Category: It Happened to Me

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Geek It Happened to Me

The BubbleShare Bubble Wrap Photo++ Contest

Albert Lai is the CEO of BubbleShare, a
software company that makes a web application bearing the same name. Albert’s and my path have crossed time and again ever since I graduated from Crazy Go Nuts University and entered the working world. We first met eleven years ago during the interactive CD-ROM boom at Mackerel Interactive Media, when he was still in high school and doing an internship there. We later met at during the P2P boom in 2000/2001 when we lived at the same Fillmore/Fulton townhouse complex in San Francisco and were working at our respective peer-to-peer projects (I was at OpenCola, and I can’t remember where Albert was working). We’ve recently crossed paths again, this time during the Web 2.0/web services boom, and BubbleShare is his project.

BubbleShare is a pretty nice photo-sharing web thingy, with the annoyances of many photo-sharing web thingies excised. You don’t have to register to start posting photos online, nor do you need to download software or pay a monthly fee. Photos on BubbleShare can be annotated with comments and even audio. It makes it easy to send email that says “Hey, look at my photos” to your friends and family, and it’s set up so that even the least technical of them — for most people, it’s “my mom”, but in my case, it’s Dad who’s the most technologically hopeless — can click a link and see your photos.

BubbleShare’s holding a contest and the company for whom I work, Tucows, is lending a hand. Click here for the details, and find out how to win some prizes. One of the prizes is an iPod Nano, and who knows — maybe my iPod Nano-luck will rub off on you.

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It Happened to Me

Good Luck, Dad

Dad’s having angioplasty today. Wish him luck!

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It Happened to Me

Now Completely in the Cult of Apple

In addition to enjoying some unseasonably warm weather in San Francsico (21 degrees C / 72 degrees F) at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference, I also won the door prize in a random draw: a white 4GB iPod Nano, pictured to the left. Wendy gave me a 2GB model in black for Christmas, so her present “boomeranged” back to her (I kept the earphones and cables I’d already used and gave her the new ones). After years of not having owned a personal stereo, my last one being an old Discman in 1999, our household is yet another in the Order of the White Earbuds.

I wiped the old one clean of my tunes — currently a lot of indie darlings such as The Decemberists, Vitalic, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Danielson Famile and Ratatat, as well as some Johnny Cash and AC/DC — and she’s loaded it with 80s music and a lot of earnest-sounding women singing and playing acoustic guitar. Lilith Fair sense…tingling!

We sweetened the deal by buying her a new iPod case at the San Francisco Apple Store at Market and Stockton. We arrived there last Wednesday a little before the store’s opening at 10 a.m. and already more than two dozen people were waiting to get inside. And to think that in the mid-nineties, there was a time when it seemed that you couldn’t give Apple stuff away.

The other Apple windfall from Christmas came from Wendy’s parents, who gave us an iSight camera to hook to our Macs, so things like video chats with the in-laws and me performing strip shows in exchange for items on my Amazon.com wishlist are in my future.

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me

Appearing on YTV’s "The Zone" for "Musical Week"

Back at Crazy Go Nuts University, I used to say that “If this computer craze blows over, I might try getting into children’s television”. The computer craze didn’t fade away, but I am getting my first appearance on tween/teen television a week from now on YTV’s show, The Zone:

For those of you who don’t live in Canada or aren’t familiar with YTV, it’s a Canadian speciality television channel aimed at youth viewers. My American readers might want to think of YTV as the Canadian answer to Nickelodeon. I assumed that YTV was short for “Youth Television”, but the YTV “About” page says this isn’t so (although one should not take the word of marketers or TV executives — and especially marketers who works for TV executives — as gospel).

The Zone is YTV’s flagship “show”: an afternoon programming block featuring some of their more popular cartoons interspersed with segments featuring two PJs (“Program Jockeys”), Sugar (Stephanie Beard) and Carlos (Carlos Bustamente). You can find out some interesting facts about The Zone and its PJs — including the fact that Sugar was the voice of “Rini” from Sailor Moon — in its Wikipedia entry.

Next week is “Musical Week” on The Zone, and through the machinations of my friend Sandra Kasturi (at whose wedding I played back in 2002), I’ll be appearing on it with my accordion. The other musical guests will be a few members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and a local mariachi band, which suggests that the theme will be running from the sublime to the ridiculous. I never cared much for the sublime thing, anyway.

I have to show up at the YTV studios — thankfully only a couple of blocks away from the office — next Wednesday at around two-ish. It should be fun, and I’ll definitely blog the event.

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It Happened to Me

Pictures from the Meetup

Sunday’s meetup was a success — at peak, we were 16 in total, all having good food, good beer and great conversation. My thanks to everyone who came, and special thanks to Tara Hunt for helping me put the whole thing together!

Ross took pictures of the event, covering both the gathering inside 21st Amendment and the accordion performance outside. Thanks, Ross! I put the photos in an album, which you can view in album or slideshow format.


Click the photo to start the slideshow.

Tara wasn’t actually in town to attend the event, but Chris Messina, pictured below, stood in for her and also promoted the event locally. Thanks, Chris!


Click the photo to start the slideshow.

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It Happened to Me

Best Conference Snack Ever

Dove

bars. Yum.

And yes, the actual content of

the Developer

Relations Conference has been not only informative, but in

some cases, downright inspiring, especially the presentation from the

dude from O’Reilly titled Developers Just Want to Have Fun. I’ve been

taking notes for all the sessions I’ve managed to catch and will post

them once I’ve formatted and cleaned them up a bit.

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It Happened to Me

Best Conference Lunch Ever

So far, the Evans Data Corporation’s Developer Relations Conference has been quite good — information-rich presentations delivered by good speakers to a interesting and varied crowd — but I’ll save all the techie/marketing stuff for the technical blog, The Farm. I’m going to report on the more touchy-feely stuff here so as not to bore my not-so-technical readers to tears.

Rather than have lunch in some stuffy hotel conference dining room, they herded us outside to this lovely tent adjoining the hotel. In case you were wondering, it’s springlike (about 14 degrees C) and sunny in San Francisco today. Here’s a photo of the tent:

I was expecting the standard salad-chicken-vanilla cake fare, but was pleasantly surprised by what we actually got:

  • The starter: A sweet salad with boston lettuce, grapes, apples and candied walnuts
  • The main course: duck and polenta with string beans. That’s right. Duck. Polenta.
  • Dessert: a nice custard-and-chocolate chip tart.

This is far better than any other conference fare I’ve ever been served. Mind you, I’m typically at developer cons, and food isn’t often high on the priority list, other than having plenty. I’m sure that “suitier” conferences have food on this level or better, but I’m a grateful geek for getting the “Food Network” treatment here. I salute Evans Data with a filet mignon on a flaming sword for the lunch.