The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century
Joey deVilla's Personal Blog
Over at my-nhl.com, there are 5 amusing little films about the Oilers/Mighty Ducks series made using tabletop “knob hockey” figures. Enjoy, and congrats to the Oilers on making it to the finals!
Note: this is hockey, so there’s some cussin’ and swearin’. A couple of four-letter words ain’t gonna kill you.
[Thanks to LeROIduPLYWOOD for the link!]
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Last night’s DemoCamp was a battle against Murphy’s Law and a stubborn projector which refused to cooperate with the demonstrators’ laptops. It made for some waits between presentations, but at least it wasn’t as bad as Microsoft Live! demo of last November.
I was busy presenting Skydasher and Feedcache and helping host the event with Jay Goldman, so I didn’t get a chance to take any notes. Luckily these people did, so go check out their reports:
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In the comments to an entry from earlier today, Ethan tells me that he has discovered the secret of Silicon Valley: there’s a software engineers’ Fight Club. He points to a Globe and Mail article, Superheroes for a Night.
I wrote about it in Tucows Farm a couple of months back and pointed to a news report complete with hilarious video clips (I always crack up during the fight where they use “Hello Kitty” toilet seats as weapons). Here’s an excerpt:
Never mind blowing off steam with videogames or going to the gym: a group made largely of software engineers in Silicon Valley have started The Gentlemen’s Fighting Club, a group whose activities are similar to those depicted in Fight Club. Unlike Fight Club, which is all about unarmed and unprotected combat, fighters in this club wear fencing masks, gloves and jockstraps and fight with all sorts of improvised weapons, from rolled-up Oprah magazines bound with duct tape to cookie sheets to “Hello Kitty” toilet seats.
Apparently it’s stress relief for these guys, and none of them seem to mind the injuries that come with the territory. If I were a member, I’d dress up exactly like the guy in the “Spongebob Squarepants” t-shirt.
Those of you who haven’t been reading this blog for too long may be unaware that I used to busk a lot more, back when I lived right by the club district. On weekends, I’d bring my accordion along and go clubbing with friends like everyone else. After last call, I’d go to the Amato’s Pizza where everyone grabbed a late-night bite and start playing. On a good night, I could easily get a hundred bucks — going out often ended up being a net gain, money wise — and if I played my cards (and accordion) right, I could get a phone number or two.
Most people who buy a late-night slice at Amato’s usually hang out on the sidewalk outside, which became my busking “stage”. Depending on the night, anywhere from 50 to 150 people would hang out, eat their pizza, chat with their friends, look for another party and sometimes, look for a fight. Sooner or later, in a crowd that’s come from a bar or club, someone will be itching for a fight. In all but one case, the fight involved two guys, and after the fight broke up, they’d be hustled into a car by their friends before the cops came. In every case I’ve seen this happen, the car had a dealership stciker that clearly marked them as from “The 905″ — the area code for the ‘burbs.
In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote that the way suburbs are designed and laid out results in boredom, and boredom leads to trouble. In the case of the guys fighting outside Amato’s, I’d say that boredom was part of the problem (the other part being that downtown was merely a playground to them); in the case of the Silicon Valley Fight Club, I’d say that their problem was a toxic combination of boredom and some other kind of emptiness in their lives.
That boredom and emptiness is why Dinesh Prasad, a member of the club, skipped meeting his wife for their first-year anniversary and went to the club instead (he’ll be divorced in a couple of years at this rate). Gints Klimanis, the organizer of the fight club, explains the club’s appeal:
“We have to go to work every day. We’re constantly told to buy things we don’t need, and just for a couple hours we have the freedom to do what we want to do.”
This is a complete seat-of-the-pants supposition, but I’d be willing to bet that the guys in the Silicon Valley fight club didn;t work at start-ups, but at large, established tech companies that once were start-ups but now have hundreds, if not thousands of employees and a very well-defined org chart. They’re not in the garage, they’re in the Dilbert Zone: cubicle-bound cogs in a large machine, not living the dream, but the nightmare described in the blog Mini-Microsoft.
Next: The first act of nerd violence I ever witnessed, and how it affected my choice of university.
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The world’s toughest man needs the world’s toughest wipe:
Feel free to make any “badass” jokes in the comments.
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Paul Graham, whose essay How to be Silicon Valley was the inspiration for this blog entry, has written a follow-up titled Why Startups Condense in America. I’ll write up more on it later.
One of the more interesting responses to my posting on Silicon Valley came from Danielle Meder, who comes from a completely different industry: fashion. In her blog, final fashion, she writes:
One of my favourite local characters, Accordion Guy, offers on his blog a recipe for Toronto to become Silicon Valley. It seems that fashion is not the only industry where Toronto struggles to define itself. Despite the fact that it is a city that is liberal, creative and economically strong, Toronto constantly deals with identity issues. Too often we define ourselves by what we are not or measure ourselves against inappropriate benchmarks (we are not New York and never will be) rather than positively asserting what we are.
Danielle points out something that some people from the tech field have pointed out in previous comments: that the Canadian aversion to self-promotion is a problem. Come to think of it, I can’t think of much in the way of my wardrobe that could be described as “Canadian”, save for a couple of dress shirts from Tip Top (who’ve improved a bit over the past few years) a couple of vests from local guys Hoax Couture and some stuff from Mexx Everything else was designed by Americans, Germans or Italians and stitched (or possibly glued) by Indonesians.
Although the stereotype is for geeks to actively eschew fashion, it does matter to a number of us. I’m sure I’ve written at least one decent fashion blog entry, and I’ll be the first to admit that the accordion is a thirty-pound fashion accessory (albeit one that makes nouse and can convert music into free beer).
Consider the DemoCamp “brain trust”: I don’t think I’ve seen David Crow without a blazer or Sutha Kamal or Thomas Purves without a good dress shirt on. I sometimes tend towards the raffish — check out my ties and shoes or the Pants of Power — but I’ll go back to the classics when the occasion demands it.
I’m not up on the state of the fashion industry in Toronto, so I doubt if I can contribute anything useful to the “How can we promote Toronto’s fashion industry?” conversation. (Hey, I haven’t even caught up with this French-cuffs-and-cufflinks trend; I don’t have a single French cuff shirt and one of my three sets of cufflinks are black with silver Playboy bunnies on them — they might come in handy if ever someone throws a Dean Martin theme party). If you’ve got any ideas, drop by this entry in Danielle’s blog and leave a comment!
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Don’t forget: DemoCamp 6.0 takes place tomorrow! For more details, see this entry in Tucows Farm. Ross and I will be among the presenters — we’ll be presenting Skydasher and Feedcache.
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[Thanks to "mantid" for finding the photo] Here’s a clever poster design from the PR department for the German branch of Unicef about child labour. The “S.O.S.” is very cleverly worked in:
The bottom of this poster reads “Children forced into work are calling for help”.
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Today is a holiday in both America, where’s it Memorial Day, and Fiji, where it’s Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna Day. Have a good one!
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While wandering around downtown Accordion City on Sunday afternoon, Wendy and I looked for a place to grab a quick lunch and ended up at Journo on King Street West and Widmer Street. It’s part-magazine store, part cafe and although I can’t quite put my finger on exactly why it seemed that way, it felt more like a Montreal establishment than a Toronto one (the big signs for their Van Houtte coffee certainly made it seem more Montreal-ish.)
It was a warm day, so went opted for a light lunch: a chicken salad sandwich and a pasta salad. The sandwich was merely okay, but the pasta salad was pretty good. In addition to salads and sandwiches, the coffee bar half of the store also has a large selection of cookies and pastries as well as Van Houtte coffees, both brewed and espresso machine-based.
The magazine section of Journo is devoted to what you’d expect to find in a decent magazine store: racks of magazines covering all sorts of interests, a selection of local, national and international newspapers and a small but interesting selection of bestselling paperbacks. It seems like a funkier version of stores like Great Canadian News and its sister in Francophone regions, Maison de la Presse. There’s a reason for this, which I’ll cover later on.
Journo also has some offerings that remind you that we’re living in the 21st century. There’s a section devoted to prepaid phone cards, but more interesting is the kiosk where you can download ringtones for your mobile phone and MP3s for your iPod. You can print photos from your camera’s memory chip, too. If you have a Rogers WiFi account (or sign up for one), you can access their hotspot.
The front section of Journo has about six or eight tables. Most of these tables were located indoors, but a couple were on its small street-facing patio, on the other side of a retractable wall. I didn’t check for power outlets near the tables, so I can’t report on their availability.
I did a little Googling and found that Journo is one of three stores being given a trial run by their owner, HDS Retail North America, a branch of Hachette Distribution Services which in turn is owned by the French media and high-tech group Lagardere. HDS Retail owns the Great Canadian News and Maison de la Presse magazine store chains. (Call me a business nerd if you must, but I sometimes find playing the “who owns whom” game interesting.)
According to this Globe and Mail article, Journo is an experiment. If these gene-splices of HDS’ core magazine store business with a cafe and a download kiosk prove to be successful, the plan is to open 100 Journos in Canada and expand into the United States.
Of note is the fact that the anti-smoking movement and smoking bans played a role in Journo’s creation. The article states that tobacco sales used to be the bread and butter of newsstands and that these merchants are now looking for “alternative revenue streams”, which is bafflegab used by suits that simply means “something else to sell”. In this case, it’s a switch of addictions: from tobacco to coffee.
If managed right, these guys could have a winning formula. In my opinion, the coffee they serve at Journo — Van Houtte — can easily go toe-to-toe against the brewed coffees at Starbucks or The Second Cup. Journo’s food selection has is at least as extensive as Starbucks or Second Cup’s, if not more so, and neither of those chains has a pop fridge for those who don’t want coffee, tea or overpriced designer juice. Books, magazines and newspapers are a natural match for cafes, and like its sister stores Great Canadian News and Maison de la Presse, Journo’s selection is pretty eclectic, especially considering that it’s a chain. On weekdays, Journo closes at 10 (which is comparable with most Starbucks and Second Cups), but on weekends it closes at midnight, well after most other coffee shops and magazine stores have turned out the lights.
They could probably do away with the download kiosk. Phones and MP3 players are too different and change too rapidly for it to be compatible with more than just a handful of models. I think they’d get a bigger bang for the buck by switching to free WiFi and capitalizing off the people who like taking their laptops to cafes; the maintenance costs would be cheaper, and when’s the last time you went to a cafe when there wasn’t at least one person with their laptop pulled out?
They might also do well to get rid of the flat-screen TVs hanging from the ceiling, which show the Pulse24 channel constantly (although with the sound turned down). They detract from the atmosphere, do nothing to lure in customers and are a waste of money.
Next: More thoughts on Journo, Starbucks and its malcontents, “third places” and “cafe coding”.
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Wendy and I picked up Douglas Coupland’s latest book, JPod, at Chapters last week for a song. It was front-and-centre at the Bloor and Runnymede branch, with a “30% off” sticker on it, knocking it down to about 25 bucks, which is pretty decent for a hardcover.
Wendy ploughed through it last weekend. Her one-line on-the-spot review: “Wicked realistic: you’d live in JPod too if you let your true personality shine.”
Now it’s my turn. So far, so good, and yes, like Microserfs, it paints a pretty believable picture of life in a geek workplace. Yes, the dialogue is a little too Gilmore Girls-precious and pop-culture-metaphor-rich to be realistic, but that’s what I read Coupland for.
Here’s an excerpt from the start of the book, courtesy of NeverHappened.org:
Never Mess with the Subway Diet
"Oh God. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel."
"That asshole."
"Who does he think he is?"
"Come on, guys, focus. We’ve got a major problem on our hands." The six of us were silent, but for our footsteps. The main corridor’s muted plasma TVs blipped out the news and sports, while co-workers in long-sleeved blue and black T-shirts oompah-loompahed in and out of laminate-access doors, elevated walkways, staircases and elevators, their missions inscrutable and squirrelly. It was a rare sunny day. Freakishly articulated sunbeams highlighted specks of mica in the hallway’s designer granite. They looked like randomized particle events.
Mark said, "I can’t even think about what just happened in there."
John Doe said, "I’d like to do whatever it is people statistically do when confronted by a jolt of large and bad news."
I suggested he ingest five milligrams of Valium and three shots of hard liquor or four glasses of domestic wine.
"Really?"
"Don’t ask me, John. Google it."
"And so I shall."
Cowboy had a Jones for cough syrup, while Bree fished through one of her many pink vinyl Japanese handbags for lip gloss—phase one of her well-established pattern of pursuing sexual conquest to silence her inner pain.
The only quiet member of our group of six was Kaitlin, new to our work area as of the day before. She was walking with us mostly because she didn’t yet know how to get from the meeting room to our cubicles. We’re not sure if Kaitlin is boring or if she’s resistant to bonding, but then again none of us have really cranked up our charm.
We passed Warren from the motion capture studio. "Yo! jPodsters! A turtle! All right" He flashed a thumbs-up.
"Thank you, Warren. We can all feel the love in the room." Clearly, via the gift of text messaging, Warren and pretty much everyone in the company now knew of our plight, which is this: during today’s marketing meeting we learned we now have to retroactively insert a charismatic cuddly turtle character into our skateboard game, which is already nearly one-third of the way through its production cycle. Yes, you read that correctly, a turtle character—in a skateboard game.
The three-hour meeting had taken place in a two-hundred-seat room nicknamed the air-conditioned rectum. I tried to make the event go faster by pretending to have superpower vision: I could see the carbon dioxide pumping in and out of everyone’s nose and mouth—it was purple. It made me think of that urban legend about the chemical they put in swimming pools that reveals when somebody pees. Then I wondered if Leonardo da Vinci had ever inhaled any of the oxygen molecules I was breathing, or if he ever had to sit through a marketing meeting. What would that have been like? "Leo, thanks for your input, but our studies indicate that when they see Lisa smile, they want a sexy, flirty smile, not that grim little slit she has now. Also, I don’t know what that closet case Michelangelo is thinking with that naked David guy, but Jesus, clamp a diaper onto him pronto. Next item on the agenda: Perspective—Passing Fad or Opportunity to Win? But first, Katie here is going to tell us about this Friday’s Jeans Day, to be followed by a ten-minute muffin break."
But the word "turtle" pulled me out of my reverie, uttered by Fearless Leader—our new head of marketing, Steve. I put up my hand and quite reasonably asked, "Sorry, Steve, did you say a turtle?"
Christine, a senior development director, said, "No need to be sarcastic, Ethan. Steve here took Toblerone chocolate and turned it around inside of two years."
"No," Steve protested. "I appreciate an open dialogue. All I’m really saying is that, at home, my son, Carter, plays SimQuest4 and can’t get enough of its turtle character, and if my Carter likes turtle characters, then a turtle character is a winner, and thus, this skateboard game needs a turtle."
John Doe BlackBerried me: I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS
And so the order was issued to make our new turtle character "accessible" and "fun" and the buzzword is so horrible I have to spell it out in ASCII: "{101, 100, 103, 121}"
Although I am a programmer, I haven’t memorized the ASCII table with the exception of uppercase “A” (65) and the space character (32). This may be the first non-tech book I’ve read that sent me scurrying to ol’ PowerBook to try something out. I threw together this Ruby one-liner to find out what the buzzword was:
[101, 100, 103, 121].each {|x| print x.chr}
So as not to spoil it for you, I won’t give away the buzzword in plain sight, but link to it here.
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If the image above is too obscure, see these blog entries by:
For reference, here’s Tim O’Reilly’s essay from last year, What is Web 2.0?. Note that nowhere in this essay does it say “And it’s my buzzword! Miiiiiine!“
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It’s that time of the year again: Doors Open Toronto takes place this weekend. 140 buildings of architectural, historic or cultural significance will open their doors to the public for free so that you can explore! It’s a great way to get to know the city and you’ll be surprised at the treasures we’ve got. For more details, see the Doors Open Toronto site and this Torontoist article. Maria’s got a plan, too.
The first of this summer’s car-free “Pedestrian Sundays” in Kensington Market takes place this weekend.
If the weather forecast is correct, Saturday and Sunday should give us some sun and warmth (Sunday’s high is supposed to be 27 degrees C), so you might want to head to the Annex and get some ice cream from Sweet Fantasies, which carries regular, dairy-free, low-fat and now organic ice cream.
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Me outside Fry’s Electronics in Silicon Valley, circa 2000.
Time is short today, so I’m going to be brief with this “Silicon Valley” post…
Nearly a hundred comments so far: Paul Graham’s using the site reddit.com as the comments section for his How to Be Silicon Valley essay, and he’s getting comments aplenty.
Ethan considers Canadian cities with a notable tech presence in the comments of this blog.
Memer suggests that “the one major missing piece (besides, potentially, cost of living) is the [lack of] perception of Toronto as a hip, liberal place to be.” I think this can and will happen — consider that in the 1950′s, you’d get arrested for playing a pick-up game of football on a Sunday. Nobody said a having a WASP heritage didn’t have a down-side.
An anonymous commenter says “I might be out of the loop, but I’m not really currently aware of any contending or ramping up Toronto start-ups that are generating buzz.” Of course, if this were the case, we probably wouldn’t be having this discussion. What we do have are most, if not all, of the elements in place. In terms of the evolution of life on earth, we’ve got the “chemical soup” and there are thunderclaps nearby.
And finally, ideas we can steal from other Canadian cities with a strong tech presence in order to make Toronto a better tech hub:
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Speaking of Silicon Valley, here’s a photo that captures the spirit of the San Francisco – San Jose drives that Cory Doctorow and I used to make:
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There’s been some interest in yesterday’s posting on Paul Graham’s essay, How to Be Silicon Valley, so I thought I’d answer some of the comments.
The first comment comes from an “Ethan” who chides me for not pointing to the following reports:
I’ve seen the first paper but not the second, so thanks for the heads-up, Ethan!
It was Paul Graham’s essay that prompted me to think about the efforts of both ICT Toronto and the loose confederacy of the DemoCamp brain trust, so that’s what I chose to point to. Besides, as a plain old web page rather than a PDF file and an essay written with a more general audience in mind — both in terms of geography and technical expertise — I thought it would be a more interesting read. But yes, if you’re in this neck of the woods and are seriously interested in the area’s potential as a high-tech hub, definitely read those papers.
Ethan asks if ICT Toronto are the same people as the TRRA (Toronto Regional Research Alliance). They’re not, but in page 52 of the ICT Report, it says:
The Toronto Regional Research Alliance (TRRA) has been formed to attract new public and private sector research investment to the region. TRRA reports that “The region is leveraging about half the public research dollars per capita of provinces like Alberta, BC and Quebec”. TRRA will attempt to attract research driven companies to the region, focussing initially on the ICT and bio-pharma sectors. At the same time, the TRRA will work with leading companies in key sectors that have already chosen to locate here, in order to expand their regional presence. If it succeeds, over time it should be an effective organizing for kick-starting new research institutions in Toronto. TRRA will also implement “a strategic, high level recruitment campaign targeting 10-20 high-growth, international, R&D-based companies likely to be seeking a North American R&D location in the next 5 years”.
TRRA has developed support and momentum for its plans, and should be a valuable ally in the Toronto Region ICT Strategy [emphasis mine].
Ethan also states:
I mean, who doesn’t want to be the next Silicon valley? If it was easy or obvious, everyone would do it. You omit historical factors, like the presence of the first semiconductor companies, which seeded the explosion in tech companies and the large number of defense contractors laid off in the area at the end of the cold war. And let’s be blunt: the weather in the bay area doesn’t hurt. Toronto’s weather, well, it can hurt at times.
“If it was easy or obvious, everyone would do it?” That applies to anything worth doing, dude. Please tell me that you don’t spend your entire life sitting in front of the TV, eating corn chips and masturbating. Please.
But seriously…
I’m not saying that Toronto should play the metropolitan version of Single White Female and obsessively duplicate the Valley. Think of the apocryphal story of the clothing company that got their hands on a French designer jacket. They brought it to a sweat shop in Hong Kong and said “duplicate this!”. They did…right down to the cigarette burn on the sleeve.
There’s much to the Valley that we shouldn’t emulate, from the laughable public transit to the nothing-but-bedrooms-communities-and-strip-malls landscape to the comic book convention male-to-female ratio to the fact that if it weren’t for the yogurt in Odwalla smoothies, there might be no active culture. When Cory and I lived in San Francisco, we often went to meetings in the Valley, where’d we’d joke as we passed by the Six Flags on Highway 101: we referred to it “Six Flags Over Absolutely Nothing”. Jamie Zawinski, who worked for Netscape, summed it up perfectly in his polemic San Jose is Hell on Earth.
I think there’s room in the industry for more hubs. Consider film and TV production; although one thinks of Hollywood, there’s a lot going on in Vancouver and Toronto — collectively known as “Hollywood North”. While only Hollywood can be Hollywood, we do a helluva lot of film work here and we also play host to the Toronto Film Festival, which over the past couple of decades has risen from obscurity to big player on the film world stage.
Yes, Silicon Valley’s tech industry is the descendant of the semiconductor industry which in turn is the descendant of the aerospace and military industries. However, they aren’t absolute prerequisites; they were what attracted the right people to gather in the same place at that time. I believe that there are at least a handful of ways to attract the right crowd for the information and communications tech industry, and perhaps even the next big industry to follow it.
I’ve got to get back to work, so I’ll post more later. In the meantime, keep those cards and letters coming!
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