Due to the demand for squishy cows (see this entry), I have to impose a deadline. If you want me to send you a squishy cow free of charge, you must:
Hurry up, because the clock is ticking!
Never mind “Cool Ranch” or “Black Pepper Jack” Doritos — all the cool kids eat “Swift Kick to the ‘Nads” Doritos!
But seriously, if any of you can read Japanese or know what’s going on with the packaging, please leave a note in the comments and explain what’s happening here.
[Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele]
At Saturday night’s exclusive-to-bloggers gathering where we got to have a one-on-one with David Cronenberg, guest curator for the Andy Warhol “Supernova” exhibit, Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan took this photo which captures Cronenberg at his Cronenbergiest. I couldn’t help adding a caption:
A deliciously eeeevil photo of David Cronenberg, taken by Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan. Click the photo to see it on Rannie’s blog.
Yesterday, I got some email about something called the Canadian Tech Mob, a grassroots movement to raise the profile of Canada’s presence in the tech sector. The first step they took was to form a webring, to which I added my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century and my professional blog, Tucows Farm. As their site implores, “if you are a blogger, entrepreneur, VC, or other member of the Canadian Tech ecosystem, we hope you will join with us to support the “spilling” of the secret of the Great White North . Let’s show the world what Canada is made of!” As one of the team who helps out with the DemoCamp effort and other initiatives to boost our local tech scene, I’m more than happy to support this effort.
If you’re a techie with a blog, why not join their webring? You can join by clicking here.
I’ll do one better than simply join the webring: I’ll provide a nice attention-grabbing graphic — a remix of the first issue of Marvel Comics’ premier Canadian superhero team, Alpha Flight!
(This article also appears on Tucows Farm.)
Let’s consider Tucows’ most prized swag: the venerable squishy cow:
The squishy cows I took to Railsconf.
Although t-shirts, baseball caps, stickers and USB keys with the Tucows logo are nice, our most asked-for piece of swag remains the foam rubber squishy cow. In my nearly 3 years here (it’ll be exactly three years this Friday), I’ve given away more of these creatures than I can recall — the number should be in the hundreds. I believe I last gave one away to Damian Conway just before his Fun with Dead Languages presentation last week.
The squishy cows I took to Railsconf, taken from a slightly different angle.
One idea we’ve been bouncing about the office is to try and get squishy cows photographed in interesting places or with interesting scenery as a backdrop, not just in our head office city of Toronto or in Starkville, where our other office is located, but all over the world. One of my standing orders is to make sure I get squishy cow photos with interesting scenery whenever I’m travelling on business, whether it’s for a meeting or attending a conference.
While I do manage to travel quite a bit, there are more scenic spots for squishy cow photos than I could ever hope to travel to. However, a squishy cow is a pretty small and light thing, and it travels far more easily than a Technical Community Development Coordinator could ever hope to. And that’s where you come in.
“I can see my pasture from here!” Taken on the flight to RailsConf.
If you’d like to have a squishy cow of your very own, I have a proposition for you: send me your mailing address and I’ll send you a squishy cow. All that I ask in return is that you:
That’s all there is to it. If you want a cow, email me with your mailing address and get ready to post some photos!
David Crow (sort of pictured to the left — that’s actually a figurine of Fred Sanford from Sanford and Son) has written a blog entry on starting a DemoCamp in your town.
Remember, the DemoCamp concept needn’t be limited to the topic of technology — if a topic can be covered in a “show and tell” format, it can be DemoCamped. Consider Eli Singer’s creation, CaseCamp, in which the DemoCamp concept is applied to marketing cases. Robert Ouelette, architect and all-round creative guy, mentioned to me that he’d like to apply the DemoCamp concept to design (probably architectural, but likely for graphic and urban design as well) and start DesignCamp.
The DemoCamp concept can be applied to just about anything — the trick is to have people who love “show and tell!”
A “Warholized” still from the video I shot of Cronenberg’s interview.
On Saturday, Wendy and I had the privilege of being invited to a special bloggers-only interview session with David Cronenberg, who is the guest curator for a new exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario titled Andy Warhol – Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962 – 1964. As the title implies, the exhibit focuses on his works from 1962 through 1964, a period during which he was obsessed with celebrity, tragedy and the way they seem to inevitably overlap. It’s essentially the classic combination of Eros and Thanatos — sex and death — dressed up for the age of the newly-ascendant mass media. For such an exhibit, it seems only fitting to have Cronenberg, the creator of many films that cover the intersection of sex, death and machinery (Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Crash, eXistenZ, to name a few) and member-in-good-standing in the Accordion City Art Scene to guest-curate the show.
Among the bloggers were our friends Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan, Jay Schneider, Robert Ouelette and from Rocketboom, Drew Baron and Elspeth. They gathered us in a room with a couple of couches and several chairs, where we had Cronenberg to ourselves for about 45 minutes. Drew got to ask the first two questions for an interview for Rocketboom (which will probably be aired on Wednesday), after which questions were opened to the rest of us. I got one in — I asked Cronenberg how he first came into contact with Warhol’s work.
I shot video segments of the entire interview session on my digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix 7600. I’ve posted them on YouTube, and you can see them by clicking on the links below:
I’d like to extend my deepest gratitude to Eli Singer and the rest of the people at the Art Gallery of Ontario for putting this event together and inviting us, and to David Cronenberg for putting up with my silliness (“Dude! I saw eXistenZ on a date!“). I salute you all with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!
I’ve got some thoughts on the exhibit that I’ll post later. In the meantime, enjoy the videos.