Category: It Happened to Me

I’ve just come back from an evening out with my coworkers Darryl,

Andrew and Sandra, buzzed off a fair number of Crown-Royal-and-Cokes,

dark beers, and getting invited by the band to join them onstange in a

performance of Steepenwolf’s Born to be Wild.

I’m drunk, but far too amped to fall asleep just yet, so here is the

Accordion Guy Eightfold Noble Path to Living Well (with apologies to Siddhartha Gautama for stealing his schtick):

• Snile broadly
• Laugh lustily
• Eat sensibly
• Exercise regularly
• Code completely (a tip of the hat to Steve McConnell)
• Party heartily
• Learn constantly
• Give generously
• Love unconditionally
• Make sure your last words aren’t “Hey, everybody — watch this!”

Well, that’s enough intoxipontification. Now, to bed.

I’ve taken on some ambitious work and career-building projects (as well

as the ambitious project of getting married), so my time’s been at a

premium and I owe a number of people phone calls, emails, appearances

at their fabulous karaoke shows and the like. I promise I’ll get back to you folks soon.

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:

  

  It doesn’t get any more Canadian than this!

Please vote, and thank you for your support!

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

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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.

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.

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.