CNET Open House on Tuesday: Under the Hood

CNET is hosting an open house on October 2nd (Tuesday). Given that every PHP Meetup in SF has been cancelled the night before, I suggest you go to this. šŸ˜€

GameSpot, TV.com, MP3.com and FilmSpot.com will be having a panel discussion on using PHP/MySQL framework to share code between multiple sites that support 49 million unique visitors and over 1 billion page views each month? Attendees will be registered to win a Nintendo Wii!

Hosts: CNET Networks HQ
Address: 235 2nd Street, San Francisco
Date: Tuesday October 2, 6PM-7:30PM
RSVP:here

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Our real selves

Twitter has all of the sleaziness of stalking with none of the messy work of having to actually leave my desk. But I found a dark underside to it: it makes stalking way too easy. Sometimes I get caught in my laziness:

Out in the real world, a girl comes up to me. ā€œHey!ā€

Me: ā€œHi. Iā€™m Terry Chay.ā€ Hello, very pretty asian girl I donā€™t recognize.

ā€œI know that! šŸ˜€ Itā€™s me.ā€

Me: ā€œIā€™m sorry, we met at a Lunch 2.0?ā€ Oh shit! I must know her. Good thing Iā€™m a bananaā€”I can drop the ā€œAll of us yellow people look alikeā€ joke if things get bad.

ā€œItā€™s me, Cā€”.ā€

Me: ā€œOh! Youā€™ve got a new haircut. It looks nice on you, by the way.ā€ Shit, how could I forget youā€”I totally twitter stalk you! Hope this dodge works.

ā€œI had the same haircut at CNET.ā€

Me: ā€œOh, I was so busy there, you know how it is.ā€ Please ignore the fact that I do nothing at Lunch 2.0 other than eat peopleā€™s lunch and claim credit for their work.

ā€œYeah, I do.ā€

Whew! That was close.

Now somewhere in the conversation, she mentioned that she would have never thought me a physicst until I mentioned it in my blog. On one hand, Iā€™m thinking Whoo hoo! nine readers! On the other hand, Iā€™m now thinking After she reads the above, Iā€™ll be back down to eight.

But the thing is, I could never really picture myself not majoring in physics. Every choice Iā€™ve made, even the fā€”d up one as majoring in physics, is part of who I am.

Cal wrote:

In other cases, blogs like my friend, Terry Chay, support the character that he is building up around himself. In both cases, with wildly different styles, the same results are achieved, a deeper understanding of the blogger.

But really, is this blog a character Iā€™m building up, or is it my real self?

[A little bit strange after the jump.]Continue reading

Battle wounds

A lot of people at work were asking me about this bright red cut I had on my nose today. The truth of the matter is, I was showering and the shampoo bottle slipped out of my hand and I cut myself across my nose. But nobody was believing that story.

Battle wounds

Battle wounds
North Beach, San Francisco, California

Leica M8, Cosina-VoigtlƤnder NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical
1/500sec, iso 320, 35mm (47mm)

I thought about it on the way home and I realized they were rightā€”I should tell people that I got into an alley fight with some pissed-off Ruby developers, and one of them nicked me before I was able to fend them off with my mad ninja coding skills.

Thatā€™ll be much more believable.

(Now Iā€™m hoping the cut stays visible for a while.)

[My Harrison Ford Scar after the jump]Continue reading

Why PHP triumphs over Ruby

ā€œIā€™m really low on my scatological count hereā€¦Iā€™m sorry I didnā€™t crack enough jokes or use enough [cuss words], but Iā€™m sure people will forgive me. They can just attend one of my talks and get their cuss quota for the year. And if not, coding these web apps themselves involves a lot of swearingā€”a lot of blood, sweat and swear.ā€
ā€”me on Pro PHP Podcast

Iā€™m not posting my talk yet because I have to give it again at ZendCon. So here is a bit of a teaser.

A simple architecture

A simple architecture
College Park, Atlanta, Georgia

Leica M8, Cosina-VoigtlƤnder NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical
1/45sec, iso 320, 35mm (47mm)

The Internet is an Ogre and this architecture is really quite simple.

[Do not hit the jump if you are easily offended. I really mean it!]Continue reading

Jobs in PHP at CNET

This is actually another one of my infamous PHP job postings. But because the people of CNET are so cool, I thought Iā€™d preface it with a couple of CNET stories first.

(I honestly donā€™t know if I should blog this. I have a standing invite to visit CNET networks next week and, knowing Mager and Potter, theyā€™ll probably use this to embarrass me when I do. But I promised for weeks that Iā€™d blog the jobs.)

CNET needs to host a Lunch 2.0

CNET needs to host a Lunch 2.0
CNET Networks, SOMA, San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Tokina 16-50mm AT-X PRO f/2.8 DX
1/100sec @ f/16, iso250, 16mm (24mm)

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a coworker who for some reason or another had been to CNETā€™s headquarters recently: ā€œThe women at CNET are hot.ā€

ā€œReally?ā€

He laughed, ā€œDidnā€™t you just have a Lunch 2.0 there?ā€

Ahh, here follows my explanation on why I depend on others to tell me who is hot or not. (Youā€™ll have to read to the end of the article :-D)

[PHP jobs and CNET hotties after the jump]Continue reading

Flights of fancy

Flights of fancy

Flights of fancy
somewhere over the Eastern United States

Leica M8, Cosina-VoigtlƤnder NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical
1/90sec, iso 320, 35mm (47mm)

My tweets make no sense.

This is why nobody follows me and even my friends have turned off updates.

I just canā€™t seem to explain my experiences in 140 characters. Maybe I should have titled this blog ā€œThe Circumlocution.ā€ Oh well, at least two people asked me about this confusing tweet after my plane landed.

But itā€™s really quite a simple story, even if I canā€™t tell it right.

Here is a helpful diagramā€¦

Helpful diagram

[More misadventures after the jump.]Continue reading

'tis me fav'rite day o the year

Like last year and the year beforeā€¦

Annual Talk Like A Pirate Day ecARRRRRRRRd

Text reads: Ahoy me mateys and buxom wenches!
The day ā€™tis ripe fer Talk Like A Pirate.
Ye be talkinā€™ like a pirate or ye be a scurvy bilge rat!
Arrrrrrr!
ā€”The Dread Pirate Terry

I think the reason I love Pirate Day so much is that I had a horrible speech impediment in grade school where I couldnā€™t say my rā€™s (you can still hear it if you listen closely, but please donā€™t). Now Iā€™m making up for it with some extra Arrrrrrā€™s. The infamous Meebo Pirate emoticon

[More pirate after the jump]Continue reading

The death of a lens

Weird and unfair

Weird and unfair
Somewher in ATL, Atlanta, Georgia

Nikon D200, Nikon 85mm f/1.4D
1/60sec @ f/1.4, iso 180, 85mm (127m)

I didn’t take this photo, though it is one of three such shots of the same thing on my memory card. The camera was in my luggage at the time so I can only guess that this photo was shot by the TSA during inspection all the while I waiting to board an airplane.

(I guess this sort of explains why my luggage didnā€™t arrive with me.)

The unfair part is when they opened my luggage, they somehow either took off the rear lens cap or didnā€™t replace it correctly on my Nikkor 12-24mm f/4G DX lens (a $1000 lens and my favorite lens for shooting) thus causing the rear element to collapse into the lensbody during transport.

The lesson here is to carry your photo equipment with you on the airplane. But I appreciate any suggestions on how to deal with the situation at hand. The lens is under extended warranty but I doubt Nikon is going to replace something that is clearly the TSAā€™s fault. (Um, yes, Nikon, it is a manufacturing defect that when someone takes off the protective lens cap and then places it back in a bag of luggage and electronics for a transcontinental flight that your rubber mount gave and the plastic ring cracked.)

This lens is dead

This lens is dead
North Beach, San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Nikon 85mm f/1.4D, Canon 500D diopter
1/40sec @ f/2.8, iso 160, 85mm (127mm)

By the way, While I donā€™t do much airplane traveling (just twice a year), but every time I travel, my luggage is opened and searched. This is the first time since 9/11 that I havenā€™t had a slip in my luggage saying that to ā€œprotect me and my fellow passengers.ā€