Rodney Buike took this photo of me on Tuesday evening. I look as if I should be backing up Tom Waits or playing in a cojunto band:

…and if you were wondering: oh yes, I do own the deluxe edition of The Beatles: Rock Band:

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.

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.

Suddenly, Star Wars makes a lot more sense…

[Thanks to CaptainMarvel for the pic!]

Here’s the view from a conference call I participated in on a recent sunny day:

Heather Leson, with whom I used to work at Tucows, snapped this photo of me breaking out the squeezebox at Tuesday’s HoHOTo charity event.

HoHOTo is the second edition of the HoHoTO (pronounced “Ho Ho Tee Oh”) party, which was a charity event that took place close to Christmas (hence the “Ho Ho”) and was very quickly organized after a few people had a little discussion on Twitter. No giant planning committees, no long meetings in windowless boardrooms over bad coffee and stale donuts, no big media marketing campaigns – just a group of dedicated volunteers and community leaders, a modicum of social media savvy, some fast-moving sponsors (including my employer, Microsoft Canada) and a club willing to let use their space on short notice.

Although it’s nowhere near Christmas, the event’s name has a lot of goodwill and the website already exists, so why not simply change the capitalization and pronunciation? And thus HoHOTo (pronounced “Ho HOT Oh”) came into being.

One again, it was organized largely by that chunk of the local creative class comprising both techies and marketing types. The event was a double success in raising over CAD$10,000 for the Daily Bread Food Bank and being a great evening out as well.

I saw camera flashes galore at HoHOTo, and a number of those flashes ended up as pictures on Flickr.

Alternate response: “What, only one?”

Most “Have you seen this cat?” posters don’t make me smile, but this one does…

Squeaky Fromme is free? Damn, I’m old.

Click the photo to see Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme’s Wikipedia entry.

(I wish I’d come up with the title, but alas, that clever turn of phrase is the name of a team that played at a trivia league in New York City last week.)

And it’s spelled properly, too!

BlogTO has some great photos that readers took of last night’s lightning storm in Accordion City.

…is rainy. Very, very rainy, as this photo taken from my balcony (I’m working from the home office today) shows:

I love Jim Hance’s painting that adds a little Star Wars to the Hitchcock classic North by Northwest, titled Force by Northwest:

Click the painting to see it at full size.

On the painting’s page on the Artbreak site, it says “Acrylic on wood board painting, scanned and digitally manipulated.” Signed prints are available!

In case you don’t recognize the scene, here’s a still from the scene that inspired it:

And here’s the scene:

 Found via Certified Bullshit Technician.

Photo courtesy of “rem”.

 Photo courtesy of Fukung.net.

Allen Stern blogs about a sign that’s outside Rice to Riches, a rice pudding place in New York City’s East Village:

The sign reads:

Help Wanted

Start a career in the fascinating, fast-paced lucrative pudding business

• Long hard hours
• Very low pay
• Lots of heavy lifting
• Work for a ball-busting asshole
• Dead-end job
• No benefits
• No advancement
• Must be college grad

Start immediately

It’s attention getting; Allen says that he saw a number of people read the sign and as a result step into the store. There’s more in his blog entry about the sign.

I wonder how many people read it and thought “Sounds great! Where do I sign up?”

I don’t normally vandalize signs, but I’d make an exception for this special case:

Stefan Arentz, a co-member of HacklabTO, sent me the photo. He says that it was put up by a Dutch cafe owner to ban accordion-playing gypsies.