Over at my-nhl.com, there are 5 amusing little films about the Oilers/Mighty Ducks series made using tabletop “knob hockey” figures. Enjoy, and congrats to the Oilers on making it to the finals!
Note: this is hockey, so there’s some cussin’ and swearin’. A couple of four-letter words ain’t gonna kill you.
[Thanks to LeROIduPLYWOOD for the link!]
The world’s toughest man needs the world’s toughest wipe:
Feel free to make any “badass” jokes in the comments.
Today is a holiday in both America, where’s it Memorial Day, and Fiji, where it’s Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna Day. Have a good one!
Wendy and I picked up Douglas Coupland’s latest book, JPod, at Chapters last week for a song. It was front-and-centre at the Bloor and Runnymede branch, with a “30% off” sticker on it, knocking it down to about 25 bucks, which is pretty decent for a hardcover.
Wendy ploughed through it last weekend. Her one-line on-the-spot review: “Wicked realistic: you’d live in JPod too if you let your true personality shine.”
Now it’s my turn. So far, so good, and yes, like Microserfs, it paints a pretty believable picture of life in a geek workplace. Yes, the dialogue is a little too Gilmore Girls-precious and pop-culture-metaphor-rich to be realistic, but that’s what I read Coupland for.
Here’s an excerpt from the start of the book, courtesy of NeverHappened.org:
Never Mess with the Subway Diet
"Oh God. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel."
"That asshole."
"Who does he think he is?"
"Come on, guys, focus. We’ve got a major problem on our hands." The six of us were silent, but for our footsteps. The main corridor’s muted plasma TVs blipped out the news and sports, while co-workers in long-sleeved blue and black T-shirts oompah-loompahed in and out of laminate-access doors, elevated walkways, staircases and elevators, their missions inscrutable and squirrelly. It was a rare sunny day. Freakishly articulated sunbeams highlighted specks of mica in the hallway’s designer granite. They looked like randomized particle events.
Mark said, "I can’t even think about what just happened in there."
John Doe said, "I’d like to do whatever it is people statistically do when confronted by a jolt of large and bad news."
I suggested he ingest five milligrams of Valium and three shots of hard liquor or four glasses of domestic wine.
"Really?"
"Don’t ask me, John. Google it."
"And so I shall."
Cowboy had a Jones for cough syrup, while Bree fished through one of her many pink vinyl Japanese handbags for lip gloss—phase one of her well-established pattern of pursuing sexual conquest to silence her inner pain.
The only quiet member of our group of six was Kaitlin, new to our work area as of the day before. She was walking with us mostly because she didn’t yet know how to get from the meeting room to our cubicles. We’re not sure if Kaitlin is boring or if she’s resistant to bonding, but then again none of us have really cranked up our charm.
We passed Warren from the motion capture studio. "Yo! jPodsters! A turtle! All right" He flashed a thumbs-up.
"Thank you, Warren. We can all feel the love in the room." Clearly, via the gift of text messaging, Warren and pretty much everyone in the company now knew of our plight, which is this: during today’s marketing meeting we learned we now have to retroactively insert a charismatic cuddly turtle character into our skateboard game, which is already nearly one-third of the way through its production cycle. Yes, you read that correctly, a turtle character—in a skateboard game.
The three-hour meeting had taken place in a two-hundred-seat room nicknamed the air-conditioned rectum. I tried to make the event go faster by pretending to have superpower vision: I could see the carbon dioxide pumping in and out of everyone’s nose and mouth—it was purple. It made me think of that urban legend about the chemical they put in swimming pools that reveals when somebody pees. Then I wondered if Leonardo da Vinci had ever inhaled any of the oxygen molecules I was breathing, or if he ever had to sit through a marketing meeting. What would that have been like? "Leo, thanks for your input, but our studies indicate that when they see Lisa smile, they want a sexy, flirty smile, not that grim little slit she has now. Also, I don’t know what that closet case Michelangelo is thinking with that naked David guy, but Jesus, clamp a diaper onto him pronto. Next item on the agenda: Perspective—Passing Fad or Opportunity to Win? But first, Katie here is going to tell us about this Friday’s Jeans Day, to be followed by a ten-minute muffin break."
But the word "turtle" pulled me out of my reverie, uttered by Fearless Leader—our new head of marketing, Steve. I put up my hand and quite reasonably asked, "Sorry, Steve, did you say a turtle?"
Christine, a senior development director, said, "No need to be sarcastic, Ethan. Steve here took Toblerone chocolate and turned it around inside of two years."
"No," Steve protested. "I appreciate an open dialogue. All I’m really saying is that, at home, my son, Carter, plays SimQuest4 and can’t get enough of its turtle character, and if my Carter likes turtle characters, then a turtle character is a winner, and thus, this skateboard game needs a turtle."
John Doe BlackBerried me: I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS
And so the order was issued to make our new turtle character "accessible" and "fun" and the buzzword is so horrible I have to spell it out in ASCII: "{101, 100, 103, 121}"
Although I am a programmer, I haven’t memorized the ASCII table with the exception of uppercase “A” (65) and the space character (32). This may be the first non-tech book I’ve read that sent me scurrying to ol’ PowerBook to try something out. I threw together this Ruby one-liner to find out what the buzzword was:
[101, 100, 103, 121].each {|x| print x.chr}
So as not to spoil it for you, I won’t give away the buzzword in plain sight, but link to it here.
If the image above is too obscure, see these blog entries by:
For reference, here’s Tim O’Reilly’s essay from last year, What is Web 2.0?. Note that nowhere in this essay does it say “And it’s my buzzword! Miiiiiine!“
Me outside Fry’s Electronics in Silicon Valley, circa 2000.
Time is short today, so I’m going to be brief with this “Silicon Valley” post…
Nearly a hundred comments so far: Paul Graham’s using the site reddit.com as the comments section for his How to Be Silicon Valley essay, and he’s getting comments aplenty.
Ethan considers Canadian cities with a notable tech presence in the comments of this blog.
Memer suggests that “the one major missing piece (besides, potentially, cost of living) is the [lack of] perception of Toronto as a hip, liberal place to be.” I think this can and will happen — consider that in the 1950’s, you’d get arrested for playing a pick-up game of football on a Sunday. Nobody said a having a WASP heritage didn’t have a down-side.
An anonymous commenter says “I might be out of the loop, but I’m not really currently aware of any contending or ramping up Toronto start-ups that are generating buzz.” Of course, if this were the case, we probably wouldn’t be having this discussion. What we do have are most, if not all, of the elements in place. In terms of the evolution of life on earth, we’ve got the “chemical soup” and there are thunderclaps nearby.
And finally, ideas we can steal from other Canadian cities with a strong tech presence in order to make Toronto a better tech hub:
(This article was also posted in Tucows Farm. Estelle, if you’re still reading this blog, please read this entry and show it to your influential friends!)
In this blog, I’ve talked about an initiative called ICT Toronto, whose goal is to move Toronto from it’s number 3 position in terms of people who work for information and communications technologies to number 2 (currently, Boston is 4th, New York has the number 2 position and the San Francisco Bay Area is number 1). I’ve also discussed my worry that ICT Toronto are going about it the wrong way, by talking only to whom they perceive as the “big players” in tech — the IBMs, Ciscos, Microsofts — which are foreign-owned companies who treat us as branch offices and not sources of innovation. They’re ignoring the smaller companies: the start-ups where the innovation really happens. I went so far as to state that “not only is ICT Toronto’s task too important to be left to ICT Toronto; I think that we will have to accomplish that task in spite of ICT Toronto.”
I closed my rant about ICT Toronto with these suggestions for Toronto’s tech community:
This leads me to Paul Graham’s latest essay, How to Be Silicon Valley, which begins with:
Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it?
It wouldn’t be surprising if it were hard to reproduce in other countries, because you couldn’t reproduce it in most of the US either. What does it take to make a silicon valley even here?
What it takes is the right people. If you could get the right ten thousand people to move from Silicon Valley to Buffalo, Buffalo would become Silicon Valley.
That’s a striking departure from the past. Up till a couple decades ago, geography was destiny for cities. All great cities were located on waterways, because cities made money by trade, and water was the only economical way to ship.
Now you could make a great city anywhere, if you could get the right people to move there. So the question of how to make a silicon valley becomes: who are the right people, and how do you get them to move?
Graham goes on by stating that you need only two types of people to create a tech hub:
Graham explains: “Few startups happen in Miami, for example, because although it’s full of rich people, it has few nerds. It’s not the kind of place nerds like. Whereas Pittsburgh has the opposite problem: plenty of nerds, but no rich people.”
what you don’t need, he says, are:
What are the qualities of a tech hub city? Graham says they are:
I’m not so sure about the “quieter pleasures” thing: consider the large contingent of nerds who like raves, goth clubs and metal, or the heavy nerd contingent at San Francisco’s DNA Lounge, owned by Jamie Zawinski, an alpha geek. I can see the local conservatives blanching at the idea that liberalism and tech excellence are connected.
If you’re interested in boosting your own city’s high-tech sector (I certainly am), I strongly encourage you to go check out Paul Graham’s essay. I’d also like to see some discussion in the comments, so please, comment!