b5media, where I hold the position of Nerd Wrangler, has the #5 position on TechVibes’ Start-Up Index Canada for July 2008.

Here are the top ten entries in the Index:

Greg Andrews has been compiling Start-Up Index lists at the tech news site TechVibes for the past half year for nine cities and regions in Canada, including Accordion City. They rank companies not on profit or market share, but on much easier to collect data: web traffic to their sites, based on data from Alexa and Compete. It’s not the best measure of the performance of a company, but it might be a decent indicator of mindshare. The Start-Up Index Canada for July 2008 is his first such index compiled for Canada as a whole.

To qualify for inclusion on the list, a company has to meet the following criteria:

• Located in Canada
• Less than 5 years old
• Not a public company
• Is a tech company; either hardware, software, web app/service, or mobile

Congrats to my fellow coworkers and b5 bloggers!

Bonus Useless Data

If you were to treat my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century as a startup, its average score, based on its Alexa ranking of 54,924 and Compete ranking of 48770, would put it in 21st place on the Start-Up Canada Index.

b5media, the company for whom I am Nerd Wrangler, is one of the finalists for the Canadian New Media Awards’ “Most Promising Company of the Year”. The announcement was made at the nextMEDIA conference, which took place this weekend in Banff.

We’re up against the esteemed competition, FileMobile and Viigo. According to the Canadian New Media Awards site, the winners will be announced at their gala in October.

My congratulations to my coworkers! I knew that working at b5 was going to be special.

If you’re a reader of the usual sites with links that nerds like, you’ve probably seen the video or read the writeup of Clay Shirky’s presentation at Web 2.0 on “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus”.

In his presentation, he describes a conversation with a TV producer, in which he talked about the effort that people put into the “Pluto” entry in Wikipedia. The producer, hearing this story, rolled her eyes and asked “Where do they find the time?”

Clay suggests that the producer believed that “free time”, which he refers to as “cognitive surplus” or “social surplus”, was TV’s by divine right. He posits that the mental energy once devoted to television watching and other equally passive ways of filling one’s spare time is being better spent — on the internet.

(I’ve always found that saying someone has “too much time on their hands” is an intellectually dishonest way of dismissing someone: see my entry Too Much Spare Time? and Cory Doctorow’s essay, Too Much Time on His Hands.)

If you haven’t seen the video of Clay’s presentation, here it is — it’s 16 minutes of your free time well spent:

The TV producer reminded me of a record executive whom I encountered at my first job out of school. It’s an interesting story about programming work and technology in the mid-90’s, the music industry and how predictions about technology can be way, way off.

My First Job Out of School

A screenshot from the 1991 version of the Mackerel Stack, a HyperCard stack the promoted Mackerel’s design work.

My first job fresh from getting my computer science degree at Crazy Go Nuts University was developing multimedia applications in Director at a little company called Mackerel Interactive Multimedia.

The year was 1995, when Myst still defined the cutting edge of multimedia, CD-ROMs and sound cards were still fairly novel peripherals and the only other opportunities for a wet-behind-the ears developer seemed to be at a bank or insurance company, neither of which seemed to be appealing. While the pay wasn’t great — I used to call us the “hos of technology” and did a Full Metal Jacket-esque routine that ended with me shouting “Me so geeky! Clicky-clicky! Me hack for long time!” — the place wasn’t soul-killing like a bank or insurance company might have been. I could wear whatever I wanted, I could dress up my office space however I pleased, the hours were flexible and the co-workers were great: a hip and cool set of young people, with a near 50:50 gender balance. It seemed like Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, which had just been published at that time, right down to the ill-advised office romances (one of which was mine).

While the dream at the company was to write the next Myst, we paid the bills by writing multimedia apps for clients — typically interactive advertising or educational pieces that would eventually be distributed on CDs or even multiple floppies.

The company went under after a disastrous merger in 1997. Its story was covered by Cory Doctorow wrote an article for Wired about the Mackerel’s demise; unfortunately, it never got published in the magazine. The Mackerel story is told from a different angle by co-founders Dave Groff and Kevin Steele at the Smackerel site, which is subtitled A Biased History of Interactive Media.

Enter the Record Exec

One of the bands represented by the record exec’s company. You can try to guess who they are, and you should be able to figure out the record company as well.

One day during the summer of 1996, one of the founders came into the area where the developers hung out and told us that we’d landed a contract with an independent record label belonging to a major record company.

“Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?” I asked.

Apparently it wasn’t. The indy label turned out to be merely a new branch of the major record company. It would sign up-and-coming underground and alternative acts and use the major label for distribution. If the major label was pin-striped and buttoned-down, the indy label was its edgier nephew, clad in faux Hot Topic-esque cred. In spite of their trying-too-hard-to-be-cool aspects, we thought they’d make an interesting client.

The record company exec was a woman who was about five years past their twenty-something demographic. She gave off more of a business school vibe than a rock vibe. She peppered her speech with business-school-isms like “target audience” and “units sold”. She used the word “product” several times and didn’t use the word “music” or even “album” once. Everything she knew about music didn’t come from being a fan; it came from what she’d read in her market research reports.

“That’s why they don’t call it show art,” one of us quipped.

The Brainstorming Session

The CD player application from System 7, the version of Mac OS from 1996.

One of the goals of this initial meeting was to brainstorm some ideas for interactive apps that we could build for them. I had been working on an idea that I was rather proud of: CD player apps customized for specific albums. For any CD other than the one for which it was customized, it would show a mostly plain interface, plus some promos for the album. However, if you used the player to play the album for which it was customized, it would “come alive” with lyrics, liner notes, album art and so on. It was an attempt to bring back what was lost in the move from LPs to CDs.

“Nice try, kid,” said the exec with great disdain. “We did some market research and we’ve determined that no one will ever listen to music on their computer. People see them as machines for getting work done. We’re aiming for the rec room, the den, the living room and the bedroom, not the home office. You computer guys are aiming for home office.”

“You sure about that?” our production manager asked. “We all use the CD players on our machines. For some of us, our computers are in our bedrooms and living rooms, and they’re also our primary stereos now.”

“That may be true for you,” she replied, “but you guys are the exception. Computers are great, but they’re office equipment. You don’t keep a typewriter or photocopier in your living room, so why would you have a computer there? And that’s where people listen to their music. Office equipment and entertainment: apples and oranges. Trust me - I’ve been in the music industry for a while - no one’s going to listen to music on their computer.”

I listened as a few other people had their ideas shot down in similar fashion. It was a matter of her knowing the music industry better than we did.

The Hail Mary MP3 Play

At some point during the increasingly futile brainstorming session, I remembered something that I’d brought back from the Macromedia User Conference. I reached into my laptop bag and fished out a floppy disc.

“Here, check this out,” I said, slotting the diskette into my laptop. “It’s something called Shockwave, which lets you embed multimedia applications inside web pages.”

“We don’t think there will be much interest in the world wide web outside of technical people. The pictures are tiny, you’re stuck with default fonts, and your customers have to go buy a modem. Too much tech hassle, too little payoff.”

“You should give this a look,” I insisted. “The company that makes the tool we use to write multimedia software is using MPEG layer 3 [the term “MP3″ hadn’t made common parlance yet] compression to squeeze music files into less space. There’s a small multimedia program on this floppy, and a whole three-minute song. It would normally take about 8 floppies to hold this song.”

I put the disk in my laptop and launched the Shockwave application, which started a tune playing.

“Sounds like crap,” she said. “And who’s the band? The Spin Doctors? They’re so over.”

“Ignore the band,” I said, trying to remain patient. “Just think of the possibilities. This three-minute single is only a megabyte in size. It fits on a floppy, which you can hand out, or you’d be able to download it in a reasonable amount of time. The download will be even faster on the new 56K modems.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” she said, making that opening-and-closing hand gesture signifying pointless chatter. “It only means something to you because you’re a techie. I’ve seen the market research, and I will tell you now: people are not going to be getting their entertainment from computers or the internet. It’s going to come from set-top boxes and MiniDisc recharging stations at their record stores.”

At this point, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour. “Well, you seem to have all the market research, so maybe the best thing would be for you to come up with ideas for an interactive application, and then we can hammer out the details with you in a later meeting.”

“I think that would be a good idea,” she said. She rose from her seat to leave the room, shaking her head.

“I don’t know about you,” I said to the others after confirming that she was out of earshot, “but I think the music industry needs to be destroyed.”

The 30-car parking lot behind the store was full of cars that I could’ve sworn were lifted right from the previous game in the series, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: small sports cars painted in bright colours with lowered suspensions, chrome wheels and obnoxiously loud exhausts and stereos driven by guys in hoodies. The male-female ratio was high, but there actually were some teenage girls in line, which is a good sign: why should guys have all the realistically rendered fun in a virtual New York?

The door to the store is a few paces past the “no left turn” sign in the distance. I waited in line for about an hour and managed to get one of the last non-pre-ordered copies for the XBox 360.

A trailer for Grand Theft Auto featuring my character’s cousin Roman.

After getting back home, I played the game for about an hour, soaking up the the visually gorgeous opening sequence, running errands for my character’s cousin, Roman, shopping for clothes to impress a lady and beating up Albanian loan sharks. I’m going to have to jack a car and explore the city, as it’s so gorgeously rendered that it feels quite real. While the “San Francisco” segment of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas gave me the feeling of deja vu (I lived there for a year), Grand Theft Auto IV made me feel as if I was in Brooklyn right now.

Here’s a video of the opening of the game, featuring the title sequence and the first few minutes of mise en scene:

The first 10 minutes of Grand Theft Auto IV.

I’ll post more details as I play the game.

More on my experiences in a later post.

[Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.]

Anyhow, I’ll be back tonight and the regular posts to Global Nerdy shall resume tomorrow, March 13th. See you then!

Didn’t I just do this?

Once again, it’s my last day at the job, which means I’m cranking that classic of 80’s hair metal: The Final Countdown by Sweden’s gift to rock, Europe.

It’s become a bit of an end-of-job tradition for me that started back at OpenCola, the dot-com that Cory Doctorow co-founded and for which I worked for during those heady last days of The Bubble. In the summer of 2001 when all but seven people (I was one of the seven) were laid off, some wag played The Final Countdown over the office intercom system. Since then, I’ve associated it with departures from a company.

Since it’s now my tradition, I now present a couple of versions of this song.

First, there’s the video for Europe’s studio version. (I’d post it on this page, but the copyright holders don’t allow that.)

Next, there’s the live version:

Can’t see the video? Click here.

Then, the most painful cover version of The Final Countdown, performed by Deep Sunshine:

Can’t see the video? Click here.

And finally, a Bollywood number that borrows from The Final Countdown’s opening riff. (Once again, the copyright holders won’t let me post it here, in spite of their having no compunctions about ripping off Europe.)u

I figured I’d start off the working week with a big announcement: I’ve landed a new gig. As of this Thursday, March 6th, I’m going to be working at b5media, a network of 320 blogs that gets a total of over 10 million unique visits every month.

Depending on whom you ask, my new job title will be “Nerd Wrangler” or “Technical Project Manager”. I’ll coordinate b5’s development team and their projects, as well contribute my own experience and expertise in both blogging and accordion-playing.

I’m going to have a rather interesting first day on the job. Rather than heading to the office, I’m heading to the airport and boarding one of these…

…because along with a good chunk of b5, I’ll be attending the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas…

…as well as attending BarCamp Austin…

…where I plan to catch up with old friends and business associates and meet some new ones!

I’ll be staying at the ranch that b5 rented and attending the conference, taking copious notes and photos (and posting them here) as well as meeting up with the b5 bloggers and development team, who come from all over.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ll say it again:

Watch this space for my posts from Austin!

Here’s what the place looked like on December 7th. You can click the photo below to see the whole photoset on Flickr:

Click this photo to see the “TSOT December 7″ photoset.

Here’s how things looked on December 20th and 21st. Once again, click the photo to see the whole photoset on Flickr:

Click this photo to see the “TSOT December 20 - 21″ photoset.

And finally, here’s how things looked on “Moving-In Day”, January 3rd. Click the photo to see the whole photoset:

Click this photo to see the “TSOT January 3″ photoset.

By now, most Rails developers — and even a number of people who couldn’t care less about Rails — have read Zed Shaw’s infamous rant titled Rails is a Ghetto. It’s given me a lot to think about, and as a result, I’m changing my presentation topic at Tuesday’s TSOT Ruby/Rails Project Night to Rant Said Zed: I’m Too Sexy for my Rails (or: Lessons and Challenges from Zed Shaw’s Rant). I promise that it’ll be both informing and entertaining.

• Want to know more about Tuesday’s TSOT Ruby/Rails Project Night, which takes place this Tuesday, January 8th? See this entry.
• Want to sign up? Email me!

Aside: A Quick Trip Down Memory Lane

How can I reference Right Said Fred without showing you the video for their one hit?

A quick reminder to my readership: If you’re going to be a jackass in the comments (like “Brian” was in this one), your comment will either not get approved, or — as in Brian’s case — “disemvowelled”. You’re in my virtual living room, and I expect you to behave accordingly.

I just got an announcement from the folks at O’Reilly about their new book, Windows Vista Annoyances. I thought to myself, “Well, that’s good for 500 pages of material”. Then I checked the page count: 664. Heh.

So Many Proposals, So Little Time

Chad Fowler, organizer of RailsConf, the annual conference for Ruby on Rails developers, writes:

There were more proposals for RailsConf this year than there were attendees at RubyConf 2006 [According to this site, there were about 250 attendees — Joey]. This means two things:

1. The state of the Rails community has changed significantly in that it has grown and there is a larger subset reaching the expert level.

2. It’s going to take us a while to sort through all of these proposals and make selections. Apologies in advance.

My Proposal

The deadline for proposals was last week, and I submitted one. Since I’m keeping a diary of the work I’m doing here at TSOT (where we’re building custom social software using Rails), I thought I had some pretty good material for a presentation.

I don’t think it’s breaking the rules to publish my proposal here, so here it is…

Adventures in the Deep End: Our First Serious Rails Project

Session Type
45 minute conference session

Level
Beginner

Description
We joined a start-up to get some Rails experience; the company’s developers left and they needed new ones. In our favor: a mostly-working Rails app, funding and interested customers. Against us: we were all Rails newbies. We were in the deep end now!

We’ll talk about our experiences: the code we inherited, the lessons we learned and the agony and ecstasy of working on our first serious Rails app.

Abstract
We were developers who wanted a challenge. Looking for some serious Rails experience and a chance to try something a little different, we left our jobs to join a start-up with a Rails app that needed a new coding team. Our mission: finish coding a social networking application designed for fraternities and sororities.

In our favor, we had a mostly-working application, development experience, funding, customers interested in paying us, good gear, a nice office, our rugged good looks and an accordion. Against us: a lack of experience with Rails (and in some cases, Ruby), an unfamiliar codebase with varying degrees of wonkiness and of course, a deadline.

You’ll hear the good, the bad and the ugly about our experiences as a team with minimal experience working on a Rails app that we inherited. We’ll talk about how we learned both Rails and someone else’s code in a hurry, how we organized ourselves and divided the work, the approaches we took in refactoring the app, the production setup we used, the “dos and don’ts” we learned along the way and the agony and ecstasy of working on our first serious Rails project.

If you’re thinking about making the leap from noodling with Rails example apps in your spare time to full-time it-pays-the-rent Rails development, you won’t want to miss this presentation.

Presenter Bios
Joey deVilla, a senior developer at TSOT, likes to mix software development, technical evangelism and accordion playing (he jammed onstage with Chad Fowler at the last RailsConf). After doing a lot of pointless noodling with Rails example apps, he took the plunge and left a cushy technical evangelist job at a stable internet company to take a chance on a start-up building social software in Rails. Joey is an active participant in Toronto’s vibrant developer community: he helps organize and provide accordion music for DemoCamp and TSOT’s Ruby/Rails Project Nights.

Dan Williams escaped from rather questionable fields — military research, insurance and telcos — to get some honest work doing full-time coding in Rails. As a senior developer at TSOT, Dan’s current projects are building social software targeted at fraternities and sororities and modelling his working life after the movie “Office Space”. While Dan does not have a mullet, he embraces the mullet philosophy: “Business in the front, party in the back”.

I was hired primarily for my tech evangelism cred and broad development experience (Visual Basic, Python, PHP, Director and Java from the rough-and-tumble Java 1.2 days) rather than for experience with Rails, on which I’d done only a little spare-time noodling. This means that a good chunk of my time during this first month on the job has been split between getting familiar with Rails as well as TSOT’s apps.

Just before my first day at TSOT, I went down to Boston to join my in-laws for American Thanksgiving. While there, I decided to take advantage of the strong Canadian dollar and Thanksgiving weekend sales to do a little job-related book shopping. Although I had the PDF edition of Apress’ Practical Rails Social Networking Sites, I was pleased to stumble across another book on building social networking apps in Rails: Addison Wesley’s RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Site with Ruby on Rails. I figured that if I find a book that covers the sort of development work that I’m about to start, I should buy it on the spot (after a quick skim of the book while in the store, of course).

Of all the books I’ve read on Rails development, this one’s my current favourite. Yes, there’ll always be a special place for Agile Web Development with Rails, but I have to say that I like the pacing, ordering of topics and the presentation of material in RailsSpace a little bit better. I like the way that authors Michael Hartl and Aurelius Prochazka take a slightly different approach to teaching Rails, from going with a social networking app rather than a “store” app to their clever visualization of Rails’ directories as a pie chart, shown below:

Graph adapted from RailsSpace
and borrowed from Weblog of Fernando Reig Matthies.

So take it from a guy who’s paying his rent by working on Rails social networking apps: if you have some development experience under your belt and are looking to pick up Rails in a hurry (or if you’re looking for a gift for someone who needs to learn Rails in a hurry) I recommend:

• Picking up a book on Ruby (because you need solid Ruby fundamentals to really write good Rails code — I’ll talk about my favourite Ruby books later)
• Picking up RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Site with Ruby on Rails

Here’s what other folks have to say about the book:

• Review at Amazon.com by Charles Harvey: My favorite of the Ten Ruby and Rails Books on my desk — “The authors’ programming style(s) are easy to read while following and teaching the Ruby/Rails community practices. The book uses output examples after each snippet of code so you can follow along not wondering if what you just did worked.

  The example app you produce while working through RailsSpace is not YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Site) rather a (LBERBPS) Learn by Example Rails Best Practices Site. It was fun for me as I was tired of shopping cart, and book/music store examples.

  I don’t know how to put it into to the right words, but this books code flows.

  I always enjoy the rare book that sets a standard of excellence, and that is what puts this book at the top of my Ruby on Rails Library.”

• myCATs: An excellent Rails tutorial for the intermediate Rails Programmer — “This book is just plain fun. As the title implies, the focus is on building a social networking site using Ruby on Rails. The depth of knowledge of the authors, Michael Hartl and Aure Prochazka, is evident right from the first chapter. The examples are relevant and well explained, with clean, consice, well-tested and correct code.”
• Nate Klaiber: RailsSpace review — “I may seem cynical about social networks, but this truly book pays attention to the small details. Building a social network is a great tutorial that covers many aspects of Rails and building your own application - no matter what it is. It has several callout boxes that give more explanation where it is needed. It discusses the importance of testing. It shows the importance of refactoring. All of this comes together to make a great reading experience and knowledge gained. If you are a Rails professional, there might not be a whole lot new for you, but if you are just beginning Rails this is an excellent full-blown tutorial. Even if you don’t want to create a social networking site, the foundation and principles set in this book will give you the knowledge needed to start building your own application.”
• ComputerWorld: RailsSpace hits the Ruby on Rails learning sweet spot — “…if you’re already a proficient OOP developer — or a beginner who prefers learning by example — RailsSpace offers useful insight into what the Ruby on Rails hoopla is all about.”
• A.P. Lawrence: RailsSpace — “I liked also that the project paid attention to both looks and ease of use without clouding up with too much detail. The design is simple, but with enough attention paid to presentation to understand how to accomplish that in ROR, and the same is true for niceties like data validation: they do enough to show the concepts without burying us in it.

  The authors also included deliberate mistakes - that is, design deficiencies which you might notice before they get around to pointing out the problem. That’s good too, because often the best way to understand why you need to do something this way is to see what happens when you don’t.”

• WebChicanery: RailsSpace - The Book — I’m somewhat skeptical of these “build a project and learn” type of book, but this book may be one the the handiest book on Ruby that I’d had a chance to read. The authors approach it was a very pragmatic and structured standpoint, all while explaining some neat steps and additions they’ve thrown in along the way.”

A number of people have approached me — both online and in person — and attempted to guess what it was that made me consider leaving my Technical Evangelist job at Tucows, a job that I enjoyed and to which I was well-suited.

The person who came closest, a “long-time reader, first-time caller”, emailed me, asking if the the photo below, which recently made the rounds on a number of tech sites, was the reason:

Photo by Martin Davidsson. Click the photo to see the original.

It’s an ad placed in Stanford University’s independent newspaper, the Stanford Daily by Y Combinator, a Boston-based venture group who specialize in investing in small tech starttups. One of their better-known beneficiaries is Reddit, which ended up being acquired by Conde Nast Publications last year. One of its principals, Paul Graham, made his fortune with a web application that eventually got bought out by Yahoo!, which turned it into Yahoo! Store. The “Larry and Sergey” referred to in the ad are Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Although seeing this photo helped crystallize my thoughts, it wasn’t what made me consider switching jobs. The credit has to go to the video below.

Why I Changed Jobs: The Video

Please be advised that it’s not safe for work because it features a guy lying on the ground with his pants dropped to expose his derriere, into which he inserts a bottle rocket.

Jason Kottke calls this “the funniest video of all time”, and he’s right.
Can’t see the video? Click here.

The Video, Described

For those of you who’d rather not play the video, here’s what happens: A bunch of guys, who look to be about high school age, are hanging around in a driveway. The central guy in the video is lying on the ground with his legs in the air and the pants pulled down. He inserts the bottle rocket’s stick into the expected orifice and one of the other guys lights the bottle rocket’s fuse.

What makes this film wonderfully comic in that Three Stooges way that we boys love so much is that this bottle rocket is too tightly attached to the stick. It ignites and shoots flames out its rear, but stays in place. The result is that the guy in the video ends up effectively blowtorching his own ass. It appears painful, but in the end (heh), it’s mostly harmless.

The poor guy wriggles in pain for the duration of the bottle rocket’s “burn”, after which he leaps to his feet. At that point, the rocket’s last bit of gunpowder goes off with a comically satisfying bang, with equally comically satisfying effects. I have watched this video at least a few dozen times and it always makes me laugh out loud.

As you, the astute reader, have probably guessed, the rest of this essay is devoted to explaining why this video convinced me that I should take a chance on a new job.

Brilliant Idea, My Ass

First, I need to take you back to the year 1993. I was in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, the location of Crazy Go Nuts University. In addition to being a computer science student, I was also, among other things, the keyboardist in a band called Volume, whose other members were George on bass, Drew on drums, Chris on guitar and Mike as lead vocalist.

One day, while relaxing after a rehearsal, Mike decided that it was time to share his brilliant idea with the rest of the band. “Guys,” he said, “I have a brilliant idea.”

George put his head in his hands. It was a generally accepted fact in our band that brilliant idea in the Mike’s own parallel universe usually translated into harebrained scheme in our own reality.

“Oh, this oughta be good,” said Drew, leaning forward. “What is it?”

We had a high nerd factor in the band: Chris and I were in computer science (him as a masters student, I was an undergrad in my sixth year), Drew was working on his masters in biology and George had finished his liberal arts bachelor degree and was working in the marketing department of a company that made a graphical database query tool.

Out of all of us, only Mike would’ve been a character in a Richard Linklater film. He was a scruffy philosophy major with a scant number of hours of classes a week who often woke up close to noon. His house was straight out of a college “stoner” movie: from the “smoking lounge” complete with dark wall, model train and jury-rigged disco ball (a hemispherical lump of clay covered in tiny pieces of mirror glopped onto an old turntable) to the fireman’s pole that let you descend from the upstairs bathroom to the kitchen in a flash, it seemed primarily set up for partying and only coincidentally set up for living in.

“I was thinking that we should close with a bang,” said Mike. “At the end of the show, I want to drop my pants, bend over, stick a Roman candle up my ass and shoot it out towards the audience.”

“You’re right,” I said, “that is brilliant.”

“Seriously, dude! I’ll drop my pants, stick the Roman cable up my ass, one of you will light it…”

“You see,” said George, “there’s already a flaw in your plan.”

The discussion went on for a little while longer, but even though some of us might have been convinced to let Mike try out his idea — even just to see if he’d actually go through with it — we never closed a show with Mike’s “Roman candle up the ass” finale.

Mike went on to bigger and better things: these days, he’s doing quite well as a lawyer on Bay Street (Toronto’s answer to Wall Street), with an office schedule that sometimes starts at 7 a.m.. If I could go back in time to show a picture of present-day Mike to the band back in 1993, none of us would have believed it.

I am beginning to suspect that Mike’s success comes from rather than in spite of his willingness to stuff an explosive device in his nether regions.

A Little Perspective

You must recall that this was almost fifteen years ago — a more innocent time, before the mainstreaming of the world wide web, before CollegeHumor.com, before Jackass and before a surprising number of people started posting videos on YouTube featuring Roman candles up their asses. [All these links are videos featuring people with Roman candles up their bums. Consider yourself warned.]

Stories about idiotic things that university students did were spread by word of mouth; only the fatal ones were covered by the media. Simply put, in those days, ideas like Mike’s weren’t copycat inspirations; more often than not, they came from your own stoned head.

Gordon Ramsay Wants to Put a Rocket Up Your Ass

On celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay’s show, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares (the original British version, not the new American one), whenever the chef of the restaurant he’s trying to save appears to have lost the passion for cooking, he almost always says “I need to put a rocket up his ass”.

While the rocket insertion of which Chef Ramsay speaks is merely figurative, I have come to the conclusion that the metaphor is even more apt than Ramsay himself realizes.

“Why White People Run This Age”

Okay, I’ll fess up. What really got me thinking about making changes to my career path wasn’t the bottle rocket video, but some commentary on the video made in a blog called The War on Folly, written by Charles T. Duggleson and Charles H. Follymacher. The article is titled why White people run this age, and here’s the relevant excerpt:

…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.

A quick aside: I don’t want my story to get derailed into a discussion of race, culture and achievement — it’s not relevant to this article — but it is notable that if you do a search on YouTube using the keywords roman candle ass or bottle rocket ass, you will discover two things:

• A surprising number of people have decided that it might be a good idea to launch fireworks from their behinds. Remember that the YouTube search results comprise only those people who had video recording equipment handy and decided to post it on YouTube.
• Most — if not all — of the asses into which the fireworks were inserted are white.

Salada’s Advice

“What we see,” goes the advice that used to be printed on the tags of bags of Salada tea, “depends mainly on what we are looking for.”

Messrs. Duggleson and Follymacher, often write about issues of race, so when they saw the bottle rocket video, they made the leap from “white kid rectal pyrotechnics” to “whitey takes chances and sometimes comes up big”.

I saw the bottle rocket video by way of their essay, so I had both the original incident and Duggleson and Follymacher’s commentary in mind when I made my logical leap: If I want to move forward in my career, it’s time to take a few chances.

Or more simply: I needed to put a rocket up my ass.

Around the time I saw the video, I attended Albert Lai’s breakfast seminar, which was held in the heart of Toronto’s financial district. In his presentation, Albert suggested that Canadian investors need to be less timid and more willing to take a chance on start-ups, which were more likely to produce innovation than larger, more established organizations. This was a point made again in a roundtable discussion that followed, where several people also asserted that you learn more at a start-up, especially if you follow an iterative process and “fail fast”.

The other factor was the restlessness I’d started to feel at my Technical Evangelist position. As I’ve written before, it was a job well-suited to me, as it allowed me to do a mix of the things I loved: technology, writing, communicating with people and even a little graphic design and accordion playing. The only problem with the job was that failure wasn’t an option, and for the wrong reason: there simply wasn’t that much opportunity to fail.

My coding work was largely limited to example code in articles and small one-afternoon projects such as the Duke of URL. The rest of the job was looking at better ways of explaining how to use Tucows’ services and getting out in front of developers and people interested in technology and acting as the company’s ambassador. It’s all stuff that I find fairly easy to do.

There’s a certain comfort in not having to program a large project that would serve thousands of paying customers a day. It’s far easier beat a deadline when writing technical articles than it is to beat a deadline to produce a working, useful program. The development team did all the heavy lifting, after which I’d simply write and talk about it.

When I started the job, I found this arrangement relaxing, having come from a dot-com where we often ended up writing code that never saw the light of day, since it had been scrapped after the investors and other powers that be changed the company’s direction (which at one point, happened every three weeks).

But after a while, I found myself looking for challenges. Luckily, I was given the mandate of writing a developer blog in which I could write about programming in general, which gave me all sorts of new topics to explore. In some ways, it felt like the “Google 20%” — the fraction of work time that any Google tech employee can devote to personal projects. I began to worry when it occurred to me that the most influential writing on the Tucows Developer Blog that I’d done this year had nothing at all to do with Tucows or its services — it was my series of articles on writing Facebook applications.

I am reminded of an old Twilight Zone episode in which a gambler believes he’s died and gone to Heaven. He finds Heaven to be like a giant Atlantic City with plenty of casinos, except that the games are rigged so that he always wins. In the beginning, this makes him happy, but as time goes on, he realizes that it’s just no fun if there’s no possibility for him to lose. At the end of the episode, he begs the angel in charge to “send me to the other place!” (back then, you couldn’t say “Hell” on TV). The angel, who turns out not to be an angel at all, says “You fool! This is the other place!”

A scene from the Twilight Zone episode A Nice Place to Visit.

Opportunity Knocks

I was thinking about all this when my cousin Dino emailed out of the blue to tell me about a Craigslist “help wanted” ad. It was for developers to work on a Ruby on Rails application in a downtown office for a very competitive salary. Although my experience with Ruby on Rails was minimal, I have seven years’ worth of development under my belt, backed by six years of blogging and almost five years of tech evangelism. Even though it was a bit of a long shot, my curiosity was piqued enough for me to give them a call.

A couple of meetings with the CEO and one hearty recommendation from Brent Ashley later, I was offered a job. After mulling it over a weekend, I accepted. A grand total of five weeks has passed between my first hearing about the job and my first day on the job, which happens to be tomorrow.

This new job — Senior Developer — is a riskier proposition that my old Tech Evangelist one. Even though they have a working product, a go-getter sales team, funding and customers, it’s still a start-up. I’ll be working on my first sizable program in a while, using a framework that’s still pretty new to me. I will be without the safety net of a large company — it’s just over a dozen people at the new place, which means that everyone has to really pull their weight to get the job done. There will be many opportunities to fail.

Still, as the saying goes, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I’m excited. So excited, in fact, that I’ve been tossing and turning in bed for the past couple of nights. It’s not out of fear, but excitement, and why not? After all, I’ve got a rocket up my ass.