Not only that, it’s FREE rock and roll too!
Damn, I’m going to miss Chuck Klosterman (who wrote the rock/pop culture book Sex and Drugs and Cocoa Puffs), who’ll be speaking tonight at 7:00 p.m. at The Rivoli (334 Queen Street West, half a block east of Spadina, right around the corner from my house).
The super fun band known as Super Furry Animals will have an in-store concert on Monday, September 15th at Soundscapes on 572 College Street West at 7:00 p.m.
Back in early 2002, I went down to the San Francisco Bay Area to hang out with friends and to help my housemate Paul present Peekabooty at CodeCon. I arrived a day early and hung out with my friend Jillzilla in Mountain View that night, where we met some engineers who were wondering why my accordion didn’t make any sound. I made a note of our conversation in my blog entry for February 23, 2002:
A group of drunk partygoers — an even mix of men and women — see the accordion and ask the question that most ninety-nine out of one hundred people ask: “Do you know how to play that thing?” I prove that I can by breaking into a couple of popular tunes.
After a couple of tunes, I stop to talk to the group. One of the women is pressing on the keys repeatedly and getting frustrated.
Her: It’s not making any sound!
Me: Of course not.
Her (annoyed, as if I’m playing some kind of joke on her): Why not?
Me: Because I’m not squeezing the bellows right now.
Her: What?
Me: The accordion is just a big harmonica with buttons and an air bag. Sound doesn’t come our of a harmonica by itself; you have to blow air into it to make noise. Same here, except you squeeze the bellows to move air over the reeds.
Her (impressed by my extremely basic science): Wow.
One of the guys: Dude, you’re not from around here, are you? What brings you down here?
Me: I’m visiting my friend Jill [I point to Jill] and am attending a conference in San Francisco tomorrow.
Guy: We’re all from around here. Most of us work at Lockheed.
Her: I’m a mechanical engineer there.
Me (thinking): I am never ever boarding a Lockheed plane again.
I was reminded of this story because earlier this week, I’d heard about how a satellite at the Lockheed Martin plant where those engineers worked got ruined due to sheer incompetence:
As the NOAA-N Prime spacecraft was being repositioned from vertical to horizontal on the “turn over cart” at approximately 7:15 PDT today, it slipped off the fixture, causing severe damage. (See attached photo). The 18′ long spacecraft was about 3′ off the ground when it fell.
The mishap was caused because 24 bolts were missing from a fixture in the turn over cart. Two errors occurred. First, technicians from another satellite program that uses the same type of turn over cart removed the 24 bolts from the NOAA cart on September 4 without proper documentation. Second, the NOAA team working today failed to follow the procedure to verify the configuration of the NOAA turn over cart since they had used it a few days earlier.
(The emphasis is mine, by the way.)
In case you’re dying for a visual, here’s a large photo of the satellite after it tipped over.
I can see the instant message chatter going on at Lockheed right now:
[RocketMan23] SRRY BOUT BORRWING BOLTS WITHOUT TELLING U BUT U SHULD HV CHEKD LOL
I really do wonder if the same engineer was involved…
I’m leaving for a weekend in Montreal tonight, and I’m taking my housemate Paul there as his birthday present (His birthday’s on the 13th). It’s part of Paul’s indoctrination as a soon-to-be “New Canadian”. I’ll take him to rue Prince-Arthur, St-Denis, the mountain, the old city, “Club Super Sexe” (at least to take his picture beside that beautiful sign) and teach him remedial French.
Thanks to a VIA Rail voucher sent to me by Dave “Dave’s Picks” Polaschek — thanks very much, Dave! — and Boris’ loaning me of his apartment (he’s off to NYC for the weekend) — thanks, Boris! — we can go to Montreal in cheap but comfortable style.
We’ll be there from tonight around 11:30 p.m. to Sunday around 6:00 p.m. If you’re in Montreal and want to share in some drinking and general accordion mayhem, I’ll have my cell phone (416 WIT N HIP — hey, that’s the number they gave me) and I should have email access.
Greg Knauss’ The Devil’s Dictionary (which I’ve mentioned before) has some wonderfully nasty definitions of things computer- and Web-ish. He updates it every now and again, and he’s added some new entries since last I checked. My favourites:
GNU License, noun
An impairment of vision, causing the victims perception to be limited to black and white.
usability, adjective
The quality of being easy, usually championed by the difficult.
(One nitpick: “usability” is a noun; “usable” is an adjective.)
extreme programming, noun
A method of software development that combines all the charm of backseat driving with all the efficiency of a marital squabble.
The downside of living in large cultural centre like Accordion City is that there is a distressingly large number of overexposed, under-brained Gen X enfants terribles who get paid terribly large salaries to write terribly bad pronouncements on popular culture. Canada’s National newspaper, the Globe and Mail, is located a short walk south of my house and houses two such twerps. I’ve already introduced you to Leah McLaren, who like outer space is beautiful yet vacous. Her male counterpart is Russell Smith, a well-dressed, well-coiffed, well-read cultural Pharisee who badly needs a good solid punch to the mouth.
His most recent column bears the title Blogs: Hanging Dirty Laundry On-line. Allow me to use one of my stock phrases: I’ve seen better paper after wiping my ass.
Like his co-worker McLaren, he immediately gets up my nose with these lines from the opening paragraph:
The blog phenomenon is perhaps the strangest side of the Internet. It’s stranger even than all the porn. Thousands of unremarkable people are posting their diaries on-line.
“Oh dear,” one can imagine him saying, “the proles are writing about their unremarkable little lives.”
Such acts, it would seem, are best left to professionals. Say, one Russell Smith, whose books about disaffected young twenty-somethings whose stories are derived from his more-remarkable-than-yours-life. Take, for instance, this plot summary of How Insensitive, a book that became a favourite in CanLit circles:
Adrift in Torontos gossipy, grant-driven cultural scene, a coterie of overeducated, underemployed young people stab at vaguely artistic projects and scramble after the opportunities that seem tantalizingly within reach if you know the right people. Searching for work, sex and big-city life is Ted Owen, who quickly finds himself swept into the complicated lives of the young and the jaded, people who thrive in a strange world of hip fashion and surreal night-clubs.
Wow, Russ, that Ted Owen character reminds me of someone. Wish I could put my finger on whom…
Here’s the first bit from a summary of his second novel, Noise:
Noise, much like Smith’s first novel How Insensitive, deals with young, Torontonian ladder-climbers.
This time the story revolves around James, a restaurant critic. We follow James as he tries to understand his relationships with those around him, and watch his struggles as he tries to make a name for himself.
Yo, Russ! Are you familiar with a term that gets bandied about in fandom called a “Mary Sue”?
(At writing schools all over North America, the credo seems to be “Write What You Know.” Surely they should teach a corollary: “Expand your knowledge. Please.“)
The difference between Russell Smith and most bloggers boils down to these things:
Here’s the deal. If you see Russ in some bar, go buy a drink. Then walk up to him and throw it in his face. I’ll reimburse you and take you out for drinks. Sound cool?
My nephew Aidan, elder son of my sister Eileen and brother-in-law Richard, turns two today. Happy birthday, little fella!
Here’s a video (QuickTime, 220K) showing how he’s already mastered the “high five”. I’ll have to teach him the “rock lock” at some point.
raku from the #joiito IRC channel on freenode.net saw the posting with the Tucows office photos and asked if he could see a close-up of the books on my desk. Here you go:
The books are:
I’d provide an appropriate link for each book, but I just don’t have the time.
