Categories
Life

A Couple of Healthy Relatives

I’ve been writing about ailing relatives for the past little while. How
’bout a couple who are hale and hearty? Ladies and gentlemen, here are
my nephews, Nicholas and Aidan!


Nico and Aidan. Awwwwwww.

They’re cute fellas, and they’re always happy to hang out with Uncle Joey.

Categories
It Happened to Me Music Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

A Little More About Saturday Night

Here are a couple of videos from last Saturday, a lovely evening spent with some GTABlogger buddies — Jeremy, Graig, Carla, Paul and special guest blogger from LA, Kristine — at the superfabulous and full-of-cute-well-dressed-women Drake Hotel.

The first one features Jeremy enjoying a glass of Couvoisier that Kristine had bought him. I’m the other voice in the video.


Livin’ in a rap video. Jeremy gets the Courvoisier passed to him.
[ Click on the picture to see the video — 1.2 MB Quicktime ]

Jeremy later got to witness the power of the accordion. One of the
group of women (seen at the end of his video) asked me to take their
picture. My birthday senses were tingling, so I asked if one of them
was celebrating a birthday. They pointed out the birthday girl, I
strapped on the squeezebox, played Happy Birthday and won more converts to the Accordion Cause.


Later that evening, a guy asked me to play Happy Birthday for his buddy, who was celebrating the big four-oh. As a sign of his gratitude, he bought Paul and I a round of drinks.

There’s nothing like having a hand-powered machine that can turn music into free drinks, let me tell you.


I shot this video of the Drake lobby (and Graig Kent) shortly after
ther Unicorns’ pointless and possibly drug-affected performance.


Teeth-clenchingly hip. Graig tells us how much he loves the Drake Hotel.
[ Click on the picture to see the video — 1.0 MB Quicktime ]



Speaking of those turds on toast known as the Unicorns, a little Googling found me an article on the band in the upcoming issue of Macleans magazine. Here’s a snippet that explains everything:

The trio’s antics have only added to their
growing legend. They hired homeless people as fill-ins for a couple of
shows and claim to have eaten magic mushrooms in preparation for an
interview with the New York Times. Topping things off, the
bandmates gave away all of their possessions last August and moved into
an RV (which has since died) to live a transient beatnik-style
existence. They still don’t have a fixed address. “The nights are
cold,” says Diamonds, during a recent 3 a.m. interview in the parking
lot of a 7-Eleven in Toronto, “but you get to walk around a lot.”
Despite inhabiting a twisted fantasy world, the Unicorns have a pretty
good idea why things are going so well. “Girls start with horses, then
get into unicorns, and then nice boys,” says Tambeur. “We like to think
of ourselves as halfway between horses and nice boys.”

Halfway between horses and nice boys — yeah…on the IQ scale or the evolutionary ladder!

Categories
Uncategorized

Boss Ross’ Interview


Report On Business Television anchor Mike Hainsworth, whom I know from my days at OpenCola, where he did some sysadmin consulting. 
[Click the photo to see the interview.]


Boss Ross, whom I know from this place where I hang out for hours every weekday.

[Click the photo to see the interview.]

Boss Ross’
interview on Report On Business Television in which he talks
about the launch of Blogware (mentioned in this entry) is available online [Windows Media Player reuqired]. Check it out, and keep and eye on the Blogware site, where I’ll be talking about some cool features that put us ahead of the blog tool pack.

And hey, don’t take my word for it; Suw Charman thinks pretty highly of Blogware too.

Categories
Uncategorized

Boss Ross on RoBTV This Afternoon

[ Update:
Yup, I’m now using a small image from my own file system rather Ross’
mondo huge 2500-by-3600 pixel image. He’s a great boss, but I have no
desire to see his tongue in such striking detail again. I’m going to
pound back Crown Royal all week in an attempt to kill the brain cells
storing that image, believe you me. ]

Boss Ross: The man just oozes authoritah! Oozes, I say!

If you have access to the Report
on Business TV
channel, tune in this afternoon at 2:13. Boss Ross will be on Danielle Bochove’s
show, Business
Day
, to talk about the best damned blogging tool there
is
.

Categories
It Happened to Me Music

Lederhosen Lucil at “Connect the Dots”, Saturday Night

Here’s a pic of my friend and former bandmate, Lederhosen Lucil, wowing the audiences with her Yamaha Portasound keyboard wizardry and her songs about boyfriends, food allergies and candy:

This was taken at the fomerly-fleabag-now-fabulous Drake Hotel on West
Queen West last Saturday night, where I caught the show with my
housemate Paul and friends Jeremy, Carla, Graig and special guest blogger Kristine. The occasion was CBC Radio 3’s Connect the Dots tour, a showcase of indie art and indie rock and fairly indie settings across Canada.


In my opinion, Lederhosen Lucil put on the best performance of the
night. As for the worst performance, I think most people in the
audience would hand that award to the last act, The Unicorns,
who took their half-decent tunes and mangled them by making the mistake
that all too many high school rock bands make: drinking too much before
the show. That, and being out of tune, even for a lo-fi band. They
managed to get a couple of funny lines of banter in, but completely
ruined it with their spazzy “we’re in our parents’ basement rec room
rockin’ out!” stage lack-of-presence.

To the Unicorns: I want those thirty minutes of my life back, you talentless turds on toast. You guys aren’t even worthy of the witless slash fiction written about you. Taste my future generations, you poseurs.

Nick informed me the
next day that he and his friend saw the drummer after the show vomiting
effluently, to which I say “good”. The taste of his vomit will be
sweet ambrosia next to the effluent bile I will unleash upon him should the little
future gas-pumper be hapless enough to cross my path.

Categories
Uncategorized

Blogware 1.0

After putting in over a year’s worth of work — research,
designing,
programming, testing and collecting feedback — we are proud to
announce the official release of Blogware version 1.0!

Blogware is our dream weblogging tool, the answer to a
question we
asked ourselves: “If we could make our ideal weblog software, what
would it be like?” The end result is a tool that we not only build, but
use every day in both our professional capacities and for personal
blogging.

Blogware has many features,
including:

  • A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What
    You Get) editor built into its web interface
  • A
    built-in comments system that can notify you and your readers via email
    whenecver a new comment is posted to a specific
    entry
  • An advanced photo album system that allows
    you to bulk upload photos as zip files and can resize them as it
    imports
  • A category system that allows your to post
    your articles under one or more categories
  • A reader
    sign-on system that lets you assign reader permissions for specific
    categories
  • A
    built-in filesystem that can be used for storing files that can be
    included in your articles, for plain HTML pages, or even just as a
    place to back up or share your files
  • Moblogging —
    you can post articles or photos via email-enabled handheld devices such
    as PDAs or cell phones
  • All kinds of options for customizing the look and feel of
    your weblog, including a layout manager that makes designing you blog’s layout as simple and dragging and dropping.

…and we’re not done yet. We’re constantly collecting
feedback and improving Blogware.

Blogware is available through a number of resellers, each
offering
their own pricing plan and support package. If you’d like to find out
more, see this
list of resellers
to see which Blogware offering is the right
one for you!


Boss Ross, who’s been running the
Blogware project since its inception last February, sends out
thank-yous in his latest blog entry, and points to a more official-sounding news release about Blogware 1.0 in Yahoo! Finance.

Categories
It Happened to Me

Happy Day, Mom!

“Mother is the name of god on the lips and hearts of all children.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray (and yes, Eric Draven in The Crow)

I wish I could say this in person, but right now, Mom’s in the Philippines with both her brothers. They’re by the bedside of my gravely ill grandfather, who’s not expected to last much longer. Until she returns this Wednesday, I’ll just have to send my best wishes for Mother’s Day long distance.

Happy Day to all you Moms out there!