The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

My sister-in-law Grace is in town for a little while and staying over at my sister and brother-in-law’s place out in Etobicoke. They live on a nice secluded street in a neighbourhood with old trees and well-kept houses where many young families live. I thought that Grace might find it a little too quiet being there all the time and invited her to come out with me on Saturday night.

“By my standards, it’ll be a fairly low-impact evening, but it’ll give you a chance to get out. You might want that, now that my Eileen’s living in the slow lane.”

“Hah,” said my sister later on, “I’d like to see him try my schedule — getting up at 5:30 a.m., taking care of a little boy, work (she’s a doctor), PAIRO (an doctors’ organization, in which she plays an active role), and keeping house — and then see if he still calls that the slow lane.”

Okay, so it’s a different kind of “fast lane”. It’s just not my kind, at least not now.

I’ll be the first to admit — and I’m certainly not the first to point it out — that good chunks of my life have been rather carefully “constructed” — a term my friend Dera used to describe it — to be a somewhat offbeat one full of interesting and amusing happenings. (I always find it odd that people put so much planning and effort into their careers but somehow expect that the rest of life will simply sort itself out.) I’m sure that when the time comes, I’m going to have to give a little of that up for Joey Jr. — or what ever his or her name will be.

(Or maybe not. Perhaps I’ll be at the forefront of the “strollerpunk” movement.)

So, sis, I take back that bit about slow. You may no longer be the hard-partying vodka-guzzling machine, but you’re now a cooler supervillain than Evil Overmom.

As for me, I think I’ll twist a quote from Augustine:

Give me domesticity…but not yet!

According to my sister (who saw it while shopping last week), there’s a Christmas stocking with “But Santa, I can explain!” printed on it.

Snow whirling downward

Daytime: coding; evening: schmooze

Someone, please hire me

Let me get this design document done first, and then I’ll write something a little more meaty. (I have a lot to write — I’m more backlogged than Marlon Brando after dinner).

Nothing says “suave” like an accordion and a fun-fur leopard vest.

The work involved in giving my career a kick-start while maintaining some semblance of a social life has meant that the blog entries aren’t as regular — or at least as substantial — as they’ve normally been. I intend to make this situation a temporary one. In the meantime, thanks for your patience.

The Save Joey’s Christmas sale still has a number of items up for grabs, the best ones still being Logic Audio and Reaktor going for (ahem) a song. If you’re a studio musician looking to save some money, I believe I’ve got a nice deal for you.

Once again, thanks to everyone who bought something.

Does anyone out there know of a reasonably inexpensive hosting service that does ASP.NET? I’m looking for a place to host some example Web applications and services. Please let me know either in the comments or e-mail me. It’ll also be a good home for my other domain, the currently unused-but-mine justafreakinminute.com.

(Please, no recommendations for Brinkster unless they’ve upgraded their service. I used them as a testing platform and found that their server folded like cheap furniture most of the time.)

The Atkins thing — I know they no longer like to use the word “diet”, and I can’t remember what word or phrase they’re using in its stead — is going well. I’ve lost six pounds and my clothes are a little roomier now. The only downside is that I really miss my beloved Yeung Chow Fried Rice.

I’ve signed a contract for a small little Web programming project with my friend Jay Goldman. It should earn me a little money and give me a finished product that I can put in my portfolio.

Six months later, I’m still a regular attendee of Body Attack at my gym. It’s a nice change of pace from the weights, and more fun than the stationary cycles or the rowing machines.

I’m still the only guy in the class. This is a plus for many reasons, not the least of which is what happens when I run into people from Body Attack outside the gym. Oftentimes, they introduce me to their friends by saying “He’s in my Tae Bo class (remember kids, Tae Bo is a registered trademark of Billy Blanks Worldwide Enterprises, or whatever the company that owns it is called). He kicks ass.” So far, no one’s given me static of either the “yet another male encroachment on womyn’s space” or “You know what we call guys like you? Chicks!” variety.

I didn’t really give much thought to the payoff of hitting the gym regularly until last Saturday. I was on my way from my house to the subway, accordion on my back, when I thought “this is too easy. I should switch to a higher gear” when I realized I wasn’t on my bike, but on foot and running. Six months ago, that kind of run with an extra 30 pounds of weight strapped to my back would’ve winded me well before I made it to the station. I’m pleased.

Thanks to everyone who sent in ideas for software that they wish existed for the Palm. They’re all quite good, and I’m going to try to implement as many of them as I can. I can’t guarantee that I’ll develop all of them any time soon, but I’ve already started preliminary work on a couple of them. There’s no time limit for you to send me your ideas — if you have a concept for a Palm app that either doesn’t exist, or if you have any ideas on how existing ones could be improved substantially, drop me a line!

I have been informed, this time by my Mom’s co-workers, that my episode of HGTV’s Love By Design — the dating-game-meets-interior-decorating show — was shown again. And once again, I missed it, this time because they’ve moved the show to the Monday night time slot.

Of course, even if you caught the episode, you missed some of the best stuff, which I’ll have to write about later.

Osama bin Laden has just become the world’s most evil action figure.

The kids in Karachi (that’s in Pakistan, folks) are mad about the toy Osama. Says one misguided little rugrat: “As you know Osama is very popular in the whole world. The same thing is happening in Pakistan. People like him and he has become a celebrity now.”

With allies like these…

I used to think IKEA was a fun place to shop. A fair number of neat things that fit in with my house, Swedish meatballs with lingonberries, and an almost singles-bar like atmosphere — there are a lot of good-looking women and lots of flirty eye-contact at everyone’s favourite assemble-the-bookshelf-yourself store.

(I’ve even gotten someone’s phone number there once; while I’m sure the accordion helped, the IKEA vibe played a large part too. I’ve always held the belief that IKEA should turn itself into a singles bar on weekend nights.)

Now I’m scared of the place. Their new television ads creep me out.

I recently saw IKEA’s two new spots, which I mentally refer to as “marriage on the rocks” and “pregnant teenage daughter”. Here’s a description of the ads, taken right from IKEA’s own press release:

Directed by The Royal Tenenbaums writer/director Wes Anderson, the second series of the campaign’s TV ads, “Kitchen” and “Living Room,” use humorously frank family discussions to show that life is “unböring” and so is shopping at IKEA.

The first thirty-second commercial, “Kitchen,” peeks into the life of a couple that is in the midst of an argument. The wife is “stuck in here like some prisoner” and accusing her husband of “prowling the streets,” when suddenly they are interrupted by a voice, “so…” The camera pulls back to show an IKEA showroom display and an IKEA co-worker, “what do you guys think?” The couple looks around the IKEA kitchen and says, “it feels good, we’ll take it.” A product montage with the IKEA logo and “shop unböring” flashes during the last few seconds.

In the second spot, “Living Room” which will air later in the month, we see a young woman slouched in a chair across from her mother. “Honey, what’s wrong?” her mother asks. “I’m pregnant,” she answers. Her father begins ranting about her “creepy boyfriend” and saying “I knew this would happen.” An IKEA co-worker interrupts the two, “so…what do you think?” The camera pulls back to reveal an IKEA living room showroom display. “I like it. It feels good, we’ll take it,” says the couple. The IKEA logo and “shop unböring” flash during the last few seconds.

I’m waiting for an ad where a couple are sullenly eating their Swedish meatballs with lingonberries at the IKEA cafeteria when she throws down her fork, narrows her eyes to cold slits and says with gritted teeth: “Where…is…this…relationship…going?”

[Thanks to EveTushnet.com for the link.]

It must be one of those synchronicity things: Jane Jacobs keeps getting mentioned in the bloggy circles in which I travel, both online and in real life.

Luke Francl, Aaron Swartz and Rael Dornfest are currently reading her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It’s one of the books cited in the bibliography of Steven Johnson’s book, Emergence (I had the pleasure of hearing Johnson speak at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference earlier this year). I remember talking about her with Emma and Graig when they dropped by my house late last week, Dan mentioned her in his blog just the other day and Cory invoked her name when he told me about how his barber got royally shafted by the landlord.

Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities during the postwar boom years, when the car was becoming an increasingly important factor in urban and suburban planning, and when the ‘burbs were beginning to expand. It’s not a book written by a trained urban planner, but rather by a keen observer who learned about cities and city life by being empirical and walking the streets and watching carefully. The ideas she put forth in her book — although counter to conventional urban planning wisdom at the time — are embraced by many of today’s urban planners.

Although she lived in the so-called greatest city on earth — New York — when she wrote the book, she moved here to Accordion City shortly after it was written and settled down in The Annex, an area with beautiful tree-lined residential streets joined by an eclectic shopping and restaurant strip, not far from the University of Toronto and the main east-west subway line. We have her to thank for killing plans to develop the Spadina Expressway (a proposed highway that would have run roughshod over several key neighbourhoods) and inspiring the St. Lawrence neighbourhood, a pleasant area where people of all income levels live together in a single neighbourhood. She’s still quite actively involved in city affairs, and Toronto is a better place for it.

If you’re looking for some holiday reading, I highly recommend The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Next: The neighbourhood I call home.