Year: 2008

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.]

[This article was also posted on Global Nerdy.]

Just a small sample of the people that make Toronto’s tech community great.

This week is going to be a week unlike any other in the Toronto technology scene: a week of events created not by municipal groups, large techno-conglomerates or industry think tanks, but by small groups of passionate individuals who enjoys working with both people and technology.

These events don’t have the benefit of major sponsorship or media coverage, nor will they be lining their organizers’ wallets. They’re events put together by amateurs in the original sense of the word: people who do it not for profit, but for their love of their craft, in the hope that both the attendees and even the field itself will be advanced from insights, understanding and knowledge gained by gathering together and exchanging ideas.

It’ll be a busy week for me. I’ll not only be attending these events, but I’ll also be MCing two of them as well. I’ll be posting reports from these gatherings here — keep watching this blog!

DemoCamp 18: Tuesday July 15th, 5:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m. at Supermarket

DemoCamp 18 is the eighteenth gathering of the bright lights in Toronto’s software development community where we show each other our projects in action. DemoCamp has grown from a gathering of a couple dozen in late 2005 to a meetup of hundreds at locations like the MaRS Centre and the Toronto Board of Trade and was voted “Toronto’s Best Unconference” earlier this year by BlogTO. It’s given many local software people the chance to showcase their work, meet other people in their field, make connections, get jobs and even get venture capitalist funding (that’s what happened to b5media, for whom I work).

I’m one of DemoCamp’s stewards and will be co-MCing DemoCamp.

You can see the schedule of events for DemoCamp 18 at the DemoCamp.info site. This event’s tickets — a good number of which were free, the remainder going for five or ten dollars — got snapped up within hours of becoming available.

Damian Conway: Wednesday, July 16th, 6:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m. at the Bahen Centre, U of T

The Perl programming language has been given the nickname “the duct tape of the internet” because of its importance in the development of the early web. Damian Conway is its most eloquent spokesperson and a speaker who can turn the dryest of academic lectures into a brain-tickling comic monologue that delivers both laughs and technical insight.

On Wednesday, Toronto will play host to the world premiere of his new talk, titled Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces… Made Easy. The event will be held at the Bahen Centre at the University of Toronto and it will be free of charge. For more details, see its Upcoming page.

FAILCamp: Friday July 18th, 4:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. at The Rhino

I’ll let the FAILCamp creators, Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs do the talking:

“My reputation grows with every failure,” wrote George Bernard Shaw in a letter to fellow author Frank Harris. A healthy attitude towards the natural state of humanity, if you ask us.

We all know failure: public, private, large, small, free or costly, embarrassing or funny or poignant (or all of the above). We have all experienced what our friend Patrick has called “the beautiful rainbow of Fail.” And we tend to stuff it in the closet, keep it under wraps, don’t-ask-don’t-tell or any other number of hidey clichés that poor, beautiful rainbows should not be subject to. 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 comraderie, 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.

Also, did we mention beer?

For more details, see FAILCamp’s event page on Facebook.

RubyFringe: Friday July 18th – Sunday July 20th at the Metropolitan Toronto Hotel

Finally, the upcoming weekend belongs to RubyFringe, the “deep nerd tech with punk rock spirit conference”.

“RubyFringe,” says its site, “RubyFringe is an avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging Ruby projects and technologies. We’re mounting a unique and eccentric gathering of the people and projects that are driving things forward in our community.”

I’ll be MCing the opening night’s events at the Amsterdam Brewery. Alas, tickets are sold out!

Over at the b5media blog Digital Photography School, the article 10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits shows you how to do just that. An example:

Workstation by “striatic”.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

In case you haven’t seen the video for Russian metal band ANJ’s song, Mikhail Gorbachov yet, I’ve posted it below. This one’s got everything — a band that sounds like Gogol Bordello-meets-early Metallica-perfroming-Trogdor, cute Russian peasant and factory worker women showing a lot cleavage, zombie Stalins, a conan-like Mikhail Gorbachev, English lyrics sung in a “makink beeg trouble for Moose and Squirrel” accent, communism getting its ass kicked by a guy with a giant axe and assault rifle, and the free market symbolized by cola, Twinkies and hot dogs raining from the sky like manna from Heaven. What more can you ask for?

GORBACHOV: THE MUSIC VIDEO – BIGGER AND RUSSIANER from Tom Stern on Vimeo.

The video’s director, Tom Stern, has this to say:

I did this video for a Russian Metal Band called ANJ. It is pretty crazy. When I saw the lyrics it seemed to be an earnest tribute to Mikael Gorbachov (that’s how the Russians spell it), so I was a bit confounded about what the video concept should be, but then I had a brainstorm to take it way over the top and I think it was just the thing. Suffice to say it’s half Russian History allegory as told through an old zombie movie made in the Soviet Union, and half animated Soviet Propaganda posters.

Want to know more about the band ANJ? Here’s their MySpace page.