There’s a woman in or around the area of Langley, British Columbia who’s going around kicking men in the groin. One was hurt so badly that one of his testicles had to be removed.

This case will probably spark two types of conversations, editorials and online commentary:

• One will be some persecution fantasy among men who think we’ve ceded too much ground to women
• And the other will be that sort of toxic combo of “Too many womyn;s studies courses, too few brain cells” rhetoric along the lines of…

Here’s a piece by the artist known as 9 0 0 0 that I rather like:

You can see the original (and more) in 9 0 0 0’s Flickr photostream.

…I was looking for a job, what with my old one having been rendered defunct by the econopocalypse (mind you, in retrospect, that was one of the luckiest breaks of my career).

Here I am in “corporate drag”, dressed up for an interview with John Oxley, who would become my manager three weeks later:

Yesterday, while setting up for the TechDays conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre, my co-workers Rick Claus (pictured below on the left with the red netbook) and Rodney Buike (pictured below on the right with the blue netbook) and I couldn’t resist playing around with the Dell netbooks that we were using to do PowerPoint donkey-work. John Bristowe, who was doing the photography, suggested striking a Charlie’s Angels-style pose and we were only too happy to oblige:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Today’s Toronto Coffee and Code – and by “today”, I mean “Friday, August 14th” – will take place at The Roastery (401 Richmond West, just east of Spadina) from noon until 6 p.m.. Come on down, shoot the breeze, ask questions, get help with Microsoft developer tools and tech, hang out!

I love the webcomic XKCD’s twist on those Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World” ads (which I also love):

Click the comic to see it on its original page.

Found via Certified Bullshit Technician.

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

Jon Udell – the developer, information architect, author who wrote about social software before we started calling it that, blogger and Senior Tech Evangelist at Microsoft – will be in Toronto next week and he’ll be at a couple of events that I’m attending.

DemoCamp Toronto 21

On Tuesday, John will be at the 21st edition of DemoCamp, the show-and-tell event for people in the Toronto tech community, where entrepreneurial developers, designers, marketers and businesspeople get together to talk about what they’re working on, exchange ideas and get to know each other. We’re about using the power of technology and creativity to make Toronto (and the world) a better place to live, work and play. And yes, Yours Truly will help host the event.

Watch this blog for more details about next week’s DemoCamp, including the demos and Ignite presentations that will be featured that night.

Science 2.0

On Wednesday, John will be at Science 2.0, a conference exploring the ways in which computers and the internet are changing the way science is done. Speakers and presentations at Science 2.0 include:

• Titus Brown: Choosing Infrastructure and Testing Tools for Scientific Software Projects
• Cameron Neylon: A Web Native Research Record: Applying the Best of the Web to the Lab Notebook
• Michael Nielsen: Doing Science in the Open: How Online Tools are Changing Scientific Discovery
• David Rich: Using “Desktop” Languages for Big Problems
• Victoria Stodden: How Computational Science is Changing the Scientific Method

John will have a talk at Science 2.0 in which he’ll cover the elmcity project, a community calendaring system running on the Azure platform and how it “tackles the challenge of social information management and aims to democratize the computational way of thinking that enables us to wire the web.”

I’ll be taking notes at both events and will post them on this blog.

Photo courtesy of Will from Dork Shelf.
Click the photo to see it at full size.

One quick announcement: I’m going to be at a couple of Coffee and Code events this week:

• I’ll be at tomorrow’s (Tuesday, July 21st) Guelph Coffee and Code, which takes place at the Albion Hotel…
• and at the Toronto Coffee and Code on Friday, July 24th at the Dark Horse Cafe on Spadina.

Be there!

Welcome to the second installment of The Unofficial FutureRuby Guide to Toronto! This is a series of articles aimed at showing out-of-town attendees of the upcoming FutureRuby conference around our fine city. (It’s useful even if you’re not planning on attending the conference).

In case you missed the previous installment, it’s here:

• What’s That Smell?

You might find last year’s Toronto guide for RubyFringe attendees useful as well:

Creative Commons picture courtesy of Rene Erhardt.

Happy Canada Day! Have a safe and fun holiday, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

Yes, the demands and schedule of my job as Sith Lord at Microsoft have kept me quite busy, but it doesn’t matter because I live in the “Hooray!” zone, as shown in the Venn diagram below:

For more information, see the LifeHacker article titled The Road to Happiness in Your Work Lies in the Hooray! Zone.

This photo from Passive-Aggressive Notes made me laugh out loud:

When it comes to vegans and vegetarians, while I get along with them just fine, I’ve got to side with chef Anthony Bourdain:

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.

I’m going to be in Ottawa this week doing a presentation on web accessibility, so I’m taking advantage of my being there and declaring a Coffee and Code event for this Thursday, June 18th at the Bridgehead Cafe at 109 Bank Street (at the corner of Bank and Albert). It’ll run from 12:00 noon to 5 p.m..

I will be joined by my fellow Microsoft evangelists from the area, the guys I like to refer to as “Les Bons Gars”:

• Christian Beauclair
• Rick Claus
• Pierre Roman

Come on and down and join us at the Bridgehead for some coffee, food and conversation! We’ll be there to answer questions, hear your comments, show you what we’re working on and even hook you up with a copy of the Windows 7 Release Candidate.

This would be a good time for you Ottawa-area Developers and IT Pros to come and give us your suggestions for the upcoming TechDays 2009 cross-Canada conference, a two-day deep-dive conference covering what you can do with Microsoft Tools and Technologies. TechDays will stop at Ottawa on December 9th and 10th, and we’re picking out our topics and speakers. Come by Ottawa Coffee and Code this Thursday and let us know what you’d like to see and if you’d like to present at TechDays 2009!

(Creative Commons photo of the Peace Tower at Night taken by the Poissant Family.)

Me and "Lunchbox” of the Gore Gore Rollergirls. Photo by Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan.

The Anthem

I’d only seen roller derby on TV – hidden deep in UHF-land — and never in real life, so when I got an invitation from “Lunchbox” of the Gore Gore Rollergirls to play the national anthem at the start of the first roller derby match of the season, I jumped at the opportunity.

The Ginger Ninja and I showed up early at George Bell Arena so that I could meet the organizers and get an advance look at the setup. We had a look around the arena and hung out in the beer room for a while. While there, I played some Nine Inch Nails at a friend’s request, which was a good warm-up for my performance.

Game time rolled around, and after Crankypants, Toronto Roller Derby’s master of ceremonies introduced the teams – the Gore Gore Rollergirls and Chicks Ahoy! – he introduced me to the audience as “Joey deVilla, the Accordion Guy”, and led to me to the dual-microphone setup.

Me playing the national anthem, as seen from the stands. Photo by Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan.

I decided that since we were in a hockey arena, it was only fitting that I played both the unofficial and official national anthems. I started the original Hockey Night in Canada theme, which I thought would please the crowd. I was right – they cheered so loud that they drowned out the final notes. I followed up with O Canada and was joined by the players and referees, who sang with great pride and gusto. I closed with the classic hockey fight chords, took my bows and then joined the audience to catch the match.

Here’s the video of my performance:

The Scene

You can watch the game from the stands, which a lot of people did…

…but if you really want a nice close-up look at the action, there’s an area right on the rink called the “Suicide Seats”. I highly recommend it:

I knew that roller derby players took on a nom de guerre, and but I didn’t know that they could also take on oddball numbers, such as 7-11, the Roman numeral XVIII, or <3. One player even had the mathematical expression e raised to the power of pi times i, which is the left side of Euler’s formula.

Not only do the players take on names; the refs do too! Here’s one of them, “The Big Leboutski”:

Here’s another one, going by the name of “Lou’s Yer Daddy”:

All local hockey arenas have a sort of time-warp feeling to them. The architecture, signage and seats always make you feel as though you’ve stepped back into the late 1950s. I kept half-expecting to see the Hanson brothers waiting for some ice time. The crowd was a friendly, interesting mix; it was as if the families and friends of Junior A hockey and Queen West tattoo shop customers teamed up to throw a party. The overall vibe is an odd combination of small-town charm and big city “alternative”. It occurred to me that roller derby would make a great setting for a film, but a little searching revealed that Drew Barrymore had the same idea and ran with it.

The Rules

Here’s a Gem City Rollergirls video that explains the rules of roller derby:

The Bout

And now, some photos from the bout:

Aftermath

Although Chicks Ahoy managed to get an early lead in the bout, the Gore Gore Rollergirls rallied and won with a score of 93-87.

We managed to catch up with Lunchbox after the bout..

…where she was only too happy to chat with the fans, pose for pictures and sign autographs.

All in all, a great evening. I’d gladly play the anthem and see a bout again!

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

I think we’ve got an early contender for the title of “Weirdest Videogame of 2009”: Muscle March for the Nintendo Wii. As if the game weren’t weird enough, the trailer below ramps up the weirdness by presenting it in that oh-so-Japanese style with epilepsy-inducing jump-cuts and a hyper-enthusiastic Japanese TV announcer:

[Found via Waxy.org.]

It would probably go something like this:

Yes, you’ll need to have seen the Milton-Bradley boardgame “Guess Who?” and this scene from the Quentin Tarantino flick Pulp Fiction to be in on the joke:

If you don’t get the joke, this image search may help you.

[Photo courtesy of Certified Bullshit Technician.]

There’s a part of me that hopes that the new Star Trek movie premiering today takes its plot from this 1980s Star Trek comic in which the crew of the Enterprise takes on a vampire who sounds like Shaft:

(This fine bit of comic Photshoppery was created by Kevin Church.)