Author: Joey deVilla

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The Clarke Axiom, but for geeks and flirting

The Clarke Axiom — named after the guy who coined it, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke — is well-known to geeks:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

You may remember seeing the Clarke Axiom mentioned on this blog before. I quoted Maciej Ceglowski, who remixed it to become:

Any sufficiently advanced society is indistinguishable from Canada.

(I can already hear the whining coming from the bloggers at the Western Standard. All I can say to those folks is: if you take your meds, the voices will stop.)

I don’t know how I ended up looking at a page in Everything2 (imagine a less academic Wikipedia written by LiveJournalers), but someone has come up with a geek lament treatment of the Clarke Axiom:

Any sufficiently nice person is indistinguishable from someone who likes you.

Bonus bragging point: This blog is currently the number one Google result for the phrase “Clarke Axiom”.

Categories
It Happened to Me Music

What My Lunch Break Looks and Sounds Like

I bring my lunch to work most days, but once a week I like to go out
for it. One of the lunch spots in Liberty Village (the former stomping grounds of a reasonably well-known blogger, internet/copyright freedom agitator and science fiction author) the neighbourhood
where Tucows is located, is the Warehouse Grill. The food’s quite good
(they make a really mean calamari) and on Thursdays, they have live
jazz on the patio. Here’s a movie [1.8MB QuickTime] that I shot a couple of Thursdays ago, featuring my co-workers Scott and Darryl at the beginning.

Categories
It Happened to Me Music

“Must-Know” Canadian Tunes?

The two weddings that I’ve attended with Wendy have both been for
Canadians of my generation, which meant that the DJ played Spirit of the West’s Home for a Rest (a song where they managed to beat The Pogues on their own turf) and a couple of
big hits that she didn’t recognize. I’ve decided to give her a hand by
making her a mixed CD of the essential Canadian rock and pop tunes for
people out age (specifically people who went to high school in the
mid-to-late eighties and university in the late eighties to
mid-nineties).

So far, I’ve come up with:

I need more songs! If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments. Some guidelines:

  • The
    songs should have been hits only within the borders of Canada, or even
    my area of Canada (Ontario/Quebec). There’s no point in putting Tom
    Cochrane’s Life is a Highway or Bryan Adams’ Summer of ’69 on this CD;
    the point is to give her music that’s new to her.
  • The term
    “hit” is relative. It the song had a cult following in my neck of the
    woods (say, a hit in the Ontario/Quebec university zone in the early
    90s but unknown in New England), it counts.
  • More than one song by the same artist is okay.

Oh, and could someone tell me if the Dream Warriors‘ My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style was or wasn’t a hit in the Excited States? It did well here in Ontario and was also a minor club hit in the UK.

Your suggestions, please…

Categories
It Happened to Me

Names by Which the Class Instructor at the Gym Has Addressed Me

  • Jerry
  • Jesse
  • Eddie
  • Jim
  • Jamie
  • Johnny
  • Jason
  • Jimmy
  • Jerome

I don’t blame her. She leads the BodyPump
class (bench presses to Alien Ant Farm and sit-ups to Avril Lavigne!)
for 300 people a week; I have to memorize only 10 gym staffers’ names.

I’m sure that my predilection for vintage work shorts with tags
bearing names that are not mine (save the “Hagerstown Ford” shirt,
which has a name tag that reads “Joe”) isn’t helping matters any.

She does know me as “that guy who plays the accordion”, however.

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Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Angry Young Swingman

Jim Munroe, author of many great reads including Flyboy Action Hero Comes With Gasmask, Angry Young Spaceman, Everyone in Silico and now An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, poses for Rannie on the Secret Swing, Accordion City’s hippest photo shoot location.

(By the bye, Rannie hits the big three-oh this Wednesday at C’est What.)

Categories
Geek

Even More Reading Material — on Spectrum!

[ via Slashdot, Shirky ] The Economist has an article titled On the same wavelength,
which “argues that overcautious control of electromagnetic spectrum, on
the part of regulatory agencies, has resulted in the sheer waste of up
to 95% of available spectrum.” Clay Shirky has just posted an article
titled The Possibility of Spectrum as a Public Good, which puts forth the notion that if the FCC “manages its proposed transmutation of small slices of
spectrum away from property rights and towards a model that regulates
spectrum as a public good”, you’ll get more innovation, citing the example of WiFi.

Categories
Uncategorized

Some Reading Material for You

I’m a little on the busy side today, so may I suggest:

  • Hoplit
    Nicholas Kerkhoff’s blog, which comes complete with a story on the front page with an opening that caught my attention:

    The  one
    thing I could always do
    the one talent I could always fall back
    on, ever
    since I discovered it at nine years old with
    a half-rack of Schlitz in my grandfather’s
     
    basement,
    was that I could drink like a son-of-a-bitch.

  • Quentin Taratino loves Harold and Kumar!
    Of course, this means that he’s going to copy it now.

  • The 20 By 20 Room
    A weblog devoted to role-playing games. I think my old writing buddy from Golden Words, Rob “King Floyd” MacDougall, has something to do with this.

  • “The corporate whistle-blower lesbian impregnating hang your head in shame movie of the year”
    In spite of referring to Spike Lee’s new movie, She Hate Me, using the phrase above, the critic says it’s bad. Unfortunately, this story is behind a paid registration wall. Check out the reviews for the movie: it’s being universally panned (it got 2,.8 stars on IMDB; even Freddy vs. Jason, which made me want to stab out my own eyes with a butter knife, did better). First the kerfuffle over the name of Spike TV, now this: when did Spike completely lose his mind?

  • Manifesto for the Reputation Society
    A rather academic First Monday paper on what is essentially Whuffie: “By leveraging our limited and local human judgement power with
    collective networked filtering, it is possible to promote an
    interconnected ecology of socially beneficial reputation systems — to
    restrain the baser side of human nature, while unleashing positive
    social changes and enabling the realization of ever higher goals.”

  • Yet another Achewood comic that is a suitable metaphor for life
    For an innocent 5-year old plush otter, Philippe is having a pretty traumatic childhood. He really needs to get the hang of wabi-sabi, and Teodor really needs to learn how to make a half-decent looking Mickey Mouse pancake.

  • Keep or Skip
    Okay, this really isn’t reading material. It is, however, a game for
    Mac OS X written as part of a challenge on CreateMacGames.org to make a
    game with no visual interface whatsoever.

    Keep or Skip uses your iTunes library as source material. It chooses a
    song at random and takes a sample of that song. It then cuts that
    sample into two or more pieces and plays those pieces in random order.
    Your job: state the correct order of those pieces!

    Keep or Skip uses the built-in speech system to prompt you with
    instructions and read the names of the song it’s about to play at you.
    The game works best if you have a sizable iTunes collection and if most
    of your songs have lyrics and aren’t full of long, repretitive
    sections. This game is great for rock, pop, folk and country tunes; I
    suspect that an iTunes library full of nothing but Phillip Glass would
    make this game a nightmare.

    Come to think of it, an iTunes library full of Phillip Glass tunes is a nightmare, game or no.