Author: Joey deVilla

I love these recent photos of Williamsburg (which, like the rest of New York City, is still covered with snow) with scenes from the ice Planet Hoth (from The Empire Strikes Back) photoshopped into them.

[ Found via Gothamist ]

Want to know what Windows Phone 7 devices are being offered by Canadian telcos? I’ve got the list below:

Telus

Telus offers two Windows Phones:

• HTC 7 Surround. This is the one with the slide-out Dolby Surround speakers and a little kickstand so you can use it as a mini video player. The speakers are surprisingly loud and clear and our coworker Anthony “The Mobile Situation” Bartolo used them to great effect at TechDays this year, annoying us with the Jersey Shore soundtrack.
• LG Optimus 7. This one’s for people with DLNA-equipped TVs (or in a pinch, a TV with an Xbox hooked up to it) – you can use DLNA to send the pictures and videos on your phone to a nice large screen. It’s great for presentations, vacations slides or even movie-watching.

Bell

There are a number of people who refuse to use on-screen virtual keyboards and like the reassuring feel of a button’s “throw”. If you’re one of these people, Bell’s LG Optimus Quantum is the Windows Phone for you, with a slide-out keyboard. I’ve taken it out for a test drive at the store and it feels pretty nice.

Rogers

I’m on Rogers (as are all Microsoft employees in Ontario – the company pays for our phones and plans), and their Windows Phone is the Samsung Focus. It’s sexy, skinny, much lighter than you’d expect for a device with this kind of horsepower and it sports a bright, crisp 4” Super AMOLED screen, just like the one on the Galaxy S. I end up doing a lot of impromptu demos with this phone, and everyone walks away impressed.

Expansys

If you’re in the market for an unlocked WP7 phone, or perhaps a WP7 phone that the Canadian telcos aren’t carrying, Expansys are the go-to people. If you’ve been to one of the big Microsoft conferences in the US – PDC, TechEd North America and so on – you’ve probably seen their booth. They’re the go-to guys for all sorts of mobile devices, including the hard-to-get ones.

They have a Canadian site, www.expansys.ca, and they’ve got a very extensive selection of Windows Phone 7 devices. Better still, their service is great. When I screwed up my last order and accidentally ordered the European version of a phone that wouldn’t be compatible with HSPA+ over here, a quick email to their service was all it took for them to fix the problem and let me know it was fixed. I salute them with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

And sadly enough, I’ll bet you know at least one person for whom this card would be perfect.

There’s a reason the tree’s done up like this —
click the picture to read the story.

It’s Christmas Eve and I’m off to spend Christmas with my family – it sounds like a big trip, but they’re a fifteen-minute drive away – so I’ll take this time to wish you all the best of the season. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, Festivus or anything else, enjoy your friends and family, have fun, be safe and go get some good deals on Sunday!

As is the tradition on the blog, I will point you to one of my favourite blog posts: The Best Christmas Present Ever, a tale that is highly unlikely to ever be turned into a Christmas TV special (for reasons that will become apparent as you read it).

From left to right: Sean, Angus, Randeep, Yours Truly
and two ladies who stopped to dance to some accordion grooves.

Here’s a photo that Lee Dale took on Saturday night of me playing Cee-Lo’s Fuck You on accordion for my friends and a couple of passers-by, who stopped to dance.

For more on what happened that night, see my earlier post Five Evenings Out.

Click the photo to see it at full size.

The CBC logo, rendered in back bacon (or what Americans call “Canadian Bacon”). All this picture needs is a Bloody Caesar.

Comic Sans is probably one of the most misused fonts out there. Originally intended for the comic book-style speech bubbles for “Clippy” and other assistants in Microsoft Office, it got used first for “fun”, “childlike” documents and signs, and then found its way into far less appropriate venues, including those shown in the photos below:

The Comic Sans Criminal site does a great job telling the story of Comic Sans, where people went terribly, terribly wrong with it, what the appropriate uses for Comic Sans are, and it ends with the Comic Sans Pledge:

Check out Comic Sans Criminal! It’s a beautifully-designed site that makes use of some good HTML5 tricks to turn it into an entertaining and gorgeous slideshow, and if it stops you from using Comic Sans inappropriately (or even better, altogether), so much the better!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.