Author: Joey deVilla

Seen outside Sausage Partners on Queen Street East on Sunday.

The summer of funemployment has been great, but the calendar, my bank account and my ambition are all saying that it’s got to end soon. I’ve peppered my time off with interviews  with a number of companies, from startups with a handful of people to a large and very well-known organization employing about 70,000, both on the phone and in person. These days, I’m devoting more of my time to landing my next job.

In case you missed it, be sure to read the article Why You Should Hire Me on my tech blog, Global Nerdy.

In my search, I’ve come across a few jobs for which I can’t apply but where I’d probably excel. One such job was announced in this posting on the Sesame Street blog, which I found by way of Laughing Squid:

Sesame Street Seeking Recurring Character

We recently announced an open casting call for a new, recurring character onSesame Street. Here are the details:

Male or female actor, 18-25, fluent in Spanish and English, comfortable with multiple Spanish dialects and accents. Good sense of humor. Must sing well. Actor should be comfortable with both physical and improvisational comedy. Actor should be warm, likable and engaging. Must be prepared to sing a cappella in Spanish and English.

DATE: Monday, August 20th

TIME: 10am – 2pm

LOCATION: Roseland Ballroom, 239 West 52nd Street, New York

Please bring a headshot and resume if you have one.

If you have any further questions, please contact Joe Lopick of McCorkle Casting at joe@mccorklecasting.com.

I like to think that I meet all the requirements except for age and Spanish fluency. My Spanish is limited to ordering food and beer and asking “¿Donde son las filmas con action caliente ‘chica sur chica’?”, which I’m quite sure is completely inappropriate for Sesame Street. (I’m also sure Oscar the Grouch would know the answer.)

I daresay that I’m more qualified to be a Sesame Street character than the Average Joe. The accordion helps, but more importantly, I have actual improvising-with-puppets experience. I present the evidence below: clips from the short-lived web show Developer Jr., which was created by Microsoft and Butterscotch.com and got cancelled due to a shortage of funding.

Here’s the promo clip:

Here’s the first episode, How to Create Your Own Games with Kodu. Developer Jr. episodes had a basic plan, but everything that “Junior” (played by Brian Hogg) and I said was ad-libbed:

Here’s a behind-the-scenes interview with Matt Harris from On Deck:

And finally, the second (and final) episode, Making Movies with Live Movie Maker:

C’mon Sesame Street people, hire me! I may be too old for the character you have in mind, but isn’t it time you had a Mr. Hooper for the 21st century? I could be play the loveable curmudgeon Asian shop owner, except I’d be encouraging the kids to read the magazines on my shelf instead of yelling the stock phrase “Dis no libarry! You buy or get out!”

Earlier this week, I posted a blog entry about the Bacon Fest taking place tomorrow in Leslieville. I thought that I would simply attend until I received a Twitter message telling me that they were looking for a judge and asking me why I love bacon.

My responses:

• Bacon works for any meal: breakfast, second breakfast, lunch, tea-time, dinner and midnight snack.
• You can add it to just about any dish to make it better. Bacon is to meals as ice cream is to dessert.
• It’s so tasty that it’s the one meat flavour that vegetarians and vegans work hard to copy

I also told them that I see bacon everywhere and sent them links to these photos:

My responses seem to have won over the committee  and I will be a judge at tomorrow’s Bacon Fest.

Once again, the competitors will be:

• Le Papillon on the Park cooking Green Gate Farms’ bacon
• Waffle Bar and Mr. Spinners cooking Highmark Farms’ traditional-style bacon
• Glas Restaurant cooking Highmark Farms’ wild boar bacon
• Wheelbarrow Farm cooking their own traditional-style bacon
• Ying Ying Soy Food cooking with their own tofu bacon

In addition to competing, they’ll also be selling their bacon-based dishes for you to try.

The bacon-based fun happens this Sunday, August 12th at Jonathan Ashbridge Park (Queen Street East, a few blocks west of Coxwell) and runs from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m..

See you there! (And yes, I’m bringing the accordion.)

…they’re tearin’ up the dance floor Gangnam Style!

Why You Should Hire Me is an article on my tech blog, Global Nerdy, and the title is self-explanatory. If you’re looking for a techie who also has communication skills, I’m your guy.

If you’ve read the article and are intrigued, here are my LinkedIn profile and my resume.

Let’s hope that this photo’s staged.

Have you ever wanted to throw fireball punches, just like Ryu from the Street Fighter games?

If you’re in Toronto this Saturday evening, you just might get your chance to do just that at Super Street Fire.

Imagine playing Street Fighter II, except instead of a joystick and buttons, you actually throw punches. Two fighters enter the ring, take their places on platforms at the opposite ends of this combat ring:

Click the diagram above to see it at full size.

They don motion-sensing gloves, and when the Master of Games yells “Fight!”, they start throwing punches and combos, and this is what it looks like:

Super Street Fire is a project created by the people at the Site3 coLaboratory, one of Toronto’s hackerspaces.  It’s a community project led by Seth Hardy, made up of volunteers from different backgrounds and with different skills: art, engineering, game design, software programming and stagecraft. It’s explained in their video:

Here’s how the Super Street Fire rig works:

The flame effect heads are propane-fed devices that emit a column of fire, or fireball, high into the air. They also dynamically change the colour of the flame so it’s obvious who dealt the blow and who stood there and took it. Flame effects are expressed as two rails, each comprised of eight computer controlled flame effect heads—one rail for the right hand gestures and one for the left. As well as the two rails between the players, there is an outer ring of sixteen flame effects that are triggered by special player move combinations and also controlled by the Master of Games for crowd engagement. The game system is computer hardware and software with an Arduino microcontroller that interfaces with the flame effect head solenoids to regulate both the intensity and duration of the flame.

The custom designed motion-sensing gloves that the players wear are modeled after traditional MMA grappling gloves. Similar to a Nintendo Wii-mote, the gloves contain inertial measurement units that capture a player’s actions. It then wirelessly sends this data to a game server that detects if those actions match one of the pre-trained game gestures. If the gesture is recognized, the game system gives feedback to the player by activating the flame effects.

The Super Street Fire crew is bound for Black Rock Desert in Nevada to take part in Burning Man, but before that happens, they’re showing off their stuff at the Amsterdam Brewing Company (21 Bathurst Street, at Fort York Boulevard) this Saturday night at 9:00 p.m.. Tickets are $10 + $1.24 processing fee — to attend, purchase your tickets online.