The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Someone who goes by the name “TheArcticEcho” digitized all the Jeopardy episodes featuring Watson playing against champion players Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter and uploaded them to YouTube. As an added bonus for people who like to see behind the scenes, VentureBeat uploaded the practice match.

I’ve been in Seattle all week for Microsoft’s TechReady conference, so I haven’t had a chance to catch Jeopardy on TV. I probably won’t get a chance to watch the YouTube videos until after I return from Seattle on Sunday night, so I decided to gather all the videos in one place for convenient viewing on Family Day – enjoy!

The Practice Match

Day 1, Part 1

Day 1, Part 2

Day 2, Part 1

Day 2, Part 2

Day 3, Part 1

Day 3, Part 2

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Funny because it’s true.

Have a good one, everybody!

The Golden Girls picture I posted for Valentine’s Day 2008 is getting a lot of hits, and I figured it was worth reposting below. Enjoy!

Here’s a photo I took during my flight from Toronto to Seattle (where I’ll be for the bext 10 days), getting as much geek mileage as I can. That’s The Social Network playing on the in-flight entertainment system (until yesterday, I still hadn’t seen it), and below that is me getting screenshots for an upcoming Windows Phone 7 development article on my Dell Latitude XT2, my phone- and touch-development demo machine.

I suppose I could’ve geeked out more by pulling out my other computer – the Dellasaurus – but it’s a 17” beast (Quad core i7 chip! 16 gigs RAM! 1 gig video! Orange!) that doesn’t fit on an airline tray table and I don’t think the person in the seat beside would’ve appreciated it.

While going through security to board the “puddle-jumper” that would take me from Vancouver to Sea-Tac, the security people asked me to prove that my accordion was indeed a musical instrument. I played the refrain from Black Eyed Peas’ I Gotta Feeling as proof and got a “standing O” at the end.

Here’s a photo I took from my hotel room early this morning. It’s actually sunny in Seattle! Better still, it’s balmy in comparison: 6 degrees C here, versus –10 back home. I’m going to enjoy the next ten days here!

The question is “name something that gets passed around”; hilarity ensues.

I’m going to be in Seattle twice this month: I leave today and will be there for TechReady, the internal Microsoft-employees-only conference, where I’ll be doing a presentation, doing a lot of networking and learning, catching up with lots of people and, as is the Microsoft Canada tradition, winding up at Kells Irish Pub by the market, where I will doubtless end up playing Wild Rover on accordion.

I’ll return to Accordion City on the 20th and will fly back to Seattle on the 27th to help out at Microsoft’s MVP Global Summit, the annual gathering of Most Valuable Professionals. MVPs are non-Microsoft employees who’ve been awarded for their community leadership and for providing expertise to users of Microsoft tools and technologies.

I’m sure some interesting stuff will happen while I’m there, and you can be sure I’ll write about it here. Watch this space!

The title of this article is a reference to the theme song from the TV series Frasier, which took place in Seattle. If you’ve ever wondered what the seemingly nonsensical lyrics of that song mean, you might want to check out this page.

What better way to start the working week than by showing you ways to throw a wrench in your productivity? Here’s The Procrastination Flowchart (provenance unknown; a reader sent it my way), showing you how it’s done. Click it to see it at full size:

Click the flowchart to see it at full size.

As you can see, you can put a lot of work into avoiding work. Being a practitioner of what I like to call “enlightened laziness”, I much prefer this much simpler version:

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.