Category: Uncategorized

Photo courtesy of SpotlightToronto.com.

This is the sixth installment of Joey’s Unofficial RubyFringe Guide to Toronto, my guide to Accordion City for attendees of the RubyFringe conference as well as people just curious about this place.

In case you missed the earlier articles in this series, they are…

1. Where Did All the Cigarettes Go?
2. Getting from the Airport to the Hotel
3. Boozin’ in Accordion City
4. The Lay of the Land, Part 1
5. FAILCamp

In this article, I’m going to talk about a little detour you might want to make for an extremely delicious cookie (and other snacks).

---

If you’ve ever gone walking around Paris looking for a quick bite to eat, Le Gourmand will give you a sense of deja vu. It’s a cafe that doubles as a somewhat pricey mini-grocery that carries gourmet food. They make excellent coffee and hot chocolate (you even get a choice of two of French chocolate mixes), delicious sandwiches, a nice bowl of steel-cut oatmeal with fruit, but most importantly, cookies to die for. Hell, they’re cookies to kill for.

The chocolate chip cookie (pictured at the top of this article) is a nice and large, which makes it crispy at the edges and soft and chewy in the center. The dough is rich, flavourful and packed with very good chocolate chips. I might actually keep my bike right by the conference to do a cookie run during the mid-afternoon lull.

Photo courtesy of SpotlightToronto.com.

If brownies are more your speed, Le Gourmand also has the Nookie Cookie, which is a brownie-like drop cookie dusted in icing sugar. It’s enough to make Dr. Atkins spin in his grave, but it’s throwing off your low-carb regime for this treat. Pair this with one of their black coffees, and you’ve got a nice civilised mid-afternoon snack.

The nearest Le Gourmand branch is at 152 Spadina, a little under a block south of Queen Street, not far from the Unspace office. Here’s a Google Map showing the way to Le Gourmand from the Metropolitan Hotel.

If you’re going to exploring around town beyond the general area of RubyFringe, there’s another branch of Le Gourmand at 20 Bloor Street East, just east of Yonge. If you’re going to be looking around the Yorkville area of town, be sure to pass by.

Welcome to the fifth installment of Joey’s Unofficial RubyFringe Guide to Toronto, my guide to Accordion City for attendees of the RubyFringe conference as well as people just curious about this place.

In case you missed the earlier articles in this series, I’ll list them here:

1. Where Did All the Cigarettes Go?
2. Getting from the Airport to the Hotel
3. Boozin’ in Accordion City
4. The Lay of the Land, Part 1

In this article, I’m going to cover FAILCamp.

---

The first event of RubyFringe is the only one that’s open to anyone, whether or not they’re attending the conference itself. It’s FAILCamp, a gathering where we’ll share stories about and lessons from failure. It will take place at The Rhino Bar and Grill (1249 Queen Street West, just west of Dufferin) and runs from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.. Once again, you don’t have to be a RubyFringe attendee to catch this one. Admission is free, but you’ll have to buy your own beer.

Here’s a quick description of the event, as written by its originators, Amy “Slash7” Hoy and Thomas “Scriptaculous” Fuchs:

We believe that it’s time to give our personal fail some tough love and talk it out over beer!

Join us for a brief, rousing introduction followed by camaraderie, beer, and show-and-tell. We’ll present a little about failure through the ages, mining your personal suck, maybe some science, pithy quotes from people you may or may not respect, and share some failure stories of our own.

Then it’ll be your turn. If all goes to plan, you may even win in our friendly “race to the bottom” for the most public, most expensive, or most ridiculous Story of Fail.

I believe that the original plan was for Amy and Thomas to host the event as a dry run for a much larger FAILCamp event taking place on the 26th in Philadelphia. Circumstances have arisen and they will be unable to make it to Accordion City this weekend. While this fits with the theme of FAILCamp, it hasn’t stopped it — instead, two new hosts have stepped up to fill in for them:

• Hampton “HAML” Catlin, who very well might be the best Ruby hacker in town, and
• Yours Truly, who very well might be the worst Ruby hacker in town.

Hampton’s going to provide a lot of insight and programming know-how to FAILCamp. Me? I’m going to be responsible for innuendo-laden stories of personal and professional failure peppered with gratuitous Zardoz references.

As for the Rhino itself, it is truly pub with a “neighbourhoody” feel. Where many places are content to be mere endpoints in the Anheuser-Busch/Molson-Coors supply chain, the Rhino is what some sociologists call a “third place”, a neighbourhood gathering point for all kinds of people, from the locals who’ve been in the Parkdale area since it was a more rough-and-tumble place to the artsy and musician types who moved into the neighbourhood to the geeks who use it as the venue for the monthly Rails Pub Nites and Ajax Pub Nites. Even though the neighbourhood is gentrifying in a manner similar to New York’s Lower East Side or certain parts of Brooklyn, The Rhino has managed to remain pretty much douchebag-free and inexpensive, unlike a number of the other pubs in the area.

The only way in which The Rhino gets fancy is with their beer menu. There are about 200 beers on the menu hailing from a few dozen countries, and they’re generally well-stocked and priced in the 5 to 7 dollar per pint/bottle range. Be sure to try the locals: their own lager, as well as Mill Street, Wellington and Creemore Springs.

• FAILCamp’s Facebook page
• Rhino review at Toronto Bits
• Rhino review at Martini Boys
• Rhino write-up at Toronto Life
• Google Map showing the way from the Metropolitan Hotel to The Rhino
• Map showing the public transit route from the Metropolitan Hotel to the Rhino

Damian Conway, Perl expert extraordinaire, Open Source luminary and long-time friend of the Toronto Perl Mongers, will deliver — free and to the public — one of his signature tour-de-force completely insane talks that is…

• 1/3 high-end IT,
• 1/3 showmanship,
• and 1/3 peyote-fuelled hallucination.

Tonight will be the world premiere of a new talk, which goes under the title of Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…Made Easy.

As with the fanciful titles of his other talks, it’s hard to tell what it’ll actually be about, but having seen a couple of his presentations, I can guarantee that it will be a slightly-askew look at technology done in an engaging and hilarious fashion. Better still, you’ll be the first to see this presentation, which is a dress rehearsal for the O’Reilly Open Source Conference taking place later this month in Portland, Oregon.

Best of all, unlike the people at the Open Source Conference who’ll have to shell out something in the neighbourhood of $2000, admission to this event is absolutely free. (They will be taking up a collection for Damian in order to provide him some sort of honorarium for his doing the presentation, and some of the DemoCamp money is also going to Damian).

If you’d like to catch this event (I’ll be there), it’s tonight at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology, which is on 40 St. George Street (just north of College), right in the middle of the University of Toronto campus.

As I like to say for this sort of event: be there and be square!

I sometimes take some gentle ribbing for my excellent whiteboard penmanship, which I why I strongly identify with this comic:

Sean Tevis, whom I know by way of my friend Miss Fipi Lele, is running for Kansas State Representative. I think he’s a far better candidate than the incumbent, hence I’m lending him my (mostly American) readership and Googlejuice in this post.

For those of you steeped in internet and pop culture memes, Sean has an XKCD-style comic that explains his platform. Those of you who aren’t so much into that sort of stuff should visit his regular site.

He’s not asking for much: if he can get 3000 people to each donate a little bit over eight dollars apiece, he can make his goal. I’m not a U.S. citizen, so I can’t donate, but I can influence. If you’re a U.S. citizen and want to fix some of the damage in Kansas, this is your chance!

Click the photo to see the whole photoset (yes, it’s safe for work).

Here’s an amusing set of photos on Flickr: snack foods whose names sound like sex acts.

[Found via The Triumph of Bullshit.]

[This article was also posted on Global Nerdy.]

Just a small sample of the people that make Toronto’s tech community great.

This week is going to be a week unlike any other in the Toronto technology scene: a week of events created not by municipal groups, large techno-conglomerates or industry think tanks, but by small groups of passionate individuals who enjoys working with both people and technology.

These events don’t have the benefit of major sponsorship or media coverage, nor will they be lining their organizers’ wallets. They’re events put together by amateurs in the original sense of the word: people who do it not for profit, but for their love of their craft, in the hope that both the attendees and even the field itself will be advanced from insights, understanding and knowledge gained by gathering together and exchanging ideas.

It’ll be a busy week for me. I’ll not only be attending these events, but I’ll also be MCing two of them as well. I’ll be posting reports from these gatherings here — keep watching this blog!

DemoCamp 18: Tuesday July 15th, 5:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m. at Supermarket

DemoCamp 18 is the eighteenth gathering of the bright lights in Toronto’s software development community where we show each other our projects in action. DemoCamp has grown from a gathering of a couple dozen in late 2005 to a meetup of hundreds at locations like the MaRS Centre and the Toronto Board of Trade and was voted “Toronto’s Best Unconference” earlier this year by BlogTO. It’s given many local software people the chance to showcase their work, meet other people in their field, make connections, get jobs and even get venture capitalist funding (that’s what happened to b5media, for whom I work).

I’m one of DemoCamp’s stewards and will be co-MCing DemoCamp.

You can see the schedule of events for DemoCamp 18 at the DemoCamp.info site. This event’s tickets — a good number of which were free, the remainder going for five or ten dollars — got snapped up within hours of becoming available.

Damian Conway: Wednesday, July 16th, 6:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m. at the Bahen Centre, U of T

The Perl programming language has been given the nickname “the duct tape of the internet” because of its importance in the development of the early web. Damian Conway is its most eloquent spokesperson and a speaker who can turn the dryest of academic lectures into a brain-tickling comic monologue that delivers both laughs and technical insight.

On Wednesday, Toronto will play host to the world premiere of his new talk, titled Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces… Made Easy. The event will be held at the Bahen Centre at the University of Toronto and it will be free of charge. For more details, see its Upcoming page.

FAILCamp: Friday July 18th, 4:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. at The Rhino

I’ll let the FAILCamp creators, Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs do the talking:

“My reputation grows with every failure,” wrote George Bernard Shaw in a letter to fellow author Frank Harris. A healthy attitude towards the natural state of humanity, if you ask us.

We all know failure: public, private, large, small, free or costly, embarrassing or funny or poignant (or all of the above). We have all experienced what our friend Patrick has called “the beautiful rainbow of Fail.” And we tend to stuff it in the closet, keep it under wraps, don’t-ask-don’t-tell or any other number of hidey clichés that poor, beautiful rainbows should not be subject to. We believe that it’s time to give our personal fail some tough love and talk it out over beer!

Join us for a brief, rousing introduction followed by comraderie, beer, and Show and Tell. We’ll present a little about failure through the ages, mining your personal suck, maybe some science, pithy quotes from people you may or may not respect, and share some failure stories of our own.

Then it’ll be your turn. If all goes to plan, you may even win in our friendly “race to the bottom” for the most public, most expensive, or most ridiculous Story of Fail.

Also, did we mention beer?

For more details, see FAILCamp’s event page on Facebook.

RubyFringe: Friday July 18th – Sunday July 20th at the Metropolitan Toronto Hotel

Finally, the upcoming weekend belongs to RubyFringe, the “deep nerd tech with punk rock spirit conference”.

“RubyFringe,” says its site, “RubyFringe is an avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging Ruby projects and technologies. We’re mounting a unique and eccentric gathering of the people and projects that are driving things forward in our community.”

I’ll be MCing the opening night’s events at the Amsterdam Brewery. Alas, tickets are sold out!