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While sick earlier this week, I took the chance to lie in bed, put The Verve Story on in the background and finally get around to reading The Modern Gentleman: A Guide to Essential Manners, Savvy & Vice, which was given to me at my last birthday party.

It’s a very light and breezy read, appreciated even through the haze of cold medication, and some passages made me even laugh out loud. Some of the advice is spot-on and echoes classics such as How to be a Gentleman and The Gentleman’s Guide to Life, some of it is stuff you should (or should have) learned by the time you hit thirty, some of it should make you say “What, are you out of your mind?” and some of the advice just hasn’t been written for some of life’s nastier surprises (the dating tips, for example, are useless for those one or two extreme dating situations that proved you’ve lived, and there’s nothing on what to do if your proposal of marriage is rejected; they assume success. Really, folks, this stuff happens.).

The book’s best feature is its writing — Messrs. Mollod and Tesauro are master stylists who easiliy blend the prose from classic etiquette books with twenty-first-century sauciness and wit. Here’s the opening paragrpah from the introduction:

A man may possess expensive duds, slick wheels and a tongue to match, but these are not the prerequisites of a gentleman. A gentleman is defined by how he carries himself and stormy climes. A student of the classics and a pilot of the new, he recommends sizzling reads, pays his gambling debts, mans the grill, and curbs his dog. Reserved, flamboyant or likely somewhere in between, a gentleman’s charisma is cultivated, not canned. He fosters an infectious comfort in others as they quietly marvel at his manner and his hats, from the erudite bowler to the plucky fedora. Little charms performed thoughtfully ensure that the inevitable faux pas are measured against a graceful reputation. He can be trusted with his word and your wife.

If you’re an aspiring gentleman with an upcoming plane flight coming up or need something to read during lunch or your daily commute, I heartily recommend this book. At the very least, it’ll make interesting conversational fodder when guests peruse your bookshelf.

More backlogged photos and video that I’d been meaning to blog.

Crab mosh pit

Updated: The link for the movie now works!

My house is right by the downtown Chinatown. If you’re not the kind of person who gets all queasy at the sight of fish and the like at open-air markets, Chinatown is a bargain-hunting paradise. A couple of weeks ago, after going out to Dim Sum with Deenster and her sister Lisa (who’s visiting from Tel Aviv) we walked by the markets just in time to see a fresh shipment of crabs get dumped into a stall and the shopping frenzy that ensued. I managed to get a video of the crab madness (1 MB QuickTime).

The Hippopotamus magazine party

One night in early September, I was accosted by a number of young women wearing hippopotamus costumes. After pinching myself to make sure it wasn’t some kind of wish-fulfillment dream, I found out that they were having a fund-raising party for a humour magazine called The Hippopotamus. While they could stand to work on their humour writing, they’re a cute bunch who throw good parties.

And hey, cute girls in hippo costumes!!!

I’m told the masks are modeled after the game Hungry Hungry Hippos:

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More Montreal photos

Once again, thanks to Dave Polaschek for the VIA rail vouchers, which enabled us to travel first class, home of the all-you-can-drink Grand Marnier and fine dining, as Paul demonstrates:

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Every Sunday, hand drum players in Montreal converge on what might be the world’s largest regular drumming circle: Tam Tam.

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In the land of the drummers, the one-accordioned man is king.

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Don’t I look as if I should be a member of the Buena Vista Social Club?

It’s been a few days since Versign did the right thing (but not without much whining, crying and outright lying — yeah, guys, “lots of people” loooooved SiteFinder — but typing a non-existent or invalid domain name no longer brings you to their search page.

My Python script for testing whether or not the Internet is over (which caught the attention of at least one techie site) now spits out the result “It’s still good”, but the most heartening thing is this lovely dialog box that Safari displayed:

The Beatles, from the movie “Help!”

I have been charged with the task of writing the “Help” files for Blogware.

Writing user documentation — that’s geek talk for “instruction manuals” — is often viewed by computer programmers as an unpleasant task. After all, it doesn’t affect how the program works, and writing it is usually deferred until after programming’s over, a point where anyone who’s worked on the project has been working on it for so long that all they want to do is go home (or perhaps the pub) and never, ever have to deal with it again. Making software work is difficult enough; making software work and explaining how to use it, doubly so.

Boss Ross manages the Blogware project, and since he is a good manager, he did what good managers do: he delegated the task of writing the help files. To me. I am qualified to do so for these reasons:

• I’ve been a very heavy-duty user of Blogware since July (I’m almost at 300 posts since then).
• I’m a reasonably good writer.
• I like writing, and I even like writing documentation. (This is a very shocking thing for a programmer to say; it may even be taboo. It’s only slightly less shocking than admitting something like “I walk around town at night, looking for unattended bicycles and sniffing the seats.”)
• There is a clause in my contract called the “Boss Ross is Strong Bad, Joey is The Cheat clause”. It says I must do whatever Boss Ross says, including picking up his dry cleaning and beating people up whenever he doesn’t feel like doing it himself.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be adding to Blogware’s help files on a daily basis. If you’re so inclined, give them a look every now and again and let me know what you think. Does it make sense to you? Am I covering topics that you, as a blog writer, want covered? More pictures or less? Read them, and if you have any suggestions, critcisms or comments, drop me a line!

Recommended Reading

Strong Bad upgrades The Cheat’s privileges. At long last, The Cheat gets use of the cripser drawer and the mute button!

According to this news report, not only will the Chinese be launching their first taikonaut into space, they’ll also be launching the first Chinese food* into space:

“They’ll be able to eat shredded pork with garlic sauce and kungpao chicken,” China.com said. “It will be more tasty than Western food. After the meal, green tea will be available to increase the astronaut’s spirits.”

D’you think the taikonauts will read their fortune cookies and then add “…in space”?

* No, I don’t count Laika as Chinese food.

My boss, Ross Rader, Tucows’ Director of Research and Innovation, writes about Blogware on the Blogware home page (which is itself a Blogware blog).

Blogware, as I mentioned earlier, is being sold to ISPs and hosting services, because that’s Tucows’ business: providing tools so that ISPs and hosting services can do their thing. Here’s Ross:

It was built specifically to deal with the needs of ISPs and webhosters. Before Blogware service providers had three choices:

1. Buy an expensive license to a centralized content management system that would facilitate bloghosting

2. Do a separate installation for each user

3. Refer all sales to a third party and just give up on taking a cut.

None of these options are particularly attractive.

Blogware handles this a little bit differently. First, it is a completely outsourced application. We handle the heavy lifting, the day to day management and administration of the infrastructure and all future development of the application code. This leaves our partners room to focus on important things like customer service, marketing and their core business. Second, the service was built to scale to meet the needs of a very demanding market. Need to set up 5000 blogs in the next 24 hours? No problem. Have a user that wants 100gb of storage and bandwidth to match? Piece of cake. Need to make sure that all of it is secure? Already taken care of.

The whole article is here.

In the meantime, I’m working on the online docs. Expect great things.

I’ve just recently updated my blogroll (see the column on the right). If you link to this blog and I haven’t linked back to you, let me know! Quid pro quo and all that, you know…