Shortly after Mel Gibson’s infamous arrest, I reported that the domain name sugartits.org was still available. It’s since been snapped up.
In light of Senator George Allen’s “Macaca” remark, I thought I’d check to see what macaca domains were still available. The answer: not much — only macaca.biz and macaca.us are available. I should not that the owner of macaca.ca (Ooh! Bonus “ca”!) says that the domain is for sale.
Nice beard, dude! A photo from The New York Times, which they captioned with “A Dell notebook computer in Thomas Forqueran’s pickup truck caught fire in July, igniting ammunition in the glove box and then the gas tanks.”
If you’ve got a Dell Laptop, you just might want to look at dellbatteryprogram.com to see if your batteries are the on the recall list. They have a tendency to ignite, sometimes with spectacular results such as depicted in the photo above. For more, here’s the New York Times’ story.
I must admit that looking at the photo of the guy above, I couldn’t help but think of the classic Bugs Bunny cartoon titled Hillbilly Hare, in which Bugs deals with a couple of hillbillies by acting as a square dance caller and telling them to do things like club each other with fenceposts. Here’s the script for the sequence, here’s a writeup of how the cartoon was produced, and I can’t not mention the Hillbilly Hare ytmnd site.
I also couldn’t help indulging in a little Photoshoppery. Inspired by Hillbilly Hare, I decided to Reuterize the original New York Times pic:
“Organizers call the ‘un-conferences’,” says the teaser line for the article titled “This one time…at BarCamp…”, “with no PowerPoint, unpaid guest speakers and lots of audience participation. Find out how they’re spreading across Canada, and beyond.”
So begins an article over at IT Business that features an interview with some of us involved with Toronto BarCamp and DemoCamp activities: David Crow, Jay Goldman, Bryce Johnson and Yours Truly. We did a phone interview with the article’s author, Grant Buckler, last Tuesday before DemoCamp 8.
I thought I’d already blogged it, but I hadn’t: my friend John Bristowe, developer evangelist for Microsoft and brother of Ashley Bristowe, whom I met fourteen years ago at Crazy Go Nuts University, interviewed me for his podcast, Developer Night in Canada. We talked about DemoCamp, BarCamp and the development of the Toronto tech scene, and you can catch the podcast on his blog.
John, my apologies for not blogging this sooner!
Here’s your second-to-last reminder: tomorrow, we’ll be holding the third “Ask Tucows” online chat session of the year. I and a number of my coworkers will participate in an online chat session where you’ll be able to ask us questions, make comments and suggestions and get to know us and the company a little better. Whether you’re a customer of ours, one of our customers’ customers, a developer who’s either building or thinking of building applications on our platform, an investor or just curious, you’re welcome to participate in the chat!
The chat will be held on the Tucows Chat site at chat.tucows.com tomorrow, Tuesday, August 1st between 12:00 noon and 3:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (that’s 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon Pacific Daylight Time, or 16:00 – 19:00 UTC). The chat system is built right into the web page, which means that all you need is a browser to participate. Join us tomorrow!
There are a few events of note taking place this week in the Accordion City tech scene:
Monday, July 17th: Rails Pub Nite
This will be the fifth such night where Accordion City’s Ruby on Rails developers and developers-to-be gather to chat, network, learn and eat and drink. It’s organized by Pete Forde and the gang at Unspace and starts at 7:00 p.m. at The Rhino (1249 Queen Street West, a little bit west of Dufferin).
Wednesday, July 19th: Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget – How We Built Flickr
A Carson Workshops seminar led by Flickr’s Cal Henderson in which he talks about building web applications that will scale — on a budget. From the promo material:
The workshop will focus on topics that have real, practical “rubber-meets-the-road” value. It will cover everything that most developers wish they’d known before tackling a huge professional web application. It will be a lot of information to take in but it’s all stuff you need to know if you’re serious about building an enterprise level web application.
The seminar runs from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and will be held at an downtown location, near the corner of Yonge and Dundas. The seminar costs $CDN495 to attend. It sounds like it’ll be fun and educational, if Tom Coates’ writeup is accurate. I’ll be there, furiously taking notes.
Wednesday, July 19th: Wireless Toronto July Meeting
Wireless Toronto describe themselves as “a not-for-profit group dedicated to bringing no-fee wireless Internet access to Toronto. Our aim is to encourage the growth of wireless networking and to build community in interesting and innovative ways.” Their meeting will take place at the Centre for Social Innovation (215 Spadina Avenue, Suite 120) at 6:00 p.m..
Thursday, July 20th: Enterprise 2.0 Toronto
Another spin-off of TorCamp: “Enterprise 2.0 is about the business world applications of “Web 2.0” and “Social Media”. The idea for Enterprise 2.0 is built on the hypothesis that the real killer app for the next generation of web and collaborative media technologies is in the enterprise. How can we take our learnings from the recent boom in the consumer internet and apply them to boosting employee productivity, enabling new ways of working and doing business?” This event will start at 8:00 p.m. at Rower’s Pub (150 Harbord Street, halfway between Bathurst and Spadina).
If you’re still not up to speed on the “network neutrality” debate about the internet, and you’re not a hard-core techie, you can still find out what’s going on without being subjected to too much technobabble. A good starting point is a Washington Post piece titled The Coming Tug of War Over the Internet, but an easier-on-the-eyes one is this comic by Jen Sorensen at Slowpoke Comics, titled Web of Deception:
