Author: Joey deVilla

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SkyMall’s Air Travel Pillows

Cover of SkyMall magazine, featuring a machine for making soft drinks at home

I’ve cut my carry-on travel bulk by switching from “dead-tree” books to electronic books on my iPad, but you can’t use electronics during takeoff and landing. Luckily, I was flying on “Continited”, the merged airline made up of Continental (“Cheap like Northwest, but our pilots are sober!”) and United (home of “Economy Minus” class), who provide a copy of SkyMall in every seat pocket.

SkyMall is always fascinating reading. It’s the finest catalog of things best described by Japanese terms: gomi, which means “junk” and chindogu, a neologism used to describe “unuseless” items: seemingly clever yet impractical solutions to First World Problems. If you’ve always wanted Draco Malfoy’s snake-headed cane, a kind of device that lets you make your own soft drinks at home or a fancy laser helmet that supposedly reverses male-pattern baldness, SkyMall can satisfy your needs.

Since the February, I’ve been averaging a flight every two and a half weeks, so I thought I’d check out the section for frequent travellers. These two items, both air travel pillows, caught my eye.

SkyMall ad for the EZ Sleep travel pillow, featuring a woman leaning against an inflatable wall mountedon the armrest of her airline seat

If you’re the kind of person who likes something to lean on while sleeping and extremely well-defined boundaries, the EZ Sleep travel pillow was made for you. If you’re by the windows, this pillow turns your seat into a little fort, and if you’re closer to the aisle, you can play “border guard” to the passengers in your row now trapped behind your inflatable Berlin Wall. The EZ Sleep pillow’s design also ends resolves the battle between you and the poor schlub beside you over the armrest by forcing a stalemate: it’s not-win-not-win!

SkyMall as for the SkyRest travel pillow, featuring man leaning forward on a large blue pillow mounted on the seatback tray table

While the ad for the EZ Sleep pillow amused me, the ad for the SkyRest pillow cracked me up. If you prefer to sleep on your stomach and you place a much higher value on 40 winks than on dignity, you’ll love this pillow. It seems designed specifically to make you look as if you’ve drunk too much and passed out right at the bar. Pair this with a dark suit and you’ll look like you had a successful three-martini business lunch with Warren Buffett; wear an aloha shirt like the guy in the ad above and people will think that you had a rip-roaring’ time with Jimmy Buffett.

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Headin’ Down to The Big Guava

barcamp tampa bay

Creative Commons photo courtesy of “Theo0023”.

Another weekend, another business trip. This time, the destination is Tampa, Florida (a.k.a. “The Big Guava”) for BarCamp Tampa Bay! A flight at 9:00 this morning will put me in Tampa a little bit before noon, and the rest of the day is customer meetings, a phone conference, technical documentation and maybe a little looking around. It’s Florida, so seafood is also on the agenda.

tampa hot n steamy

The weather promises to be…interesting. Needless to say, it’s a light-clothing trip.

More later – I’ve got to get some shut-eye. In honour of this trip, one of my favourite songs about tropical vacation spots: Hawaii by the Young Canadians, quite possibly the first Canadian punk band to perform at Mabuhay Gardens, San Francisco’s legendary combination Filipino restaurant and punk rock venue. Be warned: it’s old school punk, with f-words galore. But it’s great!)

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This is How a Lot of People Feel About the Changes to Facebook

Facebook came on a little strong with all the changes to its interface, which left users feeling ike the abuela (grandmother) in the video above…minus the laughing. I think they also imagine the dog with Mark Zuckerberg’s face, screaming “GILF! GILF! GILF!“

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

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Scenes from Today’s Toronto Techie Dim Sum

Toronto techie dim sum 1

The return of the Toronto Techie Dim Sum lunch took place earlier today, and it went off even better than I’d hoped! It had been a while since we’ve had one of these events, so I wasn’t expecting a turnout larger than a single table at Sky Dragon (their larger tables will easily accommodate 8 or 9 people), but we ended up being sixteen people in total.

There were a number of dim sum “alumni” who showed up, including Andrew Burke, who wins the Phileas Fogg award for greatest distance travelled to attend — he’s visiting from Halifax. We also had some people who’d never been to one of these events before, including my cousin Saturn, making it an event with not only figurative, but literal family! As always, it was one of those wonderful things that happens when good people meet over good food and make good conversation. I bounced between tables, either meeting people for the first time or catching up with old friend. And it was pretty inexpensive too — it worked out to about eight bucks a person, and we all ate our fill.

Toronto techie dim sum 2

I plan to organize these on a monthly basis, typically in the middle of the week in the middle of the month. Sky Dragon are great people and are only too happy to have our business. They’ll even give us a room all to ourselves if we end up with three or more tables’ worth of people, which I’d love to see in October.

Thanks to everyone who came, and if you couldn’t make it today: see you next month!

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

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Dear Microsoft: Just Update My Photo and We’ll Be Cool

If you were to go to Microsoft Canada’s blog for mobile developers as of this writing, you’d still see my photo in the banner:

canadian mobile developer banner

I really have no complaints about still having my face there, even though my last day at The Empire will be five months ago tomorrow. Being the Windows Phone guy was one of my favourite parts of my stint as a developer evangelist at Microsoft, and it’s always an honour to share a banner with Frederic Harper.

My real complaint is that the picture they’re using is from two years, and more importantly, twenty pounds ago (about the weight of a full-sized accordion).

Hey Microsoft: keep my picture up if you must, but could you at least use a newer, somewhat skinnier one? Perhaps one with me sporting my new, fashionable, I probably-paid-too-much glasses with Philippe Starck frames?

Self-portrait of Joey deVilla, taken in a mirror, showing off his new glasses

(By the bye, that’s my bathroom in the photo. I have a damn fine “re-bachelor” pad.)

If you’d much rather have a photo keeping with the mobile theme, may I suggest this one, where I’m posing with a phone and a wacky phone accessory? The pink says “Metro” – in every sense of the word!

"Moshi Moshi Metro!" Joey deVilla at Cafe Novo, holding Verna Kulish's pink iPhone connected to a pink Moshi Moshi handset.

That’s my friend and fellow ex-Microsoftie Verna Kulish’s Moshi Moshi Retro POP handset, which plugs into just about any smartphone. Feel free to Photoshop out Verna’s iPhone and replace it with an appropriate Windows Phone device – perhaps a Samsung Focus (my Windows Phone) or whatever Nokia’s releasing this fall.

Feel free to use either pic, Microsoft – as long as it’s current and skinnier, we’ll be cool.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

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Seen on a Recent Flight

one does not simply walk here

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. If you look out the windows to your right, you’ll see Mordor and the Eye of Sauron.”

(Actually, that’s a pretty cool sunset as seen on my last flight to Ottawa.)

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No Gas Pains Here

No gas pains here

Since May, I have filled the gas tank on my car a grand total of four times:

  1. Once to drive myself and my stuff from Accordion City to Ottawa, where I lived for the summer while immersing myself at my new job at Shopify.
  2. Once to drive from Ottawa to Kingston and back to attend my Engineering class’ 20th reunion at Crazy Go Nuts University.
  3. Once to drive myself and my stuff from Ottawa back to Accordion City.
  4. Once after the return trip from Ottawa. My tank is still mostly full as of this writing.

At this rate, most of my automotive spending has been on insurance and a little maintenance. Gas barely figures into the equation.

It was easy not driving in Ottawa. I lived and worked downtown, and Ottawa’s traffic, especially on the weekends, is positively idyllic in comparison to Toronto’s. Anyone who says that Ottawa has a traffic problem should be hermetically sealed in a dozen layers of bubble wrap for his or her own protection; such a person is too fragile to cope with the real world.

Since 2003, I’ve been riding “The Scorpion King”, my 7-speed Raleigh Calypso cruiser, pictured below:

The red rocket

I bought a new bike in Ottawa and broke with my tradition of buying cruisers. This time, I bought “The Red Rocket”, a deVinci Stockholm hybrid, pictured below, that I bought at the Kunstadt on Bank Street.

The red rocket

I didn’t travel terribly far in Ottawa, so while the new bike seemed appreciably snappier than the old one, I never got a sense of how good a commuter bike The Red Rocket was until I returned to Toronto and started biking from home in High Park to downtown. Hills that took some effort on the cruiser melt away on the hybrid. I zip down straightaways like an eel through a Vaseline sea. This thing is a joy to ride.

Not everyone can do this, of course. I work at a combination of locations: my rather nice home office, the Hacklab and a handful of places where they’re happy to let me “set up shop”. Given the sort of intra-urban distances I travel — about 7 kilometres (4.3 miles) from home to downtown — the bike gets me around about as quickly as public transit, once you factor in waiting times. And those of you who haven’t seen me in a bit have noticed the workout I’ve been getting; you don’t get that on the bus, streetcar or subway.

There will always be times when the car is a better option, and I’m glad I have mine. However, most of the time, the bike, combined with public transit when it’s raining, snowing or drinking, is great news for my wallet and waistline.