Author: Joey deVilla

It’s also this day…

So whether you spend today setting birthday candles or Parliament alight, have a good one!

Here’s a photo of my newly-refurbished laptop, fresh from my startup’s pivot and ready to go build some cool and useful mobile software.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Click the picture above to play the video.

I stumbled across this “hastily-made tourism video for Cleveland” while looking for links about Ohio. If you’ve ever been there, you know that it’s funny because it’s true.

Update

I found their first version:

The Economist has endorsed Obama for president, but why listen to some pink-double-cuff-shirted constipated Brits, when you can listen to some real down-home Americans from my ancestral state?

…or America’s favourite CEO, Mr. Charles Montgomery Burns?

…or poor little Abby, the little girl who just wishes the election would just end already?

In these increasingly aliterate and busy times, it’s good that people like Jessica Wise are reminding us why reading fiction is important.

The EfstonScience science and astronomy store, located on Dufferin near the 401, has closed after more than 40 years in business. When I was in high school, I used to go there all the time to check out the telescopes, science experiment kits and other stuff that made the place a nerd’s toy store for me.

I’ve just found out that they’re auctioning the last of their stuff online. As of this writing (Wednesday, October 31st at 3:15 p.m.), there are about 20 hours left in the auction. See what they’ve got on sale, and if you want it, place a bid!

Update: Wow, this guy’s even worse that I thought. See the update below.

While Hurricane Sandy was hammering Manhattan, a Twitter user with the handle of @ComfortablySmug made a series of alarming tweets to his 6,500+ followers, including:

• BREAKING: Confirmed flooding on NYSE. The trading floor is flooded under more than 3 feet of water.
• BREAKING MT @jhlipton: Con Ed shut down lower Manhattan system due to high tides
• BREAKING: Con Edison has begun shutting down ALL power in Manhattan
• BREAKING: CON EDISON SHUTTING OFF ALL POWER IN NEW YORK CITY AT 3AM IN ANTICIPATION OF POWER SURGES FROM HURRICANE SANDY

The problem with these posts? They’re all false. He made them up, for kicks.

Many people think that the sort of people who indulge in this sort of act — it’s the old “Yelling ‘Fire’ in a crowded theatre” hypothetical come true — is the sort of thing that some bored layabout would do. After all, isn’t the saying “Idle hands are the Devil’s Nintendo”?

It turns out that @ComfortablySmug is one Shashank Tripathi, isn’t some bored student or some troublemaker from the Occupy camp. In fact, he’s the opposite: he’s a hedge fund analyst.

Correction: In an earlier version of this post, I wrote that he worked for Stone Street Advisors, but Jordan Terry from Stone Street says he never worked there and only wrote a couple of entries for their blog. @Tripathi really should take the “Stone Street Advisors” link off his Twitter profile, but then again, misrepresentation seems to be his modus operandi.

He was also — and really, should we be surprised? — the campaign manager for Christopher R. Wight, this year’s Republican candidate for the U.S. House from New York’s 12th Congressional District. According to BuzzFeed, FEC documents show Wight has paid Tripathi thousands of dollars this election cycle as a “consultant”, and this Meetup page names him as the go-to guy for a Republican “Super Monday” event. He resigned from the position as soon as word got out that he was falsely crying “power outage”, and I’m sure the Repubs will work hard to distance themselves from this feeder on misery.

A New York councilman is talking to the DA, to see if charges can be pressed against Tripathi. Over on the tech news site GigaOm, Jeff John Roberts ponders whether Tripathi’s acts were just immoral or if they were also illegal.

Tripathi has since issued an apology by Twitter. It’s got all the flavour of “I’m sorry I got caught”.

I wish to offer the people of New York a sincere, humble and unconditional apology. twitter.com/ComfortablySmu…

— ComfortablySmug (@ComfortablySmug) October 31, 2012

Didn’t Tripathi have better things to do?

Update

It turns out that Tripathi’s already internet famous from this 2008 story: The Self-Obsessed, Emotionally Detached Hedge-Funder, in which he brags about “hate sex” with a woman with low-self esteem that left her bruised.

Thanks to @hypatiadotca for the tip for the update!