Category: It Happened to Me

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me

Slice of Life: Playing Accordion at HoHOTo

playing_accordion_at_hohoto_aug_2009

Heather Leson, with whom I used to work at Tucows, snapped this photo of me breaking out the squeezebox at Tuesday’s HoHOTo charity event.

HoHOTo is the second edition of the HoHoTO (pronounced “Ho Ho Tee Oh”) party, which was a charity event that took place close to Christmas (hence the “Ho Ho”) and was very quickly organized after a few people had a little discussion on Twitter. No giant planning committees, no long meetings in windowless boardrooms over bad coffee and stale donuts, no big media marketing campaigns – just a group of dedicated volunteers and community leaders, a modicum of social media savvy, some fast-moving sponsors (including my employer, Microsoft Canada) and a club willing to let use their space on short notice.

Although it’s nowhere near Christmas, the event’s name has a lot of goodwill and the website already exists, so why not simply change the capitalization and pronunciation? And thus HoHOTo (pronounced “Ho HOT Oh”) came into being.

One again, it was organized largely by that chunk of the local creative class comprising both techies and marketing types. The event was a double success in raising over CAD$10,000 for the Daily Bread Food Bank and being a great evening out as well.

I saw camera flashes galore at HoHOTo, and a number of those flashes ended up as pictures on Flickr.

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It Happened to Me Life

My Results on OKCupid’s Politics Test

I gave my father-in-law a good laugh recently when I told him I was a radical centrist. I thought I’d check that assertion by taking OKCupid’s political test. I remember taking it two years (and four jobs!) ago and remember being tagged as a social liberal and economic moderate.

Here are the results I got yesterday:

political_compass_1

I rated as:

  • 65% socially permissive – a social liberal
  • 55% economically permissive – an economic moderate

The summary said:

You are best described as a centrist. You exhibit a very well-developed sense of right and wrong and believe in economic fairness.

Switching the result chart to the “political ideologies” view, my result point puts me on the outer edge of the centrist circle, just tangential to both the libertarian and democrat zones:

political_compass_2

The more amusing chart is the “famous people” chart, in which I’m located smack-dab between Donald Trump and Adam Sandler. I have no idea how they derived Sandler’s social and political views:

political_compass_3

There’s one face on the “famous people” chart that I can’t place: who’s that in the lower right quadrant behind Hillary Clinton? The one with the nearly completely obscured face?

I think Barack Obama’s placement all the way down in the lower-right corner in deep socialist-land is wrong and based on too much listening to Rush Limbaugh (although I think any listening to him is a bad idea). I think he should be in the same zone as Hillary Clinton.

A Couple of People I Know

I know a couple of people behind WordPress: Matt Mullenweg, whom I’ve met through Rannie and tests positive for “Democrat”:

matt_mullenweg_political_test

and Mark Jaquith, with whom I worked at b5media. The test says that Mark is a libertarian bordering on anarchist. He did answer “strongly agree” to the statement that two consenting adults should be allowed to duel to the death. I wonder if he carries a “slappin’ glove” for those moments when someone has insulted his honour:

mark_jaquith_political_test

Where Do YOU Stand?

Gentle Readers! I’m curious to see where you end up on the chart – go take the political test and feel free to post your results in the comments!

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It Happened to Me Music

Guilty Pleasure: “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell”

Not the fast food chains, but the amusing hip-hop number by the oddly-named duo “Das Racist”:

I’m with this commenter: someone needs to record the Canadian version:

I’m at the Swiss Chalet!
I’m at the Harvey’s!
I’m at the combination Swiss Chalet and Harvey’s!

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It Happened to Me

The Weather Right Now…

…is rainy. Very, very rainy, as this photo taken from my balcony (I’m working from the home office today) shows:

Heavy rain falling on a garden courtyard

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

Toronto Coffee and Code: Friday, July 31st at the Dark Horse Cafe (215 Spadina)

coffee_and_code_3

If it’s Friday, it must be time for another Toronto Coffee and Code! This one will take place at the usual location – the Dark Horse Cafe, 215 Spadina – and will run from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m..

coffee_and_code_1

Coffee and Code is my Friday afternoon ritual (a phrase that my classmates at Crazy Go Nuts University will find hauntingly familiar) in which I work out of a cafe and announce that I’ll be there. I’m making myself available as both a Developer Evangelist working for Microsoft Canada and a member of the Toronto Tech Community to answer your questions, take your comments, bounce ideas off or just chat with. Come on down, have a coffee (or tea, or juice) and say hi!

coffee_and_code_2

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

One of the Problems of Space Travel

I’m at the Science 2.0 conference today, the conference for scientists and what they need to know about how software and the web is changing the way they work. In honour of the conference, here’s a comic about one of the problems of space travel:

Old comic: "There are many problems of space travel you have to learn about"

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Geek It Happened to Me

A Busy Week

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.

It’s gonna be a busy week for me — there’s a lot going on!

Damian Conway

Monday: Damian Conway and The Missing Link

On Monday evening, I’ll be catching Damian Conway’s presentation, The Missing Link. There’s nothing quite like a Damian Conway presentation – they’re equal parts computer science, mathematical digression, history lesson, physics lecture, pop-culture observation, Perl module code walkthrough and stand-up comedy routine.

If you’re up for an entertaining and enlightening presentation by one of the bright lights of the open source world and you’re going to be in Toronto tonight, you should catch this one. There’s no charge for admission and no registration process – just show up at University of Toronto’s Bahen Centre for Information Technology (40 St. George Street, west side, just north of College) at 7:00 p.m. and head to room 1160 (the big lecture theatre near the back of the first floor).

Map picture

Tuesday: DemoCamp 21 with Special Guest John Udell

DemoCamp Toronto 21: Tuesday, July 28th Tuesday evening brings the 21st edition of DemoCamp, which I like to describe as “show and tell for the bright lights of the Toronto-area tech community”. It’s a chance for people, from hobbyists working on a pet project to enterprise software developers building something globe-spanning to show their peers their projects in action or share an idea. It’s put together by my fellow Microsoftie David Crow (who’s also in Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism group); I cost-host the event with Jay Goldman.

This one’s going to be a special one for a couple of reasons. Firstly, this will be the first DemoCamp held at the Rogers Theatre. Second, Jon Udell, Microsoft Tech Evangelist extraordinaire, will be there.

The presentations on the schedule are:

  • You can’t pick your neighbours, but you can pick your neighbourhood!
    Saul Colt, Zoocasa
  • ArtAnywhere : Where Lost artwork meets Empty walls
    Christine Renaud, ArtAnywhere
  • Bringing Social Media to Contractors
    Brian Sharwood, HomeStars
  • Create a BlackBerry/iPhone Mobile App in 5 Minutes
    Alan Lysne, Cascada Mobile
  • Stories Told Together – Introducing Social Cards
    Shaun, MacDonald, MashupArts
  • WeGoWeGo.com: semantic search for city events
    Dan Wood, WeGoWeGo.com
  • Guestlist – online event management
    Ben Vinegar, Guestlist
  • guiGoog: Advanced Visual Power Search
    Jason Roks, GuiGoog

Alas, this event is sold out. I’ll take notes and post them on this blog.

Wednesday: Science 2.0

what_we_need_more_of_is_science

The Science 2.0 conference takes place on Wednesday afternoon. Its topic: how the web and computers can radically change and improve science. It takes place at the MaRS Centre and the presentations are:

  • Choosing Infrastructure and Testing Tools for Scientific Software Projects
    Titus Brown
  • A Web Native Research Record: Applying the Best of the Web to the Lab Notebook
    Cameron Neylon
  • Doing Science in the Open: How Online Tools are Changing Scientific Discovery
    Michael Nielsen
  • Using “Desktop” Languages for Big Problems
    David Rich
  • How Computational Science is Changing the Scientific Method
    Victoria Stodden
  • Collaborative Curation of Public Events
    Jon Udell

As with DemoCamp, this event is a popular one and is sold out. I’ll take notes and blog the conference.

Thursday: Windows 7 Blogger Event

I’ll be helping out at a gathering of Toronto bloggers on Thursday, where we’ll be showing them Windows 7.

Friday: Coffee and Code

coffee-and-code-2 If it’s Friday, it must be time for Toronto Coffee and Code! It’s the day when I set up shop at a cafe – usually the Dark Horse – and work from there, making myself available to answer questions, hear your opinions and comments and chat. I’ll talk about Microsoft, our tools and tech, the industry in general, whatever!

This Friday’s Toronto Coffee and Code will take place at the Dark Horse Cafe (215 Spadina) from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.. Feel free to drop by!

Map picture

Other Stuff Going On This Week

techdays_canada_2009_logo

  • Along with the other people on the team, I’m helping out with the preparatory work on the TechDays conference, which will be taking place in seven cities across Canada this fall.
  • I’m also working on ongoing series of articles covering stuff like coding fundamentals, ASP.NET MVC, mobile and some other stuff that I have to keep on the down-low for the time being.
  • And it’s not too late for me to start working on the ASP.NET MVC presentation that I’m doing with ObjectSharp’s Barry Gervin at the Toronto edition of Stack Overflow’s DevDays conference in October.