The photo above, plus interesting stories about the tech world, are good reasons why you should head over to Global Nerdy right now.

This is just a quick note to let you folks know that the old URL for this site, accordionguy.blogware.com isn't going to be active for much longer. Make sure you've bookmarked the new URL, which is...

On Saturday, Wendy and I attended our friend C.'s "Bye Bye Boobies" party, an event to celebrate her upcoming breast reduction surgery (which takes place today).

The party featured a lot of breast-themed food presented in a lovely spread, pictured below:

Among the items were this lovely chocolate boob cake:

...and this bodacious lemon boob cake:

...and, of course, melon bowls:

Wendy and I wanted to contribute, so we used our ice cream maker to prepare some appropriately saucy flavours. Before heading to the party, I took out a Sharpie marker and whipped out some signs for the ice cream. When this computer fad blows over, I could go into the sign making business for ice cream shops and coffeehouses.

Here's the sign for the first flavour: "Plain" Jayne Mansfield, better known as vanilla:

The next flavour was made with one very ripe canteloupe: Melons sorbet:

Here's the one for the ice cream with a banana base (Wendy pureed two very ripe bananas into the standard ice cream mix) and chocolate chips made from a chopped up fancy-pant high cocoa content bar -- Touch My Monkey:

And finally, here's the sign for the Oreo Cheesecake ice cream. It had 10 smashed-up Oreo cookies in it, and the base contained cream cheese, sour cream and the juice of a lemon, which gave it a distinct cheesecake flavour. You probably shouldn't have this fat-licious flavour too often.

Our thanks to C. for throwing a great party, and best of luck with the surgery!

"I fuckin' love Duran Duran!" he says, but in the video below (shot last night in Accordion City's Koreatown neighbourhood), I'm actually playing Nine Inch Nails' Head Like a Hole. Still, a compliment is a compliment...

It's the first of June, which means that once again, we're in Accordion Awareness Month! I strongly urge everyone to celebrate it by playing the accordion, enjoyign accordion music and even sending Accordion Awareness Month greeting cards.

I plan to celebrate by playing some accordion karaoke with friends tonight at Clinton's. If you're in the neighbourhood, please drop by!

(Big thanks to Nicole, who reminded me that I should post something today.)

Update -- Sunday June 3, 2007: Now I know who created this LOLCat image -- see below the image for details!

Tired: Schrodinger's Cat. Wired: Schrodinger's LOLCAT!

Click to see the image on its original Flickr page. Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

(Wondering what a LOLcat is? Start here, then go here.)

Who's Behind This Picture?

Three people are behind this image:

• Justin Wick came up with the idea
• Kevin Steele, with whom I used to work at Mackerel Interactive Multimedia, took the photo, which is of his cat Xena.
• Dan "dantekgeek" Lurie, whom I know from the #joiito IRC channel, put it all together. Here's the Flickr page where it first appeared.

Over at at my tech blog Global Nerdy, I've got a new essay titled Do the Stupidest Thing that Could Possibly Work, which you might find interesting if you're wondering about the future of tech and software development.

Me singing some accordion-enhanced karaoke.

Unlike here in North America, even the toughest bar in the Philippines -- even the ones with real-life pirates -- are likely to have karaoke. That's how hardcore we are about it. In my immediate family alone, we collectively own 4 karaoke machines (6 if you count my PlayStation 2 and XBox with their karaoke-based games).

And believe me, that's nothing. Here's a story from ABS-CBN news...

Man slain for singing off-key in videoke bar

For singing out of tune, a jobless man was shot dead by a security guard of a videoke bar at the height of an argument in San Mateo, Rizal Tuesday night.

The victim, Romy Baligula, 29, was shot in the chest and was pronounced dead on arrival in a local hospital.

Senior Superintendent Felipe Rojas, acting Rizal police director, said the suspect, Robilito Ortega, 43, was arrested by responding policemen and yielded a caliber .38 revolver with five live bullets.

Rojas said Baligula and his companions were having a drinking spree at the Jullives KTV bar where Ortega worked as a security guard.

Prior to the incident, Ortega approached the table of Baligula’s group and shook hands with each of them, apparently in a show of friendship.

When Baligula started to sing, Ortega even danced to the tune. But when the song progressed, the suspect reportedly commented that the victim was out of tune, triggering a verbal tussle.

At the height of the argument, Ortega pulled out his service firearm and opened fire at Baligula before fleeing.

Rojas said policemen patrolling the area heard the gunshots and responded to the scene and eventually arrested Ortega.

Dave, who sent me the link to this story, wrote "I will never do karaoke in the Philippines," to which I responded "Lightweight." They should try to incorporate firearms-assisted judging into American Idol.

Here's a clever space-saving idea: a staircase with drawers embedded in the steps:

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Of course, the drawers can pose a safety hazard: you'd better be the type of person who closes drawers -- if not, you'd be setting yourself up for a nasty spill one night when you go downstairs, half-awake at o-dark-thirty.

In case you missed them, here are the latest articles from the tech blog I do with my buddy George, Global Nerdy:

• LOLCODE, the LOLcat Programming Language: I can has programming language?
• Shut Up and Play: "We’re users. We don’t hook up our headsets, we mute your voice, and we just play the damn game. We’re not here to make friends, and if you extend an invite, it will just get rejected. We rarely leave feedback. For us online gaming isn’t social; most people on Xbox Live aren’t worth being social with."
• Cyberwar Ain’t What It Used to Be: This one got Global Nerdy BoingBoinged for the second time in a week -- a comparison between cyberwar as depicted in William Gibson's Neuromancer and as it happened in Estonia.
• A number of links on Microsoft Surface: Microsoft's Midnight Surprise, Microsoft’s Midnight Surprise, Revealed: Microsoft Surface, This Thing’s Gonna Make Porn AWESOME! and Microsoft Surface, Sun Starfire and Apple Knowledge Navigator Videos.
• Mesh Conference 2007: A quick note on the Mesh Conference, which wraps up today.
• July 17th: Guitar Hero Encore Rocks the 80s:Lookin' forward to this game!
• “Spam King” Robert Soloway Arrested: Is there any way we can get Soloway sent to the prison after which the TV series Oz was modelled? Please?

Click the photo to see the original at full size.

The photo above, titled The Difference of Love is getting a lot of discussion on Reddit.

My own feelings on the matter are best summed up by this musical number from the television series American Dad:

All the best business plans got started as scribbling on napkins...

Click the photo to see it at full size. Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

According to the folks at Houghton Mifflin, every high school grad should be familiar with the words in the list below. I'm not surprised that I was unfamiliar with the word abstemious given its meaning, and moiety is now part of my vocabulary.

1. abjure
2. abrogate
3. abstemious
4. acumen
5. antebellum
6. auspicious
7. belie
8. bellicose
9. bowdlerize
10. chicanery
11. chromosome
12. churlish
13. circumlocution
14. circumnavigate
15. deciduous
16. deleterious
17. diffident
18. enervate
19. enfranchise
20. epiphany
21. equinox
22. euro
23. evanescent
24. expurgate
25. facetious
26. fatuous
27. feckless
28. fiduciary
29. filibuster
30. gamete
31. gauche
32. gerrymander
33. hegemony
34. hemoglobin
35. homogeneous
36. hubris
37. hypotenuse
38. impeach
39. incognito
40. incontrovertible
41. inculcate
42. infrastructure
43. interpolate
44. irony
45. jejune
46. kinetic
47. kowtow
48. laissez faire
49. lexicon
50. loquacious
51. lugubrious
52. metamorphosis
53. mitosis
54. moiety
55. nanotechnology
56. nihilism
57. nomenclature
58. nonsectarian
59. notarize
60. obsequious
61. oligarchy
62. omnipotent
63. orthography
64. oxidize
65. parabola
66. paradigm
67. parameter
68. pecuniary
69. photosynthesis
70. plagiarize
71. plasma
72. polymer
73. precipitous
74. quasar
75. quotidian
76. recapitulate
77. reciprocal
78. reparation
79. respiration
80. sanguine
81. soliloquy
82. subjugate
83. suffragist
84. supercilious
85. tautology
86. taxonomy
87. tectonic
88. tempestuous
89. thermodynamics
90. totalitarian
91. unctuous
92. usurp
93. vacuous
94. vehement
95. vortex
96. winnow
97. wrought
98. xenophobe
99. yeoman
100. ziggurat

If you're a Simpsons fan, the word chicanery should be familiar to you ("Oh, Mr. Homer...What has reduced you to such cheap chicanery?"). If you remember your Phil Hartman-era SNL, you might recall his use of the word jejune ("Compulsion" by Calvin Kleen). Monty Python fans will have run into a form of expurgate (the bookstore skit), lugubrious appears in both Lou Reed lyrics (The Original Wrapper) and an old Zippy the Pinhead comic strip and I recall the word sanguine being used in an 80's-era X-Men comic.

Over at the tech blog I write, Global Nerdy, I've got these stories:

• Lara Croft, Then and Now: A review in pictures of the evolution of everyone's favourite hot archaeologist.
• Advertising: Best Left to the Professionals? Ad execs are unimpressed with the contest submissions for Heinz ketchup's "create you own ad" contest.
• Sony's Very Special Screws: Maybe Sony thinks that they're selling stuff to the U.S. military.
• Zombies Less Annoying Than MySpace Users: I've always suspected it, but thanks to two stories from last week about Apple Stores, I now have proof.
• A Million Fools and Their Money Have Been Parted: Believe it or not, a million Zunes will have been sold by the end of June. I had no idea there were that many people out there with serious head injuries.

John Philip Green, Pete Forde and I went out one night in Portland to check out Ground Kontrol, an place that's both bar and arcade devoted to 80's pinball and video games (I wrote a little bit about the arcade in Global Nerdy). Along the way, we passed by a glowing red neon sign that proclaimed "Jesus is Lord" and couldn't resist posing beneath it. You know, just in case The Rapture happened that night, or perhaps we might get discovered as supermodels. You never know.

We took the Max, Portland's light rail system, from the convention center to the stop at Skidmore Fountain. The place's name is so spot on that it's downright Dickensian:

The light rail stop at Skidmore Fountain, Portland, Oregon.

Here's John, posing underneath the sign. Jesus, please send him some venture capital!

John looks like he believes. Testify!

Pete struck a good pose:

Pete: "Dear Jesus, please give me a brand new drum kit..."

And here I am. Yea, though I walk through the valley of darkness, I have no fear, for I have a big honkin' accordion:

Me: "Yay-us! The power of the accordion compels you!"

Here's a great shot that New York-based Ruby guy Sebastian Delmont posted to Flickr -- it's of that pre-keynote performance that I did with RailsConf organizer Chad Fowler:

Click the image to see it on its Flickr page

Texas-based Ruby guy Sean McMains took a video of the whole performance: