From the category archives:

Life/It Happened to Me

FailCamp: One Week Away!

by Joey deVilla on July 2, 2009

FailCamp poster, featuring Sean Connery in his role as "Zed" from "Zardoz"

If you were at last year’s FailCamp, you might remember the best story of FAIL of the evening, which involved warming up some “body lube” in the microwave oven for a little too long, after which hilarity ensued.

Here’s how Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, the originators of FailCamp, describe their vision of the event:

We believe that it’s time to give our personal fail some tough love and talk it out over beer!

Join us for a brief, rousing introduction followed by camaraderie, beer, and show-and-tell. We’ll present a little about failure through the ages, mining your personal suck, maybe some science, pithy quotes from people you may or may not respect, and share some failure stories of our own.

Then it’ll be your turn. If all goes to plan, you may even win in our friendly “race to the bottom” for the most public, most expensive, or most ridiculous Story of Fail.

FailCamp returns next Thursday, July 9th and once again, it’s the warm-up act for Unspace’s Ruby programmer conference (going by the name “FutureRuby” this year), which takes place on the weekend of July 10th through 12th. Just like last year, FailCamp will once again provide a forum for you to share your greatest and most pathetic stories of FAIL, and hopefully how that failure taught you some important lessons and made you a better, wiser, more-careful-with-the-lube person.

joey_presenting_at_failcamp_1Me, presenting at last year’s FailCamp.

Once again, I will be hosting FailCamp. I’ll start the evening with a couple of stories of failure, including a couple of Keyboard Cat-worthy ones of my own, after which I’ll open up the floor to you, the audience, to share your own stories of FAIL. Once we’re all thoroughly embarrassed, DJ Barbi will spin the wheels of steel and we’ll dance our shame away.

There are some tickets left as of this writing:

  • For FutureRuby attendees, there are 4 free tickets to FailCamp remaining.
  • For those of you who are not attending FutureRuby but would like to catch FailCamp, there are 19 “Pay What You Can” tickets left.

If you want ‘em, go to the FailCamp registration page and get them before they disappear!

joey_presenting_at_failcamp_2My one-slide summary of how things went terribly wrong in the movie Deliverance
(The link leads to the “Squeal like a pig” scene from the movie – you might not want to watch at work).

FailCamp will take place at the Queen City Yacht Club on the Toronto Islands (Algonquin Island, to be precise). Your printed ticket stub is good for a free ferry ride from the Toronto docks to the Yacht Club, where we’ll have some finger food, the Yacht club’s kitchen and cash bar will be open, and the evening should be full of surprises.

What better way to close an article about FailCamp than the Keyboard Cat video starring “Pinky, Pet of the Week”?

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Collector’s Plates

by Joey deVilla on June 28, 2009

Seen in the window at a shop in Bloor West Village and coming soon to your grandmother’s (or a die-hard Star Trek or M*A*S*H fan’s) house:

collectors_platesClick the photo to see it at full size.

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This is what ten dollars got you at Thursday’s Pride Week barbecue at University of Toronto’s Hart House:

Paper picnic plate piled with food, "Hart House: University of Toronto" napkin, beer.

It was quite a meal: one beef kebab, one piece of chicken, 4 pork ribs, a slice of bread, roast potatoes, steamed vegetables and salad, all prepared quite well. The Ginger Ninja and I enjoyed it.

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I no longer live in Accordion City’s Queen/Spadina neighbourhood and therefore don’t play there very often anymore. Luckily that doesn’t mean that they’re lacking for the accordion: there was a guy playing a fine little red number there earlier this afternoon:

queen-spadina_accordion_player

Squeeze on, good sir!

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All Che Guevara T-Shirts Should Have This Caption

by Joey deVilla on June 19, 2009

Dark green t-shirt featuring Che Guevara and the text "I have no idea who this is".

Seen at “Diaper-eze”, a baby clothing store in Bloor West Village, in the west end of Accordion City.

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Hello from Ottawa!

June 17, 2009

 The view from my hotel room.
I haven’t been to Ottawa in 20 years. The last time, it was to visit a girl, and it ended badly. Every pedicab and rickshaw guy in town was in love with her and wished hot death upon me during my visit, and in the end, she decided that she [...]

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The “employment.nil?” Ruby Job Fair

June 11, 2009

This article also appears in my personal tech blog, Global Nerdy. Although the topic is about a job fair for Ruby programmers, I thought it would be good to post it here, as it’s a great example of grassroots community action.

One of the pillars of the Toronto developer scene is the Ruby/Rails community. They’re an [...]

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“Make Web Not War” in Toronto This Wednesday!

June 8, 2009

I’ll be at the Make Web Not War web development conference taking place in downtown Accordion City this Wednesday. For more details, see my post on Global Nerdy or Canadian Developer Connection.

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“employment.nil”

June 6, 2009

In case you’re:

a programmer who works with the Ruby programming language
looking for work
available to get down to Toronto’s “West Queen West” neighbourhood soon

you might want to do what I’m doing in a couple of minutes (as of this writing): heading down to the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen Street West, at Dufferin) to [...]

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The “Make Web Not War” Accordion Video

June 3, 2009

One of the nice things about my job is that they actually ask me to incorporate the accordion into it. Yesterday, we shot this video featuring me on accordion promoting the upcoming Make Web Not War event happening next week right here in Accordion City. Think of it as another of my contributions to Accordion [...]

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A Busy Day

June 2, 2009

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.
It’s a busy, meeting-filled day for Yours Truly down at the local headquarters for The Empire. Here’s a (slightly edited) photo that I took at our big Evangelism team meeting around 3:30 this afternoon:

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Playing the National Anthem at Tomorrow’s Toronto Roller Derby

May 29, 2009

Tomorrow at the George Bell Arena in Accordion City’s west end, I’ll be playing (and singing) Canada’s National Anthem at the start of the Toronto Roller Derby match between the Gore-Gore Rollergirls and Chicks Ahoy! I’m working on a rendition that respects the proud heritages of both Canada and roller derby.

If you’d like to [...]

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Toronto Coffee and Code Today! (with Slight Time Change)

May 29, 2009

Yes, Toronto Coffee and Code returns today! It’s a day when I make myself (and by extension, Microsoft) very accessible by working out of a cafe and answering your questions, getting your opinions and sharing ideas. Once again, it’ll take place at the Dark Horse Cafe at 215 Spadina, near the lights between Dundas [...]

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Mental Models, Mantras and My Mission

May 25, 2009

This article also appears in Global Nerdy. Like the previous article, it’s about my role at Microsoft and doesn’t delve too deeply into technology, so I thought it was suitable for a more general audience and decided to republish it here. Enjoy!
Mental Models and Bill Buxton’s “Draw a Computer” Exercise

In the mid 1990s, well before [...]

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Evangelist, Immigrant and Shaman

May 24, 2009

This article also appears in Global Nerdy. I thought it might be of interest not just to geeks, but also to people who are thinking about defining their roles at work.
This week, Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team is getting together to do its planning for the upcoming financial year, which runs from July [...]

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Ben Bernanke’s Commencement Speech for the 2009 Boston College Law Graduates

May 23, 2009

First, a quick “congratulations!” to my brother-in-law on graduating from Boston College’s School of Law! Law School ain’t easy, and graduating cum laude is even tougher. Well done – I salute you with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!
The graduation ceremony took place on the Boston College campus. BC has considerable “juice”, and [...]

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