Categories
In the News

Meanwhile, in the Middle East…

The photo above is one of my friend Lisa Goldman, a journalist based in Tel Aviv who blogs at On the Face. Whenever things are going all ballistic in the neighbourhood of Israel, I go check out her blog to see perspectives I might not otherwise catch on the news here — not only hers, but from the blogs to which she links. Her most recent entries cover the current situation — not just from the war-and-politics angle, but also from the point of view of someone going about their daily life amidst it all. Go check out her blog; it’s worthwhile reading.

Categories
Geek Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

This Week in Local Nerd-dom

There are a few events of note taking place this week in the Accordion City tech scene:

Monday, July 17th: Rails Pub Nite

This will be the fifth such night where Accordion City’s Ruby on Rails developers and developers-to-be gather to chat, network, learn and eat and drink. It’s organized by Pete Forde and the gang at Unspace and starts at 7:00 p.m. at The Rhino (1249 Queen Street West, a little bit west of Dufferin).

Wednesday, July 19th: Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget – How We Built Flickr

A Carson Workshops seminar led by Flickr’s Cal Henderson in which he talks about building web applications that will scale — on a budget. From the promo material:

The workshop will focus on topics that have real, practical “rubber-meets-the-road” value. It will cover everything that most developers wish they’d known before tackling a huge professional web application. It will be a lot of information to take in but it’s all stuff you need to know if you’re serious about building an enterprise level web application.

The seminar runs from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and will be held at an downtown location, near the corner of Yonge and Dundas. The seminar costs $CDN495 to attend. It sounds like it’ll be fun and educational, if Tom Coates’ writeup is accurate. I’ll be there, furiously taking notes.

Wednesday, July 19th: Wireless Toronto July Meeting

Wireless Toronto describe themselves as “a not-for-profit group dedicated to bringing no-fee wireless Internet access to Toronto. Our aim is to encourage the growth of wireless networking and to build community in interesting and innovative ways.” Their meeting will take place at the Centre for Social Innovation (215 Spadina Avenue, Suite 120) at 6:00 p.m..

Thursday, July 20th: Enterprise 2.0 Toronto

Another spin-off of TorCamp: “Enterprise 2.0 is about the business world applications of “Web 2.0” and “Social Media”. The idea for Enterprise 2.0 is built on the hypothesis that the real killer app for the next generation of web and collaborative media technologies is in the enterprise. How can we take our learnings from the recent boom in the consumer internet and apply them to boosting employee productivity, enabling new ways of working and doing business?” This event will start at 8:00 p.m. at Rower’s Pub (150 Harbord Street, halfway between Bathurst and Spadina).

Categories
Uncategorized

Is "Sinfest" Making a Comeback?

One of the more popular webcomics when it first came out was Tatsuya Ichida’s Sinfest. Here’s the first comic, which was published on January 17th, 2000 (strangely enough, my first day at OpenCola, which was the first time I’d ever worked in the dot-com world):

Sinfest’s primary themes were hip-hop culture, “lad mag” culture, Japanese culture, dating, the differences between cats and dogs and religion. The comic often mashed some of these themes together; such as with the “Blaxploitation Funk Bible” comic:

For years, a new Sinfest was published nearly every day, but lately, Tatsuya hasn’t posted as often. In fact, not a single comic was published during February 2006, which led me (and many others) to believe that he’d stopped doing the comic.

However, I saw a posting about a new Sinfest comic today: a full-colour large-format comic, just like the Sunday funnies in the newspapers! Here it is:

After reading it, I checked Sinfest’s archives and found that while updates have been sporadic, the comic is still ongoing. Here’s to hoping that we’ll see a few more Sinfests yet.

Categories
Geek

An Introduction to Network Neutrality

If you’re still not up to speed on the “network neutrality” debate about the internet, and you’re not a hard-core techie, you can still find out what’s going on without being subjected to too much technobabble. A good starting point is a Washington Post piece titled The Coming Tug of War Over the Internet, but an easier-on-the-eyes one is this comic by Jen Sorensen at Slowpoke Comics, titled Web of Deception:

'Slowpoke' comic titled 'Web of Deception'.

Categories
Geek

Why Peter Might be Repeating Algebra Next Year

You’ve got to give “Peter”, whose answer for the algebra test question is shown below, some credit for at least being funny in the face of not knowing the binomial theorem:

By the bye, the answer is:

[Thanks to Adampsyche for the photo!]

Categories
Uncategorized

The Thagomizer

'Far Side' comic with caveman showing a slide presentation and saying 'Now this end is called the thagomizer, after the late Thag Simmons'.

If you’re in your twenties or older, chances are that you’ve seen the Far Side comic shown on the left: the caveman slideshow in which the spikes on the tail of a stegosaurus are identified as the “Thagomizer”, named in memory of an unfortunate caveman named Thag Simmons.

Although I’ve known that The Far Side comics are popular amongs nerds and scientists, I had no idea that the term “Thagomizer” had been adopted by paleontologists as an actual term. But that’s what happened, and now the word has its own Wikipedia entry and is seen mention by the Smithsonian, a book published by Scientific American and New Scientist magazine.

Categories
It Happened to Me

Third Work-a-Versary

In addition to being Bastille Day, it is also the third anniversary of my joining Tucows as its Technical Community Development Coordinator. So far, in the course of this job, I have:

  • Held one job title — Technical Community Development Coordinator — the longest title in the company
  • Worked in two departments: Research and Innovation under “Boss Ross” Rader until recently, and now “Looking for a rhyme” Ken Schafer in the Marketing department
  • Occupied three desks, two in the downstairs section, and now I’m upstairs
  • Gone on four business trips, during one of which I met Wendy
  • Appeared on TV five times as an employee of Tucows
  • Written over six…teen hundred blog entries on Tucows Farm
  • Explained that the company is more than just “the shareware site” seven gazillion times

Three years later, I’m still enjoying it here. The place still passes the “snooze bar test” — the only reason I ever hit the snooze bar on the alarm clock on a workday is because I was up late the night before and not because I’m dreading another day at the office. At the start of year four, my job’s going to go through some interesting changes not only as a result of my changing departments, but also because of some exciting changes all ’round — not just within the company, but also our neighbourhood, the Toronto tech and creative communities and in our industry. It’s going to be an interesting time, and I’m glad to be here.