November 2001

I’m leaving today…

…for New York City for a mini-vacation and to celebrate my friend George’s 32nd birthday.

I know it’s a day early, but George, as you once wrote on a birthday card: Happy birthday, you old poop. I’ll be in Manhattan by lunch, and maybe we can hit that nice Mexican place a couple of blocks up from your house. What say you, George?

Thanks to the Current Situation, I have to wake up at yet another ungodly hour in order to allow for enough time for airport security to make me crack open my accordion and prove it’s a working instrument. Hence this short entry…gotta get some shut-eye. But first, a couple of links…

Recommended reading

CBGB OMFUG and The Knitting Factory: Someday I’ll gig at these places. Someday.

The Soup Nazi. Yup, he really exists.

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The app I’ve been working on

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks hammering out a prototype of an news-gathering app that would be based on the peer-to-peer kernel that we’re developing. I’m pretty proud of this prototype for a number of reasons. For starters, it’s my first serious application written in C#. Second, there’s a clever little database-based engine underneath it that simulates a network of users exchanging and recommending news stories. For a “canned” app, it’s pretty smart. Finally, with only the most vague of specs provided by the suits and with the departure of our UI specialist and our graphic artist, I’ve had to do all the interaction and graphic design — this sucker really has my fingerprints all over it. I think I can show you the splash screen I designed without violating my NDA…

Ah gotz to reprasent to them wack-ass VC bitchez, yo

One of the occupational hazards of being a programmer at a start-up is doing early morning demos of your latest work for the monthly “dog and pony show” for the investors. The Chief Suit likes my prototype app and wanted me to show it to the guys from our VC, who I’ll just refer to as “J-Low” and “L-Dogg”. The prototype app isn’t quite done yet and I haven’t had a chance to build an installer, so I decided it would be safest to run it on my development machine, so there’d be no nasty surprises come demo time. I spent a good chunk of last night and the wee hours of this morning putting up enough “scaffolding” so that I could run a reasonable-looking demo. I woke up after 4 hours’ sleep to double-check the prototype for bugs (None! Yay!) and then wait for Johnny to come and pick me up from the corner of Queen and Spadina.

Ten minutes after he was supposed to pick me up, the wind started to blow and I was beginning to feel a little chilly.

Fifteen minutes after he was supposed to pick me up, I was really getting cold. I gave his cell phone a call and got his voice mail.

Twenty minutes later, still no lift. No answer on his phone either.

Half an hour later, I was trying to reach the office to tell them I’d be late. I’m imagining J-Low and L-Dogg sitting at the office, wondering where this nifty prototype that Chief Suit promised was.

I wrote Johnny off and called Kostya, the co-worker who normally gives me a lift to work. I arranged for him to pick me up at the usual place at our more civilized usual time and went to Lettieri (the Italian cafe at the corner) to have a hot chocolate and bash on the app a little more. Kostya picked me up about forty minutes later and got me to the office in time to do the demo, which took less than two minutes and got an simple nod of approval (and barely a mumble) from L-Dogg. This is what I stayed up late and woke up early for?

Normally, I’d say that L-Dogg is the strong, silent type, but that sounds too close to a compliment for the likes of a VC. They all need a good pimp-slapping.

One tiny upside

While waiting in the cold for Johnny to not show up (it turned out that he slept straight through his alarm clock’s blare), a car pulled up to the curb where I was standing. The cute brunette driver rolled down the passenger window (where an equally cute passenger was sitting) and they both yelled out “Hey, Accordion Guy! How’re you doing?”

Being greeted on the street like that — to me, that’s worth more than a million half-hearted nods of approval from a semi-interested VC.

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When my alarm clock goes off each morning, I look at it like it’s some tool of the inquisition whose nature is clear but exact use and application I’m still trying to puzzle out.

– Ry4an Brase, a friend and ex-co-worker of mine, on IRC.

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My ex used to say that I had this way of saying the word pants that sounded really dirty. Pants has a certain je ne sais quoi when you say it with your teeth place together in some kind of lecherous demi-smile. And that, my friend, is the theme of today’s post.

pantscam.com

Apparently a student named Alison has decided that it would be a worthwhile use of technology to place a webcam in her pants. A hand-sized Tri-M computer (powered by a 486), a small webcam and a Lucent 802.11 wireless card make this great contribution to the Internet possible. The whole thing is viewable on this page, and there’s even a handly little chat facility so that you can make Beavis and Butt-Head-esque comments to your fellow lechers.

In the twenty minutes I had my browser trained on the site, I caught a lot of darkness, then light, then some long-haired guy, then a bed. Naturally, I would be doing Way New Journalism (and the Internet as a whole) if I didn’t post some screen shots…

Suddenly, I am flooded with vague memories of my own birth.

What’s a dorm room doing in these pants?

And now the kid pants are off!

So this is what Marshall McLuhan was going on about.

Boong Ga Boong Ga

I got the link to Alison’s Pants Cam while reading about the latest Japanese videogame craze, Boong Ga Boong Ga, which translates loosely as “spanky-spanky”. The user interface consists of a derriere and a large finger which you wear on your hand. You gain points through ramming said derriere with the finger. This is probably not what Doug Englebart was thinking of when he invented the point-and-click interface.

If this kind of thing were invented in the States, there’d be all kinds of furor, but I can see the digerati going on about the inscrutability of Japanese culture. Let’s get off the blind Nihon worship, kids. Iron Chef was neat, but they’re capable of many dumb-ass ideas too.

Hey, I’m all for kink as much as…well, actually even more than the next guy, but I don’t think I want to be known throughout the arcade as the guy who’s really good at ramming his finger up people’s asses. In fact I’m worried that someone out there is thinking At last! A use for my secret talent!

Required reading

All your boonga are belong to us. The brochure for the video game, in classic Engrish.

Korean Ass Shooter. Korean. Ass. Shooter. What, you want me to draw you a picture?

A clever pun you can use when discussing Boong Ga Boong Ga: “The game may have its bottom-feeder appeal, but don’t expect much penetration in the North American market.” Arf! Arf!
Free Habbo Coins
I’m sticking with Dance Dance Revolution.

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