Never before has so much awesome been gathered in one place.

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The Big Apple

Whenever my coworker Damir and I take to the road and the road takes us by Colborne, we make it a point to stop by the Big Apple. That’s not “Big Apple” as in the nickname for New York City, but rather the apple pie restaurant just off Highway 401 with a giant apple-shaped building beside it. The photo above shows where the magic happens, and the photo below shows the pie menu:

Along for the ride was our coworker Jaime, who’d never been to the Big Apple before> He was impressed by the long rows of ready-to-eat slices:

Here’s a sign that society’s getting a little too litigious: a warning that food that you heated yourself in a microwave oven just might be hot:

Jaime made the mistake of putting whipped cream on his apple pie before heating it up in the microwave. The end result wasn’t pretty, but he said it tasted good.

Back on the Road

With our bellies full of pie, it was time to hit the road. With winter approaching and standard time, the transition from day…

…to night was pretty quick:

In addition to conversation, we stayed entertained with the thrilling tales from an audiobook I bought at a truck stop last year: Mark Dalton, Trucker/Detective: Highway Robbery and Other Tales of the Open Road. It’s pure pulp fiction, but it’s also like cheap potato chips – you know it’s bad for you, but once you try it, you can’t stop yourself:

Dinner at Reubens

We pulled into our hotel, the Queen Elizabeth, around 9:30 p.m., quickly dropped off our stuff, caught up with our coworker Rick and made a beeline for Reubens, where it was smoked meat and Bloody Caesars all ‘round:

I always eat and drink well in Montreal!

(In the photo above, from left to right: me, Damir, Stuart from TELAV (in the back), Rick, Jaime.)

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To my American readers: Happy Thanksgiving! I have much to be thankful for, and I hope you do too.

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…and as a matter of fact, I do have a stitch to wear. Waiting for Jamie Sorgente’s ride from the Hotel Le Germain (a pimped-out Audi that they use to take guests about town) to pick me up at the Queen Elizabeth and take us to Garde Manger.

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I stopped blogging for a week, and a number of people asked if I was all right. The second-best answer I can give – at least here on the blog – is “Yes…considering the circumstances.”

As for the best answer, it’s a dream that I had Thursday night, after returning to my hotel room after a healthy dose of rye-and-cokes at a post-conference cocktail party in London, Ontario, and lying awake, having one of those long dark nights of the soul where you ask yourself so what do I do now? 

For the purposes of a public forum like this one, I think it does a pretty good job of capturing my state of mind without violating any confidences.

In the dream, I’ve got my accordion strapped on, and for some reason, I’m wearing the stereotypical mariachi band outfit – the kind that’s black with lots of gold trim. Around me are two dozen other guys and a couple of women. The guys vary in age from boys in their teens to men in their 60s and are dressed like I am, while for some reason the women are wearing old-school Swiss Chalet waitress uniforms, the type that had “beaucoup décolletage”.

One of the guys looks familiar, and it turns out to be Paco Ortega. I played accordion with his daughter Lindi, in an earlier incarnation of her band back in 2001, when she was doing shows in support of her first album. For the first few gigs, Paco was our band’s bassist, and in this dream, he had a big Rickenbacker bass slung over his shoulder.

“Paco," I ask him after shaking his hand, “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”

“I have no idea,” he replies, “I was at home, and suddenly, I’m here in this ridiculous costume.”

A quick glance around the room reveals that everyone else is in the same situation: no idea of how they got here or why they’re dressed that way. Upon closer inspection, I realize that everyone has an instrument in their hands: each of the men is holding some kind of instrument suitable for a mariachi band member, while the women have glockenspiels.

“Where are we?” asks one of the younger guys, craning his neck towards the high ceiling as he looks around. To my left is a brick wall with circuit breakers, big electrical switches and pegs securing ropes leading to the ceiling. To the right is a red velvet curtain about two storeys high. Above us are bright lights. I recognize our surroundings: we’re backstage at some kind of theatre.

My curiosity gets the better of me and I try to take a peek onstage to see where we are. As soon as I touch the curtain to move it aside, the backstage vanishes. The rear wall is now an acoustic “clamshell” four storeys tall, the ceiling is now a starless night sky with a distant airliner flying overhead and where there once was a curtain, there’s now an audience waiting patiently for a performance. The venue looks familiar, but I can’t place it. Luckily, Paco knows where we are.

“Holy shit,” he says with a hushed voice. “This is the Hollywood Bowl.”

We’re all trying to make sense of our surroundings when we hear an ostinato piano riff start. The audience is leaning forward, in anticipation of a performance. Onstage, we mariachi/Swiss Chalet players are giving each other very confused looks. The piano part sounds familiar, but I can’t place it. Where have I heard it before?

That’s when I notice a little cubbyhole upstage, dead centre. In it is a musical director, whose face and gestures clearly say will you idiots start already, the audience is waiting!

The piano riff stops, and moments later, starts again. It’s a second attempt at the performance. The musical director is clearly agitated and the audience is beginning to look concerned and annoyed.

We do nothing except stare upstage, all of us with a “deer caught in the headlights” expression on our faces.

The riff stops again, then starts over again: it’s the third attempt. In the audience, a couple of people start making their way to the exits, while the rest of them whisper amongst themselves. A couple of the mariachi players are slinking offstage, trying desperately not to be noticed. It’s like one of those “Play me off, Johnny!” moments from Family Guy.

The musical director is pointing at his temple with his index and middle finger, with his thumb raised, pantomiming the act of blowing his brains out with a gun.

I’m deep in the middle of every performer’s worst nightmare.

For a brief moment, I contemplate getting offstage, but then it hits me: I recognize the piano riff. It’s the vamp for Semisonic’s pub anthem, Closing Time – a pop song that I remember for the line “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end“ (The Wikipedia entry for the song says that this line is a direct quote from Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger). Recognizing the song inspires me, and at that point I decide that rather than retreat, we should perform the number.

I unstrap my accordion’s bellows and started testing out notes on the keyboard in order to identify the chords (I do this at karaoke all the time). In the dream, I identify them as C – G – Dm – F.

(When I woke up and did a search for the chords, it turned out that the actual chords are G – D – Am – C, which is the same chord progression, just in a different key.)

The younger guys in the group recognize the song, and start to play. I yell out the chords to the older guys. I don’t have to tell Paco; he’s already picked out the chords and is playing a suitable bassline.

“Someone take out their phone!” I yell to my newfound bandmates. “Look up the lyrics!”

The song takes shape, and by the second verse, we’ve hit our stride. When the song hits its climax, with the repeated lines of “I know who I want to take me home”, it’s a glorious crescendo of accordions, Spanish guitars, trumpets, castanets, maracas and glockenspiels, bringing it to a perfect, if completely unorthodox, finish. The audience roars with approving applause and gives us a “Standing O”. As we bow, one of the glockenspiel-playing, low-cut Swiss Chalet uniform-wearing girls runs across the stage and puts her arms around me.

“You’re such a glocktease,” I tell her, and the dream ends.

I think my subconscious is trying to tell me something.

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“To infinity and beyond”, indeed:

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Gamercamp takes place today and tomorrow in Toronto! Billed as “two days of living, breathing and playing video games”, it’s a conference for people who make – or aspire to make – videogames, love to think and talk about them, and of course, play them.

I’ll be there today, catching the keynotes, and tomorrow, demoing XNA, Xboxes with Kinect and Windows Phone (yup, Microsoft’s a sponsor).

Gamercamp spans two days (here’s the agenda), with a different location for each day:

• Saturday, November 13th at Toronto Underground Cinema (186 Spadina, a little bit north of Queen)
• Sunday, November 14th at George Brown College School of Design (230 Richmond Street East)

If you’d like to attend, tickets are available at the door and also online. Here’s how much it costs to attend:

• The Gamercamp Festival Pass goes for $30.00 and gets you into the main sessions for Saturday and Sunday.
• If you’re attending Gamercamp and want a ticket to the 1UP Party (featuring musical acts Anamanaguchi and Starscream), tickets for 1UP are $12.00.
• If you just want to attend 1UP and not Gamercamp, tickets are $15.00.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

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It’s the 21st century, and that means it’s time to get your news the 21st century way: not read by some Western talking head on TV, but in the form of Chinese computer-generated animation!

Ever since my first encounter with the Chinese news organization NMA News’ animated take on the Tiger Woods car crash/infidelity story, I’ve been checking on their YouTube channel regularly to see their takes on various news stories, from less-serious stuff like the clash between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, their hilarious one-minute synopsis of the Facebook movie The Social Network and their coverage of George W. Bush’s new memoir…

…to more serious pieces like the Tyler Clementi suicide and the emergency go-around that a China Airlines jet had to do to avoid landing on an EVA Air cargo plane still on the runway. You might not understand the language of the voice-overs, but you will get the gist.

NMA News are aware of their popularity of their YouTube postings and have since expanded to create a “World Edition” version of their channel in English. The latest posting to this channel is an amusing gangsta rap number that does a pretty decent “101 level” introduction to the currency battle between the U.S. and China, as rapped by Hu Jintao and Barack Obama:

Money is not the only resource over which “Westerners” and “Asians” seem to be doing battle – universities are another one. The Canadian magazine Macleans (for those of you outside Canada, think Newsweek with a more conservative bent) publishes an annual issue in which they rank Canada’s universities and feature stories on university life and other issues surrounding post-secondary education. As they are wont to do, Macleans went straight for the cultural “hot button” with an article titled Too Asian?, which starts off with these paragraphs:

When Alexandra and her friend Rachel, both graduates of Toronto’s Havergal College, an all-girls private school, were deciding which university to go to, they didn’t even bother considering the University of Toronto. “The only people from our school who went to U of T were Asian,” explains Alexandra, a second-year student who looks like a girl from an Aritzia billboard. “All the white kids,” she says, “go to Queen’s, Western and McGill.”

Alexandra eventually chose the University of Western Ontario. Her younger brother, now a high school senior deciding where he’d like to go, will head “either east, west or to McGill”—unusual academic options, but in keeping with what he wants from his university experience. “East would suit him because it’s chill, out west he could be a ski bum,” says Alexandra, who explains her little brother wants to study hard, but is also looking for a good time—which rules out U of T, a school with an academic reputation that can be a bit of a killjoy.

Or, as Alexandra puts it—she asked that her real name not be used in this article, and broached the topic of race at universities hesitantly—a “reputation of being Asian.”

Those of you who know me well know that I went to one of the “white kids” schools – Crazy Go Nuts University, a.k.a. Queen’s. For me, it’ wasn’t that University of Toronto was too Asian, but too close to home; going there felt like flying to Paris and eating at McDonald’s. Queen’s, and for that matter, the other “Canadian Ivies” Western and McGill (where my sister did her undergrad), were popular choices with those Asian students who wanted to work both sides of the cultural divide. I led an experience more akin to Harold and Kumar than Long Duk Dong, but still majored in computer science. Crazy Go Nuts University let me sharpen both my computer programming skills and schmooze-fu, and both have proven to be a handy yin and yang that have kept me quite recession-proof (I even ended up benefiting from the econopocalypse of 2008).

The article hints at the possibility of Canadian universities establishing secret – or perhaps not-so-secret – quotas on Asian enrollment. It’s not the first time that people have talked about the insidious presence of a visible minority with a reputation for academics, and it’s just as creepy this time ‘round.

To anyone who’s a bit freaked out over Asians taking over universities, I have two things to say:

1. Would it kill you to crack open a math book once in a while and solve for x?
2. Remember the sage words of “Jack” (the TV exec on 30 Rock played by Alec Baldwin): “This country was built by immigrants. The first generation works their fingers to the bone building it from the ground up. The second generation goes to college, drives innovation, and makes a better life for their families. The third generation…[sigh] snowboards and takes improv classes.”

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

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Click the photo to see it at full size.

The “Ask the Experts” (or in French, “Demander aux experts”) area of the TechDays Ottawa conference sports whiteboards that were looking a little too blank for this recovering cartoonist’s tastes. Taking matters into my own hands, I started working on a whiteboard “tapestry”, adding to it during lulls that happened in the conference centre as sessions took place. By 2:45 p.m., the whiteboard was full and the result appears in the photo above – click on it to see it at a larger size.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

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Seen in the elevator at the hotel I’m staying at in Ottawa:

Heh heh heh.

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I’m on VIA Rail train 42, bound for Ottawa as I write this. As a student at Crazy Go Nuts University (some of you may know it by its other name, Queen’s) with friends and family in the Toronto/Ottawa/Montreal triangle, riding on VIA was a ritual in which I partook at least a half-dozen times a year. If I were to go solely by outward appearances, my student self – I was a student from 1987 to 1994 – would recognize just about everything on this train car; to my eye, it looks exactly the same as a circa-1994 one does, except for two things: the power outlets and the sticker above the window announcing the availability of wifi.

TechDays Ottawa, the Ottawa edition of Microsoft’s cross-country conference from developers and IT pros, starts tomorrow. Hence my presence on this train: I’m heading to the nation’s capital to help the conference along with my fellow evangelists Damir Bersinic, Rick Claus and Christian Beauclair. Once you factor in the travel to and from airports, the airport security dance and all the waiting around you have to do, the time difference between travelling from Toronto to Ottawa by train isn’t all that difference from getting there via plane. Within 15 minutes of arriving at Union Station’s front door, I’d acquired my ticket, bought breakfast, taken my seat on the train, fored up my laptop and gone online.

For those of you curious about the wifi on the train, SpeedTest.net reports that that I’m getting a download speed of 0.77 Mb/s and an upload speed of 0.76 Mb/s (you can see their report to the right). It’s usable for email, web, social networking and even for testing networked Windows Phone 7 apps in the emulator. It’s certainly not for downloading large files, and they block access to high-bandwidth sites like YouTube. It’s still better than the complete lack of internet access on most flight, and if I had higher-bandwidth needs, I could always switch to my internet stick.

I’m making a mental note to favour the train for any business trips to Ottawa or Montreal. This is especially useful for Montreal. since their Gare Centrale is right under the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth, Microsoft Canada’s preferred hotel.

The train left Toronto at 9:30 and will arrive in Ottawa’s so-called “Downtown” station at around 2:00 p.m.. VIA Rail is playing a little fast and loose by calling the Ottawa’s main train station “downtown”, but for my purposes, it’s at a convenient location: TechDays Ottawa’s venue is the Hampton Inn Conference Centre on Coventry Road, which is barely a kilometre away.

This afternoon, I’ll be helping set up the presentation rooms, hooking up the presentation computers for both developer tracks (Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud and Optimizing the Development Process) as well as the Local Flavours track, and then heading to speaker dinner later this evening to catch up with the presenters. Tuesday and Wednesday will be all TechDays, all the time, with Day 1 being a 14-hour day starting with the professional-focused TechDays during the day and the student-focused Go DevMental conference in the evening. Day 2 is a relatively languid 10 hours. Thursday puts me on a return trip to Toronto, this time in the form of a road trip with Damir, my road-tripping buddy from last year’s TechDays.

Watch this space (plus the other blogs, Global Nerdy and Canadian Developer Connection) for more reports from TechDays and the road!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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If you’re looking for something to do tomorrow night, Saturday November 6th from 8:00 p.m. on, I’m throwing a little birthday wing-ding at The Piston (937 Bloor Street West, just west of Ossington subway station). The Piston doesn’t really have a sign – it’s got a black storefront with a big garage door and a blue light, and it’s between Long & McQuade and the “adult magazine” shop. The beer’s great, the food’s nice and the music’s pretty good. Come on down for rock and roll, bacchanalia and birthday celebrations!

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