The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Seen in the elevator at the hotel I’m staying at in Ottawa:

Heh heh heh.

I’m on VIA Rail train 42, bound for Ottawa as I write this. As a student at Crazy Go Nuts University (some of you may know it by its other name, Queen’s) with friends and family in the Toronto/Ottawa/Montreal triangle, riding on VIA was a ritual in which I partook at least a half-dozen times a year. If I were to go solely by outward appearances, my student self – I was a student from 1987 to 1994 – would recognize just about everything on this train car; to my eye, it looks exactly the same as a circa-1994 one does, except for two things: the power outlets and the sticker above the window announcing the availability of wifi.

TechDays Ottawa, the Ottawa edition of Microsoft’s cross-country conference from developers and IT pros, starts tomorrow. Hence my presence on this train: I’m heading to the nation’s capital to help the conference along with my fellow evangelists Damir Bersinic, Rick Claus and Christian Beauclair. Once you factor in the travel to and from airports, the airport security dance and all the waiting around you have to do, the time difference between travelling from Toronto to Ottawa by train isn’t all that difference from getting there via plane. Within 15 minutes of arriving at Union Station’s front door, I’d acquired my ticket, bought breakfast, taken my seat on the train, fored up my laptop and gone online.

For those of you curious about the wifi on the train, SpeedTest.net reports that that I’m getting a download speed of 0.77 Mb/s and an upload speed of 0.76 Mb/s (you can see their report to the right). It’s usable for email, web, social networking and even for testing networked Windows Phone 7 apps in the emulator. It’s certainly not for downloading large files, and they block access to high-bandwidth sites like YouTube. It’s still better than the complete lack of internet access on most flight, and if I had higher-bandwidth needs, I could always switch to my internet stick.

I’m making a mental note to favour the train for any business trips to Ottawa or Montreal. This is especially useful for Montreal. since their Gare Centrale is right under the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth, Microsoft Canada’s preferred hotel.

The train left Toronto at 9:30 and will arrive in Ottawa’s so-called “Downtown” station at around 2:00 p.m.. VIA Rail is playing a little fast and loose by calling the Ottawa’s main train station “downtown”, but for my purposes, it’s at a convenient location: TechDays Ottawa’s venue is the Hampton Inn Conference Centre on Coventry Road, which is barely a kilometre away.

This afternoon, I’ll be helping set up the presentation rooms, hooking up the presentation computers for both developer tracks (Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud and Optimizing the Development Process) as well as the Local Flavours track, and then heading to speaker dinner later this evening to catch up with the presenters. Tuesday and Wednesday will be all TechDays, all the time, with Day 1 being a 14-hour day starting with the professional-focused TechDays during the day and the student-focused Go DevMental conference in the evening. Day 2 is a relatively languid 10 hours. Thursday puts me on a return trip to Toronto, this time in the form of a road trip with Damir, my road-tripping buddy from last year’s TechDays.

Watch this space (plus the other blogs, Global Nerdy and Canadian Developer Connection) for more reports from TechDays and the road!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’re looking for something to do tomorrow night, Saturday November 6th from 8:00 p.m. on, I’m throwing a little birthday wing-ding at The Piston (937 Bloor Street West, just west of Ossington subway station). The Piston doesn’t really have a sign – it’s got a black storefront with a big garage door and a blue light, and it’s between Long & McQuade and the “adult magazine” shop. The beer’s great, the food’s nice and the music’s pretty good. Come on down for rock and roll, bacchanalia and birthday celebrations!

It’s become a tradition that whenever my coworkers and I are in Halifax to hold the TechDays conference, we head to the Lower Deck – one of this fine city’s drinking establishments — on the evening of Day 1. Regular readers of this blog will remember last year’s performance, where I joined the band for a Blue Rodeo number followed by a rousing rendition of Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild.

This year, Day 1 of TechDays is a long one for me. I arrive at the conference venue at 7:00 a.m. and help manage TechDays’ sessions, do presentations, meet with guests, ask questions and perform all manner of conference-related tasks until the conference day ends at 4:45 p.m.. Then I switch into “student gear”, preparing for the Go DevMental student conference, which runs from 6:30 – 9:30 p.m. that evening, for which I did a 45-minute live-coding presentation on web development with WebMatrix, followed by another 45-minute live coding presentation on videogame programming for Windows Phone, followed by a roundtable discussion with computer science/computer programming faculty.

Our day ended at 10:00 p.m., after which we made a beeline to the Lower Deck for dinner upstairs (a great bowl of seafood chowder and curried mussels) and then headed downstairs for beer and live music.

When we arrived at the bar, we were greeted with cheers by coworkers, conference staff and conference attendees, already well-lubricated with local draught.

“I spy an itinerant accordion player!” exclaimed the guitarist from the stage, and minutes later, I was performing a couple of traditional Irish folk/drinking tunes with the band. They were a great band to play with, a a friendly bunch. Thanks for the opportunity to jam, gentlemen!

I’m in Halifax to help run the TechDays conference, catch up with a couple of friends and with a modicum of luck, sample some of the city’s pub life.

In the TV series Family Guy, to which I likened Accordion City’s mayoral election, there’s an episode in which Peter Griffin discovers that thanks to a technicality, the lot on which his house was built is technically not part of the United States. Fed up with his tax hassles and the city not allowing him to build a pool on his property, he declares his house a sovereign state and names it “Petoria” (because the name “Peterland” was already taken by a gay bar down by the airport).

To carry on with the Family Guy metaphor, Toronto is now Petoria. Rob Ford, whom I likened to Peter Griffin, has decisively won the election. With 1831 out of 1870 polls reporting and 50% voter turnout, here’s how the votes break down:

It’s a fact of democracy that at least sometimes, the candidate you want to win doesn’t. Or perhaps more accurately, the candidate for whom you feel great distaste does. And that’s okay – the people of Toronto have spoken, and they asked for Peter, not Stewie. You work with the mayor you’ve got, and not the mayor you want.

I’ve got to give credit where credit’s due: like him or not, Ford had an actual story to tell. I may not have agreed with it, but he actually had a platform while the others simply reacted by becoming anyone-but-Ford candidates. That, in combination with good use of social media and a team in the field holding regular meetings, “shaking hands and kissing babies”, eventually made the election all about him. As a developer evangelist who works on campaigns of a different sort (but campaigns nonetheless), I’ve got to give the Ford team kudos for succeeding at a difficult task – taking an outsider, “dark horse” candidate up against George Smitherman (who at the start of the campaign had quite a lead) and winning.

So what happens now? Despite the hyperbole you’re going to hear from the left and some of the centre-left, it’s not as if Toronto’s going to be reduced to a smoking hole in the ground or even transformed into a giant, characterless suburb where the most important use for land is parking cars. “Mayor Griffin” still has to win over City Council in order to get things done, and as “Councillor Griffin”, he’s had great trouble getting them onside. For the short term, the worst that will happen is that you’re going to have to deal with the triumphant crowing of right-wing bloggers and website commenters (eagerly awaiting subway trains to bring progressives to the Final Solution) and the braying of Toronto Sun columnist Sue-Ann Levy. Unless you’re a political junkie – and really, I have better things to do – it’s highly unlikely that the mayor’s going to either ruin or make your day.

To my fellow cyclists – and people, I’m a car owner and driver too, with GPS and satellite radio, even! – it’s up to us to keep Toronto a great place to get around by cycle, and yes, car, public transit, foot, pogo stick, whatever. Ford and many others may believe that cyclists are waging a “War on the Car”, when in fact what we really want is for Toronto to be a great place to get around on two self-powered wheels. Bicycles are efficient, cut down on traffic and pollution, save their users money and keep them in shape. But when I’m hauling a lot of computers, groceries or friends around, or when I have to boot up to Microsoft HQ in Mississauga, I’m glad I’ve got the ol’ Honda handy! Surely there’s a way for everyone to get around in the manner they prefer, and we’ve got to band together to remind Ford of this. Toronto Cyclists Union, if you’re reading this, you might want to get me to do some spokesperson work, as I don’t fit the stereotype: Middle-aged guy! Corporate douchebag at a Fortune 50 company! Nice salary! Business casual! Drives stereotypical Asian car! Accordion Player! Frequent flyer points up the wazoo! Bikes downtown!

There’s a bright side to all this: I’m certain that a Ford mayorship is a gift to satirists. There could be lots of grist for the blog mill! At the very least, I’m going to get a lot of mileage out of my collection of Peter Griffin graphics.

And finally, I’m open to the possibility that Ford could pleasantly surprise us. The thought of Toronto’s service unions – long a hiding place for mediocrity –grimacing at the thought of dealing with a mayor who isn’t so beholden to them pleases this accordion player. As Stewie Griffin might say: “Perhaps the Fat Man might prove to be useful after all.”