I discovered this in a post in the blog This is Hi-Fi via a recent trackback:
…Accordion Guy used to have a relatively cool blog with topics such as the multi-part “Worst Date Ever“.
Dude, I wasn’t going to stay a single guy forever, and I certainly wouldn’t do so for the story value!
in 2002, I was invited as one of the special guests for the
100th episode of MuchMusic’s show MuchOnDemand, a live show tailored
to the after-school crowd. The show, which was hosted by VJs Rick
Campanelli and Jennifer
Hollett
at the time, is an hour long and features some entertainment news, a
couple of videos, the occasional interview with a rock/pop star and the
usual talk show “filler activities”, all in front of a live audience of
mostly teens. It takes place in a studio whose garage-door walls are
opened so that passers-by and fans can get a look. If you’re familiar
with MTV, MuchOnDemand‘s format is a clone of TRL, right down to the way they
refer to it as “MOD”.
They show videos in between live segments on MuchOnDemand.
During the videos, the cameras are off and the hosts have a chance to
either take a little breather, get prepped by the director or chat up
the audience.
The differences between guys and girls really manifest themselves in
the audience during the lull. The guys remain fairly silent, preferring
to express their hots for Jenn through sly whispers. The girls, on the
other hand, aren’t as quiet about their celeb-crushes on Rick.
“Oh, hold on,” said the director while we were in mid-conversation.
“You need to see this.”
He pointed at a pow-wow of girls in the audience. Their leader said
“Okay, on the count of three. One…two…three…”
“RICK, YOU’RE HOT!” exclaimed a dozen of them in unison. This call was
followed by a bunch of embarrassed giggles.
“Nice job you’ve got here, Rick,” I said to him.
“It’s one of the perks,” he replied.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended the TechTV meetup at No Regrets, a
resto-bar just a block away from the Tucows office. The place was
packed literally hundreds of geeks; at least 300 had RSVP’d for the
meetup.
Perhaps some of the geeks were there to see G4TechTv Canada’s Call for Help’s Leo
LaPorte, some were fans of excellent Techphile podcast and some
were there to the first diggnation shoot in Canada.
But let’s face it: the real most of the geeks were there is the leftmost person in the shot below.
They were there for Amber MacArthur, host on G4TechTV Canada’s Call for Help and geek’s dream dare.
“Accordion Guy!” a number of people would ask after handing me their
cameras, “could you please get a shot of me and Amber?” I’d gladly
oblige, and like Rick from MuchMusic, Amber was very good about
indulging her fans.
“Hey, Accordion Guy,” said Amber, “d’you wanna be on TV? Come over here
and let’s shoot a promo spot for Call for Help with you and the
accordion and me and Leo.”
As I walked over, I heard a mumbled “I hate you” from some guy behind me. Heh.
The deja vu moment of the evening came as I was talking with Ray
“iPodderX” Slakinski. Behind us, about ten guys had formed a line and
were following the lead of a guy who was saying “Okay…here
goes…three…two…one…”
“AMBER, YOU ROCK!” they yelled in unison, followed by some laughter and high-fives amongst themselves.
“That was odd,” said Ray.
“Not really,” I said. “They’re just in touch with their inner teenage girl.”
I laughed all through the movie. Steve Carell’s bang-on portrayal of a
nerdy man-child, the strong supporting cast (especially Seth Rogen and
his often-ad-libbed performance as a grown-up version of his Freaks and Geeks
character), the endless tream of good jokes (even the ethnic humor got
done just right) and the best movie ending in a long time all made it
that rarest of things: a movie I’d gladly see again in the theatre
during its first run. It’s both a “boy’s night out” film with a heart
and a date movie
that won’t make you feel as if you’ve been chloroformed.
It really pushes the R-rating on the swearing, but it’s no worse than
the way a good number of otherwise upstanding individuals speak all the
fucking time.
If my endorsement is not sufficient, you could always listen to the
movie critics, who by and
large loved the film.
…a lot. Here are just two of the many things going on:
Farm
: An intro to subversion from Red Hat Magazine, movingfrom ADO to ADO.NET and wondering if Joel Spolsky was actually being
“agile” with the spec for his new product, Copilot.
be told:
Tucows Inc. completes publicoffering.
Shares of common stock will trade on the American Stock Exchange under
the symbol “TCX” and on the Toronto
Stock Exchange under this symbol:
(In case you don’t recognize the face, that’s “TC”, the coolest
supporting character from Magnum, P.I.)
[I also posted this question on Ask Metafilter.]
Here’s one for the security buffs!
I often get called to appear on the nightly news whenever they need a
guy to talk about computers, the internet or blogging. This time, it’s
a piece about “how terrorists use the net to organize and plan attacks”
to be aired on national news (I’ll reveal the network later).
In my segment,
I will use my Google-fu to demonstrate how easy or hard it is to dig up
maps and blueprints, especially for “sensitive” places. I’m trying to
make sure the facts get out there, but I also want to do my bit to
counter any scaremongering.
My question: Can anyone point to sites or
articles that discuss whether or not such publicly-available maps,
diagrams and blueprints are a real security risk?
Here’s a graphic I stumbled across yesterday. It’s for a book in
French, which I’ve shown below. The title translates directly as “The
Virtual Samurai,” and as you can see, its author is Neal Stephenson,
“The Dark Prince of Hacker Fiction”:
“Virtual Samurai?” you might be asking yourself. “He wrote no such
book!” However, he did, but under the title for which it is better
known:
Snow Crash: published in 1992, this book is considered to be an indispensable part of the Geek Canon, seated at the right hand of William Gibson’s “Sprawl Series”.
I bought it in November 1992 based on a quick blurb in some
nerd/culture magazine — either the
dreadfully-too-into-the-Grateful-Dead Mondo 2000 or boing boing (not the blog, but the magazine that preceded it) — and a hearty
recommendation from a young and excitable nerd manning the counter at
the old Bakka Books on Queen Street (who may have been this guy).
I was a computer science student at Crazy Go Nuts University
at the time, and it was this book that inspired me to go beyond the
particular areas for which I was displaying a knack — namely, software
engineering and databases — and take up a computer networking course.
You must remember that in 1992, the World Wide Web was a pet project of
European nuclear scientists for posting their papers; you surfed the
The “Virtual Samurai” to whom the French edition’s title refers is Hiro
Protagonist, who is — as his name suggests — one of the book’s two
protagonists. He’s a half-Japanese half-African-American hacker who
also delivers pizza in 30 minutes or less. He’s a good swordsman in the
real world, but in the Metaverse, the next-generation virtual reality
internet of the book’s world, he’s the top-ranking swordfighter. While
he is a major character in the book, it’s not completely his story. The
French retitling is like renaming Star Wars (Episode IV: A New Hope) as “The Restless Farmboy Who Whined a Lot”.
(There are worse examples of retitling for translations. One notable case that comes to mind is the movie The Sound of Music. In Hong Kong, it’s called Fairy Music Blow Fragrant Place, Place Hear. Hong Kong and Chinese cinemagoers are an odd bunch and prefer movie titles that are either overly literal or made up of words describing elements of the movie, strung together: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Eat Drink Man Woman.)
What do covers of Snow Crash published in other countries look like?
Here’s what a little Googling turned up.
This one’s similar to the cover of the 1992 edition. If I recall
correctly, the ’92 paperback cover used the same typeface, but had a
single square picture in the centre of a white cover.
I’ve seen this less-artful cover in a couple of US-based online
bookstores. The artwork — and I’m using the term very loosely —
doesn’t suggest a critically-acclaimed cyberpunk novel, but an unsubtle
and unreadable spy-tech thriller written by an Evangelical right-winger
with both an axe to grind and a none-too-discriminating publisher.
Motorbikes! Circuitry! Rock and roll! These three elements of Snow Crash make up the montage in this UK cover.
By the way, Industrial Rock circa 1991 called and they’d like their album cover back.
The stereotype of Germans is that they are an efficient people. The
fact that they tell you that a book is a novel by stating it on the
cover (they use the word “roman”, as in the French expressions “roman a clef” or “roman policier“)
only reinforces it. In the computer science world, we call these things
“metadata” or “tagging”; in the real world, we call this “anal
retentive”.
This cover’s pretty sharp:
This one says “It’s 1992! Read this while waiting in line for your Lollapalooza tickets!”
This one is close to the American cover, except for the bit where they tell you it’s a novel.
This Italian cover uses the image of a “snow crash” — random data as
represented on a computer’s display — as the backdrop for the stylized
half-Japanese, half-African-American face of Hiro Protagonist. Dig
those lips!
Actually, he’s all pouty because he’s got a sword in his head.
Like the German edition, the designer Italian edition felt that is was necessary to tell you that THIS! IS! A! NOVEL!
I always love the way they reinterpret American culture in the Land of
the Rising Contradiction. Sometimes it’s cool, sometimes it’s creepy,
sometimes it’s creepy-cool.
I believe that these are two alternate covers for the same Japanese edition:
I also like the stark printed-circuit board look of this cover:
Here’s the Russian cover, featuring Hiro. I assume that this depicts him on his motorbike trip to Alaska.
I cannot resist: “In Soviet Russia, virus catches you!“
In Spain, Hiro is depicted as a Samuel L. Jackson-style badass on a
bike. Note the way the tires are depicted — that’s a pretty faithful
interpretation of the self-adjusting “SmartWheels” in the world of Snow Crash.
You can click the image below to see a larger version.
If you know your William Gibson, you don’t need to know Russian to figure out what this is a cover for:
I’m just not sure who the woman with the mohawk is (Sally/Molly? Then
where are her eye impants?) or what scene the cover depicts (the final
showdown at Gentry’s?). I welcome your comments.
Here’s a bang-on bit of satire from this week’s edition of The Onion:
An excerpt from the article:
Critics of Intelligent Falling point out that gravity is a provable
law based on empirical observations of natural phenomena. Evangelical
physicists, however, insist that there is no conflict between Newton’s
mathematics and Holy Scripture.
“Closed-minded gravitists cannot find a way to make Einstein’s
general relativity match up with the subatomic quantum world,” said Dr.
Ellen Carson, a leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work
with the Kansan Youth Ministry. “They’ve been trying to do it for the
better part of a century now, and despite all their empirical
observation and carefully compiled data, they still don’t know how.”
“Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how
gravitation is supposed to work,” Carson said. “What the gravity-agenda
scientists need to realize is that ‘gravity waves’ and ‘gravitons’ are
just secular words for ‘God can do whatever He wants.'”
Some evangelical physicists propose that Intelligent Falling
provides an elegant solution to the central problem of modern physics.
“Anti-falling physicists have been theorizing for decades about the
‘electromagnetic force,’ the ‘weak nuclear force,’ the ‘strong nuclear
force,’ and so-called ‘force of gravity,'” Burdett said. “And they tilt
their findings toward trying to unite them into one force. But readers
of the Bible have already known for millennia what this one, unified
force is: His name is Jesus.”