Category: about me

Pure Vanity.

Starbucks mastermind

All month, the closest Starbucks’s chalkboard has read: “Try a Skinny or Mocha Cinnamon dolce Latté A Non-fat, Sugar-free dairy delight!”

I had to stop ordering them because I dislike the sugar-free aftertaste. This means that I’m now faced with the question, “Do I want whip cream in it?”

Of course, when given an option for my food, I almost always say “yes,” and I started to realize that this is eating into my need for variety. How to balance those two?

[choice, choice, and more choice after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 11

LEGOs of things past

Scott Beale notes the 50th anniversary of the LEGO brick.

Burka asks, what is our preferred LEGO theme?

Does it show my age when I mention that pretty much the only theme available at the time was SPACE:

LEGO SPACE Model 442 (1978)

LEGO Space Shuttle (Model 442—1978)

Just so you know, the antenna in the back turns into a long range gauss gun. 😉

Look up the legos from your childhood on the LUGNET LEGO Set Database.

In 1977, there was a popular series of LEGO-like kits that allowed you to snap together models battleships, destroyers, and such. I don’t remember the name, but given the timing, they were the reason LEGO started to make themes. Here’s to that forgotten piece of toy history.

Posted on by tychay 4

Being popular

After the merkley??? party, I went with some friends to Matt Mullenweg’s birthday party.

(Matt, for those of you who don’t know, wrote WordPress which over the years has become the premier blogging application on the internet. Matt also gets a lot of shit from me when I talk about programming)

My friends and I are chatting in line outside BigFoot, when this pretty girl, K—, who I’ve never met before, ahead of me in line, turns around and says, “Wait, is your name ‘Terry Chay?’”

“Oh noes!” Morgan says, “Terry, you’re internet famous!”

So this is what it feels like to be popular?, I thought. Is it wrong that I sort of like it?

[Internet Fame after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 18

OOps! I (recycled my talk) again!

PHP is a hacky piece of shit that gets the job done that somehow that suits me just fine.

I honestly don’t know why I support SF PHP Meetup.

Quite frankly, I find the whole “Meetup” website strangely-segmented, overly-restrictive, and a closed-off and archaic anachronism. I am counting the days until Facebook or Ning finally gets their s—t together and wipes it off the face of the earth. But there it is, and I still show up these meetups despite opening my mouth and subsequently drinking a whole Cup ’O Instant Regret.

The only valid conclusion is I have a huge ego and just like hearing myself talk. So when Touge invited me to turn the next SF PHP meetup into a “Terry Show,” I felt strangely compelled to say yes.

And just so that you don’t have to navigate that horrible website, I, in a weird spate of generosity, decided to copy down the deets…

What: OOps! The PHP Fear and Loathing Guide to Object-Oriented Design
When: Thursday, February 7, 2008 at 7PM
Where: CNET networks, 235 2nd street, San Francisco, CA
Why: Because someone has to provide the “asshole engineer” benchmark, it might as well be me.
RSVP: The great thing is you show up. Just don’t give security the queer eye…download iCalendar, spam Upcoming, and whore this on Facebook.

A small dilemma was, as an asshole engineer, I’m fundamentally lazy—that’s why I became a software architect in the first place: so I wouldn’t have to actually write anything and could just rip into other people’s code and claim credit for their hard work.

What to do?

How about recycle an old talk FTW? After all, George seemed to like it.

OOps at SF PHP Meetup

Think of this just like Britney’s comeback performance only a whole lot worse a trainwreck.

So you better go to this talk, because my ego isn’t big enough for the both of us and I’ll need you around to pop it. If you can’t make it, maybe I’ll install Profcast or someone will stream it so you can count my cuss words on #phpc again. Then again, maybe not. Because you obviously missed the memo wherein I revealed I’m a lazy sloth.

Perhaps I’ll actually delete the slides that are truly embarrassing, but probably not. Wouldn’t want to mess with my perfect record of regret at PHP meetups.

Posted on by tychay 6

My analog blog

I showed up late to the Pownce party and crouched into the back of the line. Since there was not much else to do, I started to write something down in my notebook, which I’ve been carrying around since my iPhone replaced my Palm T|X.

(Isn’t it ironic that we used to be able to beam people our contact information and now, seven years in the future, we have to resort to pen/paper, or a phone call/exchange. Technology, why hast thou abandoned me?)

A friend, further up in the line, made the comment, “Terry Chay is writing in his analog blog.”

“Pownce Launch Party” by magerleagues

Yeah, it’s a moleskine. Don’t shoot me.

Then ensued some Q&A about what I write down in there?

Answer: really boring stuff like shopping lists, task lists, an occasional outline for a blog entry I’ll never write…

So if you ever see me writing in “my analog blog,” you know it’s nothing interesting.

[More pownce after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 15

Zippers

My grandfather once told me this story:

Every day, on his way to work as a chemistry professor at the University of Utah (1948-1973), my grandfather would pass the same man walking the other way. For some reason, each never exchanged more than a tacit acknowledgement of the other. This bothered my grandfather, but as it had happened so often, it had become the protocol.

Then one day, as they were walking toward each other, the man extended his hand to my grandfather.

Finally a chance to meet this man! my grandfather thought and happily extended his hand in return.

“No,” the man said as his hand formed into a point, “your zipper is down.”

…

I mention this story, because now is the second time in two days I’ve gone hours before realizing I forgot to zip up.

My grandfather is very famous in his home country. I heard there is a statue of him at a university there and he’s buried in the national cemetery. Somehow the thought of this embarrassment of one of Korea’s most famous scientists makes mine a little less.

I miss my grandfather.

Posted on by tychay 3

The purpose of pr0n

In the early 90’s, random dot stereograms made really popular geek posters.

I haven’t a clue what this really looks like. click here to view larger. You can view more and get other stereogram paraphernalia here.

To view them, you had to unfocus your eyes a bit and then stare at infinity. I could never do this so I never saw the fucking giraffes, giraffes fucking, or whatever that others claimed they saw. This caused me to develop quite an elaborate conspiracy theory around the Magic Eye corporation.

When I walk to work, I have this insanely long internal monolog. During a twelve minute walk, I create at least one blog entry I’ll never write and come up with three clever turns of phrases of which maybe I’ll remember one of them in the future and someone will say, “I’ll quote you on that”—but they won’t and we’ll forget it together forever.

However, if you stuck one of those posters in front of me right then, my eyes are so unfocused, I’d probably be able to see the fucking giraffe fucking and finally dispel a conspiracy theory of my youth.

[The Blog Post Who Lived. After the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 6

Why we call Jesus “Lord”

Scott blogs about (Advanced) Dungeons and Dragons and it brings back memories of Sunday School.

…

It was third grade sunday school, We are talking about why we refer to God as “Our Lord.” “Does anyone know what a ‘lord’ is,” the nun asks?

Nobody else knows. I raise my hand.

“Yes, Terry?”

“It’s a tenth level fighter!” I answer.

The whole class freezes… and then bursts out into laughter.

The nun continues, “That may be true, but in the middle ages…”

…

You can bet I had no trouble answering this question in 6th grade social studies segment on feudalism.

Sometimes when we’re most embarrassed is when we learn the most.

(Embarrassed because clearly a fighter becomes a lord at the 9th level, not the 10th. 😉 )

Thank you Dad (and Santa) for giving me the Basic D&D set in the third grade.

I go down the rabbit hole.

The day I first laid eyes on this, my life changed forever.

I have this box in storage in the South Bay. And people wonder why I don’t clean out my storage?!

Posted on by tychay 8

Dial-a-gender

Twice this month I found that I’ve found that I’m a better conversationalist when I’m waiting in line to use the bathroom in those bars, places, or homes that don’t have separate bathrooms by gender.

I guess it’s the combination of boredom, a captive audience, and the need to distract myself from my bladder causes me to strike up a conversation.

It gets me wondering if this is one reason women, who have to endure “the pee line” on an almost daily basis, go to the bathroom in groups.

But mostly it gets me thinking about an obscure piece of Caltech arcana.

In the North Houses, the bathrooms have urinals, stalls, showers and a sink. This makes them impossible to have a locked door/pee line combination. They were designed at a time when the campus was single-gendered (male). When they became multi-gendered, before that balance was anything remotely like a geek event, this represented a big logistical problem.

The solution, I felt, was quite clever. Basically all you needed was an old LP, a nail, and a white-out pen and created the dial-a-gender bathroom:

Dial-A-Gender

Just turn the wheel…like magic!

(I thought the bottom quadrant was quite clever.)

[The death of dial-a-gender after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 7

My supermodel moment

Just heard something about me that was completely ridiculous and, at the same time, very funny. (I only wish it were true.)

To set the record straight:
> Due to the ergodic hypothesis, social entropy, and a weird lensing effect, it may have appeared at that particular moment that the male-female ratio in my vicinity suffered a slight and short-lived population inversion.

Dave says that everyone eventually has their “supermodel moment” and I guess whatever caused that person to say that comment about me was mine.

We’ll give you something hot to photograph

We’ll give you something hot to photograph
Slide, Union Square, San Francisco, California

Nikon D70, Nikkor 12-24mm f/4G, SB-800, Ultimate Light Box
1/20 sec @ f/4, iso 1250, 12mm (18mm)

I was photographing an event and asked these pretty girls if they wouldn’t mind me taking their picture. After I did, two of them said they’d give me something really worth photographing, which they did multiple times.

This photo appeared on my Facebook feed and Plaxo Pulse, and incidents like this is how rumors about me get started.

Not that I’m complaining!

Posted on by tychay 9