The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Seen in Mississauga last week:

The folks at Unspace, one of Accordion City’s fine software development shops (and the people behind the upcoming RubyFringe conference), have come up with a site called Complainy, where you can anonymously write a short complaint about anything. Using it is as simple as entering two pieces of info: the thing you’re complaining about, and the details:

Really, it does.

Click the “Say.” button and your complaint will get added to the list. The latest complaints appear on Complainy’s main page:

And clicking on any complaint shows you all the complaints for that complaint’s subject:

(I’ll admit it. Those are all mine.)

If you really must keep track of any complaint, Complainy provides RSS feeds for all the complaints it stores. Other Complainy features include “Gossip”, which lists the top recent and all-time complaints, and if you can’t think of anything to complain about, there’s “Lightning Round”.

[Thanks to Hampton Catlin for telling me about Complainy!]

Seen earlier today during a run to Costco:

Only through the distorted lens of FOX News could you witness the egging of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at a presentation in Budapest and then conclude that Europeans hate prosperity. In the clip below, sock puppets Neil Cavuto and his guest Monica Crowley fail to understand that it’s a hatred for Microsoft’s playing dirty pool in the tech industry all these years to prop its products (which many techies feel run the gamut from sub-par to passable) not prosperity:

Crowley’s quotes are standard-issue FOX talking points: that European think that American capitalism is “rampant, unenlightened” and have an “enormous sense of envy towards the United States” because they “can’t compete economically”, “envy our prosperity” and are “jealous of it.” However, the it’s Cavuto who provides this clip’s gem, a bootlicker classic: “And look — this is one of the world’s richest men, and no one is coming to his aid!”

I’ll Be at Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2008

I’ve been granted a media pass to the upcoming Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2008 conference, which takes place here in Accordion City from June 16th to 18th. The media pass will probably give me access to some free snacks in the press lounge, but more importantly, it’ll give me access to the whole conference — not just keynotes and presentations, but the tutorial sessions and even one-on-one interviews with some of the search engine experts who’ll be presenting and teaching at the conference.

In exchange for this access to the conference, I’ll be posting blog entries about the conference for the next little while, both in the time leading up to the conference and from the conference floor. I’ll post articles about search engines and search engine optimization as well as my one-on-one interviews. They appear in both my blogs, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century and Global Nerdy, with the more general-interest material in Accordion Guy and the more technical stuff in Global Nerdy. I hope you’ll enjoy them, whether you’re deeply involved in web development, are someone hoping to promote his or her business online or just curious about how you find things on the web.

Linda Evangelista, My Google Indicator (or: It’s Not Just a Nerd Topic Anymore)

I try to be careful not to make too many assumptions about which technologies the general public uses. As someone who works (and lives and plays) in the tech industry, I’m an early adopter of some technologies and an unusual user of others. I realized this ages ago when somebody asked me to run a quick calculation; she was surprised when instead of firing up the Calculator application or Excel, I punched up terminal window and started a Python interactive shell. Why fire up some puny little calculator when there’s a whole programming tool at your disposal?

Since I’m the type who prefers to write software for ordinary people (other programmers prefer to write systems software, who primary “users” are machines or other software), I make it a point to observe how people who don’t eat, breathe and sleep technology use it. It’s not something I always consciously do; I often just see a non-techie using technology and make a mental note of what happens.

One such moment stands out in my mind. About five years ago, I was lazily leafing through a celebrity magazine while waiting to get my hair cut when I stumbled across an article about supermodel Linda Evangelista. The only thing I remember about the article is that at one point, Linda said “Hold on, let me Google it.”

Normally, when I hear about supermodels and technology, it’s usually something along the lines of the incident where Naomi Campbell flipped out and hurled a BlackBerry— one studded with Swarovski crystals, in fact — at her upstairs housekeeper (she has two assigned to each floor of her house). The fact that Linda Evangelista used “Google” in its I’m-searching-the-web verb form was a hint that search engine technology wasn’t just used by techies. It’s a sign that everyone’s using search engines.

Next: How a search engine helped my pick my job title.

Thinking of Attending Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2008?

You can find out more about the conference at the Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2008 site — be sure to check out the agenda for the Search Engine Marketing training day on Monday, June 16th and the agendas for the conference days on Tuesday, June 17th and Wednesday, June 18th.

I wish I could take credit for the title of this post, but that has to go to Doug Sheppard, who came up with this gem after reading a Torontoist article by local nightlife crusader Kevin Bracken in which he suggests that in order to boost tourism, Accordion City should promote itself as a capital of vice — having the cops look the other way when it comes to pot, extending legal drinking hours, and having “a little bit more ‘red-light district’.”

I have more to say, but in the meantime, enjoy this book cover that I posted in an article from a couple of years back…