by Joey deVilla on September 11, 2006
Monday, September 25th marks the return of DemoCamp, the show-and-tell eevnt for the Toronto tech community, to its regualr monthly scehdule. This Democamp will start at 6:30 p.m. and will take place at No Regrets Restaurant. This month’s demos will be:
- DictaBrain - Rapid Voice to Text to Blog Transcription
- InfoQ.com - Floyd Marinescu
- ConceptShare - A new way to share and manage visual design concepts
- the eMail company - Build online webforms, webpolls, surveys, refer a friend forms, subscriber profile centres on the fly…and sooooo much more
- Unspace presents.. Pursudo - put yourself out there
For more details, see the wiki page for DemoCamp 9.
by Joey deVilla on September 11, 2006
The photo below should give you an idea of where I was this weekend:
Click the photo to see a larger version.
That’s the sign for the Frontier Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. I was in Vegas, but I stayed at the Mirage. What it lacks in dirty girls, mud wrestling and bikini bull riding, it makes up for by still having cold beer and being considerably less skanky.
I was there for a family vacation weekend to celebrate my mother-in-law’s birthday with Wendy, her mom, her dad, her brother and his grilfriend and her aunt and uncle. I’m at the age where vacationing with family is enjoyable again, and having recently come from a quick trip to Ireland where I caught up with my mom and sister and several cousins and aunts and uncles at my cousin Kara’s wedding, the past few weeks have been tiring but fun.
Recommended
While the highlight of the trip was celebrating the birthday of the other woman I call “Mom”, most of you readers would probably view the highlights of the trip to Vegas as…
We had the big birthday dinner on Friday night at the craftsteak steak house, located in the MGM Grand Hotel. craftsteak is part of Tom Colicchio’s family of restaurants under the “craft” name and follows the philosophy currently being espoused by the better Food Network chefs: prepare food simply, but do so extremely well. The restaurants use ingredients from specialty providers and small family farms.
I started the meal with an excellent vodka-and-limoncello martini. As an appetizer, I had the heirloom tomato salad, which was made with slices of twelve different types of small-farm-grown tomatoes ranging in size from a cherry tomato to grapefruit-sized and ranging in colour from purple to yellow, dressed in simple herbs and a wine vinegar and extra virgin olive oil dressing. Wendy’s starter was a very delicious corn soup; while most corn chowders taste like cream soup flavoured with corn, the predominant taste of this soup was very fresh, very sweet corn. I plan to have it the next time I visit Vegas.
My main course was a 16-ounce cut of grass-fed sirloin, cooked medium rare. It was a very good cut of meat, deliciously prepared and unhindered by fancy sauces or too much spice. Wendy had the 10-ounce bison, also medium rare,. I had a bite, and it was also quite good. We selected a number of side dishes to share; my favourites were the assortment of mushrooms (hen of the woods, chanterelles and oyster mushrooms), sweet corn and grilled maui onions.
For dessert, I chose the ice cream sandwich, which was actually two sandwiches of homemade vanilla ice cream between two homemamde chocolate chip cookies. It may seem a bit prosaic to those of you who like their desserts a little more frou-frou, but these were really good ice cream and cookies made by a very good dessert chef.
On Saturday night, we saw the new Cirque du Soleil show titled Love. This show uses the music of the Beatles as the basis for the Cirque du Soleil acrobatics and special effects that we’ve all come to know and love. Having seen a number of Cirque shows over the years, I’d put this one in the top three and would also recommend it to rock fans for their first Cirque show. To my boss Ken, who’s going to vegas in a couple of weeks and hates gambling even more than I do: go see this show.
For more details about Love, see this Rolling Stone piece and this National Public Radio report.
by Joey deVilla on September 10, 2006
by Joey deVilla on September 7, 2006
by Joey deVilla on September 7, 2006
In both the upcoming podcast interview I did with Elliot and Ross and in a TalkCrunch podcast, Elliot credits me with telling Tucows that the web calendar application Kiko was up for sale, which in turn triggered the acquisition. When I posted it to our internal mailing list, I was thinking “Oh, it’s a long shot, none of the higher-ups will ever consider buying it, but wouldn’t it be nice if we did?”
(When he mentions me in the interview — it’s around the 4 minute 45 second mark — he calls me “a blogger of some renown”.)
Needless to say, I am so bringing this up at my next annual review.
Of course, I had to hear about Kiko’s going up for sale from somewhere or someone, and in this case, it was a someone named George Scriban. I’ve known George since my first year at Crazy Go Nuts University back in 1987, and we’ve been involved in all sorts of ventures together, from playing in the same band and working at Clark Hall Pub (he was a bartender, I was a DJ) to the working together during the Dot-Com bubble at OpenCola and his being the Best Man at my wedding. George IM’d me about Kiko, and I in turn sent a message to the Tucows Powers That Be.
This isn’t the first time that George and I have played “Outside Cop, Inside Cop” with a CEO. Back in early 2000, I was getting VC hints from George over the phone while I was doing dog-and-pony demos with Cory Doctorow in front of Canada’s largest venture capitalists. It put me in very good standing with OpenCola’s CEO, Grad Conn, and eventually landed George a job at OpenCola with the hip title of Iron Chef Business Development.
So George, in the words of Charles Montgomery Burns: I owe you a Coke.
by Joey deVilla on September 7, 2006
ISPCON is the premier conference and networking event for internet service providers of the wired and wireless variety, hosting providers and VOIP services. ISPCON Fall 2006 takes place in Santa Clara, California at the Santa Clara Convention Center from November 7th through 9th.
I’ll be hosting a panel titled What the Web 2.0? What it is, why it matters and where’s the money? on Wednesday, November 8th. I’ll also be wandering about the conference with my accordion at the ready and presumably with some squishy cows to hand out. Perhaps it’s time to call a Silicon Valley geek gathering for one of those nights — the one Ross and I held back in February (with the very able assistance of Tara Hunt and Chris Messina) was quite successful and a lot of fun to boot.
I won’t be the only person from Team Tucows onstage at the conference. My boss Ken Schafer will do his presentation, 30 Rapid-Fire Website Wins, Guaranteed and Fearless Leader Elliot Noss will do a keynote with the Internet’s Adult Supervision, the one and only Doc Searls — it’s called In the Hotseat with Doc: A Fireside Chat.
For more details, check out the latest entry on The Tucows Blog.
by Joey deVilla on September 7, 2006
by Joey deVilla on September 6, 2006
Yesterday, I recorded a podcast that covered the Kiko acquisition in more detail. Right now, I’m editing it and cleaning up the audio; I hope to post it by week’s end.
Just because I can, I’m going to be different and post an outtake from the podcast before posting the podcast itself.
Here’s an outtake of an interview session [486K MP3 file] with me and Tucows’ CEO, Elliot Noss, and my old boss, Ross Rader, General Manager of Retail Services. The question I meant to ask was about “how they managed to purchase an asset like Kiko in a spectacular auction,” and I completely flubbed the line, turning it into a question about how they got that spectacular ass.
It’s the very first thing we recorded in yesterday afternoon’s session. I like getting the bad takes out of the way as early as possible. Enjoy!
by Joey deVilla on September 5, 2006
For those of you who follow the news about web companies, you’re probably aware that the web calendaring application Kiko was recently put up for sale on eBay and sold for US$258,100. The only clue to the identity of the buyer was the eBay username “powerjoe1998″.
Well, now that all the i’s have been dotted and the t’s have been crossed, it can now be revealed: it’s us, and by us, I mean the company for whom I hold the title of Technical Evangelist: Tucows.
Want to know more? Check out the article on our new blog: Why We Bought Kiko.com.
I’ve just finished recording a podcast with our CEO, Elliot Noss and our General Manager of Retail Products, Ross Rader. It’ll get posted later this week and will go into more detail about the Kiko acquisition and have a tiny bit about my small but not insignificant role in it.
More about this in upcoming posts.
Want to Find Out More About Kiko?
You try it yourself — go to Kiko.com and get yourself a calendar — or if you’d rather read about it, check out all these links on Reddit.com.
by Joey deVilla on September 5, 2006
It’s an insanely busy day today at work, so in the meantime, please enjoy the photo below, which is titled The Exorcism of Toby. If you’ve got any ideas for captions, feel free to share them in the comments.
by Joey deVilla on September 1, 2006
Phone Call
Yesterday, I got a phone call at the office that started like this:
Voice on phone: Hello! Is this Accordion Guy?
Me: Yes, this is. How can I help you?
Voice on phone: My name is [X] and I own [moving company X]. I was wondering how I can get a comment removed from your blog.
It turned out to be another case of my blog entry titled Anyone Know any Good Toronto Movers? having a Google-based ripple effect. Regular readers of this blog will recall that this is the entry that led to my receiving a phone call from Quick Boys Moving. As a Google search will show, their vague threats backfired on them; the first page of results is largely about their thuggery.
In the entry, he said that [moving company X] got a couple of bad reviews. These reviews, being in a highly-linked article, were the number one results for Google searches on his moving company’s name. He was asking what he could do to get those comments removed, and if he could buy ad space on this blog. I explained to him that the ads were Google Ads; the content of the ads were determined by Google’s analysis of the contents of the web page currently being shown.
At least this guy was considerably more pleasant that the thug who called from Quick Boys. I was in a rush to get a lot of things done, so I took down his name and number and said I’d look into it and get back to him.
What I Plan to Do
I doubt that those comments were economic tort. I’m going to try and contact the people who left the comments about [moving company X] and see if they still stand behind what they posted. Based on this, I’ll make the decision as to whether those comments will stay or be deleted.
It’s incredibly unlikely that I will delete them. I asked specifically for opinions on movers in Toronto because I was moving and because it seemed that the general opinion is that there are many unscrupulous movers out there. These people came forward with their opinions and their experiences, and if you’re getting bad reviews, perhaps it’s because you’re providing terrible service. The way to fix this is not through threats or offers to buy ad space from me; it’s to provide good service and to respond in kind: with a rebuttal online.
Which Movers Did I End Up Using?
Based on the recommendations in the comments to my article, I went with Tippet-Richardson. Yes, they were pricier — about CDN$1000 for four hours — but they sent three guys in a truck equipped with all sorts of packing gear, wardrobe boxes and padding, and they were professionals who treated my nearly three bedrooms’ worth of stuff very well.
by Joey deVilla on September 1, 2006
I should use this photo as my avatar on Accordionist.org.
Accordionist.org is a site set up by Jordan Wagner as a place where accordion players can meet their peers, announce upcoming gigs, exchange playing and maintenance tips, talk about their repertoires and generally discuss all matters accordion. I’ve just signed up for an account, and if you play accordion and would like to chat with other accordion players, you might want to as well.
