This is a shameless plug for my friend Andrei.

Andrei is writing something that forms the very essence of my future employment: PHP 6, and more specifically, unicode support in PHP 6. ICU in PHP is three meaningless letters about three other meaningless letters to most of you. I get that. Even though this meaninglessness stuff has 60% market share and powers sites like Yahoo!, Wikipedia, WordPress, Facebook… (The “Vote for Andrei” generator above was written in PHP. It powers the websites for JPG Magazine and Flickr below.)

So when I say that it’s really important to keep this guy happy, please believe me. Think about the last time that you visited to the above websites. You wouldn’t want them to suck do you? If your native language is not English, then you would want them to work in your country right?

Luckily, photography is infinitely more accessible than the stuff that pays the bills. So please, take some time off from your day of ignoring my blog posts to do the world a favor and vote for this photo on JPG magazine (and tell your friends to too):

“Time eats itself” by andreiz

It’s a great photo and utterly appropriate with the theme of the month. My only complaint with it is he should have gotten with the bandwagon on photos like this and LOMO’d the sucker beyond recognition. I can almost recognize what it is.

[Andrei and photography after the jump.]

George and I have been insinuating Nikon Acquisition Syndrome in the PHP development community. That’s pretty cool when you consider that this is the last major open source community not to adopt Macs in droves (we’re too cheap). Ruby development is like the anti-mirror of PHP. Buying a Nikon instead of a Canon is a big deal for this crowd.

Andrei was an early victim. He still shoots his Nikon D70 and it was a huge coop to get him to buy a 50mm f/1.8 lens for it. I mean the guy works building the core infrastructure of the company that owns Flickr and he doesn’t have a pro Flickr account!

Yesterday, Andrei and I went to the Flickr333 and met a bunch of people I don’t remember. It’s was an interesting experience not getting strange looks when you pull out a Nikon D200 and 70-200mm f/2.8 VR because Cal has his Canon 1D Mk II and a 70-200 f/2.8 IS.

It was there, I realized that Andrei gotten a lot better at photography than me. In a year, he’ll be ashamed to have known me. Luckily, I spend a lot of money on nice lenses which I encourage him to borrow, so I’ll enjoy this year. 😀