Author: Joey deVilla

On the results of the US election: The Accordion Dude abides.

Update

Reader Chris Charabaruk stated in the comments that he prefers this image:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Last night, TechCrunch came to town and invited 1,000 people to come and mingle at the Steam Whistle Brewery. Anitra and I attended the event, which was packed solid. Even with 1,000 free tickets available, there were still a large number of people waitlisted.

The photo above shows the party floor as things were winding down. At the start of the party, the place was packed solid, with local tech startup people watching demos put on by startups who managed to pull together the $1,500 sponsor fee, catching up with each other and trying to meet new co-founders, collaborators, funders and employees.

A good number of the Usual Suspects were there, including Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan and Rob Tyrie, pictured above. Also present were some of my former colleagues at Shopify, including Blair Beckwith, Brian Alkerton and Mark Hayes, Shoplocket co-founders Katherine Hague and Andrew Louis, Anna Starasts from Grossman Dorland, James Woods from Shifthub (I worked with him at Tucows, along with Greg Frank, who was also there), Julie Tyios (who I cracked up with my Ford Canada interview), Vahid Jozi (whom I met while in Ottawa), Austin Ziegler, Jon from Venio, Rohan “Silver Fox” Jayasekara, John Gauthier and Jean-Luc David, to name a few. Special out-of-town mention has to go to Greg “Gregarious” Narain.

John Biggs and Yours Truly at TechCrunch Toronto.

My moment of the evening: when John Biggs, TechCrunch’s East Coast Editor saw me and asked “Is that the Accordion Guy?” It turns out that’s he’s been a reader of The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century for some time! I’ve been following his stuff since he was Editor-in-Chief at Gizmodo, so the recognition made me feel like a rock star — a very nice birthday present!

Events like this are good for our local startup ecosystem. The chance meetings and exchange of ideas at shindigs like this have led to all sorts of things: friendships, collaborations, partnerships, employment and even getting some funding, but most importantly, they lend that sense of cohesiveness necessary to creating an environment where little businesses built on big ideas can thrive. My thanks to the folks at TechCrunch, the sponsors and all who came for making this event a fun and productive one!

You can read the TechCrunch summary of the event here.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

All this and more at the Dog Shaming site.

It’s your chance to use your baby as a billboard that announces to the world “Mommy reads poorly-written softcore S&M novels”. Take it from a divorcé having the best midlife crisis ever: there’s so much good porn and so many fine kinky people out there. Don’t settle for Fifty Shades, the McDonald’s of smut!

Get out there and vote! You live in a democracy only if you use your voice.

(And by the bye: using a revolver to hammer in nails is probably not a good idea.)

Found via Wil Wheaton.

Oh, what happens when a perfectly innocent phrase turns into a term for a sex act. I haven’t enjoyed such an accidental double-entendre since posting this Archie comic cover:

Accordion City is often called Canada’s analogue to New York. While that’s true in many ways, the differences between the cities becomes starkly apparent when it comes to their mayors. New York has Michael Bloomberg (pictured above; be sure to check out the recent piece on him in The Atlantic) and we have…Rob Ford.

In an article titled Doubling Down on Toronto’s Future, Spacing’s John Lorinc looks at both mayors and laments at the gulf between them. For all the complaints made about Bloomberg’s handling of Hurricane Sandy, it’s frightening to think about how Ford would’ve fared under similar circumstances.

On matters less hypothetical, Ford can still be found wanting, whether you compare New York’s ambitious Applied Sciences Initiative to Toronto’s “Hey, Let’s put in a casino!” idea or Bloomberg’s regular use of public transit to the commandeering of two public transit buses for the football team Ford coaches, which in turn had to dump their passengers during a rainy rush hour. Bloomberg understands urban living, Ford is so anti-urban (as very well pointed out in Richard Florida’s recent op-ed in Toronto Life) that he can’t even answer the simple question “What do you love about Toronto?”

By the way, if you’re wondering what his answer was, here it is:

This is a great city. We’ve cleaned it up. There’s less graffiti than there was, obviously, a year ago. It’s a cleaner city than it was a year ago. And we’ve made this a safer city. We made it a cleaner city. Jobs are coming into the city now. So, you know what, this has been a very, very prosperous year. We had a zero per cent tax increase for the first time in 11 years last year, gave people some breathing room. I cut the $60 car tax—that’s $70 million in savings. That’s a large amount of money, when people said it couldn’t be done…

It’s the difference between the mayor of New York City and the mayor of SimCity.

And as Torontonians, it’s our fault. Those of us who voted for him — I’m not one of them — may have put him in there, but we’re all responsible for holding his feet to the fire and each one of us is responsible for his or her contribution to what makes Toronto great. Richard Florida hit the nail on the head in an email to John Lorinc:

Many Torontonians including our business leadership claim to want Toronto to be a great global city like London or New York. But they say nothing about the casino, nothing about the mayor. They just want it to somehow “happen”. I cannot understand the failure of the business community to speak out. The mayor is ruinous to them – he and his policies hinder and hamper their ability to attract talent. How do they not see this?  Why don’t they speak out? Why do they acquiesce?

I hope that this issue is a topic of discussion at tonight’s TechCrunch meetup.