Category: It Happened to Me

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It Happened to Me

Five Reasons to Vote for Accordion Guy for "Best Canadian Blog" in the 2005 Bloggies

Voting on the 2005 Bloggies

closes on Thursday, February 3rd at 10:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

(that’s GMT-5). If you enjoy this blog, please vote for it for “Best

Canadian Blog”!

And now the five reasons — five particularly well-received entries from 2004:

  • Christine on the Secret Swing
    The

    story that ended up on Boing Boing, leading to MuchMusic and the Globe

    and Mail contacting me about its location and subsequently doing

    stories on it.

  • Must-Know Canadian Tunes?
    In

    which I ask for readers’ help to suggest pop/rock songs that are part

    of the Canadian experience that my love fiancee, who is American, may

    not have heard..

  • The Breakup Style of PowerPoint
    We spend at least 40 hours a week at work — surely some office culture has seeped into unexpected places in our lives.
  • Quite Possibly the First Time the Word “Blog” was Used in Comics
    The

    teenaged Spider-Man was a pretty angsty guy — I’m sure he’d have had a

    LiveJournal — but the credit goes to Superman for what was possibly

    the first time the word “blog” was used in comics.

  • Almost 30 Years Later, and I Still Don’t Belong
    In

    which an extremely right-wing writer gets up my nose about who’s really

    Canadian and who’s not. It aslo gave rise to this button, which got

    bandied about a lot more than I thought it ever would:

    Banner: My Canada includes Accordion Guy

    It doesn’t get any more Canadian than this!

Please vote, and thank you for your support!

Categories
It Happened to Me

The Old Adage About Goldfish and the Size of the Bowl [Updated]

Update – January 28, 2005, 1:57 p.m. EST: Fixed some broken links. Enjoy!

Over the past couple of weeks, Tucows has been rearranging its office

space. The office has been expanded dramatically; we’ve taken over a

large, airy second-floor office next door.

Before we got this space, a department’s members could be scattered

about the office; it was much easier to simply give a new hire the

first available desk rather than rearrange a large number of people to

accomodate the hire. It was actually possible to be on the other side

of the office from the rest of your department.

The new space has given us a chance to regroup the departments and

leave each one some empty desks to accomodate new hires. Most

departments get a cluster or aisle of workstations. This has proven to

be a really interesting development for my department, Research and

Innovation, which consists of three people. Boss Ross gets a “boss”

workstation at the end of the aisle, which has left me and Darryl with

an entire aisle of 12 workstations all to ourselves. Rather than let

this lovely space go to waste, we’ve taken over the whole space and

turned it into the next best thing to having a private office.

Click on any of these thumbnails to see the corresponding full-size picture.

The ongoing work on our aisle will appear in this photo album.

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It Happened to Me

Virtual Bubble Wrap — M.I.A.

Hello, regular readers and visitors from BoingBoing! [BoingBoing referred to this blog in an entry posted earlier today.]

Alas, I’ve taken down the pages on which Virtual Bubble Wrap lived. I’ve been planning to put them up somewhere, but just haven’t gotten around to it. Luckily, I posted a standalone Windows version last year. You can get it from this entry.

Screen shot: Standalone version of Mackerel's Virtual Bubble Wrap.

Although BoingBoing‘s Xeni Jardin says that Cory Doctorow says that I am the father of all bubble wrap game sites, the real credit for Virtual Bubble Wrap should go to its creators, Dave Groff and Kevin Steele (creative directors of Mackerel Interactive Multimedia, where I got my first job out of university) and its first coder, Karl Borst (also of Mackerel). They created it to be part of The Mackerel Stack, an interactive presentation handed on a single floppy disk. My contribution was re-implementing it in Shockwave for Director so that it could be put onto the web.

I’ve probably mentioned it a million times before, but I’ll do it again: Cory Doctorow wrote a elegy for Mackerel titled Burying the Fish. It was intended for Wired, but never made it to print.

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Geek It Happened to Me

It Just Dawned on Me That Bill Gates is Partially Responsible for My First Kiss (and Now I Need a Drink)

Take a look at this screen shot from an old IBM PC game whose filename

was “DONKEY.BAS” (the “.BAS” filename extension denotes that the

program was written in the BASIC programming language):

I will bet that I am the only human being who feels an old adolescent

twinge whenever I see this screen. The reason is that back in 1983,

when I was just shy of turning 16, I was reverse engineering this game

on my friend’s dad’s IBM PC when a girl interrupted me for my first

alcoholic drink and kiss. Had I not been at that machine, that

experience could potentially have been delayed by years (you must

remember that it was 1983, well before the Internet and geek chic made

nerds cool).

Today, I discovered that Bill Gates himself co-wrote DONKEY.BAS. If

Bill hadn’t written that cheesy little demo program, my personal

history would’ve been far less interesting. The girl, you see, was so

much trouble that the rest of the story, I’m afraid, is unbloggable.

Needless to say, the thought of ol’ Bill’s involvement in my first

kiss, however tangential, is a little irksome. I need to do a

double-shot of Crown Royal now.

Photo: Doctored photo of Bill Gates hugging Joey deVilla.

Thank you, Bill…yeeeeesh.

If you want to play DONKEY.BAS or see its innards, check out this entry on IndieGameDev, where I’ve posted both an executable that’ll run on any Windows box (even XP!) and the BASIC source code.

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

Starbucks I Have Known

In an article titled Maximum Starbucks Density, Jason Kottke points to a blog entry by Justin Blanton, who used the Starbucks locator web page

and discovered that there are 43 Starbucks branches within a 5-mile

radius of his apartment. He challenged readers to beat that. I can, with 51 branches. The record — a whopping 170 Starbucks — belongs to an area “around Broadway in NYC”.

While looking at some of the locations on the map of the Starbucks near

my house, I got the urge to annotate the map (classifying things

qualifies as a recreational activity in the nerd world). Here’s what I

put together — click the map below for a larger version:

Categories
In the News It Happened to Me Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

In Response to the Comment That May Have Come from Russell Smith

Graphic: 'Muy Muy Rapido Tuesday' icon.

Photo: Poncey boy Russell Smith.

Someone who might be Russell Smith wrote in a comment:

Well, I am disappointed with you. Last week I committed an outrageous

rant against not only the cinematic arts but indeed against the whole

of humanity, hoping to at least provoke some angry justification for

film or for happy communion with normal people or whatever. I was

begging for a brilliant demolition. At the end of my column I asked

readers to explain to me what was attractive about the movie-going

experience. I thought I knew pretty well what the answers would be (in

fact, I will list my expected arguments below, if you won’t do it for

me).

To which I replied with equal snark:

Sorry, fella, but I’ve been quite busy, what with a lot of extra work

at theoffice (including a change of desks) and a weekend trip to

Boston, where the snowstorm has delayed my return flight.

There’s also the matter of having a real job.

But I promise, comments soon!

I shall comment soon, but here’s the abbreviated version:

I largely agree with Smith’s sentiments about present-day movie-going (in fact, I generally agree with his sense of style and his articles on men’s fashion, save for his unwinnable fight to make capri pants for men acceptable).

Going to the cinema is a

carnival of bad manners from both theatre and audience. The

advertisements are an insult after the ridiculous admission prices and

exorbitant snack bar markups, and getting shown an anti-piracy ad after you’ve paid to see the movie is enough to make one want to see the entire MPAA

board drawn and quartered. As for the boorishness, yes, there’s nothing

like the annoyance of some idiot in the theatre uttering every stray

thought that comes to him. I remember one particular instance while

watching Hannibal with Cory Doctorow at the Metreon

(back when we both lived and worked at his dot-com in San Francisco);

during the really intense dinner scene with Ray Liotta, the guy behind

us blurted out “Daaaa-yum! Hannibal be eatin’ his brain!“

I take issue with the tone: snotty, condescending, downright prissy and

completely bereft of any suggestion towards ameliorating the problem.

It’s just plain ranting, and I expect that from LiveJournal, not The Globe and Mail. I also expect better from Smith, who’s an excellent writer when he’s not getting up my nose.

I have a few suggestions in an attempt to find a solution, but they’ll

have to wait until I have a little more time. It is, after all, Muy Muy Rapido Tuesday!

Categories
It Happened to Me

The Last of the Bill Gates Photos…I Think

Graphic: 'Muy Muy Rapido Tuesday' icon.

Far be it for me to flog a dead meme, but I couldn’t pass up Darryl Wiggers’ (he’s the programming director for Scream, the horror movie channel) Photoshopped images of those Bill Gates photos featuring Yours Truly and his fiancee…

Photo: Yet another remix of that 'Bill Gates posing on the desk' photo.

Photo: One more remix of that 'Bill Gates posing on the desk' photo.

Thanks, Darryl!