Author: Joey deVilla

And, looking out my entirely-glass south wall just to the right of where I make the software magic happen (that would be my bedroom office), it would appear that I’m also buried in rain.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present the Polini 910 Carena: a motorbike small enough to put on your mantelpiece, but real enough to ride!

From the article at Motorcycle.com:

Basically, pocket bikes, also known as minimotos, are not mini-bikes in the traditional sense. They are miniature GP racing motorcycles, accurate in proportion to GP bikes and include many of the same component materials such as disc brakes, alloy and billet aluminum cast perimeter frame and swingarm. They are so small they many be perfect as a decoration piece. However, pocket bikes are manufactured to be ridden.

Our test bike, the 910 Carena, represented the middle ground of the Polini pocket bike line-up. The air-cooled, single-cylinder, two-stroke motor only produces a little over six horsepower, but there is a lot of potential in this pocket bike. Bear with us as we try to explain to you what its like to ride this Italian micro-bike less than a foot off the ground at speeds up to 40 miles-per-hour.

They called it a two-stroke motor?! It’s a two-stroke engine, people. There’s a difference.

All I can say is that you’d better be the toughest (or hottest) biker of the gang if you want to ride one of these in Quebec.

[Thanks to John “lemonodor” Wiseman for pointing out this link!]

According to this story, 1.2% of the gun dealers in the United States sell weapons that account for 57% of all firearms used in crimes.

Recommended Reading

Just in case you didn’t know (and hence didn’t get the joke title), here’s an explanation of what the Pareto Principle is.

We’re only a couple of days into National Accordion Awareness Month, and nobody can accuse me of not pulling my weight. Here are my contributions…

“If I’ve told them once, I’ve told them a thousand times, it’s AccordionGuy first, then Rush Limbaugh.”

Thanks to a recommendation from Scott “Hello, My Name Is Scott” Ginsberg — he’s the guy who wears a name tag, which gets accordion-like results and doesn’t weigh thirty freaking pounds — I’m going to be interviewed on the Keith Larson Show on WBT News/Talk Radio (1110 on your AM dial in Charlotte, NC) this Friday at 11:35 a.m. Eastern. They haevn’t given me any particular “script” to stick to; as far as I can tell, it’ll be me nattering for twenty-five minutes in my radio-friendly schmoove voice, after which Rush Limbaugh takes over. I hear he’s going to eat a tree on his Friday show.

A big thank you to Scott for the recommendation! You’re the man!

ChickTV

Next week, I’ll be taping a segment for an episode of an upcoming W Network / WTN show called Living Romance. This particular episode concerns itself with serenading and will feature a mariachi band, a violinist who plays for his girlfriend in the morning to wake her up and at night to lull her to sleep (oh yeah, that’ll be happening once the honeymoon’s over), and me. As with the radio show, this will be largely unscripted, although I think there’s going to be a busking segment where I attempt to woo women on the street. Which sounds like an average weekend for me.

Ooh! I get a movie credit!

On Monday, June 16th, the Canadian Film Centre will premiere five new short films, including one called Squeezebox, on which I served as technical consultant, extra, accordion foley artist and soundtrack musician. That, and I also gave two of the young teen stars help with their music and math homework. The preview screening will take place at the Uptown Theatre on Monday, June 16th at 7:00 p.m., followed by an after party at The Phoenix at 8:30.

I’ll be there, and if you live in Accordion City and want to come along, drop me a line and let me know!

…which I’m afraid might be too much of a good thing. I wake up and start coding, and before I go to bed, the last thing I do is check files into version control. Then I sleep, only to dream about coding. In one particular dream, I was standing in front of the Kickass Karaoke crowd, and they were asking me “why isn’t it done yet?” and on the screens, there was SQL instead of song lyrics.

Thankfully, I still managed to squeeze out enough personal time for the weekly dinner with my family and a couple of hours to make an impromptu visit to meet the utterly charming Min Jung Kim when she passed through town. No one expects the Min Jung Inquisition! (Min Jung, you can try on my accordion any time, and thanks, Rannie for the invite!)

The rest of my life, however is TLAs (three-letter acronyms): PHP, ASP, SQL, P2P. (Okay, “2” isn’t a letter.)

All I have to do is survive the next couple of weeks and things will get back to what passes for normal round my way.

I’m going to try to post something later on tonight, but there are no guarantees. In the meantime, how about another one of those silly Internet quiz results that I save for these occasions?

Yeah, as if we hadn’t guessed that already.

The beauty of the Internet is that it allows anyone with the will, knowledge and obsessiveness to catalog the most obscure information and make it available to the world.

Case in point: The Unh! Project is an online collection of gutteral moans from comics. It features one of my all-time favourite noises, blurrrgh!, a noise I often used in my own comics back at Queen’s — it’s the sound of someone paying the price for having a few too many Moscow Mules.

On Monday at noon, I took a little time off work to visit and offer moral support to my friend Liz, who joined 10,000 other hopefuls at the Canadian Idol audition. The auditions were being held somewhere near the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, a quick bike ride from Big Trouble in Little China, a.k.a. my house. With the accordion slung on my back and a bag of pop and snacks for Liz, I biked around the north side of the Convention Centre looking for any sign of the audition without any success. The news stories predicted that thousands would show up — where were they?

Luckily Liz had brought her cell phone.

“We’re on the other side of the building, past the train station,” she said. Ah. The south side. I keep forgetting that the Convention Centre has a south building, located in the green space that is also home to the SkyDome and the former railround roundhouse which became the Steam Whistle Brewery.

When I arrived, I saw a ridiculous scene: instead of some kind of queue, the Idol hopefuls were corralled into a parking lot normally reserved for service vehicles. The lot wasn’t paved and was surrounded by a chain link fence. The north side of the lot had a row of porta-johnnies and a small grassy slope where a number of people lay motionless. The people inside were milling about listlessly, a good number of them with that sleep-deprived look that those of us who worked at Internet start-ups should find eerily familiar. A quartet of scowling people in red gold shirts with the word SECURITY emblazoned on the chest and back stood guard at the fence’s gate. That’s where Liz met me.

“Oh my God, Liz,” I said, “it looks like…like some kind of concentration camp for pop stars!”

“Let’s get you inside,” she said.

She had a word with the security guy at the gate with the most leader-like demeanor. At first, he said that he’d let me in if I left my bike outside. However, as I chained my bike to the nearest rack, he saw the accordion and decided that I was a straggler trying to sneak into the auditions and decided not to let me in.

“Hey, I’m not trying to audition. I have a real –” I caught myself about to say “real job”, which might’ve been impolitic, considering that dozens of sleep-deprived, grouchy aspiring pop singers were within earshot. “Um, I’m a computer programmer here to offer a friend some moral support and snacks. The accordion thing’s just a hobby.”

The security guard shook his head, looking resolute behind his Dirty Harry sunglasses.

I handed Liz the bag of snacks over the fence. “I feel as if I’m visiting you in prison!” I said. We both extended our thumbs and pinkies, pantomiming the act of talking on the phone through Plexiglas, the way they do in the movies.

“D’you think I should’ve put a file in the Doritos?” I asked.

“Some wire cutters would work well on the fence,” she replied.

“How long have you been here?”

“Since three in the morning. There was a line-up down the block, and then they corralled us into this lot.”

She went on to tell me how the transition from a line along the sidewalk to amorphous blob in a parking lot upset some people. Suddenly, camping out early — some people have been waiting here since Friday — was pointless. They might as well have spent a rainy weekend indoors and shown up in the wee hours of Monday morning.

No wonder some of them looked really miserable; they’d just been punished for showing some initiative.