The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Gangnam socks!

I’ve got a big meeting today with a very corporate client, which means full-on business attire. Even my usual blazer/dress shirt/jeans combo, considered “overdressing” by many people in my line of work, isn’t going to cut the mustard for the pow-wow. It’s a business non-casual day, which means I need to dress like the folks pictured above, not the folks pictured below. Enjoy the photos!

Seen in Kensington Market on Wednesday afternoon.

Wednesday marked the return of Toronto Techie Dim Sum, the regular gathering for a cheap and cheerful dim sum lunch at Sky Dragon restaurant for local techies and their friends. I called ahead and booked the back room, which made the event a little harder to find, but once you found it, it was much easier to walk around, mingle with people at the other tables and catch up with or meet everyone.

Thirty-three people attended, which made for three tables of guests and a lively room. Lunch turned out to be pretty cheap as well — it worked out to about $10.50 a person. Some people who had to get back to work early left “yuppie food stamps” (my favourite term for $20 bills), which meant that Adam (the staffer in charge of the room) and the folks at Sky Dragon got a nice (and well-deserved) tip.

Toronto Techie Dim Sum will be a monthly event, and I’ll announce a date soon. Thanks to everyone who came out!

After lunch, I had a good long chat with a programmer whom I’ve been thinking of recruiting for my startup’s project. We had a nice conversation over ice mochas at Moonbeam in nearby Kensington Market, the official place for deep off-site conversations for HacklabTO members.

With the conversation done, I hopped on my bike and hightailed it to the home office, where I continued to work on the aforementioned startup project, which is building mobile device management systems for enterprises.

I’ll save a full description of what that means for a later time; it should suffice to say that it’s a way for medium to large companies to manage their employees’ smartphones and tablets when they’re on company time, let people use their phones and tablets they way they want to when they’re off the clock, and keep sensitive company information safe. Enterprise software is neither cool nor sexy, which one of the reasons why startups typically avoid that market. However, I wanted my return to building software to involve building something of substance, and uncool and unsexy as it is, enterprise software is how you have a bank balance, how food finds it way to your grocery store, how you can get checked in at the ER and how your flight/hotel package to your last vacation destination got put together.

Later that evening, I got dressed up Gangnam Style…

…to attend the fundraiser bash for Ladies Learning Code. The proceeds from admission to the bash, held on the bottom floor of the Centre for Social Innovation’s Annex location, are going to build their classroom/workshop space, computer lab and mini-maker studio, all of which will be used to help girls and women — who are severely underrepresented in the sausage party of tech — learn about computers, mobile tech, programming and related stuff.

They had a Makerbot 3D printer printing out jewellery for sale, but even more impressive was the 3D printer being built by Panda Robotics, pictured below:

While most of Makerbot’s 3D printers are aimed at the hobbyist who doesn’t mind building something from a kit, Panda Robotics’ is more like a paper printer you’d pick up at Best Buy: ready-built, simple to assemble out of the box, and meant for the general public. Panda’s printer had a rock-solid-feeling aluminum chassis and doesn’t go out of alignment when you sneeze on it. If the Makerbot’s analogue are the Altair 8800 and other kit-based computers of the mid-1970s, Panda Robotics’ is the Apple ][, which went a long way to defining what desktop computers were.

Photo by John Gauthier. Click to see the original.

And yes, I played accordion at the party.

I saw this in Kensington Market yesterday. I may have to send one of these to my friend Nick Small, who named a software creation of his after the Dark Knight.

Here’s punk rock legend (among other things) Henry Rollins with some solid advice. Enjoy, and listen carefully, even if you’re not a young person. They’re words to live by.

Transcript of the Video

Young person, you’ll find in your life that sometimes your great ambitions will be momentarily stymied, thwarted, marginalized by those who were perhaps luckier, come from money, where more doors opened, where college was a given–it was not a student loan; it was something that Dad paid for–to where an ease and confidence in life was almost a birthright, where for you it was a very hard climb.

You cannot let these people make you feel that you have in any way been dwarfed or out-classed. You must really go for your own and realize how short life is. You got what you got, so you have to make the most of it. You really can’t spend a whole lot of time worrying about his. You really have to go for your own. If you have an idea of what you want to do in your future, you must go at it with almost monastic obsession, be it music, the ballet or just a basic degree. You have to go at it single-mindedly and let nothing get in your way. You’re young. That’s why you can survive on no sleep, Top Ramen noodles and dental floss and still look good.

All the people you admire, from Muhammad Ali to any politician, they work and work and work. Your president right now is a man who got where he is through very hard work and scholarships, mainly hard work and application and discipline. If these people can do it, why not you?

We live in very interesting times and, as a young person going into a very turbulent and fragile economy that is going to get better–it’s going to take awhile–, it is easy to lose your moral compass, your decency, your sense of civility and your sense of community. Very easy. You known, things in traffic make you mad. People are getting a little desperate. They might not show their best elements to you. You must never lower yourself to being a person you don’t like.

There is no better time than now to have a moral and civic backbone, to have a moral and civic true north. This is a tremendous opportunity for you, a young person, to be heroic, to be morally upstanding, to be helpful, almost Boy Scout-like, presidential, to be altruistic.

Weakness is what brings ignorance, cheapness, racism, homophobia, desperation, cruelty, brutality, all these things that will keep a society chained to the ground, one foot nailed to the floor. It’s by being strong in the face of all of that, not lowering yourself to it, that’s how you lead. That’s how you liberate others and maintain freedom. You don’t have to beat your chest. You don’t have to wave a flag, but to maintain a high level of decency

And it sounds like I’m a cranky old man, like something you want to rebel against, but really think about what I’m saying. I think I’m right about this. When you look at what real desperation and ignorance looks like, when you have to run from it, like, literally run from it, you don’t want to be that. You want to be that which leads others out of that.

And now more than ever is the time to show these great qualities, to extol these great qualities and to embody these great qualities, which you have. Now it’s time to magnify them, personify them and inspire others with them. And there’s never been a time where they’re needed more than right now.