At ZendCon tomorrow – see my talk, drink their drink

I love teasing Zend and right now their conference, the largest PHP conference in the world, is going on.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ll be giving my talk on “The Internet is an Ogre” tomorrow at 10 AM. It’s a fun talk so you better go see it! (Besides, if everyone goes to this, I’ll have satisfied my life-long dream of rasmussing Coogle’s talk. :-D)

As a teaser, I might point out that Keith Casey finally gave me and my talk the proper billing it deserves, in front of BoingBoing, the Foo fighters, Joel on Software, and digg!

The presenter list is once again extensive and includes Terry Chay, Cory Doctorow, Chris Shiflett, Joel Spolsky, and Eli White.. with sponsors ranging from Microsoft to Oracle to Zend.

This ordering has everything to do with talent and relevance and nothing to do with something as arbitrary as alphab… (Why yes, I haven’t seen Andrei’s talk on ICU collation keys, why do you ask?)

If you aren’t attending ZendCon, then stop by to H2.O- a free Happy Hour 2.0 at ZendCon. I’m told the exhibit hall will have lots of space so you can meet all these cool people of the PHP world—I guarantee, they’re “nerd-orable.”

Oh yeah, stop by and say hi to me. I’ll be the drunk photographer mooching all the free food and drink:

Moving forward…

[Terry Chay, Terry Chay, Terry Chay after the jump]Continue reading

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. “Hey!”

Me: “Hi. I’m Terry Chay.” Hello, very pretty asian girl I don’t recognize.

“I know that! 😀 It’s me.”

Me: “I’m sorry, we met at a Lunch 2.0?” Oh shit! I must know her. Good thing I’m a banana—I can drop the “All of us yellow people look alike” joke if things get bad.

“It’s me, C—.”

Me: “Oh! You’ve got a new haircut. It looks nice on you, by the way.” Shit, how could I forget you—I totally twitter stalk you! Hope this dodge works.

“I had the same haircut at CNET.”

Me: “Oh, I was so busy there, you know how it is.” Please ignore the fact that I do nothing at Lunch 2.0 other than eat people’s lunch and claim credit for their work.

“Yeah, I do.”

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, I’m thinking Whoo hoo! nine readers! On the other hand, I’m now thinking After she reads the above, I’ll be back down to eight.

But the thing is, I could never really picture myself not majoring in physics. Every choice I’ve made, even the f—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 I’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-Voigtländer NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical
1/500sec, iso 320, 35mm (47mm)

I thought about it on the way home and I realized they were right—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.

That’ll be much more believable.

(Now I’m hoping the cut stays visible for a while.)

[My Harrison Ford Scar after the jump]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 I’d preface it with a couple of CNET stories first.

(I honestly don’t know if I should blog this. I have a standing invite to visit CNET networks next week and, knowing Mager and Potter, they’ll probably use this to embarrass me when I do. But I promised for weeks that I’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 CNET’s headquarters recently: “The women at CNET are hot.”

“Really?”

He laughed, “Didn’t you just have a Lunch 2.0 there?”

Ahh, here follows my explanation on why I depend on others to tell me who is hot or not. (You’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-Voigtländer 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 can’t seem to explain my experiences in 140 characters. Maybe I should have titled this blog “The Circumlocution.” Oh well, at least two people asked me about this confusing tweet after my plane landed.

But it’s really quite a simple story, even if I can’t tell it right.

Here is a helpful diagram…

Helpful diagram

[More misadventures after the jump.]Continue reading

'tis me fav'rite day o the year

Like last year and the year before

Annual Talk Like A Pirate Day ecARRRRRRRRd

Text reads: Ahoy me mateys and buxom wenches!
The day ’tis ripe fer Talk Like A Pirate.
Ye be talkin’ like a pirate or ye be a scurvy bilge rat!
Arrrrrrr!
—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 couldn’t say my r’s (you can still hear it if you listen closely, but please don’t). Now I’m making up for it with some extra Arrrrrr’s. The infamous Meebo Pirate emoticon

[More pirate after the jump]Continue reading

Ruby, Photography, and Women

My second twitterstalk was Andrei at Caffe Trieste in North Beach. Andrei is someone everyone should be nice to for reasons I mentioned before. He’s trying to get me back into photography.

I think it’s because he has a photoblog now…

and probably figures that getting my competitive juices flowing will be the photography equivalent of dollar-nassau. But I hate to compete and the only thing that motivates me is, quite frankly, intense fear. And besides, what chance do I have? As Ed Finkler says, the man’s got scary amounts of kevorka:

This White Russian smiles

This White Russian smiles
CNET Headquarters
SOMA, San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Tokina 16-50mm AT-X PRO f/2.8 DX. SB-800
1/60sec @ f/2.8, iso 100, 38mm (47mm)

Go subscribe to his blog now (besides the pictures are good, quite unlike mine).

[cats, coffee, photography, ruby, and women after the jump]Continue reading

Not a way to begin an e-mail

I got this cold-email from a Hank Z…

Mr. Chay… (Ms??)

We are the deleted

We saw your resume on the Web…

We are urgently seeking candidates who are SW engineers, and have a background in database SW development, and also expertise in mySQL.

Boy, Hank, (or is it Ms. Hank?) you recruiters know how to bring back bad memories, fuck you very much!

See, when I got in to the physics graduate school at the University of Illinois, I got a “Ms. Terrence Chay” acceptance letter from them. I thought Oh shit, I checked the wrong box. You might think this is impossible, but when I asked my father to dig up the photocopy of my application, he didn’t give a pause and I could see he was already relishing the opportunity to lord this mistake over me for the rest of my life.

(Thankfully, I checked the right box—truly, the first time in my life I filled out a form correctly. Needless to say, purchasing stuff online is always a trial for me.)

[the only highlight after the jump]Continue reading