Month: July 2008

Welcome to installment number seven of Joey’s Unofficial RubyFringe Guide to Toronto, my guide to Accordion City for attendees of the RubyFringe conference or for anyone who’s wondering about interesting stuff in Toronto.

The previous articles in this series are:

1. Where Did All the Cigarettes Go?
2. Getting from the Airport to the Hotel
3. Boozin’ in Accordion City
4. The Lay of the Land, Part 1
5. FAILCamp
6. The Best Damn Cookie in Town

This article will cover Active Surplus, a long-time resident of Queen Street West and a surplus electronics-and-gear store like no other. It’s a short walk away from the Metropolitan Hotel and well worth a visit.

If you’re a mad scientist, electronic hobbyist, artist, looking to get your stereo hooked up or even getting stuff for your wedding, I recommend taking a look around Active Surplus on a regular basis. A fixture of Queen Street West since my high-school days (the early 1980s!), Active Surplus is a warehouse filled with bins of all sorts of gadgets, gears, cables, adapters, speakers and all sorts of electronic and mechanical stuff that you’re just not going to find at Best Buy or Radio Shack, especially at their prices.

Active Surplus is located at 347 Queen Street West — here’s a Google Map showing you the way there from the Metropolitan Hotel.

Here’s what it looks like once you climb up the stairs leading into the store:

They’ve got all sorts of cables: audio, video, computer…

…and there are power strips and extension cords aplenty, all going dirt cheap:

They’ve got a row of interface peripherals — mice, trackpads and keyboards, including this water-resistant flexible USB keyboard:

…and there are all sorts of electric motors and pumps, from those for small aquariums to those for light industrial purposes:

You can unleash your inner security officer with one of these surveillance cameras:

Or perhaps it’s your inner meter maid you want to unleash with these assemblies from decomissioned electronic parking meters:

They’ve got a section of bin devoted to digital camera and card goodies. They’ve got all kind of card readers going for very low prices:

If RubyFringe turns into that kind of party, you’ll know where to buy electric trimmers:

Active Surplus has a good stock of pens, for those of you who like taking notes by hand:

They have a few bins of sunglasses as well as 3-D glasses:

Need to cordon off an area so that you can do CSI-style investigations? They’ve got police barrier tape:

They have a seemingly endless supply of stickers and adhesive-backed mini-mirrors:

I have no idea what this glass thing was originally for (bedpan?), but I’m sure all of you who listen to jam bands saw this and thought “bong!”:

Here’s a portable toilet, suitable for camping. I love that they felt it was necessary to say that you’re not supposed to try the in the store:

And last but not least, they’ve got “Baby Legs”, which are described as “young padawan parts, thanks to Darth Vader.”

Photo courtesy of SpotlightToronto.com.

This is the sixth installment of Joey’s Unofficial RubyFringe Guide to Toronto, my guide to Accordion City for attendees of the RubyFringe conference as well as people just curious about this place.

In case you missed the earlier articles in this series, they are…

1. Where Did All the Cigarettes Go?
2. Getting from the Airport to the Hotel
3. Boozin’ in Accordion City
4. The Lay of the Land, Part 1
5. FAILCamp

In this article, I’m going to talk about a little detour you might want to make for an extremely delicious cookie (and other snacks).

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If you’ve ever gone walking around Paris looking for a quick bite to eat, Le Gourmand will give you a sense of deja vu. It’s a cafe that doubles as a somewhat pricey mini-grocery that carries gourmet food. They make excellent coffee and hot chocolate (you even get a choice of two of French chocolate mixes), delicious sandwiches, a nice bowl of steel-cut oatmeal with fruit, but most importantly, cookies to die for. Hell, they’re cookies to kill for.

The chocolate chip cookie (pictured at the top of this article) is a nice and large, which makes it crispy at the edges and soft and chewy in the center. The dough is rich, flavourful and packed with very good chocolate chips. I might actually keep my bike right by the conference to do a cookie run during the mid-afternoon lull.

Photo courtesy of SpotlightToronto.com.

If brownies are more your speed, Le Gourmand also has the Nookie Cookie, which is a brownie-like drop cookie dusted in icing sugar. It’s enough to make Dr. Atkins spin in his grave, but it’s throwing off your low-carb regime for this treat. Pair this with one of their black coffees, and you’ve got a nice civilised mid-afternoon snack.

The nearest Le Gourmand branch is at 152 Spadina, a little under a block south of Queen Street, not far from the Unspace office. Here’s a Google Map showing the way to Le Gourmand from the Metropolitan Hotel.

If you’re going to exploring around town beyond the general area of RubyFringe, there’s another branch of Le Gourmand at 20 Bloor Street East, just east of Yonge. If you’re going to be looking around the Yorkville area of town, be sure to pass by.

Welcome to the fifth installment of Joey’s Unofficial RubyFringe Guide to Toronto, my guide to Accordion City for attendees of the RubyFringe conference as well as people just curious about this place.

In case you missed the earlier articles in this series, I’ll list them here:

1. Where Did All the Cigarettes Go?
2. Getting from the Airport to the Hotel
3. Boozin’ in Accordion City
4. The Lay of the Land, Part 1

In this article, I’m going to cover FAILCamp.

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The first event of RubyFringe is the only one that’s open to anyone, whether or not they’re attending the conference itself. It’s FAILCamp, a gathering where we’ll share stories about and lessons from failure. It will take place at The Rhino Bar and Grill (1249 Queen Street West, just west of Dufferin) and runs from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.. Once again, you don’t have to be a RubyFringe attendee to catch this one. Admission is free, but you’ll have to buy your own beer.

Here’s a quick description of the event, as written by its originators, Amy “Slash7” Hoy and Thomas “Scriptaculous” Fuchs:

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.

I believe that the original plan was for Amy and Thomas to host the event as a dry run for a much larger FAILCamp event taking place on the 26th in Philadelphia. Circumstances have arisen and they will be unable to make it to Accordion City this weekend. While this fits with the theme of FAILCamp, it hasn’t stopped it — instead, two new hosts have stepped up to fill in for them:

• Hampton “HAML” Catlin, who very well might be the best Ruby hacker in town, and
• Yours Truly, who very well might be the worst Ruby hacker in town.

Hampton’s going to provide a lot of insight and programming know-how to FAILCamp. Me? I’m going to be responsible for innuendo-laden stories of personal and professional failure peppered with gratuitous Zardoz references.

As for the Rhino itself, it is truly pub with a “neighbourhoody” feel. Where many places are content to be mere endpoints in the Anheuser-Busch/Molson-Coors supply chain, the Rhino is what some sociologists call a “third place”, a neighbourhood gathering point for all kinds of people, from the locals who’ve been in the Parkdale area since it was a more rough-and-tumble place to the artsy and musician types who moved into the neighbourhood to the geeks who use it as the venue for the monthly Rails Pub Nites and Ajax Pub Nites. Even though the neighbourhood is gentrifying in a manner similar to New York’s Lower East Side or certain parts of Brooklyn, The Rhino has managed to remain pretty much douchebag-free and inexpensive, unlike a number of the other pubs in the area.

The only way in which The Rhino gets fancy is with their beer menu. There are about 200 beers on the menu hailing from a few dozen countries, and they’re generally well-stocked and priced in the 5 to 7 dollar per pint/bottle range. Be sure to try the locals: their own lager, as well as Mill Street, Wellington and Creemore Springs.

• FAILCamp’s Facebook page
• Rhino review at Toronto Bits
• Rhino review at Martini Boys
• Rhino write-up at Toronto Life
• Google Map showing the way from the Metropolitan Hotel to The Rhino
• Map showing the public transit route from the Metropolitan Hotel to the Rhino

Damian Conway, Perl expert extraordinaire, Open Source luminary and long-time friend of the Toronto Perl Mongers, will deliver — free and to the public — one of his signature tour-de-force completely insane talks that is…

• 1/3 high-end IT,
• 1/3 showmanship,
• and 1/3 peyote-fuelled hallucination.

Tonight will be the world premiere of a new talk, which goes under the title of Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…Made Easy.

As with the fanciful titles of his other talks, it’s hard to tell what it’ll actually be about, but having seen a couple of his presentations, I can guarantee that it will be a slightly-askew look at technology done in an engaging and hilarious fashion. Better still, you’ll be the first to see this presentation, which is a dress rehearsal for the O’Reilly Open Source Conference taking place later this month in Portland, Oregon.

Best of all, unlike the people at the Open Source Conference who’ll have to shell out something in the neighbourhood of $2000, admission to this event is absolutely free. (They will be taking up a collection for Damian in order to provide him some sort of honorarium for his doing the presentation, and some of the DemoCamp money is also going to Damian).

If you’d like to catch this event (I’ll be there), it’s tonight at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology, which is on 40 St. George Street (just north of College), right in the middle of the University of Toronto campus.

As I like to say for this sort of event: be there and be square!

I sometimes take some gentle ribbing for my excellent whiteboard penmanship, which I why I strongly identify with this comic:

Sean Tevis, whom I know by way of my friend Miss Fipi Lele, is running for Kansas State Representative. I think he’s a far better candidate than the incumbent, hence I’m lending him my (mostly American) readership and Googlejuice in this post.

For those of you steeped in internet and pop culture memes, Sean has an XKCD-style comic that explains his platform. Those of you who aren’t so much into that sort of stuff should visit his regular site.

He’s not asking for much: if he can get 3000 people to each donate a little bit over eight dollars apiece, he can make his goal. I’m not a U.S. citizen, so I can’t donate, but I can influence. If you’re a U.S. citizen and want to fix some of the damage in Kansas, this is your chance!

Click the photo to see the whole photoset (yes, it’s safe for work).

Here’s an amusing set of photos on Flickr: snack foods whose names sound like sex acts.

[Found via The Triumph of Bullshit.]