This month’s theme: Facebook.

To kick things off, serial entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chahal — whose tagline seems to be “became a multimillionaire at 18” — gave a pep talk. He just launched gWallet, a virtual currency platform which aims to bring some ethics and legitimacy to the industry.

But the talk steered clear of his current plans in favour of tips on how to succeed in life.

Why’s he qualified to give motivational speeches (other than his obvious financial success)? Watch the Oprah version of his life story:

The demos

I’ve never played a single game on Facebook; I have almost no attention span for them. I also refuse to use ugly software (which is why I don’t use Tweetdeck) and most Facebook apps are hideous.

BUT people seem to making boatloads of money with Facebook apps — sometimes in shady ways — which makes them at least interesting to check out.

Toronto’s serial entrepreneur, Albert Lai, talked about his latest project, Kontagent, which aims to bring social analytics to Facebook. He also passed around a bucket taking donations for Haiti and promised to match whatever was donated. The result: $1400.

Other demos tonight:

• Oz Solomon, Social Gaming Studios
• Greg Thomson, Tall Tree Games
• Joel Auge, HitGrab
• Mark Zohar, Scenecaster
• Roy Pereira, ShinyAds.com

(Also worth noting: there wasn’t a single Mac at the podium. I don’t want to sound all fanboy about this but it’s interesting to see how an event like Democa evolves.)

With the demos out of the way, it was time to move to the much-grungier Imperial Pub — ironically, the venue for a few previous Democamps.

Posted via email from dailystream.mondoville.com

Posted via email from hyfen’s posterous

One year ago, Toronto’s Twitter crowd came together to raise money for the Daily Bread Food Bank. In the summer, it happened again. Yesterday: a third edition of Hohoto!

For a lot of us, this was an anniversary of sorts. Sure, this community didn’t come out of nowhere but Hohoto was where so many of us met for the first time.

For example, compare and contrast the old Jaime Woo:

As a relative Twitter neophyte—illiTwitterate, if you will—we were slightly overwhelmed: it was like sneezing with your eyes open. The party felt like a high-school reunion. You know a few people, sorta recognize a few other faces, and there’s a sea of faces that do not compute at all.

…with the new Jaime Woo.

It was also the event that helped show Twitter is a Big Deal: a group of near-strangers organized a huge event in only three weeks.

In the last year, we’ve met a lot of people, had a lot of events, and sometimes made a difference — and at least some of this has been thanks to the community that formed around last year’s event. So to Toronto, cheers to a good year.

But enough with this sentimentalism.

Keeping it oldschool

Like last year, Hohoto was held at the Mod Club.

Similarly, these guys took care of the music.

With upstairs help from this guy:

(And this guy — except I didn’t get any photos of him. But Lee, thanks again for rescuing my camera bag!)

An anniversary gift

Traditionalists have come up with a big table describing which type of gifts are suitable to celebrate various anniversaries. For first year anniversaries, we’re told to give a gift of paper. Do banknotes count?

Let’s hope so — Toronto sure gave a lot of them: a whopping $48k was raised for the Daily Bread Food Bank.

@jaygoldman: Final #hohoto total: $48,424. Absolutely incredible. Our community is amazing.

(British people are told to go with gifts of cotton and as a Commonwealth country, we probably have this option too. Incidentally, banknotes are made out of a blend of cotton and paper. But this is an overcomplication of an already overcomplicated thought so now I’ve made it sit within these parentheses.)

And what good timing:

More Canadians than ever before are turning to food banks to make ends meet in recession-ravaged households, Food Banks Canada reports: 794,738 Canadians used food banks in March 2009. That’s an 18% increase over the previous year

Some surplus photos

Awesome night for a fogwalk.

Fog? My ears perked up. I’m a sucker for the stuff

I looked outside and sure enough, it was gorgeous. I grabbed my camera and jumped on my bike.

Was it worth going outside at 2am for?

(Oh wait, I’m jumbling the order. Forgive me — I’m just extremely proud of this shot.)

I stepped outside into an eerie version of the Annex.

I sped south on my bike. First stop: Central Technical School. The school is composed of two adjacent, but visually dissimilar buildings. The historical main building:

And the brutalist beauty, The Art Centre:

On Harbord, I headed towards another Toronto brutalist masterpiece, Robarts Library at UofT.

One more concrete masterpiece in fog: the medsci building.

From there, it was more traditional UofT. Soldier’s Tower and Hart House:

And the UTSU world HQ:

I biked north to Bloor. Another architecture landmark (of the world-class-ier variety): the new ROM Crystal:

From here, I headed through Queen’s Park (without stopping to shake hands with any of the creeps on the prowl) and hit Yonge Street.

At almost 4am, the afterparty on Yonge was still in effect. These party animals thought it would be a entertaining to hurl paper over the signs.

Whereas these guys just wanted to get home.

Southwards! The city’s new heart looked about the same as it always does.

Note the police. They (or their colleagues, anyway) make a guest appearance later on.

The fog put these two in a contemplative mood:

I didn’t encounter a single soul in Yorkville. (But does one ever?)

But the night’s lighting really brought out the angles of the Four Seasons.

Back in my home turf, Bloor looked better than ever.

You think it ends there, do you?

A postscript

Ironically, before I went out, my friend told me:

@hyfen Wandering around at night through a residential area with a camera. Seems legit.

Little did I know…

Just as I was entering my apartment building, I heard a car screeching down my driveway. “That’s strange,” I thought. The car was coming the wrong way.

Two big guys flashed police badges at me. They even had the customary cop stache. Legit, all right. One jumped out.

“What are you doing outside?”

“It’s a beautiful night outside and I was taking photos of the fog.”

“You weren’t taking photos through peoples’ windows were you? Can I see your photos?”

I started flipping through my camera but he cut me off. “That’s good enough for me,” he said and grinned.

I asked how long they’d been following me: “About half an hour.”

Bizarre. I hadn’t noticed a thing. That was either not quite true or spotting tails is a lot harder than in the movies.

But at least it wasn’t:

@hyfen could have had a repeat of @nruuuuup’s experience, nailed for “walking outside after dark with electronics”

Last month, I attended a tasting for The Macallan Scotch. As Pam said:

Going to learn about “The Macallan.” If it as a “the” it has to be amazing, right?

This guy sure thinks so:

He’s Marc Laverdiere, Scotch Whisky Ambassador for The Macallan. He told us all about the art of Scotch making.

Because so many other people — like Casie

— have already done such a good job of blogging his lesson, I’ll just share a few slightly-less-important things I learned:

Satan himself is involved in the distilling process.

I kid you not:

Scotch lends itself well to unusual pairings

Or at least Sass thought so.

Iceball making devices have been invented already

It’s a really mind-blowing process. You simply set a block of ice in this copper thingamajig:

And through the magic of science and specific heat you get something like this a few seconds later:

Again, because of physics, it takes longer for the ice to melt, keeping your drink cooler and less water-logged:

Talking about Scotch can often be misconstrued

Karly noted a few:

“the wood has nothing more to give”- “At first the wood is generous, over 20 years the spirit could overcome the wood”

http://twitter.com/_topshelf/status/5214980707

“you have yet to put your lips on the liquid, and it does not matter”

http://twitter.com/_topshelf/status/5214581032

Over time, the liquid will penetrate the wood”

http://twitter.com/_topshelf/status/5214317934

“part your lips when you smell, and then - have fun”

http://twitter.com/_topshelf/status/5214109734

Scotch plays well with light

And if this blog post spurred you into making a trip or three to the LCBO, the nice folks at Matchstick want you to tell them a thing or two.

Apparently the most common reaction was “OMG Facebook, I use that website!” — just more proof that the key to a successful Halloween costumes is to keep it simple enough so that even the drunkest idiot can understand it.

No details were overlooked. We all know how horrifically bad Youtube comments are:

Who is this chick? Halloween rox omggg

Or the Related Videos:

Or the meta Facebook wall comments. It gets even more meta:

All photos courtesy of Lori Lee.

What could be geekier than going to Halloween as video game characters from TF2? (If you don’t know what TF2 is and have a winter break to waste, click here.)

Close enough?

This certainly wasn’t the first time it’s been done. Heck, it’s even been done in Lego.

But none of these other guys had a backdrop quite as video-game-like as the Bahen Centre (computer science HQ) at UofT.

And here are some individual shots of the characters:

Pyro

Sniper

Engineer

Scout

Spies

Demoman

Medics

A cameo

The spy character in TF2 has the special ability to disguise himself as another player:

When disguised in TF2, you will resemble a Spy wearing a “cardboard-cutout mask” of your chosen class, to your teammates. This will help to distinguish you from an actual enemy player.

Here’s my friend Ian disguised as a certain blogger/photographer:

Update: you may also like the shenanigans from this year: Halloween 2.0: Social Media Edition.

A full day of inspiration and learning for developers, brought to you by the team behind StackOverflow.com and FogBugz. Lunch is provided so you’ll have plenty of time to hang out and meet other developers. Hope you can join us!

Here’s the guy who organized it. Contrary to appearances, I don’t think Joel Spolsky is tweeting: Update: he says:

I was checking the time, I think… we had so much on the agenda we timed everything down to the minute.

Unfortunately, I only arrived midway through the conference so I only have photos from the last two talks. It also means the only front-row seat left was behind a TV monitor on the stage - lots of awkward shots.

If you want to read all the proper reviews, they’re compiled — where else? — on stackoverflow. In particular, Geoffrey Wiseman has more photos.

Greg Wilson

I’ll leave it to Joey deVilla to do the summary of Greg’s amazing talk:

By my own judgement, as well as the judgement of the attendees, Greg Wilson’s presentation was by far the best one of the day. This was sole no-code-at-all presentation of the day, featuring the sort of “let’s change the world” vibe that we strive for at DemoCamp. In it, Greg challenged us to weed out the false or faulty maxims based on poor or no research that are now an accepted part of programming practices, find out what we really know about the practice of software development, and do our best to expand what we do know about programming, with research and rigor, not anecdotes and assumptions.

“How many people are still programming Java?”

Some hands went up. “It’s our generation’s COBOL.”

Joey deVilla always takes excellent best conference notes. Here’s
an look at what goes into producing them:

Greg posted his slides:

They got quite a bit of circulation around the internetz. The Hacker News discussion was particularly interesting. Most of the criticism surrounded the difficulty in measuring properties of software engineering. A comment from arohner:

Software bug rates are not comparable to scurvy incidence rates, and developer productivity is not similar to the number of bricks a laborer can move in an hour.

In any case, the message wasn’t that we should throw up our hands and crying “it’s too hard!”

Reg Braithwaite

Reg Braithwaite has some of the most challenging writing on software development out there. I recommend going through the posts in his sidebar if you’re at all interested in software development. In particular, A Brief History of Dangerous Ideas gives me goosebumps.

Last summer he announced that he was going to stop blogging. But all’s not doom and gloom. In fact, quite the opposite: he now publishes his thoughts using distributed version control software.

He gave a talk that was similar to the one he did at FutureRuby. His slides are all on Flickr.

Wrap-up

From Joey’s post:

At the end of the conference, Joel took a show of hands of people who’d attend next year. When nearly all the hands in the audience went up, he said “All right – we’re going to be back here next year!”

Full slideshow

(Excuse the awful photos. You’re not allowed to bring bags inside and I didn’t feel like carrying around my big camera.)

Aren’t fundraising book sales supposed to be folksy affairs with too many tattered copies of The Late, Great Planet Earth? Not Trinity College’s:

It is this country’s - and possibly this continent’s - greatest celebration of the allegedly dead medium known as the printed word. There are some 50,000 books being hawked, ranging from a rare 1884 world atlas selling for $100 to vintage literary paperbacks - Eliot, Hemingway, Richler - selling for pocket change. Nowhere else will you find a table of secondhand theology books assembled by an actual theologian.

How many other book sales get written up by the Globe and Mail? For those who want first crack at the offerings on the first day, they’ll have to stand in line for hours behind veteran collectors and fork over $5 for admission. It’s that hardcore.

To get an idea of how large this event is, last year’s book sale had 100,000 books and raised over $136,000. (Seeing these two stats together should also give you an idea of how good the deals are.) The listing on BookSaleFinder.com (a lovely gem — worth a poke around) gives it the coveted “BIG SALE” label.

When I first came to UofT, this and the other similar book sales on campus were Nirvana. I’d stumble home with piles of books, busting open more than a few backpacks in the process. But when I moved downtown, I became tired of dealing with “stuff” and implemented a zero-input policy for my apartment. This means absolutely no book buying (thankfully the internet is a big place). It’s surprisingly zen.

So why do I keep tempting myself by going to these book sales?

To witness moments like this: Michael Moore sitting next to an early edition of MaCaulay’s History of England:

Believe it or not, this is from the “Treasures” room. It’s hallowed ground for collectors — first editions, signed books, and rarities:

It’s filled with quirky books that represent different times. Like the glory days of eugenics :

Or history books written in the time when Christianity ruled the land:

Many of the books are breathtakingly beautiful. Like the cover art for George Orwell’s The English People, a strange book that he requested not to be reprinted. This copy is now in the possession of my friend Rob Duffy):

Or the beautiful gold foil printing on the cover of this otherwise crazy book about spiritual warfare written by one of the prophets of the Sevent-day Adventist Church, Ellen White:

How about $45 for a dozen pages worth of utterances from UofT royalty, Harold Innis. Here’s what Marshall McLuhan, also UofT royalty, had to say about Innis:

His intellectual disciple and university colleague, Marshall McLuhan, lamented Innis’s premature death as a disastrous loss for human understanding. McLuhan wrote: “I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing.”

I spotted a pair of first editions of these classic novels (hang on to your Stephen King books, folks):

To the main room! The first picture in this post shows the space. This is where the plebs browse for middlebrow non-fiction. UofT dignitaries of yore stare down at you while you browse:

When asked where the US history section was, a volunteer unsarcastically directed us here (note the section’s name):

I read The Dark Side of Camelot almost cover-to-cover in one of those beautiful corner windows on a top floor of Robarts Library. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh shatters most of the sacred myths of the Kennedy era. I tried to force it on my friend Rob Duffy — a huge Kennedy fan — but he flat-out refused to give up his illusions. I secretly told his girlfriend Emily to buy it for his birthday:

A frustrated conservative ridding themselves of all their McCain artifacts?

Some volunteer probably thought they were being clever for using an oversized $1000 bill to mark the Business section:

The one thing that shocks me is how much alcohol Trinity alums seem to consume. The books are all transported in these boxes:

All in all, a wonderful afternoon of journeying through times of old. And I even managed to emerge without purchasing a single book.

The full list of violations is pretty egregious.

I ate there at least a few times a month. Not only did the food taste exactly like my Lebanese grandmother’s cooking, they always kept a chess set around. Andrey and I used to play all the time when he still lived in Toronto.

Here’s a picture of a typical plate.

Sigh

Update (Oct 29): And it’s open again? I’m so torn.

Posted via email from hyfen’s posterous

My friend Jen posted a link to this deal dubbing it the “Deal of the Century.” I clicked ‘Buy Album’ within seconds.

To re-emphasize, that’s 730 tracks / 2:10:06:35 time / 6GB worth of music for $9.99! It’s almost certainly a pricing error on the Canadian iTunes store. It’s listed at $119.99 in the US store. (Canadians get cheaper healthcare AND classical music!)

Deal or no deal, this is a pretty fantastic collection from probably the best classical recording label in the world. This ain’t no second-tier, discount-bin “Classical Greatest Hits”. Here’s a press release-ey statement:

Deutsche Grammophon’s president Michael Lang said, “Deutsche Grammophon remains the preeminent classical recording company – presenting the finest in recorded music by the best artists – while anticipating and fulfilling the evolving interests of its old and new audiences. Deutsche Grammophon is poised for a vibrant future as remarkable as its storied past.”

http://www.dg-111.com/en_GB/albums/55-cd-box-set

To all my Canadian friends, I’m officially considering you an idiot if you don’t take advantage of this temporary price anomaly.

Update: Someone landed on this post via the Google query “111 years of deutsche grammophon crash itunes” — there’s that much music.

Update (Oct 27, 01:20): Could they be finally changing the price? The front page of iTunes shows the price at $119.99 (if you click and go to the album page, it’s still at $9.99):

Update (Oct 27, 11:26): Christmas is over. The album is now $119.99 (or $148 if you prefer being able to cradle these in your hands). For everyone who’s still arriving at this post, that price is still an excellent deal!

Download now or listen on posterous

3-04 24 Préludes, Op. 28_ IV. In E Minor.m4a (4114 KB)

Download now or listen on posterous

21-13 Suite No. 2 in B Minor, BWV 1067_ VI. Menuet.m4a (2611 KB)

Posted via email from hyfen’s posterous

Well, not necessarily.

“Unconference” isn’t a catch-all term for any event that’s free and unstructured. Instead, it’s a gathering where the rules are agreed upon by all participants. (Consult the Wikipedia entry for details.)

Apparently this distinction trips up even publications like NOW. In a piece titled “‘Un’ too many”, Josh Errett asks: “has Toronto reached a tipping point with unconferences?” The article’s message: there are way too many unconferences in Toronto and perhaps some consolidation is in order.

But people immediately jumped on his lack of evidence. Ryan Coleman comments:

Wow. Stunning research at work here as approximately NONE of the events you list would be considered, nor advertise themselves, as “unconferences”.

Again, from another comment on the post by Mark Kuznicki:

I will add that you do your readers a disservice by failing to clearly explain what an unconference is. “The idea is that there is no format” is completely wrong. There is a format. An unconference is a self-organizing format where the participants create the content.

So the bottom line: there are lots of casual events in Toronto but not all of them are real unconferences.

Last month, I found myself at one of the real ones: HealthCampTO.

We will use the “unconference” format to create a safe place for contrarians, free thinkers, change agents and idea entrepreneurs. It is the first healthcamp in Canada, modeled after the globally renowned healthcamp movement begun in San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia.

The invite came courtesy of my friend Rob Fraser. I first met him while working on an article for The Varsity about online communities. After an earlier interview with Daniel Patricio, he introduced me to Rob and his blog, nursingideas.ca, citing it as an example of someone who was using technology to reach out to a broader community beyond the boundaries of a particular school.

Half a year later, Rob is still extremely active in the healthcare community. One of his latest projects was helping organize HealthCamp.

Here’s Rob introducing himself at the start of HealthCamp:

Fellow organizer Carlos Rizo kicked off the day with a tale about Umberto Eco. The scholar has a collection of 30,000 books and when visitors enter his library, most comment on the sheer size of his collection. However, 1% of the time, someone will tell him: “Amazing! All this knowledge — there’s so much more that we have to learn.”

Likewise with healthcare.

Unconference facilitator, Mark Kuznicki laid down some rules:

• Law of two feet: if you don’t like a session, you can leave
• The 1/n rule: don’t try to talk more than 1/n percentage of the time, where n is the number of people in a session

After the introductions, people wrote down issues and questions which they felt should be discussed. The grid below represents the room and time for each topic (also available online):

A full day later, here’s Jen McCabe sharing some her thoughts at the end of the day.

If you want to go through the digital artifacts from the day, you can replay the CoverItLive Feed or check out the various topic pages.

Posted via email from hyfen’s posterous

From an excerpt on Wikipedia:

This book is my personal summary of the evidence that the ‘theory’ of evolution is actually a fact - as incontrovertible a fact as any in science.
—Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, p. vii

Heavy.

As part of the literary-industrial complex’s promotion efforts, he made a whirlwind voyage through Toronto’s media scene last week. Hamutal Dotan and I decided to join in the fun and cover the Indigo-organized book reading for Torontoist.

Full house at Isabel Bader. Apparently lots of people like this guy. So for everyone who had to fork over $10 (or $100 in the case of this desperate soul) to see Dawkins, was it worth it?

Only if you enjoy listening to celebrities read. Don’t get me wrong — Richard Dawkins has a beautiful voice and an even more beautiful writing style.

But about the only thing that I learned that I couldn’t have got from his book is the fact that his wife knows how to paint neckties. He was wearing one that featured various icons of evolution and apparently it’s one of his most cherished possessions.

Other than that, it was the usual Creationist-bashing that anyone who follows the evolution “debate” is familiar with.

The Canadian twist, of course, was the abundance of self-congratulatory clapping to indicate how much saner we are than those crazy Americans. From Hamutal’s piece:

In a textbook case of preaching to the choir, Dawkins gleefully skewered the 44% of Americans who believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” and his listeners laughed right along with him.

If Dawkins really wants to reach this group, is such a sarcastic, aggressive tone the most effective?

Again, from Hamutal’s piece

The very last question of the evening dealt with a recent attempt to repackage atheists under the more positive-sounding name “Brights.” Dawkins, a supporter of this movement, told the audience that the term never took off because it implied that non-believers were smarter than believers. “So?” he asked rhetorically, with an arched eyebrow and a knowing smile.

But at least he wasn’t as offensive as another angry atheist I’ve covered before.

After the highly-regulated Q&A, it was off to the assembly-line style book signing. Streams of people were hustled past the sales table and given a brief moment with Dawkins to get their books signed — “No greetings! Just signatures” — and perhaps squeeze in a few moments of chit chat. Like most celebrities, Dawkins is a master at extricating himself from demanding questions (the swarms of Indigo staffers also helped on this front).

All in all, not the most memorable event. But hey, at least I wasn’t the victim of a theft like I was the last time I covered something with Hamutal.

If you want to see pictures of someone who managed to score closer seats, Michael Willems has also has some shots on his blog.

This event is a special one – we’d like to thank each of you that has supported Refresh Events over the past year. Come on out to The London Tap House on August 24th at 7pm to meet fellow designers, developers, social media experts and others working in Toronto’s vibrant interactive community.

Here’s the view from the roof:

This DJ sure gets around:

This DJ, not so much. Here’s Saul “wiki wiki”-ing.

There was cake:

(Sprouter has a better photo.)

Some more pictures

(Alternately, you can look at Elaine’s set - she has way more.)

If you suspect you’ve seen a post with this title on my blog before, you’re absolutely right!

But eagle-eyed readers will spot a slight variation in the casing of the letters. This one is pronounced “ho-HOT-o.”

Get it? “Hot.” As in the awful muggy weather we’re having right now.

Yesterday was the summer followup of the charity event that raised $25k for the Daily Bread Food Bank.

Join us at the #hoHOTo summer camp. Do you really think that we geeks could resist the chance to run a summer camp?

Due to the lack of lakes — I said “lakes” not cesspools — in Toronto, it was held at the multi-storied Wetbar & Suite 106 in the heart of Clubland.

Mmm. Summer breezes.

Actually, it was much cooler inside. Here’s the view:

A whirlwind summary of the night

Prizes were drawn:

And cotton-candy was handed out:

Certain Microsoft employees were there. Like this guy:

Or this guy (the accordion-playing variety).

As usual, the tunes were brought to you by these fellows:

And the photos were taken by this birthday boy (taking a drinking break):

Final tally: $10,500 to the Daily Bread Food Bank.

The full set of photos

Yes, it might look more like Colorado, but this photo was indeed snapped in Ontario. It’s from an area known ominously as “The Cheltenham Badlands” and is located right about here.

So what’s the story?

Ages ago, this part of Ontario was the edge of a shallow sea. Iron-rich sediment and the shells of sea creatures compressed together to form this reddish shale and now it’s part of the Niagara Escarpment.

But why don’t we see more of this in Ontario? That’s where us humans come in. A century ago, farmers cut the trees down, and the land was used for cattle grazing. In other parts of Ontario, shale is typically protected with layers of harder rock but here, heavy overgrazing and erosion left nothing but this scifi-ey landscape.

This handy sign had the full scoop (view it at full size):

It’s very interesting to see where vegetation surviving in the middle of the shale.

It’s also a great stage for some parkour… without the buildings.

This was only half of our trip. After this, we headed west to Elora Gorge.

Because of past electronics-related tragedies, I decided to play it safe and stow away my camera. The remainder of the afternoon was spent relaxing in a tube that moved rather slowly down the Grand River.

We took the scenic route home, passing through Ontario’s beautiful countryside.

(Ironically, I almost like my iphone photos more)

 — 
Andrew Louis http://hyfen.net

Posted via email from hyfen’s posterous

Once upon a time, I had a math teacher who constantly suggested that my friend Sharlene and I should get married. One day, instead of groaning, we decided to just go with the flow and announce that we got engaged.

And so she became my “fiancée.” This nickname guaranteed a solid five minutes of fun confusion whenever we happened to introduce each other at gatherings.

But alas, all great party tricks must come to an end. A few years ago, she went to Calgary and came back to Toronto with a real fiancé. Yesterday, she got married.

As part of her wedding gift, I offered her my camera-operating capabilities. This got me a spot in the limo:

It had what all good weddings should have: tree climbing, cute children, and a group dance of the Macarena.

Congrats Sharlene and Ian!

(no decision yet on whether we will maintain our sham engagement)

Update: Why did it take so long for someone to tell me that fiancée is with two e’s? Come on people.