Author: Joey deVilla

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In the News

On Blogs and the Monkey Knife Fight

On Blogs

Logo for “The Globe and Mail”This blog got mentioned in a list accompanying an article in today’s Globe and Mail titled It’s not the blogs I hate, it’s their fans. In the article, Ivor Tossell talks about blogging’s image problems on its (contested) tenth anniversary, summing it up with:

People want the same thing from blogs that they want from every other print outlet: a good read. There are plenty that provide, and the sooner that blogging triumphalism is history, the sooner “blog” will stop being an unfairly loaded word. As someone wiser than me once said, it’s not the band I hate. It’s their fans.

As for Ivor’s summary of this blog, it’s:

A nice guy, an interesting life, a good writer: exactly what a first-person blog should be. Engaging and sometimes touching, but never overwrought.

Thanks for the mention, Ivor! (I’m sure I’ve been overwrought on this blog at least once, though.)

On the Monkey Knife Fight (a.k.a. Blog Comments)

Superfriends and Space Ghost characters betting on a monkey knife fight between Gleek and Blip.

In one of those coincidences that happen more often than we like to think, the comments for the aforementioned article have thus far are related to another current story about blogging. As I write this, there are two comments made in response to that article:

(Somebody better tell Brad that sometimes people quote things that come from even farther back in time. For instance, consider the saying “An eye for eye, a tooth for a tooth” saying? That’s, like, at least 200 times older than Sloan’s Coax Me.)

These sorts of comments are one reason why a number of people don’t allow comments in their blogs — some people don’t want to deal with the aggravation. In a short piece about what makes a blog a blog, Dave Winer says that it’s the fact that it’s your unedited voice and not the use of comments (which he says detract from your voice), and Joel Spolsky has written an article in which he agrees.

(I agree with the bit about a blog being your voice, but not Dave’s contention that the voice should necessarily be unedited. Having met — and dated — people incapable of doing so, I can assure you that self-editing is a virtue whose value has been severely underestimated. While the lack of that inner editor makes for some entertaining stories, self-editing and self-restraint are graces that people could stand to practice a little more.)

Before I got into blogging, I had been a street musician for a couple of years, and before that, a DJ at a campus pub for five. Handling unruly commenters is child’s play compared to the sort of people-managing I had to do with those other two hobbies. Often, the bravado that a detractor will show from the safety of his or her keyboard — especially one who does so anonymously — evaporates in a face-to-face encounter.

Hence there are comments on this blog. I handle commenters in a manner similar to what Lisa Williams calls “The Living Room Doctrine”: if I’ll allow it in my living room, I’ll allow it in the comments section of my blog. The system’s worked quite well for almost six years, and so I’ll keep it running that way.

Categories
funny

LOLCat Bible

It was bound to happen: having been translated into just about every living human language, it’s time to translate it into LOLcat-speak:

Page 1 of the Bible, translated into LOLcat.
Photo created by Ted “Not a Blog” Stoltz.
Click the photo to see it on its original page.

Categories
Uncategorized

Ghetto Man and the Legends of the Superheroes

I’m a little bit busy today, but you won’t leave this blog empty-handed. For your viewing pleasure, I present an entire episode of a terrible television show from the 1970s — Legends of the Superheroes.

I’ll leave it to Movie Poop Shoot to give you a description of the show:

What is LEGENDS OF THE SUPERHEROES? Well, I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and I’m still not sure. Airing on NBC in January 1979, LEGENDS was apparently one of Hanna-Barbera’s few ventures into live-action. If I had to guess, it seems to me like the success of the “SUPERFRIENDS” Saturday-morning animated series prompted the production of this abomination, a live-action comedy/action kids’ show that thankfully only managed to eke out two episodes, most likely because when the people bankrolling this trainwreck saw the finished project, they not only slashed funding, they probably slashed their wrists as well.

Here’s a segment from one of the episodes in which Ed McMahon introduces the never-heard-of-before (nor again) hero, Ghetto Man, who does a painfully bad stand-up/roast routine that mashes up “in the hood” jokes with superhero humour:

If you need more seventies cheese, I’ve posted the entire first episode below in six parts:

Legends of the Superheroes, Part 1

Legends of the Superheroes, Part 2

Legends of the Superheroes, Part 3

Legends of the Superheroes, Part 4

Legends of the Superheroes, Part 5

Legends of the Superheroes, Part 6

Categories
It Happened to Me

A Fortnight Without Caffeine

How to Spot the Coffee Addict


Back during the dot-com bubble, I worked with a programmer who liked to experiment with caffeine. When he wasn’t wasting time and money with interesting computer science theoretical esoterica that didn’t quite pertain to us releasing software on time and on budget, he would try to see how much caffeine he could jam into his system.

Of his caffeine-seeking exploits, the Ultimate Venti incident stands out in my mind. One hot summer afternoon, he convinced the Starbucks on Yonge just north of Bloor — the one that used to be a book store — to serve him a Venti made with 10 additional espresso shots. He took it back to the office so that he could drink it in front of us.

Half an hour later, he was more hopped up that a hornet’s nest that has just been used as a pinata, and unable to focus on anything for more than a minute or so. The work he did that day was fast, furious and completely pointless: most of it was tweaking his system (pun intended) — downloading new desktop backgrounds, checking mail waaaay too often, recompiling various utility programs and so forth. He crashed a couple of hours later on one of the nearby couches, treating us to some world-class snoring.

Man with 4 syringes stylised to look like cola cans, all injecting into his head. Syringes have the labels “acid”, “sugar”, “caffeine”, “hype”

As for me, while I do like coffee, my preferred caffeine delivery system is Diet Coke. In the tradition of the great programmer J. C. R. Licklider, who liked to start the day with a Coke, I did the same, just with the diet version. On a mellow day, I might drink two cans’ worth; on a very busy high-stress day, perhaps 6. Such a habit is costly if you buy cans straight from the machine; I preferred to buy two-litre bottles and keep in the fridge (luckily, we’ve got three at work, and I like to keep the ice trays stocked).

My bed at the sleep lab


My appointment at the sleep lab was, if you’ll pardon the expression, my wake-up call. “Don’t take any caffeine for at least 24 hours before your sleep lab session,” I was told. I decided to go without caffeine a full 48 hours beforehand. A mere six hours before my session, I was deep into one skull-crusher of a headache and went crawling to Maria, the keeper of the office’s ibuprofen supply for help.

“I really must be caffeine-dependent,” I told her, “I need three hits of Advil.”

Although I got a good night’s sleep at the lab, I was so caffeine-deprived the next day that I fell asleep shortly after dinner the next day.

Bubbly water

For the past 2 weeks, I’ve stayed away from caffeinated beverages. The only liquids that have gone into my drinking mug at work — a pint mug given to me as a gift from the bartender at the Dubliner’s Pub in Osaka — are:

  • Ice water
  • Sparkling water
  • My fakety-fake Italian sodas: four-fifths sparking water, one-fifth fruit juice

Aside from an initial couple of days of feeling slightly more tired, avoiding caffeine plus trying to get a little more sleep hasn’t been that big a shock to my system. I was never one of those “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my first coffee” type of people, so as far as I can tell, there’s been no noticeable change in my behaviour.

In fact, when Leona found out that I’m off caffeine for the next little while, she exclaimed “Why didn’t you tell us?”, in the same tone of voice one uses for the question “Why didn’t you tell us that you quit crystal meth cold turkey and took up collecting butcher’s knives as a hobby?”

But really, I feel fine.

Categories
Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Richard Florida, Torontonian on “The Colbert Report”

On last night’s Colbert Report, Colbert did a piece on the current housing slump and a possible solution by way of a study that looks at the “Bohemian/Gay Index” (to which he remarked “that may sound like another name for the San Francisco phone book”).

The study says that artistic, gay and bohemian populations increase the housing values of the neighbourhoods in which they reside. It’s based on the theory that tolerant communities where gays and bohemians are welcome tend to nurture open-minded, creative communities which in turn are the sorts of places that drive prosperity for the cities they’re in.

While watching this segment, I thought “that sounds like something up Richard Florida’s alley!” Only seconds later, Colbert brought in Florida, whom he introduced as coming from “The University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management“. That introduction was pretty surprising, seeing as the announcement of his coming to Accordion City is only days old and he hasn’t yet had his first official day on the job.

Near the end of the interview, Florida says “You know, we just sold our house on Sunday to move to Toronto, my wife and I”.

Categories
Geek

The Tucows Developer Blog

Tan Lines from Typical Summer Activities

Back when I first started at Tucows — four years ago last Saturday — they asked me to start a developer blog that featured a mix of articles about programming in general and articles about developing using Tucows’ services. This blog became The Farm, and it received a fair bit of acclaim and a decent-size readership (typically about 1,500 pageviews on any given business day).

When we introduced the Tucows Blog in the fall of 2006, we thought that we’d roll the programming content in The Farm into it. Over time, we learned that it it’s better to have articles on programming in their own blog, so we’ve decided to bring back the developer blog and make it a little more “official” by making it part of the services.tucows.com site.

And thus the Tucows Developer Blog was born.

It’s aimed primarily at developers who use Tucows’ services or are likely to do so, which means that it’s got articles about developing using Tucows services and articles for developers in general, especially those doing web application development. Like The Farm, I plan to update it every business day and write it using my “voice”, which is generally casual and sometimes irreverent.

Please drop by!

Banner for the Tucows Developer Blog

Categories
funny

Catmas is Alive!

Cat scratching the word “HUNGRY” on the wall

The Internet’s Powers That Be reserved the domain names example.com, example.net and example.org for use in documentation, instructional manuals and the like as example domain names. If you visit them, you’ll get a terse matter-of-fact explanation of what those domains is for on an otherwise blank page.

At Tucows — the company where I hold the position of Technical Evangelist — we prefer to use the domain catmas.com as our example domain, and rather than use it to house a dull mostly-empty page, we take advantage of the fact that one of the Internet’s raisons d’etre is for sharing funny pictures of cats.

Catmas.com has been neglected for the past few months, but I’ve decided to give it a little jolt by publishing cat pictures on it on a more regular basis. If you ever need to use an example website or are jonesing for a cat picture fix, Catmas.com is there to help.