Category: It Happened to Me

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Geek It Happened to Me

Road Trip Diary, Part 4: More Big Apple

Some more photos from the Big Apple! Here’s their pie menu:

08 pie menu

The Big Apple is an apple-shaped three-storey building with an observation deck on the roof. Here’s a shot of Damir beside the Big Apple:

10 damir big apple 1

Here’s a close-up:

11 damir big apple 2

Inside the building is an apple museum. We were all rarin’ to go inside and take photos of the various displays inside the museum, but…

12 closed

Closed! Look at the disappointment on Damir’s face:

13 damir disappointed

I was even more disappointed (look at my sad mug below). “Ain’t that just like an apple,” I said, “tantalizing promises, but you get denied the moment you get close. Now I know how iPhone developers feel.” (Remember, folks – I kid because I care.)

14 joey disappointed

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Geek It Happened to Me

Road Trip Diary, Part 3: The Big Apple

01 big apple sign

When people in Toronto and area refer to “The Big Apple”, we’re usually not talking about New York, but the Big Apple in Coburg, Ontario. It’s one of the must-visit stops on that stretch of Highway 401 that spans the Toronto-Montreal corridor: roadside rest stop, mini-amusement park, apple pie facvory, apple museum and giant apple-shaped building with a balcony on top giving a commanding view of the cars whizzing by.

02 big apple building

There’s no shortage of interesting signs on the grounds:

03 rabbits are wild

Apparently, the Big Apple is about 13,000 kilometres from the city of my birth, Manila:

04 city signs

The place is heaven for people who like pie:

05 boxes of pies

They have a mascot, but no one was running around in the giant apple costume today. Damir and I had to settle for the little statue by the counter:

06 apple mascot

We arrived in the Ford Flex just before a busload of people, which means that we didn’t have to wait for pie:

07 pie crowd

More scenes from the Big Apple to follow!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Geek It Happened to Me

Road Trip Diary, Part 2: The Blogging Rig

blogging rig

Here’s the blogging setup I’m using from within the Ford Flex as we drive to Montreal: my laptop with a Rogers stick and carte blanche to use as much bandwidth as I need to continually post from the road. Damir’s at the wheel, I’ve got my seat moved all the way back, my own set of climate controls and Raw Dog Comedy on the satellite radio. It’s a surprisingly decent work setup; I could get a fair bit done this way.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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It Happened to Me

I’m in Montreal Next Week

Ah, Montreal, city of nightlife, all-round fun and source of much of my girl trouble when I was a younger man, I’m heading your way next week…

super sexe signEvery young guy from out of town takes a picture of this Montreal landmark sign.

I’m there to help run the TechDays conference and do a presentation at Career Demo Camp. For more details, see my article at Canadian Developer Connection or Global Nerdy.

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

A Bad Experience at Wasabi

 Wasabi Restaurant, 1730 Bloor Street West. The Verdict: Decent food, scatterbrained "service"

All I wanted was my dinner. After an early morning flight back to Accordion City from Calgary and enough work to keep me from getting a decent lunch, I was looking forward to a nice dinner with The Missus at Wasabi (1730 Bloor Street West, at Keele), the all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant that had opened a few blocks away from our home.

Wasabi’s menu is not unlike those at other local all-you-can-eat sushi places like Aji Sai. It comprises a selection of sushi, sashimi, tempura, donburi and other things that can be made quickly and cheaply and can provide a lot of bang for your twenty bucks.

It’s the busiest restaurant that’s ever opened at that corner. When we walked in on Friday night, we saw a full restaurant bustling with all sorts of people: groups of young friends having dinner before a night out, many young families with strollers in tow, solo diners who brought some reading material with them, couples out for an end-of-week meal and so on. At first glance, the place appeared to be the next neighbourhood hit.

It took a little while for someone to take our order. We chalked it up to the place’s newness; it often takes a restaurant a little while to work the kinks out of its system during its “shakedown phase” and get a sense of how busy they’ll be. They appeared understaffed, and the the staff they had clearly weren’t used to working in a busy restaurant.

The orders we did manage to get were, for the most part, decent. The seafood tempura was done right, the dynamite roll was tasty and the edamame was well, edamame. After that, no food came to our table for a good while.

After asking around, we discovered that our order had been sent to the wrong table. We were still willing to forgive this mistake and place another order, and the waitress apologized and told us she’d be right back with a notepad. Hey, it’s an all-you-can-eat place, and most of the stuff was the kind that other places can make quickly.

She never came back. A good quarter-hour, complete with a lot of waves to the waitress, has passed without any service. It was clearly time for plan B.

“Enough already. Pizza slice?” I asked Wendy, gesturing to the Pizza Pizza across the street.

“Sure."

We walked up to the front, told the staff that our order had been served to the wrong table and no one had attempted to correct the mistake. Another customer who was standing at the counter said “Yeah, they screwed up my order, too.”

We also told them that we weren’t paying, and walked out. They gave no reply other than confused looks, tilted heads and stunned silence – not even an “I’m sorry". This sort of reaction is the hallmark of complete incompetence and the front-of-house staff treat the place as many similar people do: the restaurant’s just a place that provides a paycheque in exchange for you just showing up.

As we walked towards the pizza place, we ran into our neighbours Chris and Wanda, who were heading to Wasabi to try them out, and warned them away from the place. Consider this blog entry the same warning to the rest of the world: Wasabi is run by scatterbrains, and if you’d actually like some service, go elsewhere.

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me Music

My Morning on CBC Radio’s “GO!”

08 hot or not segmentGO!’s host Brent Bambury gets the audience warmed up before the show.

A little while back, Jeff Goodes, producer for CBC Radio One’s Saturday morning flagship show GO!, emailed me asking if I’d like to do a radio appearance on a show featuring some kind of music-related contest. I said “of course!” and ended up at CBC studios to record today’s episode earlier this morning.

01 jeff preps the audience GO!’s producer Jeff Goodes explains things to the audience before the show.

The theme of today’s show was “Spin the Wheel of GO!”, in which Wheel of Fortune- and I Ching-style randomness would supposedly determine what would appear and what would happen on the show. I had a lot of fun doing the show, and you can hear the fun by heading down to GO!’s audio archives, scrolling down to the show marked 11/21/2009 – Spin the Wheel of GO! and clicking the “Play” button.

click here to go to go

When I arrived just after 8:30 a.m., I was escorted to the green room, where the indie-folk strains of Kate Rogers and her band could be heard as they performed a number for a sound check. It sounded great and I made a mental note to buy their CD after the show.

07 kate rogers and bandKate Rogers and her band.

kate rogersKate Rogers (photo courtesy of the CBC).

I got to meet my fellow guests Teodora, who would be “competing” against me in musical trivia games, and Shin, a guitarist who’d just come to Accordion City from Japan. He would provide music for one of the music trivia games.

05 shin plays guitarShin playing guitar.

ShinShin (photo courtesy of the CBC).

At 9:30, after Brent and Jeff quickly gave the audience the “this is how things work on this show” explanation and handed out some prizes to the audience for answering trivia questions, and the recording session began.

02 brent warms up the audienceBrent warms up the audience.

The first music trivia game that Brent had Teodora and me play was “The Japanese Guitarist”, in which Shin played slowed-down versions of popular tunes on guitar and sang the lyrics in Japanese. I scored half-points for identifying Flo Rida’s Right Round as Dead or Alive’s You Spin Me Round, the song from which Flo Rida took the sample.

teodoraTeodora (photo courtesy of the CBC).

I completely failed to identify the second song he played for me as Avril Lavigne’s Sk8r Boi, which I should’ve done, since I played the song on accordion on MuchMusic’s Much on Demand show a few years back.

03 teodora and brentTeodora and Brent.

Around that time, Katherine Burrell took a seat beside me at the table. She and Brent did a bit on Michael Jackson’s “Secret CIA file”, after which they cut to some music. During that lull, she took a closer look at my accordion, which I was wearing, and ran her hand down its side.

“Did you just stroke his accordion?” Brent asked, incredulously.

“I get that all the time,” I said, with what was probably a smirk. Ah, the things that never make it to broadcast…

04 brentBrent Bambury.

The next trivia game was “This Is It”, featuring questions about Michael Jackson. I cleaned up – and surprised myself – with the depth of my Michael Jackson knowledge.

joeyYours Truly (photo courtesy of the CBC).

The final trivia game was the “Foxy Roxy” game, in which Teodora and I answered questions about British art-rock band Roxy Music. I didn’t do too badly with this one, correctly identifying the Roxy Music single that Bill Murray performed at a karaoke bar in Lost in Translation as More Than This.

joey and accordionYours Truly on accordion (photo courtesy of the CBC).

I did much worse with my attempt at performing Roxy Music’s Avalon on accordion. I have no idea why – for the most part, it’s a three-chord song that I should’ve been able to squeeze out in even the most drunken of states. I’m just terrible at playing songs in the key of F. Clearly I need more practice.

(I thought I did a half-decent job of emulating Bryan Ferry’s “I just had a good hard shag” vocals.)

I just hope that Bryan Ferry can forgive me for murdering his song.

After that, we had another performance by the Kate Rogers Band:

06 kate rogers and band

After which the show wrapped up and Brent tooks questions from the audience:

09 brent answers audience questions

One of the questions from the audience was “Could we hear Joey do a full song?”, so I gave them the sure-fire number Baby One More Time, which got a lot of applause.

10 audeince asks brent questions

And before I left, Jeff snapped this photo of Teodora, me and Shin:      

00 teodora me and shin

I’d like to thank Jeff Goodes and Brent Bambury for having me on the show, and all the CBC staff for making me feel welcome. Jeff, if you ever need me for more shows, you’ve got my number!

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me Music

Saturday Morning on GO!

accordion guy cbc

If you listen on CBC Radio One on Saturdays you’re in for a surprise: Yours Truly will be appearing on the Brent Bambury’s show Go! tomorrow. There’ll be musical merriment of all sorts. Go! broadcasts live at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, 11:00 in Newfoundland.