Welcome, Zooko, Amber, Irby and Jill!

This weekend, friends of mine from the peer-to-peer programming world are in town.

Bryce (a.k.a. “Zooko“), Amber and their charming little boy Irby are in town to check out the University of Toronto, one of the places where Amber’s been accepted for grad studies. Bryce was one of the programmers behind Mojo Nation, one of the cooler peer-to-peer applications that emerged during the salad days of P2P. He’s currently working on MNet, a project that utilizes the collective drive space of a network of computers to create a large secure file store. I think it’d be pretty cool if they chose to move here…here’s hoping!

Jill (a.k.a. “Jillium”, “Jillzilla”) is here to visit and participate in a Joey-style debauched weekend. Like Bryce, she also worked at Mojo Nation. Now, she runs the “crawl” at Google — the process where Google computers hoover Web content for indexing. Suffice to say, without Jill, Google doesn’t work. So if you run into us this weekend, get down on your knees and supplicate yourself before her in an appropriate fashion.

Jill arrives in the mid-afternoon today. I’ll hang out with her for a couple of hours, and then run off to Pickering for a rehearsal, then back into town to show Jill around and hang out, as we did in Mountain View and San Francisco back in February. I haven’t decided where we’ll go yet — perhaps the Queen Street West strip, just to show her where a lot of these blog stories take place (NASA, Velvet Underground, Zen Lounge, The Paddock, Bovine Sex Club), or perhaps Toronto’s best ambisexual dance night, Tallulah’s Cabaret at the Buddies in Bad Times theatre.

(I haven’t been to Buddies in a while; I stopped going when a large number of my outing there ended in annoyance or social disaster. It’s the only place where I’ve ever started a fight. In retrospect, the story’s kind of funny…)

Tomorrow night, I’m performing at C’est What with Lindi. We’ll be a stripped down band tomorrow — I mean we’ll be clothed (well, drummer Devin and I will be; Lindi’s outfits get skimpier with each gig), but it’ll just be Lindi, Devin and me. We’ll be doing the show with Lindy, the really tall, really sweet Icelandic folk-rocker. After the gig, we’re going to go to…

…The Matador!

Infamous Toronto “after-hours establishment” (I’ll leave it to you to decipher that), place where Harrison Ford likes to hang out when he’s in town and site of a few accordion-related hijinks.

Anyone who wants to join me as I show Jill around is welcome to come — drop me a line, or show up for the Lindi/Lindy gig at C’est What on Saturday night.

Mischief is expected.

Jesus and the accordion player, remixed

Lindi took the “Jesus/accordion player” image from a couple of days ago and made it a little more pencil-sketch-like. Here it is: