The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Satchmo greets all who arrive at the airport bearing his name.

The Joey deVilla North America Tour continues! This time, it’s a trip to New Orleans commencing today at noon and concluding sometime just past dinner on Monday. As always, the trip will begin with a review of the flight safety card located in the seat pocket in front of you:

The North American Tour so far:

• mid-late February: Seattle, WA for Microsoft’s TechReady 12 conference and sausage fest
• late February/early March: Seattle WA again (a week after the previous trip) for the Microsoft MVP Summit
• early March: Ottawa, ON for a job interview with Shopify (a same-day round trip)
• mid-March: Austin, TX for the South by Southwest Interactive conference
• mid-April: Boston, MA for BarCamp Boston
• mid-April (immediately after Boston): Las Vegas, NV for Microsoft’s MIX conference
• May 1: Moved from Toronto to Ottawa for the summer
• early May: Minneapolis, MN for MinneBar (BarCamp Minnesota)
• late May: Portland, OR for BarCamp Portland, followed by a quick jaunt to Seattle by train, then flying home
• mid-June: Seattle, WA (4th time this year!) for BarCamp Seattle
• and now, mid-July: New Orleans, LA for BarCamp NOLA

It’s been wild, it’s been crazy, it’s been fun and it’s never been boring.

It’s a high-larious way of separating the run-of-the-mill Harry Potter fans from the ones who take it a little too seriously.

Don’t forget: Shopify’s second pub night is tonight! Come hang out with the Shopifolks, whether your interests are in tech, creative, “bidniss” or just good conversation, food and drink. We’ll be at Peter Devine’s (in ByWard Market — 73 Clarence Street, at William) from 5:30 until about 9:30 or so. Join us!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Here’s an interesting Shopify-powered online store: Tattly. Here’s what the store’s all about, in owner Tina “swissmiss” Roth Eisenberg’s words:

Tattly is a temporary tattoo store for design-minded kids and kids-at-heart. After applying many bad-clip-art tattoos on her daughter, swissmiss decided to stop complaining and take matters into her own hands. Tattly was born. Now, let’s rock the tattoo world together.

The store’s just opened, and they’ve got a launch special called “Everything” — every tattoo currently in their catalog for US$35.

Check it out, and remember, if you’ve got stuff to sell online, there’s a service I can very heartily recommend. Email me if you’ve got questions.

Illustration by Zac Gorman.

I still have days like this. In fact, they happen more often these days.

Creative Commons photo by Shubert Ciencia.

I’m going to be in New Orleans from Thursday evening to Monday morning! I’ll be there on behalf of Shopify to catch BarCamp NOLA, the New Orleans edition of the unconference that’s changing the tech, creative and business worlds and to catch some of the sights, sounds and nightlife of the town whose motto is Laissez les bons temps rouler!

I haven’t been there in something close to 20 years, and my memories of that trip are studenty, boozy, fuzzy and rushed. I purposely set things so that I’d have Thursday evening and Friday during the day to look around — and I’ll be doing so with my co-worker Edward Ocampo-Gooding — so if you have suggestions for anything we should check out, please let me know in the comments!

I’ll close this article with one of my favourite new New Orleans musicians: Trombone Shorty, doing a live version of his song, Backatown. Unfortunately, he’s on tour in Germany this weekend, so there ain’t no catching him while I’m there: