Month: April 2007

The recent arguments over the Kathy Sierra situation as well as the battle between the “cowards” and “armchair Bruce Willises” over what they would have done had they been at Virginia Tech on that fateful day have led me to declare the classic and much-parodied Star Trek fight theme [1.8 MB MP3] as the official song of internet discussions and blog comments. Like the Vulcan ritual that the music underscored, most internet arguments are triggered by a response in the most primitive parts of our brains, look silly to outsiders and seem to be taken up by people who are slated to have sex once every seven years.

Live short and fester!

Here’s something that you might find entertaining: a video of various people from a company called Connected Ventures (“a group of friends who work for: Vimeo, CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, and Defunker“) lip-synching Harvey Danger’s 1998 hit Flagpole Sitta.

In the beginning, the video threatens to be just a slightly better-than-average YouTube lipsynch featuring a cute girl, but it gets better.

Some thoughts on the video:

• Before finding out more about the people who made the video, I thought “Hmmm…either a web 2.0 company or some kind of creative agency.” Assuming that the video isn’t a professional piece with actors, that’s the only way you get an office with that high a concentration of good-looking hipsters.
• I love that “SILF” shirt.
• Once they move away from the initial shots, note the clever camera work. I looks as though it’s a continuous shot, without any cuts.

I’ve been fortunate enough to work at three companies with such a high concentration of the young and good looking:

• My first job out of school, as a programmer at Mackerel Interactive Multimedia, Accordion City’s hardest-partying CD-ROM and web development company. We got even more good looking after a merger with Owl magazine, whose staff was mostly women in their 20s and early 30s. The best telling of the Mackerel story is Cory Doctorow’s piece Burying the Fish
• At the start of OpenCola, which was originally a side project at an advertising agency, whose staff was mostly women in their 20s and early 30s.
• His Own Bad Self, a software development consultancy consisting of just me.

Every day, I check out my friend Fipi Lele’s offering of interesting picture files. Today, one file with the title Lord Diller Presley caught my eye, so I opened it and found this rare treasure: a photo featuring Elvis Presley, Phyllis Diller and Jack Lord (Steve McGarrett from Hawaii Five-O):

Click the photo to see it at full size. Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

As an owner and operator of big sideburns, it’s a wonderful thing to see two of my sideburn heroes in the same picture.

You know it’s a wild party when those three show up and start hanging out.

In case you haven’t been looking at the address bar on your browser, this blog isn’t located at accordionguy.blogware.com anymore (although that address will work for a few months). From now on, the official URL for The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century is:

joeydevilla.com

What better and more graphic way could I illustrate the change than by using now-and-then images of the Governator himself, Mister Arnold Schwarzenegger?

David’s Report

Most accounts of last night’s DemoCamp say that it was a good one, and it seems that the new format is helping. David’s got all the details in this entry on his blog, which not only covers what happened but also what can be done to improve DemoCamp.

The New Sound System

If you were there, you might have noticed that it was easy to hear the speakers. That’s thanks to the new TorCamp sound system, which I picked up at Long & McQuade earlier that day. It consists of 2 80-watt individually self-powered speakers, which can be used either in tandem (for large gatherings) or separately (for 2 break-out sessions where some voice amplification is desired). It will be used at DemoCamp events, and it’s available for anyone who wants amplification for an event that falls under the “TorCamp” umbrella.

I paid for $376 for the speakers and expected that it would take 3 or 4 passing-arounds-of-the-hat at DemoCamp events for me to recoup the costs, but last night, we collected $316.44 from all of you, with BubbleShare’s Albert Lai stating that he would match the funds raised out of his own pocket. Since we did so well, Albert, what say you can I split the remaining $60?

The generosity of the DemoCamp community is wonderful. I thank you, and so does my VISA card.

Geeks and Guitars

Some of us went from DemoCamp to Geeks and Guitars, which is just Mark Kuznicki’s name for what happens when we geeks descend on the open mic jam night at a lovely little bar called The Press Room (850 Dundas Street West, between Manning and Euclid). That was fun, and I’ll post a story later about how we had not one but two accordionists rockin’ out last night.

Don’t forget: Another Open Coffee gathering takes place tomorrow (Thursday the 26th) at Tequila Bookworm (512

Queen Street West) from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. I’m going to try and catch the first hour, but I’ll have to run after that to catch a meeting.

Open coffee takes place every Thursday and is an informal gathering where people in or interested in Accordion City’s startup scene — entrepreneurs, developers, investors, students, or the curious — can get to know each other, chat face-to-face, exchange ideas and have coffee and/or breakfast.

Oh, the high-larious differences between British and North American English…

Click the photo to see it at full size. Photo courtesy of Fipi Lele and wxsnoozle.