Category: Geek

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Geek It Happened to Me Work

I’m in Montreal This Week

Montreal: photo of poutine

I’m headed to Montreal this week, where Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team (of which I am a member) will be getting together for our annual team meeting as well as to help run the Make Web Not War conference on Thursday. There’ll be a lot of crazy stuff going on, and whatever isn’t blackmail material will end up here on the Accordion Guy blog, so watch this space!

The first part of the trip is about getting there, and we’re not doing it in the usual way. We’ve hired out a VIA Rail car to take us and a lot of Make Web Not War attendees to Montreal in style. The car’s rigged with power, wifi, Xboxes, Rock Band, monitors and other goodies to make the five-ish-hour trip even more nerd-a-riffic. I’ll post photos from the train.

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

Hand Eye Society Indie Game Social: Toronto, May 27th

Banner from the Hand Eye Society's blog: "The Hand Eye Society: Meshing Toronto's Videogame Communities"

The Hand Eye Society describes itself as a “not-for-profit coalition of people and projects in support of Toronto’s videogame communities”. Their goals are:

  1. To help people make games
  2. To connect game makers with each other and with an audience, offline
  3. To foster diversity in game creation and public perception of games

I shouldn’t be surprised that one of the people behind the Hand Eye Society is Jim Munroe. He’s a former Adbusters editor turned self-publishing author of a number of enjoyable science fiction books such Flyboy Action Hero Comes with Gasmask and Angry Young Spaceman, developer of indie games including the interactive fiction piece Punk Points (the online version requires Java), maker of movies and all-round Toronto DIY-espousing creative type.

Also connected with the Hand Eye Society are other indie videogame notables including:

Poster for Hand Eye Society's "social": "Free presentation and social event from the Hand Eye Society / May 27 2010 @ 19:30 EST / Unit Bar, 1198 Queen West / Featuring: Mr. Brandon Boyer, founder of Offworld, contributing editor of Boing Boing & IGF Chairman"

The Hand Eye Society is throwing a social this Thursday, May 27th in Toronto at Unit Bar (1198 Queen Street West, a shade east of Dufferin/Gladstone, halfway between the Drake and Gladstone hotels). The doors will open at 7:00 and there may be a set of curated videogames for you to check out.

At 8:00 p.m. special guest dignitary Brandon Boyer, Chairman of the Independent Games Festival and contributing editor for Boing Boing and Boing Boing’s games blog Offworld, will, as the Hand Eye Society’s blog puts it, “deliver some form of immensely significant communication to the assembled videogame creators, enthusiasts, organizers & slack-jawed onlookers.”

If I weren’t going to be in Montreal that evening for the Make Web Not War conference, I’d most certainly at this event (I’ll definitely catch the next social). If you’re in Toronto and love videogames (especially ones that break from the mainstream) and especially if you love making them, catch the Hand Eye Society’s social this Thursday!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Geek Life

The “Social Media Revolution 2” Video

It’s Mesh week here in Toronto! Today, the developer-and-creative-focused MeshU conference takes place, followed tomorrow and Wednesday by the social-media-and-marketing focused Mesh conference. I’ll be in the audience at MeshU, and tending the Microsoft lounge (and the cocktail parties) at Mesh. If you’re attending, please say “hi!”

In the spirit of Mesh, I present Social Media Revolution 2, the follow-up to last year’s Social Media Revolution video, produced by the people behind the book Socialnomics (written by Erik Qualman, who blogs here). Whether you’re looking for little facts and statistics for a presentation, need some infotainment to get the week started or both, this video is for you!

(Want to feel old? The music track for the video is Fatboy Slim’s Right Here Right Now, which is from the album You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, which is 12 years old. Yowch.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Geek Play

The Geek Alphabet

The blog Geeks are Sexy put together a wonderful alphabet rhyme using Creative Commons “share-alike”-licensed photos on Flickr, which I thought I’d share with you:

geek alphabet

Here’s the text of the rhyme, along with a credit for each corresponding photo:

A is for Away Team, where you should never wear red (mild mannered photographer)
B is for Binary, 1s and 0s in your head (jpstanley)
C is for Cosplay, making cons an awesome place
D is for Doctor, who keeps changing face (great beyond)
E is for Emoticons, that tell you what we’re feeling (neal gillis)
F is for Flickr, whose photos we are “stealing” (tricky)
G is for Gadgets, the way to our heart (slipstreamjc)
H is for Hardware, I took it apart! (jurvetson)
I is for iEverything, love it or hate it (dan dickinson)
J is for Japan, we’re glad Nintendo invaded (oscar mota)
K is for Keyboard, we love every letter (andrew*)
L is for Leias, the more the better! (koadmunkee)
M is for MMORPGs, it’s a magical place (i eated a cookie)
N is for NASA, and the beauty of space (nasa1fan)
O is for Occipital Lobe, we love using our brains (illuminaut)
P is for Programming, ((though lisp is a pain)) (phil_jackson)
Q is for Quilting, and other geeky crafts (athenamat)
R is for Reading, no matter what the path (timonoko)
S is for Science, though the cake is a lie (don solo)
T is for Tabletop, and a 20-sided die (nengard)
U is for Uncertainty, you just never know (neil crosby)
V is for Voltage, oh the places we’ll go! (oskay)
W is for the World Wide Web, it’s more than just porn (shimown)
X is for Xerox, where so much geekiness was born (marc smith)
Y is for Youth, since kids are geeks too (benmcleod)
Z is for Zork, watch out for the grue! (the_tml)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Geek It Happened to Me Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Toronto Developer Lunch, Friday May 14th

developer lunch

Once again, Kristan “Krispy” Uccello has declared another Toronto developer dim sum lunch! It’s at the usual place – Sky Dragon, located on the top floor of Dragon City mall (corner of Spadina and Dundas) tomorrow (Friday, May 14th, that is) at noon.

I’m trying to boost the .NET geek quotient at these lunches – it can’t just be me, Mark Cidade, Reg “Raganwald” Braithwaite (he’s developed with just about everything under the sun) and David Crow! If you’re in the area, come on down and have some cheap, delicious dim sum. We split the bill at the end, and it typically runs about $11 – 12 a person.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Geek The Current Situation

I Don’t Think They Wanted to Use That Photo

Take a look at the photo accompanying the SFGate article below, which is about the all-hands meeting being called at Facebook over complaints about their approach to privacy:

sfgate facebook privacy article

Click the image to see the original article.

While the photo is probably not the one they wanted to use for the article, it’s a pretty good metaphor for the scene at a company when they call emergency all-hands meetings of this sort.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Categories
Geek It Happened to Me Work

Toronto-Montreal NerdTrain (Departs Tuesday, May 25th, Returns Friday, May 28th)

via nerd car

A quick reminder: if you’re looking for cheap transport to Montreal for MonDev, Montreal’s Open Source Week (which concludes with the Make Web Not War conference), we’ve booked an entire VIA Rail car from Montreal to Toronto! The train car (pictured above) has wifi, power outlets and will be equipped with video monitors, an Xbox or two, a big-ass HP TouchSmart computer and other technological goodies to make the time pass by.

Best of all, if you want to book a trip on this car, we’re subsidizing it. Round-trip tickets are a mere $50 and cover the cost of the ride, a sandwich lunch and drink voucher! The train departs for Montreal on the morning of Tuesday, May 25th and departs back for Toronto on the morning of Friday, May 28th.

For more details, email cdnsol@microsoft.com.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.