Category: It Happened to Me

Here’s what I wore to Kickass Karaoke on Sunday: “Indigo Girls Fan”.

Wendy says that if you took away the cowboy hat, collar and leash, this

was the sort of thing she wore all through high school:

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Wendy and I joined my sister, brother-in-law and nephews yesterday for their Hallowe’en run, which took place in their Kingsway

neighbourhood, on a street heavy with young families. Some of the

houses went all-out, with giant inflatable jack-o-lanterns, faux

gravestones and smoke machines. Some of the houses did such a good job

at being scary that my nephews Aidan (age 4) and Nico (age 2) 

refused to go anywhere near them.

Here’s Aidan, in his “George Shrinks in his zip-car” costume.

Nico went as Thomas the Tank Engine:

Yesterday’s posting of the goth-themed Archie comic got BoingBoing-ed, leading to a spike in visits to this blog. Welcome, folks!

A number of posts across the blogosphere that linked to it made a couple of astute observations:

• This may be the first time in a long time that the goth subculture hasn’t been portrayed as unstable Columbine-style Trenchcoat Mafia killers. The goths in the comic seem pretty cheerful — they must be part of the perkygoth subcategory — and quite friendly to Betty, whom when she meets them is dressed as a “normal” (the term sometimes used by goths to describe non-goths, especially mainstream ones).

  My own experience with goth-dom has been overwhelmingly positive. Being a keyboard player, I’m fond of much of the music, which tends to be synth-y. I’ve had many a lovely evening at the no-longer-existent local haunt, the Sanctuary Vampire Sex Bar, a wonderful establoshment owned by my friend Lance Goth. And lastly and most importantly, my first onstage appearance with an accordion was in front of a roomful of goths at Sanctuary, where my friend Karl Mohr and I played our first accordion rendition of Nine Inch Nails’ Head Like a Hole to great applause.

• Many have noted that Betty, like many kids who join some kind of subculture, is doing it for the attention.
• Reggie’s line at the end of the comic, “It’s totally dismal and excellent!” is an awesome catch phrase.

  

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It has been said that the goth subculture is derived from two earlier subcultures: the new romantics and the punks. I don’t know if Archie or his pals ever appeared in a new romantic incarnation (wearing clothes from Parachute, listening to Visage and Vince Clarke-era Depeche Mode), but they’ve gone punk at least once, most notably in a “comic-within-a-comic” in issue 1 of Anarchy Comics:

Click the image to read the full comic.

Check out the full comic segment, titled Anarchie [433K JPEG file, may not be safe for work if your workplace is a little on the conservative side].

I rather like the lampooning of hippie parents — the pot-smoking Mr. Andrews (Archie’s dad) reminds me of a few of my friends’ folks.

[A tip of the hat to Josh Karpf for providing the comic!]

Last weekend, my friend and former housemate Paul gave me a very eastern European gift — a set of matreshka (Russian nesting dolls) that he picked up during his summer visit to Poland and the Czech Republic. This was an unusual set — rather than the whey-faced women and girls typically depicted on such dolls, these had the Middle East’s most notorious characters:

• Osama Bin Laden
• Mullah Omar
• Saddam Hussein
• Yasser Arafat
• Ayatollah Khomeini

Click the image to see a photo album of shots of this matreshka.

He wisely chose not to give them to me at my wedding, which took place in the United States. If American airport security found this in your carry-on luggage, I’d bet that your next stop would be the body cavity search room.

I took a few shots of the matreshka and put them in a photo album. You can view this album in album format or as a slideshow.

I’m working on the details. Stay tuned…

Me at last year’s bash.

Yesterday, Boss Ross sent me a stack of presentations from Evans Data

Corporation’s 2005 Developer Relations Conference. Seeing as my job is

developer relations, I feel a little silly for having been unaware of

its existence and have adjusted my radar accordingly.

I went through the presentations — mostly outlines of the developer

relations techniques used by various companies — looking for ideas

that could be incorporated into Tucows’ developer relations strategy.

One slide in

particular caught my attention. Its title was Who is the Developer? and

its bullet points outlined the average developer, based on a study by

the Evans Data’s 2005 study of the developer market:

• Male (over 90% of respondents)
• 40 years old
• Married (nearly two-thirds of respondents)
• 15 years’ experience
• Loves programming and isn’t in it primarily for the money (two-thirds of respondents)
• Enjoys logic and puzzles (57% of respondents)
• Skills picked up mostly on the job or self-taught (75% of respondents)

My own experience is not the norm (in fact, the master of

ceremonies at my friend Rob’s wedding introduced me as “a guy whose

life was engineered to be offbeat”), having spent most of my career at

start-ups and oddball companies. I expected that the average developer

would be thirty and single with closer to five years’ experience.

Upon further reflection, I realized that as of a month ago, I match

those stats. That’s a little frightening. Confronted with

this realization, a lesser man might admit defeat, program an “easy

rock” station into his radio, buy a Ford Taurus and restock the

wardrobe with golf shirts and elastic-waistband slacks.

But me? I’m cool.