If you’re a techie in Montreal, you want to attend Career Demo Camp on Wednesday, December 2nd at 6:30 p.m. in the Mont-Royal Centre! It’s part tech career guidance conference, part DemoCamp-style event, and an opportunity for developers and start-ups to get together and learn about the job market, see projects that Montreal-area techies are working on and get to know and network with your local nerds. It’s presented by the Confoo conference (taking place in March 2010) and PHUG and will be hosted by Yours Truly and Jean-Luc SansCartier.

Here’s the schedule:

• 6:30 p.m.: Intro to Career Demo Camp
• 7:00 p.m.: Alex Kovalenko – IT Headhunting and Recruiting
• 7:30 p.m.: Joey deVilla; Better Living Through Blogging
• 8:00 p.m.: DemoCamp Introduction
• 8:15 p.m.: DemoCamp Presentations
• 10:00 p.m.: Networking Session

The event is free of charge! All you have to do to attend is sign up at Career Demo Camp’s Registration page.

Microsoft Canada’s providing the space – we booked the Mont-Royal Centre for TechDays Montreal for two days (December 2nd and 3rd) and we weren’t doing anything with the space on the evening of Day 1. We decided to offer the space for some kind of community event, and Confoo and PHUG put together Career Demo Camp. I love doing developer community events and was only too happy to co-host.

The DemoCamp portion of the evening needs people to do DemoCamp-style demos: 5 minutes of “Show and Tell” where you show your software, web application or project in action. It’s the only thing you’re allowed to show on the big screen — no slides allowed! The idea is for you to show off your technology in action and inspire us, not to do a sales pitch. Think you’ve got a demo in you? Contact Jean-Luc Sans Cartier or Yann Larrivee and let them know you want to demo at Career Demo Camp!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.

I – along with a good chunk of Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team – am in Calgary for the fourth leg of the TechDays Canada seven-city tour. TechDays Calgary is taking place in the BMO Centre on the Calgary Stampede grounds. Wanting to be a good guest, I decided to observe a local custom:

I haven’t worn my flaming cowboy hat in ages!

As far as I can tell, I’m the only attendee who brought a cowboy hat. The only other similarly-haberdashed people on the premises are the Calgary Stampede staff and the washroom signs:

There are a number of Christmas-related events taking place at the BMO Centre before and after TechDays, so the place is all decked out for Christmas:

The isn’t a Santa Claus on site, but we do have IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus delivering goodies:

…and Rick’s session has drawn quite a crowd:

Another well-attended session was Introducing ASP.NET MVC, which was delivered by Tom Opgenorth:

Here’s the ASP.NET MVC room, already filling up a full 15 minutes before the start of the day:

Tom ended up speaking to a room packed to maximum capacity:

The people who couldn’t fit into the ASP.NET MVC sessions were still able to catch the proceedings on a monitor outside the room:

Meanwhile, next door, Developer Evangelist John Bristowe delivered the Practical Web Testing presentation:

And one door over, Adam “Adam Bomb” Carter (the first guy to suggest to me that I get a job at Microsoft) spoke at the Inside the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 session:

Here’s a scene from the speaker prep room that reminded me of the Sesame Street song One of These Things is Not Like the Other:

“Look! I’m at a conference, watching the proceedings of another conference!”

And just outside the speaker prep room, Rob Burke and D’Arcy Lussier chat:

Things seem to be going well, if IT Pro Evangelist and TechDays man-in-charge Damir Bersinic’s thumbs-up is any indication:

And down the hall, the Ford Flex featuring Microsoft’ Ford Sync technology awaits some passengers:

Someday, arranging for conference wireless will not be an arduous, expensive affair, but in the meantime, we set up these hard-wired internet access stations. Note the anti-bacterial lotion beside the laptop – a sign of these H1N1 times. If I’d had any foresight, I’d have bought a lot of Purell stock:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

To celebrate the release of Windows 7, Japanese Burger King franchises are offering a Windows 7 Whopper with 7 patties, selling for 777 Yen (CAD$8.92 as of this writing), available only for the next 7 days. I have no idea why they’re not doing this on this side of the Pacific; I’m sure it would be a big hit:

According to Julie from ObjectSharp, the Japanese text after “13cm” says “American-size buns”.

[Thanks to Ian Irving for pointing this to me!]

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.

I bought a fuzzy “Cat in the Hat”-style raver hat with a Canadian flag pattern on a whim earlier this year, thinking that I’d probably find a pretty good use for it some day. That day, it turns out, was yesterday, where I turned it into what I believe was yesterday’s only Steve Ballmer photo-op with a non-management Microsoft Canada employee:

Photo by Barnaby Jeans.

Yesterday was a busy day at the Harbour Castle Convention Centre, where we had an all-day Steve Ballmer-rama. In the morning, Steve keynoted an event showcasing Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010 for the media, key customers and partners. This was followed by an employees-only “town hall” where Steve did a short presentation followed by a Q&A session. On a whim similar to the one that led me to buy it, I took the hat (along with the accordion) along with me.

Following a suggestion from my co-worker Damir, I arrived very early for the town hall, grabbed a seat by the stage and donned the hat. When Steve made his appearance, he did so in classic Ballmer style, running and whooping, high-fiving people as he made his way to the stage. As soon as he saw me, he yelled “Hey!”, put the hat on and posed with me for the photo above.

I’d made a decent splash at Microsoft in my first year, and I’d been wondering if I could match it in my second, which began on Monday. This isn’t a bad start.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Fo’shizzle my Ballizle: on tonight’s episode of CBC’s news show The Hour, “Strombo”’s interviewing an unlikely pair: the CEO of the company for whom I work, Steve Ballmer, and Snoop Dogg. Alas, they’re taping the segments separately, so there’s no chance of Ballmer and Snoop doing a rap duet called Win and Juice.

The Hour airs on CBC tonight at 11 p.m. Eastern.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.

The official launch of Windows 7 doesn’t happen until tomorrow, but we’re having a big launch event with Steve Ballmer today in Toronto! I’ll be blogging and tweeting all day from the launch venue – Toronto’s Harbour Castle Westin Convention Centre.

For the full skinny on the event, follow the #cdnwin7 (short for “Canadian Windows 7”) hashtag on Twitter.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.

Are there any computers available today that come in that particular shade of blue, with matching chair?

Click the photo to see it at full size. Photo courtesy of retrofuture.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

I knew that I might be a little too busy to write an anniversary blog post with my work schedule this week. That’s why I wrote that article last month to mark having worked at Microsoft for 11 months. My schedule was a little less hectic then. Go and read the article if you like – everything that I wrote then still applies today, with the notable exception of a month’s time having passed.

Having said that, I still like celebrating milestones, so I thought I’d mark this day with a quick photo-collage featuring Yours Truly on the job:

As I wrote earlier: “It’s been great so far. I’m going to stick around for a little while.”

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

I have no idea if WIND Mobile is going to be able to deliver what they promise – a mobile phone company that listens to its customers and provides better service than the sad players in the Canadian mobile phone oligarchy – but they’ve got the right ideas and some rather funny videos that perfectly illustrate what the Canadian mobile customer has to contend with.

What if Toronto’s hot dog vendors had a pricing model like Canadian mobile phone companies? Buying a hot dog would be like this:

Canada is the only country in the world where mobile companies lock you into three-year contracts for mobile service, and this situation is illustrated in the video titled Bike Lock:

I always look at the service packages offered by U.S. mobile companies with envy. Here, the mobile companies love nickel-and-diming you:

WIND is a new entrant into the Canadian mobile phone market and a branch of Globalive Communications, who already have a presence in Canada in the form of Yak Communications, an alternative phone and internet provider. They seem to be taking a very “social media” approach to their marketing, what with the “viral” YouTube videos and a “conversational” website in which readers are encourage to actively participate in online discussions.

They look like an interesting company to watch, and hey, if they can get me a better deal than Rogers, I’ll switch.

Recommended Reading

Tom Purves has been one of voices leading the battle cry against Canadian mobile companies for the past couple of years. Back in 2007 at DemoCamp 17, he gave what I consider to be the best ignite presentation ever given at a Toronto DemoCamp, The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks. Here’s the slide deck from that presentation:

He recently revised his presentation for 2009 when he presented it at the FITC mobile conference in September, which mentions WIND mobile:

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Brett Domino

British uberpopnerd Brett Domino elevates hip-hop to a whole new level with a medley of Rapper’s Delight by the Sugar Hill Gang, Jump Around by House of Pain and Fresh Prince and Jazzy Jeff’s Boom! Shake the Room, equipped with only two “Stylos” and a microphone:

Klenginem

Klenginem is a German guy who does Eminem numbers – in tlhIngan Hol, which you might know better as “Klingon”. Qapla’!

Kate "AlpineKat" McAlpine

I can’t talk about nerd hip-hop without bringing up Kate "AlpineKat" McAlpine, the science communicator/rapper behind the Large Hadron Collider Rap, which explains what the Large Hadron Collider is and why it was made:

Here are some photos I took at Monday’s Windows 7 media event showing off the latest Windows 7-compatible computers from six vendors:

The participating vendors were:

• Dell
• Hewlett-Packard
• Lenovo
• LG
• Sony
• Toshiba

The whole day was a non-stop demo from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., with journalists both mainstream and tech, associated with an organization or independent, print and television, streaming in constantly to get a look at Windows 7 in action on all sorts of hardware. I was there as the "Microsoft Guy" to answer questions about Windows 7 in general; the vendors each sent a rep to talk up their specific hardware.

I did some demos that will find their way to television soon: one demo for CTV News which should air next week. I also did a demo for the Space channel’s always-entertaining Ajay Fry which will be appearing on Space’s show InnerSPACE (formerly known as The Circuit) tonight at 11 p.m. (Eastern); it’ll repeat tomorrow at noon (Eastern). Alas, there is no accordion playing, but I think I did a pretty good demo of some of the cool multi-touch possibilities with Windows 7. I don’t know if you’ll be watching it, but I certainly will!

My thanks to our friends at High Road Communications and the vendors for making the event both a success and very enjoyable.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.

I’m working out of the building known as “The Richmond” today, participating in a showcase of Windows 7-ready hardware for the media. As of this writing, I’ve done demos of Windows 7 on an HP TouchSmart computer hooked to a Sony Bravia TV equipped with DLNA for a number of journos for various media outlets including ITWorld Canada, Butterscotch and Space.

We’re all in suite 104, which is a loft-ish split-level space where Dell, HP, Lenovo, LG, Sony and Toshiba have set up tables to show of their Windows 7-compatible wares. I’m perched near the door, doing demos of Windows 7 features, while the hardware guys are showing off their machines

I’ve been here since 8 in the morning, and the journos will be visiting continuously all day until about 5:30 or so. Most nerds find this sort of dog-and-pony activity excruciating, but I find schmoozing tech and consumer press energizing, so I’m having a blast.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.

When life gives you a lemon, make lemonade. And when your company produces a cringe-inducing video on how to host a Stepford party, you repurpose it:

Don’t forget that FailCamp Toronto 3 takes place this Tuesday, September 29th at 7:00 p.m. in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, South Building, Room 716. If you’re coming in from the Front Street entrance of the Centre, remember that you’ve got to go up one floor then use the bridge to get to the South Building.

Here’s a map of level 7 of the South Building showing room 716, where the FailCamp magic takes place:

Tell Me Again: What is FailCamp?

FailCamp is a celebration of failure. It’s about sharing your tales of epic fail and the lessons you learned from them. It’s about learning not to view failure as defeat, but as a learning opportunity and stepping stone to success. It’s about taking away the fear of failure and learning to take a chance, think big and achieve what you thought you couldn’t.

We’ll start with some stories of historical failure: some you’ve read in the history books, and some culled from our own personal histories — the wisdom of fail through the ages. Then we’ll turn the microphone on you, inviting you to share your greatest stories of failure, challenging you to entertain the audience and even win prizes if our "Panel of Fail" deems your failure or the lessons derived from it to be the best of the bunch. The more embarassing, hilarious and educational your story, the better! Where else can you win big by losing big?

Joey deVilla (Microsoft, DemoCamp, accordion trouble-making) and John Bristowe (Microsoft) will host the event, encouraging you to confess your failures while sharing their own. FailCamp alumni Meghann Millard (Unspace, RubyFringe, FutureRuby) and Justin Kozuch (Refresh Events) and others will be the Panel of Fail whom you must impress in order to win prizes.

How Do I Get Tickets?

It’s very easy, because the event is free! Just sign up on our event page and show up on Tuesday, September 29th at 7:00 p.m. in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, South Building, Room 716!

Today, September 22nd, is One Web Day, the day on which we celebrate the awesomeness of the web and try to make it even better! As the One Web Day folks put it, think of it as “Earth Day for the Internet”.

Here in Accordion City, we’re having One Web Day Toronto, where there’ll be many independent events as well as a big one tonight at Cafe Taste (1330 Queen St West, at Brock) from 6:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.. It will feature:

• Talks by Us Now, Little Geeks, the Mozilla Foundation and my old company, the good guys of domains, Tucows!
• Free wine, snacks, buttons and t-shirts
• The “I Love the Web” poster wall to which you can add your own art
• A used computer drop-off organized by Tucows and Little Geeks
• General celebration of the World Wide Web, which we know and love (and without which I wouldn’t be me)

If you can make it, drop by Cafe Taste and celebrate the web, and if not, make sure you celebrate it wherever you are.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Suddenly, Star Wars makes a lot more sense…

[Thanks to CaptainMarvel for the pic!]

That’s right, we’re holding another FailCamp in Toronto! Mark Tuesday, September 29th on your calendar and be prepared to share you best/worst stories of FAIL, impress the judges in our “Panel of Fail” and win big prizes!

Here’s what the event is all about, as taken directly from FailCamp Toronto 3’s event page:

The pictures of Sean Connery in his ridiculous costume from Zardoz can only mean one thing: it’s time for another FailCamp!

FailCamp is a celebration of failure. It’s about sharing your tales of epic fail and the lessons you learned from them. It’s about learning not to view failure as defeat, but as a learning opportunity and stepping stone to success. It’s about taking away the fear of failure and learning to take a chance, think big and achieve what you thought you couldn’t.

We’ll start with some stories of historical failure: some you’ve read in the history books, and some culled from our own personal histories — the wisdom of fail through the ages. Then we’ll turn the microphone on you, inviting you to share your greatest stories of failure, challenging you to entertain the audience and even win prizes if our "Panel of Fail" deems your failure or the lessons derived from it to be the best of the bunch. The more embarassing, hilarious and educational your story, the better! Where else can you win big by losing big?

Joey deVilla (Microsoft, DemoCamp, accordion trouble-making) and John Bristowe (Microsoft) will host the event, encouraging you to confess your failures while sharing their own. FailCamp alumni Meghann Millard (Unspace, RubyFringe, FutureRuby) and Justin Kozuch (Refresh Events) and others will be the Panel of Fail whom you must impress in order to win prizes.

FailCamp takes place on Tuesday, September 29th at 7:00 p.m. at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (255 Front Street West, between John and Simcoe Streets). Admission is free — all you have to do is register to attend, and make sure you bring your best story of fail! It’ll be full of win!

If you live in Vancouver or are going to be there on Monday night, don’t forget that Demo Ignite Camp, the show-and-tell event for the bright lights of the Vancouver tech scene, is taking place that night at the Vancouver Convention Centre!

For more details, see my earlier post on Demo Ignite Camp or visit its event page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.

If you’re a student at one of the eligible Canadian universities or colleges, you can get the top-of-the-line edition of Microsoft Office 2007 for CDN$64. For more details, see my article in Global Nerdy.

I’m going to be in Vancouver from the afternoon of Friday, September 11th until the morning of Friday, September 18th. I’m there first and foremost to manage the “Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform” track of the TechDays conference, then to meet up with the local tech community, but also to enjoy the city I fondly refer to as “Vangroovy”.

Here’s what I’ll be up to:

Coffee and Code Vancouver: Saturday, September 12th

My coworker John Bristowe and I will be holding Coffee and Code on Saturday, September 12th from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Pacific time, of course) at the Take 5 Cafe on Granville (429 Granville, near Hastings). We’ll be there to talk about TechDays, The Empire and the tech industry in general – but it won’t just be geeky stuff; we’ll provide scintillating conversation about accordions, the Calgary Flames, deep fried snack foods, “Am I metrosexual or not”, life, the universe and everything. I will have the accordion with me, so tunes are definitely on the menu!

You can register for Coffee and Code Vancouver on its event page.

TechDays Vancouver: Monday, September 14th – Tuesday, September 15th

TechDays is Microsoft Canada’s cross-Canada tour, where we highlight what you can do with currently-available Microsoft tools and tech that you probably aren’t doing yet. We take the content from the infinitely more expensive TechEd North America conference (admission fee USD$2000), update it, and have local techies present it near you at a price you can afford (CAD$299 if you caught the early bird rate, CAD$599 otherwise). You get great content at a great price, and we get to make contact with tech communities across the country. Think of it as “Geek Global, Spend Local”.

TechDays Vancouver will be happening at the Vancouver Convention Centre, which is also the venue of…

Demo Ignite Camp: Monday, September 14th @ 7:00 p.m.

Since we had the Vancouver Convention Centre booked for two days, it meant that we had these big rooms lying fallow on the first night. I wanted a pajama party for accordion players, but since that idea got nixed, I called on Boris Mann and suggested we hold a DemoCamp-style event. The end result: Demo Ignite Camp!

Thus far, we’ve got 5 out of 8 presentation slots filled:

1. Joey deVilla’s Ignite Presentation: Do the Stupidest Thing That Could Possibly Work.
2. Avi Bryant will demo Clamato, a Smalltalk dialect that operates within the JavaScript runtime.
3. Dima Berastau will demo RestfulX, a RESTful framework for Flex and AIR applications.
4. Carson Lam will demo TransitDB, his Vancouver transit information web app, which won the PHP FTW competition earlier this year.
5. The folks from Ayogo will present their iPhone games built using the PhoneGap cross-mobile-platform framework.

I’m more than happy to drop my Ignite presentation to make room for a demo or Ignite by someone local. I’m already hosting, and Demo Ignite Camp is about the Vancouver tech scene, not me!

For more information, see the Demo Ignite Camp event page.

Launch Party Vancouver, Wednesday, September 16th

My fellow TechDays coordinators and I will be attending Launch Party Vancouver, which is:

…a lively mixer for the city’s brightest entrepreneurs, tech junkies, and bloggers, who are doing it, have done it or want to make their ideas happen here. The goal of the event is to connect BC’s growing community of Internet and new media leaders with investors and other trailblazers across Canada and abroad.

Founded by local entrepreneurs,  LPV is not your typical networking event. There are no presentations or panels to be found.  But what you will discover are the individuals responsible for making Vancouver one of the greatest start-up cities in Canada.  Every event features local, early stage new media companies strutting their stuff and sharing their ideas with the community.

It’s happening at Circa Resto Lounge from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.; tickets are available via EventBrite.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.