’re into that sort of thing, drop me a line.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The amount of work people do in order to avoid work never ceases to amaze me. If there’s a prize for this sort of thing, we might have to award it to Aaron Siebers, 27, of Denver, Colorado, a Blockbuster employee who didn’t think that simply calling in sick was enough. Here’s the report from the UK paper The Telegraph:

Facing a night shift at a Blockbuster video store, Aaron Siebers, 27, took a serrated knife and stabbed himself in the leg. For good measure he then slashed his own face and stomach.

Mr Siebers then told the video store in Denver, Colorado, that he had been attacked by three men dressed in black on his way to work.

After stabbing himself, he was hospitalised with a deep puncture wound to his lower leg.

But his ploy sparked a large police manhunt with officers and sniffer dogs combing the streets for his attacker.

CCTV near where the incident was supposed to have taken place showed no attack and, after repeated questioning, Mr Siebers eventually admitted that he had made it up to get out of work.

He has been charged with false reporting and obstructing police.

Two out of three races is pretty good, but it’s not a sweep.

I saw these posters for Algoma University yesterday:

There’s always been an implicit promise of freedom in going away to university, but this is the first time I can recall where it’s been used as an actual selling point.

I don’t think that this campaign is a good idea. Algoma’s got some things going for it – as a techie, I’m aware of their $6 million technology wing and game development courses. I think that any good qualities that Algoma may have are tarnished by these ads’ “Live the dream — No curfews! Dress like a skank!” message. In trying to hit 18 or 19 year-olds yearning to break free from their parents where they live, they’re cheapening the school’s image and the value of an Algoma degree.

What do you think?

There’s a woman in or around the area of Langley, British Columbia who’s going around kicking men in the groin. One was hurt so badly that one of his testicles had to be removed.

This case will probably spark two types of conversations, editorials and online commentary:

• One will be some persecution fantasy among men who think we’ve ceded too much ground to women
• And the other will be that sort of toxic combo of “Too many womyn;s studies courses, too few brain cells” rhetoric along the lines of…

Here’s a piece by the artist known as 9 0 0 0 that I rather like:

You can see the original (and more) in 9 0 0 0’s Flickr photostream.

TechDays, Microsoft’s cross-Canada conference for developers and IT pros took a break in October, but returns in November to complete its tour of the five remaining cities. As leader of one of the conference tracks it means that I’ll be on the road, hitting these five cities over the next couple of months:

• Halifax: November 2nd and 3rd
• Calgary: November 17th and 18th
• Montreal: December 2nd and 3rd
• Ottawa: December 9th and 10th
• Winnipeg: December 15th and 16th

If you’re a programmer or IT pro who works with Microsoft tools and technologies or is thinking about doing so, you’d do well to check out TechDays. You can find out more at the TechDays site, or you can always drop me a line.

If you’re in Halifax and would like to catch up, I’ll be holding a Coffee and Code at Just Us Cafe (1678 Barrington) on Wednesday, November 4th from 2 to 6 p.m. Come by, have a coffee and a chat!

I’ll be landing in Halifax this weekend, and chances are I might be looking to do something on Saturday night…

This article also appears in Coffee and Code.
Related articles appear in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.

…and if you were wondering: oh yes, I do own the deluxe edition of The Beatles: Rock Band:

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.