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For the record

For the record, here’s the posting that got noticed by Whistleblower and started the whole New Girl brouhaha, with New Girl’s name and the photo removed.

(For extra-special fun, check out this Google search on the phrase “blogs save lives”.)

I promise that this will be one of the few gushy-sickly-sweet postings you’ll ever see in this blog. In seventeen months of blogging, I’m entitled to one such post. Bear with me, willya?

Top Ten Things About New Girl

10. She insists she’s not a goth. She wears mostly black (“But I wear pink too!” she says). She has a lot of PVC clothing. She likes EBM, darkwave and synthpop music (she helped do the promotions for Synthpop Goes The World last year). She has a credit on the alt.goth.fashion FAQ. All the bar staff at the goth bars in town know her.

But nooooo, she insists she’s not a goth. Nope. Nu-uh.

Riiiiiiight.

9. She looooves videogames. For her 16th birthday, she asked for a Super Nintendo, and she’s the proud owner of a PlayStation 2 (yay, because I don’t own one). She can probably mop the floor with me in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. While watching TV the other day, we saw the ad for the new ninja game and turned to me and said “we have got to rent that one.”

As for PC-based games, I got her hooked on Freedom Force, and she now curses at my computer whenever El Diablo’s aim is off (that’s why I call him “El Asso Wipe-o”, dear…)

8. She looooves meat, especially hamburgers. She doesn’t trust vegetarians or vegans (“Eat an animal, wuss”). She has a $150 gift certificate for The Keg, and we’re going to be ordering like this: “Just shave the fur, saw off the horns, wipe its ass and put it on a plate!”

Okay, maybe we won’t be like that, but she thought that line was funny.

7. She’s a Montreal Girl. Montreal Girls, especially those who hung out at Les Foufounes Electriques (a great club — the name literally translates as “The Electric Buttocks”) and the Bar Formerly Known As La Nausee (“Nausea” — cheap beer, great music, just don’t use the can), are cooler than the other side of the pillow. (For those of you familiar with this lovely city, she’s a Traf girl.)

6. She loves cartoons. She can quote The Simpsons and Invader Zim (which is hard to come by up here in Soviet Canuckistan), knows what line of business Hank Hill is in and loves anime too.

She’s also a Hello Kitty fiend. I’ll have to get her the Hello Kitty Tarot card deck for her birthday.

5. She’s a geek’s dream date. She’s a programmer with a computer engineering degree from UBC. Just the kind of girl that Roast Beef from Achewood would appreciate:

Graphic: Roast Beef from Achewood says 'I would ideally like to meet a lady with a strong Java/C++ background but maybe PHP is your thing!'

As a matter of fact, she does have a strong Java/C++ background. PHP is her thing; she’s the webmistress at Alliance Atlantis. Free movie passes, whoo-hoo!

4. She looooves going out clubbing, drinking and dancing and hanging out at home with our computers. “Joey, I wanna go to Velvet tonight!” “Joey, I wanna learn OpenGL programming!” We’re going to get along just fine.

3. She has a Yamaha synth dork guitar-style keyboard like I do! Long before I became the Accordion Guy, I was the Synth Dork. Having spent my teenage years in the eighties and watching too many Howard Jones videos, I didn’t want to be trapped behind a stack of keyboards like Keith Emerson, so I got into playing on those keyboards that you could wear just like guitars (like the second guy from the left in this photo). If you’re going to play the uncoolest instrument, you should do it in the uncoolest way possible. I still am the proud owner of a wedge-shaped Yamaha SHS-200.

It turns out that New Girl, synthpop fiend that she is, has the smaller version of my keyboard, the Yamaha SHS-10 (here’s a picture of the beast)

You realise, of course, that we’re taking the dork keyboards out on the street this summer.

2. She’s baking a pie tonight! Better yet, she used the Eric Cartman quote about pie before I could.

1. She’s cute. Spanktastically so.

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No, I did NOT meet her online

Number one with a bullet! The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century has managed to top Blogdex, Popdex and Daypop (a pretty strong showing on Technorati, too). A lot of blogs have been pointed to The Girl Who Cried “Webmaster”, and some of their authors are under the mistaken impression that it’s a cautionary tale about the danger of online “dating”.

I’ve made it clear that I met New Girl in the real world — not online — in the comments for that blog entry and would’ve left it at that except for the fact that someone pointed me to a comment made in the comments section of another blog, and it got my dander up:

Bah! This guy is just crying [more like whining] now cuz he won’t get to have *sex* with a “hot” chick he met online. Boo hoo! Cry me a river n’ give the guy a telethon. I say more femme dupers – less shallow online horndogs!!

Online? Guilty as charged. I have a blog. But really, I’m very much a citzen of the real world. The Fresh Prince of Meatspace, if you will.

Horndog? Sometimes. I am after all, male.

But shallow? “More femme dupers”? I suspect the commenter’s got some unresolved issues and lingering bitterness.

Normally I wouldn’t give a crap, but let’s just say that my Zen isn’t at its usual level these days.

Allow me to state for the record:

I met New Girl in real life.

Sorry to ruin your schadenfreude, honey.

We met at the neighbourhood cafe, Tequila Bookworm. I was introduced to her by friends, one of whom I’ve known for over a decade. Two of these friends are Web programmers, and both were convinced that new Girl was a webmaster and developer at Alliance Atlantis. One of these friends had a friend who went out with her for a short while, and this friend-of-a-friend had no idea of what she really was like. She used enough tech and gamer talk to have us convinced.

If only it were traditional to invite girls to do some pair programming rather than dancing. I might’ve seen through her act.

As AKMA astutely observed, it was a reversal of what you’d expect: the danger came from real life and salvation came from the online world.

This is precisely why I don’t try to “pick up” (or for my British friends, “pull”) online: there’s just too much miscommunication possible. You don’t have those subtle nuances like facial expressions, body language and what they call “chemistry” and all the other goodies that come from real life. The anonymity of medium makes it that much easier to pretend to be something you’re not. And yes, we’ve had con artists and scammers around long before we had the Internet.

Once again, thanks to everyone who left a comment or sent me email. Barring anything else that gets my dander up and makes me write another blog entry, I’ll see you folks on Monday.

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Gone fishin’

See you folks on Monday.

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I’m not sure how fast the SARS bug is spreading, but the meme’s pretty infectious

Some SARS-related stories, mostly from Accordion City…


On Saturday, Paul and I took visiting International Man of User Experience Matt “Black Belt” Jones and his friend Andrea to Shanghai Cowgirl, a nice little diner on Queen Street West (their motto — I swear this is true — is “Will that be fried or deep-fried?”). The chalkboard sign outside the restaurant read “100% SARS FREE”.

Andrea mentioned that on Matt’s British Airways flight home, passengers would be asked to wear masks for the duration of the flight. Matt, did everyone werar masks, and if so, did you get a photo of the cabin? I think it would be even cooler than the famous Life magazine photo of the audience at a 3-D movie…


Chinatown is right around the corner from my house (hence its name, Big Trouble In Little China). While walking around this weekend, I saw the occasional person wearing a mask, and at least two stores were selling N95 surgical masks. A couple of news crews were doing interviews at some of my usual haunts, including the Pho Hung Vietnamese noodle shop and Rol San, home of the sizzling Chinese peppercorn beef.


Yesterday on my subway ride home, I was drinking a Diet Coke when the train braked suddenly and I got some down my windpipe. Naturally, I started coughing. I got a couple of concerned looks from nearby passengers, one of whom quickly dove into her purse, got some Kleenex and pressed it over her nose and mouth as a makeshift mask. To anyone who looks even remotely Chinese and has the sniffles or a cough: you officially have the cooties. On the bright side, I’m sure people gladly give me their seat and even some elbow room if I break into a fit of fake coughing.


Here’s a cat in Taichung City, Taiwan that’s been given a mask to protect it from SARS.

Which caption do you think is best?

  • Awwwwww! Wook at the cute wittle kitty!
  • They’ll let anyone into med school these days.
  • You’re gonna need a bigger egg roll wrapper! This one won’t even cover its head!
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Eight Simple Rules for Standing Near Me at a Show

At long last, someone’s written a nice little guide to rock concert etiquette. Live it. Learn it. And quit burning me with your cigarettes!

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Art imitates life

Cory Doctorow hit the 30,000-word mark on his latest novel, usr/bin/god (ask a geeky friend who uses some version of the UNIX operating system if you don’t get the joke). To celebrate the milestone, he’s posted a 2,000-word snippet which includes this interesting paragraph:

Job interview! He cringed at the words, cringed at the memory of the grueling, humiliating pre-test he’d had to do to even *get* a job-interview, which had included fifteen essay questions on the history of the Internet, the fine points of Microsoft Foundation Classes, and SQL query-syntax. He’d had to define a glossary of no fewer than 30 technical terms, including “PEBKAC” (“Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair”), which had been his freaking *login* for five years on an underpowered Solaris box at his ISP.

Regular readers of this blog may recall a posting of mine about having to answer a dozen essay questions — many of which were meant merely to determine my 1337 bona fides rather than any techincal skill or experience — to even get an interview with a particular software company located in downtown Accordion City. After that, there was still the matter of a pre-interview interview, followed by an interview, followed by a presentation.

Cory noted the job interview hoop-jumping I had to do in two entries in BoingBoing back in November. It would seem that those blog entries provided some inspiration for a detail in the story, which seems pretty cool. (The mention of Microsoft Foundation Classes might have also come from me — see this blog entry — most of Cory’s geek friends are either those dirty Linux hippies or glaze-eyed Mac moonies.)

I am, of course, making a wild assumption here. Cory could’ve come up with that detail all on his own. However, as the World’s Most Humble Egomaniac™, my mantra is “It’s all about me.”

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Bet you didn’t know Kim Jong Il had a LiveJournal

I’ve kidded Jamie Zawinski that I thought he wasn’t disturbed enough to have a LiveJournal, but I’m sure Kim Jong Il is. And lo and behold, it turns out that “beloved leader” actually has one!

Whoever’s writing it has got the LiveJournal writing style down pat, opting to write Kim Jong Il as a mopey teenager. Here’s a snippet:

I’m not feeling very good about myself today. I guess I build walls around myself because I don’t want people to get too close. Sometimes I wish I could just be normal and not such a Stalinist.

All the writer really needs to do to truly capture the LJ angsty flavour is use a black background and mood icons like:

Today I am feeling: Graphic: LJ mood icon of kitten ennui, but so what else is new?

Here’s my favourite entry so far, a transcript of an IM chat between Kim and Bush. Some of you may find the conversation eerily familiar:

License2KimJongill: hey

License2KimJongill: so listen, if you’re not doing anything next month, i thought it would be fun if maybe we did something

Bush43: LIKE WHAT?

License2KimJongill: i was thinking maybe you could come to pyongyang and maybe we could have nuclear negotiations

Bush43: YEAH! IT SOUNDS LIKE FUN! I’LL INVITE RUSSIA AND JAPAN AND CHINA AND ALL THOSE GUYS. AND MAYBE WE SHOULD HAVE IT AT MY HOUSE INSTEAD

License2KimJongill: oh, um……

License2KimJongill: i kind of thought it would be more fun if it was just us

Bush43: WHAT, YOU MEAN JUST THE TWO OF US?

Bush43: ONE ON ONE?

License2KimJongill: yeah! over here in pyongyang. we could watch the mass games and go frolicking on Mount Paektu. there’s this rainbow

Bush43: I THINK THAT MIGHT BE WIERD

License2KimJongill: what do you mean?

Bush43: LOOK I’M STILL GETTING OVER THIS SADDAM THING OKAY? I THINK I ALREADY TOLD YOU SADDAM IS STILL IN MY LIFE. SO I JUST DON’T THINK IT’S A GOOD IDEA RIGHT NOW

License2KimJongill: oh

Bush43: I’D STIL LIKE TO GO BUT I THINK RUSSIA AND JAPAN AND CHINA SHOULD COME TOO. WE COULD DO A GROUP THING

License2KimJongill: you know what…just forget it