February 2012

This happened back in late 2010, but sometimes it takes a while for a video to go viral. Pictured above is a snippet from a newscast for WUFT, a TV station in Gainesville, Florida (seeing the word “Florida” should tip you off that something funny or weird is about to happen). In it, Kristin Giannas, who was working in the station’s edit suite on a project for one of her classes realizes that she’s just walked into the middle of a news broadcast and realizing that she’s in the shot, does what she can to get out. Hilarity ensues.

Kristin wrote about this event and explained what happened in this entry on her blog.

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This photo of marine Brandon Morgan kissing his boyfriend Dalan after coming home has gone viral with 14,000 “likes” on Facebook and 3,000 comments. Brandon’s reply to this response:

To everyone who has responded in a positive way. My partner and I want to say thank you. Dalan, the giant in the photo, can’t believe how many shares and likes we have gotten on this. We didn’t do this to get famous,or something like that we did this cause after 3 deployments and four years knowing each other, we finally told each other how we felt. As for the haters, let em hate…to quote Kat Williams, everyone needs haters, so let them hate. We are the happiest we have ever been and as for the whole PDA and kissing slash hugging in uniform…it was a homecoming, if the Sergeants Major, Captains, Majors, and Colonels around us didn’t care…then why do you care what these random people have to say? In summation thank you for your love and support. I received a lot of friend requests off this. I don’t just accept requests so if your request was because of this post message me and let me know. Goodnight all, and Semper Fi.

Ain’t nuthin’ wrong with being gay, despite what you’ll hear from social knuckledraggers. Besides, as my friend gruverja says: “If you serve this nation for shitty pay and lousy benefits, possibly at great personal danger to yourself, you should be able to kiss anyone you goddamn want and not to have to take any shit for it.”

(Besides, the guy’s a marine. You gonna give him static for being gay? It’s your funeral.)

Semper Fi!

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Shiner Bock: The unofficial official beer of SxSW.
Creative Commons Photo by Berenice Garcia. Click the photo to see the original.

Shopify’s going to be at the South by Southwest Interactive festival this year from Friday, March 9th through Tuesday, March 13th, and we’d like to invite you to join us for a drink and chat while we’re down in Austin! Whether you’re a shopowner with a Shopify-powered shop, a developer who builds Shopify apps, a designer who make Shopify themes or just wondering what Shopify’s all about, we’d like to meet up with you.

We’re working out the exact details of where and when – we’re thinking late afternoon/early evening of Saturday, March 10th — but we’ll announce it all over the place: on this blog, Facebook, Twitter and everywhere else we can.

More details soon!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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“High quality and functional toothpaste,” they said. “Delicious green tea and salt flavour,” they said.

While packing for tomorrow’s trip to Montreal to attend the ConFoo conference for the rest of the week – it’s part of the month of travel on which I’m about to embark – I found this tube of “Greentea Salt” toothpaste. My friend Dayv Mattt, who gave it to me, lives in Korea and gave me this to me when I caught up with him while he was visiting Accordion City to see his family over Christmas.

I’ll have to give it a try. I’ll post a review here and let you know what I think.

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Swear Cuts is a video featuring just the bits with the profane and unkind dialogue from the nine nominees for “Best Picture” for the 84th Academy Awards, a.k.a. the 2012 Oscars. The movies in this video are listed below, along with the “number of swears” they contain:

“DHRECK”, who assembled this video, also put together an article about it — check it out!

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Kudos to Sacha Baron Cohen for livening up the Oscars’ “red carpet” segment by going as his General Aladeen, his character from The Dictator, and dumping what he said were the ashes of his “dear friend and doubles tennis partner, Kim Jong-Il” on the normally bland TV talking head Ryan Seacrest.

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Han Solo vs. Darth Vader. One of the best scenes from the best film in the series.

This little bit of Han Solo-inspired philosophy has been around since 2009, and it looks as if Daniel Miessler’s the original author. I stumbled into it only recently and have adopted it as a regular reminder to myself:

So Han’s walking down the halls of Bespin with his old friend Lando. Leia’s there, and lookin’ good. Han thinks he’s off to dinner – maybe some wine, a little flirting, and then back to the ol’ guest quarters with Her Hotness.

But the door opens, and there’s Darth Vader.

Han doesn’t look incredulously at Lando; he doesn’t duck or run away. What does Han do?

He starts shooting at the motherfucker. He starts shooting.

Be like Han.

Want this in desktop form? Here you go – right-click and “Save as…” and it’s yours:

The “Be Like Han” desktop wallpaper. Click this baby to see it in its full 1900-by-1200 pixel glory.

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During the first few days of that change in my life that I like to call The Great Reset, one of the decisions I made was to re-incorporate travel into my life. My then-boss John Oxley understood what I was going through and was only too happy to oblige when I came into his office and said “Put me on the road, man. Put me on hardcore.” He did, and in the first three months of 2011, I travelled far and wide on Microsoft’s behalf (as well as their dime), going to Montreal, Austin and Vegas, as well as Seattle twice in a month.

Between the Great Reset and a couple of personal discoveries made during the two Seattle trips (which includes a long night of the soul, where I took advantage of the hotel’s “three chicken tacos and three Coronas in a bucket of ice for 20 bucks” room service special and stared at the highway to Portland), I decided that I needed the big life-reset needed to be complemented by a big job-reset. A very lucky break landed me a job at Shopify, and with it came even more travel. Between all the flying about (see this entry for a partial list of my trips) and spending the summer doing Shopify immersion in Ottawa, 50% of my time was spent on the road. Hence my current catchphrase, “Home is a nice place to visit.”

This week marks the beginning of a month of travel. Here are my destinations…

Montreal (Tuesday, February 28th – Saturday, March 3rd)

My last jam session at the Montreal metro, back in 2009. The story is here.

I’ll be going to Montreal attend ConFoo, a “web techno conference”. I’ll be there to represent Shopify as well as to give a presentation on the Ruby programming language titled Ruby as She is Spoke (Thursday, March 1st at 11:00 am). I’ll also be there to provide moral support for my coworker David Underwood, who’ll be giving the Mo’ Money, Less Problems with ActiveMerchant talk (Friday, March 2nd at 8:30 a.m.). I have every intention of enjoying the city’s wonderful night life while I’m there, but I’ll be back in Toronto on the afternoon of Saturday, March 3rd to catch up with local friends.

Austin (Thursday, March 8th – Wednesday, March 14th)

Having a great time on some bar patio at last year’s SxSW. Photo by Kris Krug.

After a short stay in Accordion City will come a fortnight of warm weather. For the first week, I’ll be in Austin to attend the South by Southwest Interactive conference! This will be my third; I attended my first in 2008 as an employee of b5media, my second in 2011 as an employee of Microsoft and now I’m going as an employee of Shopify.

If you’d like to know what hijinks I got up to during SxSW 2008 and 2011, see this entry.

This will also be my first time as a speaker. I’ll be on a panel titled 5 Brands Travel the US Inspiring Entrepreneurship, where I, along with my fellow members of the BarCamp Tour, will talk about our experiences and lessons from last year, when we crossed the country as very active and participatory sponsors of BarCamps in several cities. This presentation will take place on the Sunday, March 11th, but at least it will happen at a hangover-friendly time slot: 3:30 – 4:30 p.m..

This trip will have one more first: my first time making use of AirBnB. My coworker Edward Ocampo-Gooding and I will be staying at a really nice apartment just down the river from the Austin Convention Center, and the owner of the place has been especially nice to deal with.

Tampa (Wednesday, March 14th – Wednesday, March 21st)

I still haven’t blogged about the evening we went to Tampa’s big goth bar!

You see, there’s this girl. There’s also St. Paddy’s Day, which happens to fall on a Saturday this year. Finally, there’s a party, and my presence is expected.  It’ll be work during the day, and definitely-not-work in the evenings.

Ottawa (Monday, March 26th – Saturday, April 1st)

Some of us Shopifolks: me, Harley Finkelstein and Brennan Loh,
hanging out at Shopify’s Toronto office last week.

I’ll be checking in at HQ this week. While my job at Shopify coupled with my “travel anywhere” bag o’ gear gives me extraordinary amounts of freedom to work just about anywhere, there’s still no substitute for face-to-face contact with the coworkers at the home office. Hence this trip to touch base with the Shopifolks. I’ll be back in Toronto for April Fools’ hilarity Saturday afternoon.

Pleased to Meet Me

A self-portrait I shot in the mirror of my room at the Queen Elizabeth hotel,
a few days into The Great Reset. The original blog entry is here.

“If you travel long enough and far enough,” the saying goes, “you will eventually meet yourself.” Over the past year, I’ve done just that, and while the self I’ve met could always stand some improvement, he’s turned out to be pretty cool. I’ve discovered that I can go pretty far with just a few essentials: a computer, a camera, an accordion and a change of clothes. I took more chances in the past year than I did in the previous five. I have had more heart-to-heart conversations in a Starbucks in the past year than I have in the previous ten. I lost 30 pounds. I learned just what I’m capable of when the limitations are few and I put my mind to it. I’ve surprised myself – in the good way.

And oh, the experiences! I’ve been perp-walked into a “we have to talk” meeting with a Microsoft CTO and faced down a non-date gone terribly, terribly wrong – in the same 48 hours. I’ve used my accordion to win a karaoke contest in Austin, lead a Bastille Day parade in New Orleans’ French Quarter and charm ladies in a few cities. I have written code, given presentations and frightened room service in hotel rooms, I have created documentation and signed my Shopify contract in bars and I have put together demos as well as a letter of resignation in airport lounges. I have ejected loose women from a Quonset hut where I was staying and have myself been ejected from a lake by action-seeking casino cops. I have snuggled with someone in the nicest and crappiest hotels I’ve stayed at in the past 12 months. I made many new friends and acquaintances. I met a girl.

I have not yet tired of travel. Last year was about getting back into the swing of it; this year is more like that phase of having a sports car where you say “Okay, I’m comfortable with the controls…now let’s see what this thing can really do.”. This should be an interesting month in an interesting year, and I hope to share a lot of it here on the Accordion Guy blog.

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What if Star Wars: Episode I was Good? is a question that Belated Media asks and answers in the video above. The narrator imagines a better movie, in which Obi-Wan Kenobi is the main character — something the actual movie lacks — and the plot is reworked so that it isn’t so scattered. In other words, a movie that couldn’t be made by someone whose incentive is not to tell a great story but to move as much movie-related merchandise as possible.

In case you don’t remember what’s wrong with Star Wars: Episode I, here’s Red Letter Media’s excellent deconstruction (parts 1 and 2):

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The Pet Shop Boys’ single West End Girls was released when I was sixteen and then remixed and re-released in its better-known form when I was seventeen, so it’s got a special place in my heart. That’s probably why I enjoyed Plum Thunder’s parody, Boys Without Girls, which takes the music of West End Girls and name-drops Accordion City places and obsessions.

My only quibble: how can you use a Pet Shop Boys tune and give it a Toronto theme but not mention the Church-Wellesley Village, our most faaaabulous neighbourhood? Big omission, that.

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The Cooking Light site has a great list covering 41 common cooking mistakes and how to avoid them. Many of the mistakes they list fall under the categories of overdoing something, not bringing the food to the right temperatures and forgetting the maxim “the hurrier I go, the behinder I get.” I should know; I’ve made most of them at one point or another.

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I have some really nice friends, like Ashwin Panchapakesan who made the original version (which in turn is based on this photo from Daniel Shapiro) and Darryl Wiggers, who made this remix:

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Click to see the photo at full size.

I have no idea what the context for this photo featuring Neil Patrick Harris in a toga taking on five ninjas is, but I approve nonetheless.

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Thanks to Ashwin Panchapakesan for taking a photo from an earlier blog post and making this poster!

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