I’ve got a couple of photosets from my recent trip to Seattle on Flickr. One of them is of the great signs I saw at Pike Place Market:
Click the photo to see the full photoset.
…and the other is devoted to some of the other sights around the market:
Click the photo to see the full photoset.
This article also appears in Global Nerdy.
Even though it’s been almost four months since I’ve joined Microsoft, I’m still asked the question “Joey, why did you join the Dark Side?”
There are many reasons for joining the Dark Side. One of them is that the Rebels are sick, sick puppies:
Card courtesy of Ben Congdon.
Happy Valentine’s Day. my fellow nerds!
Cupid and Psyche by Francois Gerard.
Now why don’t you crazy kids put on some pants.
I would normally just post this in Global Nerdy and not here in Accordion Guy, but I can’t pass up the chance to share one of the best nerdy Sesame Street moments!
If it weren’t for the fact that the 0 isn’t at the end of the sequence, this Sesame Street video with The Count and Patrick Stewart would be perfect for celebrating Unix time 1234567890, the number of seconds since January 1, 1970. This numerically perfect moment takes place tonight at 23:31:30 GMT (in my neck of the woods – Eastern Standard Time, that’s 18:31:30).
I’ve always admired people who can walk into an awkward situation and handle it with a quick wit, improvisation and aplomb. It’s a quality that I constantly strive to cultivate in myself. It’s also a quality that David Letterman has often been able to tap while interviewing some of his more difficult guests, most recently with a heavily bearded (and heavy sedated) Joaquin Phoenix on Wednesday’s Late Night show:
Letterman took would’ve been a ten-minute disaster for many other hosts and with a combination of “steering”, harnessing the audience’s goodwill toward Phoenix and gentle ribbing (“Can you tell us about your days with the Unabomber?”) turned it into one of his more memorable interviews. He even managed to evoke a smile and compliment from his spaced-out guest: “You’re a funny dude.”
Kudos to Dave for pulling it off!
Bonus reading material: Time has compiled Letterman’s top ten disastrous interviews.
I’m posting this animation for no reason other than the fact that it amuses me:
This article also appears in Global Nerdy.
From 1998 to 2000, I was self-employed. Lacking the funds to rent office space, I ended up working outside the boundaries of cubicle-land or even anything that looked like an office. I worked out of my kitchen, my business partner Adam’s living room and often by the bar at the old location of the Queen Street cafe known as Tequila Bookworm. Being a gregarious and social guy, I enjoyed working at “The ‘Worm”, mixing work with mingling with both the people who came to the cafe and the people who worked there (which led to a story I call Worst Date Ever, which was actually a lot of fun, even back then).
Today, I’m a Sith Lord – er, Developer Evangelist — at Microsoft. In addition to the cool red lightsaber and the ability to hurl lightning bolts, I also have the benefit of being a remote worker, which means I can choose where I work. I’ve got a nice home office setup and I can go hang out at the Evangelist Corner at the Mississauga office, but neither of these locations puts me anywhere where you can come up and talk to me.
That’s why I plan have a “Coffee and Code” day at least once a week. On these days, I plan to work from a wifi-equipped cafe, where you can walk right up to me and talk.
This brings me to my question: Where should I set up? A better way of putting this question might be “Where should I set up so that it’s convenient for you to drop by and have a word with me?” As long as it’s got wifi and it’s somewhere in Toronto, if it’s at a place that’s convenient for a lot of developers and techies, that’s where I want to be.
If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments!