Did you ever know that I’m your hero?

Can I ever say enough times how much I like to hear my name? Oh sure, Meagan one-upped my last article by getting her photo in Valleywag. But I refuse to be outdone.

Me! Me! Me!

So a big thank you to Bobs Matthis for making me his hero on Friday, with my own trading card, special powers, and everything. 🙂

Terry Chay

Bobs writes:

“I am a subscriber of [t]his blog and always look forward to [Terry’s] next post. His blog is always entertaining as he mixes in technical posts right along with everything else. He has a way with mixing in comical antics along with technical posts where he still comes across as an experienced developer, intelligent, and hilarious.”

Pshawww!!! I’m blushing! (In other news, my readership count has jumped to 11! That’s like as high as the dial goes, baby!)

[More about me after the jump]
I was living high on the world until I found out that I’m #3 in the series. Wha??? Rasmus Lerdorf and Chris Shiflett are before me? What have these guys done to deserve their prominent placement anyways—I mean besides invent PHP and done more than anyone else to dispel the “don’t use PHP because it’s insecure” myth (and possibly moonlight as a guitarist for the Foo Fighters).

*sigh* I get no respect.

Well the PHP trading card thing has come full circle when we talked about what special powers you get when you tap various cards. (My special power was profanity :-D)

Being a hero

Well, PHP Heros are a fun idea! I’ll try not to let my ego blow up too much—we all know what happened to Tokyo last time one of us lost control of our powers

Back in the early days of IRC (circa 1992), whenever someone was annoying me on EFNet, I’d sing them that Bette Middler song. It’d embarass them into shutting up long enough for me to dominate on #jeopardy or #initgame while getting kick-banned for the thousandth time on #twilight_zone and #hack (preferably at the same time and for opposite reasons). (Yeah, I even got our server jupe’d.1 How many of you fuckers can say that?)

Oh well, time to sing myself the song:

Did I ever know that I’m your hero~~~
and everything I would like to be?~~~
I can code higher than an hack-er~~~~
I am the wind beneath your wings~~~

Basically, this means I’m the flatulence of the PHP world.

1 A little bit of trivia. The wikipedia entry is wrong or something has changed in the IRC argot in the last 15 years. Jupitering or “juping” only applies to servers. When it is done to nicknames it’s called a “nick collide” and when it is done channels it’s called “nick colliding a channel” (A fun thing to do to #twilight_zone when those fuckers kick ban you.) The latter two could be done by any user who knew how to code back then; the former required an IRC administrator to put a competing C:N line in their server, start up another server, and an IRC operator to issue a netsplit. Nowadays people implement Run’s timestamp patch to the IRC Daemon + an ChanServ services line to eliminate user space nick colliding. But Jupitering on the other hand… Ahh! That’s just genius. In fact, juping a particular server and it’s downlinks is how EFNet got its name: “Eris Free” Network.

[tags]ReformatThis, hero, PHP hero, terry chay, Meagan Marks, Rasmus Lerdorf, Chris Shifflet, Wind Beneath My Wings, IRC, EFNet, notoriety, ego, jupe, Bobs Matthis[/tags]

10 thoughts on “Did you ever know that I’m your hero?

  1. Watch out Terry, your uncle could be the new hero. You made the mistake of sharing him with the world, and now he’s threatening to upstage you

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