Pictured above are Daniela and her three children: Daniela (age 9), Brandon (age 6) and Evelyn (age 4). Daniela and her family are in a difficult situation, and David Armano (VP Experience Design at Critical Mass, a Chicago-based marketing and design agency) is trying to rally some help for her.
Daniela is a Romanian immigrant who divorced her husband after years of physical abuse. Her youngest daughter Evelyn has Down Syndrome. She makes very little money cleaning houses and lost her house when her mortgage went unpaid.
David and his family have taken Daniela and her family into their home. They’re trying to get her an apartment through a fundraising drive. The goal is to collect at least US$5,000 so that she doesn’t have to worry about rent or a deposit while trying to improve her situation.
Here’s a photo taken inside David’s garage that shows everything that Daniela owns in the world:
David wrote in his blog post about about Daniela that he understand that getting donations in these tough economic times is difficult. In spite of that, he’s asking people to make donate even just a little money to help Daniela out.
I would argue that in times like this, it’s even more important to make an effort to perform acts of kindness. Pulling together and helping each other, especially those of us who are most vulnerable, is how we’ll all ride out the Credit Crunch. As Douglas Rushkoff wrote in his essay Riding Out the Credit Collapse:
The more we are willing to do for each other on our own terms and for compensation that doesn’t necessarily involve the until-recently-almighty dollar, the less vulnerable we are to the movements of markets that, quite frankly, have nothing to do with us.
As of my writing this, David’s campaign has raised over $9,000 for Daniela. Even though he’s raised nearly twice the target amount for Daniela, I would still suggest that you make a donation if you can. $5,000 isn’t going to last very long, and with three kids, Daniela will have expenses other than rent to worry about.
I’ve moved this blog from server to server and blogging platform to blogging platform over the past seven years. In the process of moving its contents about, the archives from May through October 2004 went missing. After looking about my backup files for months, I found and restored them, and you’ll find them in the “Archives” links in the sidebar.
Notable articles from the “Missing Months” include:
The Breakup Style of PowerPoint (July 30, 2004): Edward Tufte wrote about how PowerPoint’s misuse is killing presentations; I write about how it might be changing the way we break up.
Granddad’s Blog Entry (May 31, 2004): A couple of entries from my grandfather’s diary – a decalogue of his personal principles written in 1935 and a letter to himself he wrote in 1938.
Almost 30 Years Later and I Still Don’t Belong (May 26, 2004): Some jackass on a right-wing blog says that immigrants have no idea what it means to be a real Canadian; I tell some personal stories that say otherwise.
Click the screenshot to see the full version on its Flickr page.
Michael Arrington, you big girl’s blouse, they use the word “vagina” on prime time TV – for starters, on Family Guy. Also, thanks to Britney’s now legendary bad judgement and celebrity blogs, we’ve all seen said vagina anyway [link not safe for work!].
Here’s the unauthorized post on Rick Sanchez’ Twitter account:
Click the screenshot to see the full version on its Flickr page.
And my favourite, the unauthorized post on FOX News’ Twitter account that tells the shocking truth of about falafel-and-loofah fetishist and screaming head Bill O’Reilly:
Click the screenshot to see the full version on its Flickr page.
Anyhow, you might not be a celebrity, but it still might be a good idea to update your Twitter password if it’s something easily cracked, like a word that can be found in the dictionary.
It’s because I always end up typing the wrong message in the wrong chat window. So far, I haven’t done anything as embarrassing as the ChaCha guide below, but I’m not going to tempt fate…
Younger readers may not be familiar with this incarnation of Steve Martin, who was then best known as a stand-up comedian specializing in absurdist routines. This is pre-Man with Two Brains, pre-The Jerk, pre-King Tut(“Buried with a donkey! / He’s my favourite honky!”), and even pre-“Crazy Czech brothers” Steve Martin improvising his way across the city – I’d love to see the rest of the film sometime.
Here’s a nostalgia trip for those of you who watched TVOntario during the late seventies and early eighties: a montage of images from its daytime educational shows. Did any of you ever watch Parlez-Moi, Write On!, H&G Mysteries, Bits and Bytes or Math Patrol?
At the end of 1992, when the marriages of her children, Prince Charles, Prince Andrew and Princess Anne all dissolved and Windsor Castle caught fire, Queen Elizabeth II alluded to the title of John Dryden’s poem Annus Mirabilis (“Year of Miracles”) and referred to the year as an annus horribilis(“horrible year”).
As H.R.H. the Queen of England riffed on Dryden’s coinage, so shall I riff upon hers. If I had to summarize the year between 2008 in a quick soundbite, I would use the pseudo-Latin coinage Annus Assrocketis, as in “Year of Assrockets”.
Assrockets and Opportunities
A little bit over a year ago, I wrote an article titled Assrockets and Opportunities explaining why I was leaving my job as Tucows’ Technical Evangelist, a relatively safe, secure and cushy job – one that its CEO Elliot Noss said “fit me like a glove” — for a startup in the rather iffy social software space.
I had been feeling a little bit restless for a little while, but that restlessness alone wasn’t enough to make me take the leap. Strangely enough, it took a video of a guy sticking a bottle rocket up his butt and an observation made by Charles Follymacher in the blog The War on Folly. Assrockets and Opportunities summarized how the video and Follymacher’s blog entry inspired me to change jobs.
As a quick refresher, here’s the video. Be advised that it may not be safe to view at your workplace, as it shows a young man’s bare bottom and a bottle rocket stick being inserted into said bottom. It also has a lot of crude vernacular that young men are wont to use. That being said, I still think it’s one of the funniest internet home videos of all time and it still makes me laugh out loud, even after hundreds of viewings:
Still the funniest video of all time.
In response to this video, Follymacher, a person of colour (I myself prefer the term “force of darkness” – it has a little more oomph) wrote a hilarious and insightful observation titled why White people rule this age. The relevant excerpts appear below:
…I’m once again reminded why White people rule the globe. It’s not a new idea, just feeling compelled to state it once more, this time without feeling: they run the world because they have a much (much) higher percentage of folk who will do absolutely *anything.* any bloody, assinine [sic] thing at all. if you can name it, guaranteed it will be tried, if it hasn’t been already.
it is out of these absolutely stark, raving, barking mad experiments that new discoveries are made, which in turn lead to a fresh new batch of shit to fuck with. new answers urge new questions and all that, right?
…
us colored peoples of the world tend to leave well enough alone a lot more, not much for forcing Mother Nature’s hand. our ancient sciences are lost. that’s our bad. who knew? we didn’t ask. and now it may be too late to churn up that kind of insatiable hunger for knowledge.
a lot of White folk die off in these quests to discover and experience the unknowns, large or wtf. but some small percentage do manage to live to tell the tale and, wherever possible, wreak [sic] the profits.
I read the article in mid-October of last year and decided that it was high time I stuck a rocket up my ass, at least in the figurative sense. I put out a few feelers into the local tech job market.
Soon after that, I ran across an announcement of an open position at a startup looking for Ruby on Rails developers. The salary offered was a good deal better than my then-current one, and the opportunity to get back to writing code was very tempting. In five weeks, I went from replying to the offer to my first day on the job, the Monday after American Thanksgiving 2007.
Since that time, I have had three jobs.
The First Job (November 2007 – March 2008)
The startup I left Tucows to join – I don’t even like mentioning their name; you can look it up in this blog’s archives if you really must know – was building a Facebook-like web app for fraternities and sororities (“So you’re telling me that it’s like Facebook, but for students,” Cory Doctorow would say much later).
It might’ve stood a chance if it had these three missing ingredients:
A business plan. The original plan was to make money by advertising. The sales guy came up with a much better plan – selling that app as a way for fraternity and sorority chapters to collect dues and charging them on a per-member basis — but it was too little, too late. It wouldn’t have hurt for the founder to have actually written down his business plan, even his lame-o first one.
A product plan. The app was the result of “wouldn’t it be neat if this existed?” pipe-dreaming, and there wasn’t much thought or research put into it after that.
A CEO who wasn’t just in love with the idea of running his own “Web 2.0” business and the associated trappings. He was hooked on the idea of creating office spaces with cool custom furniture like Joel Spolsky’s Bionic Office, “20% projects” like Google’s and “Hero Training”, in which we’d take a full day off work to do personal development. He also had some kind of fanatical belief in Ruby on Rails’ ability to solve any problem, from rapid development to world peace, curing cancer and fixing erectile dysfunction.
Truth be told, having missing ingredient number 3 might’ve given us missing ingredients number 1 and 2.
Click the montage to see the Flickr photoset.
Perhaps I’ll write about it at length someday, but for now a quick summary of what happened to this startup will have to suffice. They burned through money irresponsibly in many ways, including:
Renting office space in a pricey office building in a posh boutique district of town. We were located between the Mont Blanc and Ports International stores and across the street from the downtown Four Seasons.
Hiring an interior decorator to do a custom design of the office space, with custom furniture. I’d have kept the decent chairs, but we would’ve been just as productive with folding tables as we were with the custom desks.
Purchasing two large flat-screen TVs, neither of which were ever used for business purposes. They were pretty great for Wii and Xbox 360 games, though.
The ice sculpture and oyster shucker at the office-warming party. The party was black tie optional for some reason that still eludes me. At least they scaled down their ice sculpture purchase; they originally wanted the Chrysler Building, but settled for the less complex (and less expensive) company logo instead.
The ice sculpture at the office-warming party.
Alarmed at the company’s burn rate and lack of income, the source of the startup’s funding threatened to cut off the money. We were then informed by the CEO that unless we accelerated the schedule unreasonably, we’d all have to take a 20% pay cut. He went on vacation to Hawaii with his girlfriend a couple of days after that because he always went on vacation to Hawaii with his girlfriend at that time of year, crisis at his own company be damned.
While he was away, the entire senior developer team, of which I was part, started circulating their resumes and putting out the word that they were looking for new jobs. Within six weeks, the senior team had left the company. Within six months, the company had all but vanished. The website for the software no longer works, and the website for the company is now a single page showing the startup logo and nothing more.
My job at the startup, which had gone from dream to nightmare, lasted three months and a few days. The name of the startup still gets mentioned from time to time at local geek gatherings, sometimes as a cautionary tale, sometimes as a joke.
The Second Job (March 2008 – September 2008)
While searching around for jobs, I noticed that b5media was looking for a technical project manager. “b5”, as they’re often called, is a local startup success story, having grown from a small core of five bloggers and an office in Mark Evans’ garage to a network of over 300 blogs. I also knew that they’d landed funding thanks to meeting VC Rick Segal at DemoCamp, a semi-regular “show and tell” event for the Toronto tech community that I help host.
I showed up at b5media for an interview at 11:00 a.m. on one cold day in February, expecting a one-hour interview. It turned into a seven-hour series of multiple interviews with various people at the company, mostly testing me for how well I fit in with the office’s culture. I pretty much landed the job that day, and a couple of weeks later, I had my first day on the job, which involved flying down to Austin, Texas to attend the South by Southwest Interactive Festival for a week. I’d have to say that it was the best first week on the job I’ve ever had.
Regular readers of this blog know what happened in the end: changes in the market and at the company left me with nearly nothing to do, and they let me go…on the day of my wedding anniversary (they didn’t know that, but their timing still left something to be desired). I hold no ill will towards them; paying me to warm a chair does neither b5 nor me any good. It was the right thing to do, and they treated me quite well during the process.
Still, I felt like this:
The Job Search
I decided to treat my getting laid off as an opportunity in disguise, a chance to explore all my options and do a little long-term career planning. At the same time, watching my old schoolmate Ali Velshi on CNN talking about the credit crunch and dealing with a worried wife meant that I should try to secure some income as quickly as I could.
I had one big thing working in my favour: nearly seven years’ worth of tech evangelism and seven years’ worth of blogging meant that I had a lot of what VC Howard Lindzon calls “social capital” in the bank. I did not have to go looking for job openings; they came looking for me. A number of people called, emailed, instant-messaged and tweeted me, asking if I’d be interested in working for their company and if I could make some time to meet them for an interview. The jobs ran the gamut from doing some development for an adult entertainment site to doing tech evangelism for some pretty high-profile companies. I did interviews with just about everyone who called me, which meant that I was actually busier as an unemployed man that I was during my last weeks at b5.
I even got a call from an editor at a very reputable book publisher in New York asking if I’d ever given any thought to writing a book. The answer, by the way, is “yes”, and as soon as an idea comes to me, I plan to fly down to Manhattan in a nice suit and do a pitch over cocktails, which if Mad Men is not lying to me, is how these things go.
Most of the companies who called were the type I’d always worked for: either startups or small operations where I’d have the ability to wear many hats, make a significant contribution and have a great degree of freedom. Medium to large companies were completely off my radar, but I’d have to say that it was mostly because I’d grown accustomed to thinking of myself as a small company man.
As a result, it seemed unreal when I got a number of calls from different people from the same organization, all asking variations on the same question:
“Have you ever considered joining The Empire?“
Imperial Considerations
I’ll be honest: I had some qualms about joining Microsoft.
Fear of “selling out” and working for a big company wasn’t even a factor. It probably should matter at 21, but not at 41. To borrow a saying often misattributed to Churchill: if you’re not at least a little liberal at 21, you have no heart; if you’re not at least a little conservative at 41, you have no brain.
There’s also the standing order from The Missus: “No more working for fucking under-30 CEOs!”
Finally, consider the great truth expressed in the comic below:
My qualms didn’t arise out of loyalty to Apple; they make some really nice machines and an excellent OS, but I’m not really one of those “It’s Apple or nothing” types. They also didn’t come from an “open source forever, Microsoft never!” feeling either. Open source has resulting in some great things happening, but once again, I’m not a “F/OSS or nothing” kind of guy, either.
My qualms came from the feeling that Microsoft had little to offer to me as a developer. Once upon a time, back when my friend Adam Smith and I had a little software development constancy, Microsoft was my friend. From the mid-1990s to the release of .NET 1.0, it felt as if they were constantly reaching out to developers. Then somewhere along the way, at around the same time as the rise of web applications, Apache, PHP and later things like Rails and Django, something happened. Microsoft had apparently switched their focus away from developers and towards the suits – the decision-makers who approved the tech purchases, rather than the people who actually had to live with the decisions. I’m sure that many developers felt the same way I did: Microsoft slowly faded from my radar because it seemed as if I’d faded from theirs.
I think that my friend Danny O’Brien expressed this best when he wrote:
One of my big bones with MS stuff is that it always makes me feel like I’m eating out of the trash bins outside a cubicle farm. All of their software is designed to help busy executives plan their lives. Everyone I know uses it to try and write birthday cards and chat with their friends. When people use Microsoft Office they use it anywhere but in an office. Microsoft knows this - but it also knows that the money comes from their corporate clients, so there’s a limit to how much it can bend its software toward a wider customer base. Ultimately when you use MS software, you’re not the end user MS perceives at all: we’re just living off the scraps Microsoft leaves out after feeding its big customers.
One thing that convinced me to join Microsoft was a small-seeming but important sense of a “sea change” at Microsoft.
Perhaps it was their hiring of some people I’d never expect:David Crow (I’ll admit that I was ready to bet some good money on his leaving within six months, saying “It’ll either end in tears…or gunfire”), Bryce Johnson, John Lam and Danah Boyd.
It might have been their willingness to even consider talking to me after my posting this graphic on my blog:
It might have been some very lengthy conversations I had with friends who worked at Microsoft.
What probably convinced me most was the opportunity to work for a couple of great people who believed in me, Mark Relph and John Oxley. They offered the combination of a lot of support and a great deal of latitude, the ability to work largely from the home office and most importantly, the freedom to inject my own personal style into the work I’d do. I think Mark’s line, “We enter as friends, we leave as friends”, struck a chord with me.
At the end of my sixth(!) interview, John said “We’d like to take you on. Are you interested?”
I replied “To quote Homer Simpson, I have only two questions: ‘How much?’ and ‘Give it to me!’”
In the end, I was unemployed for a grand total of three weeks. Considered the economic collapse taking place all ‘round, that’s not bad at all.
Fry-Kirk Syndrome (or: The Third Job; October 2008 – Present)
At the dawn of 2009, just over a year after leaving my tech evangelist job, I have escaped from one imploding company, been laid off from a downsizing one and finally ended up at a job that fits me like a glove. After this journey, I have become…a tech evangelist.
I feel like “Fry” from Space Pilot 3000, the premiere episode of Futurama. Fry, a p[izza delivery boy in 1999, is frozen on New Year’s Eve 1999 and revived a thousand ears later. In the year 3000, a computer determines that he is best-suited to being a delivery boy, and he spends much of the episode trying to escape this fate. In the end, he cheers as he finds work with a distant relative…as a delivery boy.
Captain Kirk had a similar experience: he always returned to his first, best destiny – being captain of the Enterprise. I feel that I’ve managed to do the same, and with the added bonus of not having a court martial, blowing up the ship, losing my son and getting demoted from Admiral.
Like the young man in the “Bottle Rocket” video near the start of this essay, I took some risks and got a little singed in the process. But as Charles Follymacher also pointed out, sometimes you “manage to live to tell the tale and, wherever possible, wreak [sic] the profits,” and that’s what happened to me in the end.
As any decent poker player will tell you, winning isn’t in the cards you’re dealt, but how you play them. In spite of all the craziness this year, I did quite well.
Seattle police shot and killed a University of Washington senior who was dressed in a World War II-era German uniform and who officers say was brandishing a long rifle with a bayonet early Thursday in his University District apartment.
The student, identified by friends as Miles Allen Murphy, was well-known on campus as a smart, eccentric history buff who loved to participate in WWII re-enactments and would even show up to class, at times, dressed in a historic uniform.
…
Murphy was killed about 2 a.m. Thursday when police responded to neighbors’ complaints that several men were shooting vintage, military-style rifles and shotguns into a dark alley near the 5200 block of 17th Avenue Northeast, police spokesman Jeff Kappel said.
When police were called, Kappel said, neighbors pointed out an apartment in a large white house. When police knocked on the door, one of the suspects opened the door brandishing a long rifle with a large bayonet attached.
Uniformed police officers warned the man several times to drop his weapon. He didn’t, Kappel said, and he pointed it at one of the officers. Two officers shot him several times. He died at a hospital Thursday morning, Kappel said.
Yow. The moral of the story is that if you’re dressed in a Nazi uniform and carrying a rifle, people will assume that you’re up to no good.
The story includes quotes from friends who describe him as a history buff and not a neo-Nazi. Also of note is the third paragraph of the story – people who know me will experience a sense of deja vu:
Friends said Murphy, 22, would entertain at parties by playing everything from old German folk songs to Britney Spears tunes on his accordion.
JPG magazine was beautiful but unsustainable. A photography magazine whose contributors were also its readers, it was part publication, part online community and part art project. You didn’t have to be an established professional photographer to get published in JPG; all you had to do was submit a really good shot (and everyone’s got one really good shot in them). Photography magazines aren’t really my thing, but I actually bought a couple of issues of JPG because the photos and articles they featured caught my eye.
In an earlier article, Branford Marsalis’ Take on Students Today, I posted a video in which jazz.funk sax man Branford Marsalis talked about his music students. His first lines in the interview are:
What I’ve learned from my students is that students today are completely full of shit.
That is what I’ve learned from my students. Much like the generation before them, the only thing they are really interested in is you telling them how right they are and how good they are.
I mentioned that the interview comes from a documentary titled Before the Music Dies, a documentary film in which filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen “traveled the country, hoping to understand why mainstream music seems so packaged and repetitive, and whether corporations really had the power to silence musical innovation.”
A reader named “Tomas” said in a comment to the article that Before the Music Dies was posted in its entirety on Google Video. You can watch it in the little video window above, or at a larger size on its Google Video page. If you really care about music, whether as someone who plays it or simply enjoys it, watch it; you’ll find it’s two hours well-spent.
I like the Hawaiian treat called “Spam Sushi” (it’s properly referred to as Spam Musubi since the rice is salted rather than vinegared), which is probably why I the idea Spam Fritters (“succulent pieces of SPAM covered in a deliciously light and crispy golden batter”) sounds all right to me.
According to this article at MeatInfo.co.uk, the Spam Fritter was re-introduced to the UK market along with two other spam variants: Spam with Stinky French Garlic and Spam with Bacon. These new products are meant to reach “a younger demographic, as well as satisfying the needs of its core market.”
Both my blogs hit new readership records in 2008. Global Nerdy got nearly 703,000 pageviews, more than double the previous year’s numbers. The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century didn’t quite double its 2007 pageviews, but it still did pretty well: over 2.6 million, of which about 2 million were unique.
Here’s a chart, courtesy of StatCounter, showing the pageviews the blog has received over the past few years. Keep in mind that web statistics should be taken with a grain of salt:
Here’s how the numbers break down for each quarter of 2008:
The second quarter numbers got a big boost from an article I posted on May 29th, Geek Gang Signs, which was responsible for nearly 100,000 pageviews on May 30th alone.
I’d like to thank you, the readers, for continuing to visit both The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century and Global Nerdy. There’s plenty of blogging to come in the new year – please visit often!
As long as I’m in a jazzy, funky mode today (see today’s earlier blog entries featuring Branford Marsalis and Thelonious Monk), I thought I’d point to one of the tunes currently getting heavy rotation on my iPod: Marvin Gaye’sSexual Healing, as covered by New Orleans’ Hot 8 Brass Band, who give the classic track some gumbo-flavoured gusto. I’d love to see these guys play live:
If you like the cover, there’s an excellent studio version on their album, Rock with the Hot 8. Here are some links:
Even if you’re not a jazz musician or even a jazz fan, you might still get some mileage from the advice that legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk gave to jazz saxophonist Steve Lacy. Lacy took down some notes, which appear below:
Here’s a transcript of the notes:
1. MONK’S ADVICE (1960)
Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep time.
Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head, when you play.
Stop playing all those weird notes (that bullshit), play the melody!
Make the drummer sound good.
Discrimination is important.
You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?
ALL REET!
Always know….(MONK)
It must be always night, otherwise they wouldn’t need the lights.
Let’s lift the band stand!!
I want to avoid the hecklers.
Don’t play the piano part, I’m playing that. Don’t listen to me. I’m supposed to be accompanying you!
The inside of the tune (the bridge) is the part that makes the outside sound good.
Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by. Some music just imagined. What you don’t play can be more important that what you do.
A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.
Stay in shape! Sometimes a musician waits for a gig, and when it comes, he’s out of shape and can’t make it.
When you’re swinging, swing some more.
(What should we wear tonight? Sharp as possible!)
Always leave them wanting more.
Don’t sound anybody for a gig, just be on the scene. These pieces were written so as to have something to play and get cats interested enough to come to rehearsal.
You’ve got it! If you don’t want to play, tell a joke or dance, but in any case, you got it! (To a drummer who didn’t want to solo)
Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it. A genius is the one most like himself.
They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along and spoil it.
Here’s a great clip from the documentary Before the Music Dies in which saxophonist Branford Marsalis tells us what he really thinks about students today:
Here’s my transcript of the video:
What I’ve learned from my students is that students today are completely full of shit.
That is what I’ve learned from my students. Much like the generation before them, the only thing they are really interested in is you telling them how right they are and how good they are.
That is the same mentality that basically forces Harvard to give out B’s to people that don’t deserve them out of the fear that they’ll go to other school that will give them B’s, and those schools will make the money.
We live in a country that seems to be in this massive state of delusion, where the idea of what you are is more important than you actually being that. And it actually works just as long as everybody’s winking at the same time. If one person stops winking, you just beat the crap out of that person, and they either starting winking or go somewhere else.
My students – all they want to hear how good they are and how talented they are. Most of them aren’t really willing to work to the degree to live up to that.
Don’t dismiss this as just a statement about jazz or even about music. I see the attitude of Marsalis’ students everywhere.
The trailer for Before the Music Dies is really intriguing. I’m going to have to watch it:
JPG magazine
