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An Itinerant Accordion Player at Halifax’s Lower Deck

It’s become a tradition that whenever my coworkers and I are in Halifax to hold the TechDays conference, we head to the Lower Deck – one of this fine city’s drinking establishments — on the evening of Day 1. Regular readers of this blog will remember last year’s performance, where I joined the band for a Blue Rodeo number followed by a rousing rendition of Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild.

This year, Day 1 of TechDays is a long one for me. I arrive at the conference venue at 7:00 a.m. and help manage TechDays’ sessions, do presentations, meet with guests, ask questions and perform all manner of conference-related tasks until the conference day ends at 4:45 p.m.. Then I switch into “student gear”, preparing for the Go DevMental student conference, which runs from 6:30 – 9:30 p.m. that evening, for which I did a 45-minute live-coding presentation on web development with WebMatrix, followed by another 45-minute live coding presentation on videogame programming for Windows Phone, followed by a roundtable discussion with computer science/computer programming faculty.

Our day ended at 10:00 p.m., after which we made a beeline to the Lower Deck for dinner upstairs (a great bowl of seafood chowder and curried mussels) and then headed downstairs for beer and live music.

When we arrived at the bar, we were greeted with cheers by coworkers, conference staff and conference attendees, already well-lubricated with local draught.

“I spy an itinerant accordion player!” exclaimed the guitarist from the stage, and minutes later, I was performing a couple of traditional Irish folk/drinking tunes with the band. They were a great band to play with, a a friendly bunch. Thanks for the opportunity to jam, gentlemen!

Joey deVilla

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Andrew Trevors says:

November 4, 2010 at 5:06 pm

I've been fortunate enough to see both your Lower Deck performances and they are indeed a major highlight of the conference. Next year we need to get this as part of the official schedule ;)

i.e. "9:30 - when they kick us out - Lower Deck - Local beverages, good conversation, and accordion music!"

Thanks Joey, Rick, Rodney, Damir and the rest of the Microsoft crew (and other non-MS people, you know who you are) that helped put on the conference, great time.