Category: about me

Pure Vanity.

Thoughts on graphic design: colors

Ironing my clothing is always always a reminder that I have an obsession with the color blue that borders on unhealthy. And not just any blue: really dark navy blue. Good thing dyes are synthetic because all of India would still be under colonial rule to keep up with my need for blue clothing.

Blue and me seem to always be brought together. In evangelical summer camp, I was assigned to the Galatians—if I told you that the other team was the Romans who were red, you can guess what color the Galatians were. My high school colors: Blue and gold. My house colors: Page blue. Heck, even that running joke that is the “south bay uniform” wasn’t my choice: my entire wardrobe of blue oxford button downs are actually hand-me-downs from my brother.

I’ve known this for a while now. That’s why when I made my resume five years ago, I chose… red and yellow. The resume is littered with other little design jokes (like the use of rules instead of white space, or the css “resume” garden markup.)

[Favorite colors in design after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 1

Collapsing the female wave-function

The solution to the greatest paradoxes of the twentieth century physics is the realization that the observer cannot be separated from the experimental design.

  • General Relativity? The observer can’t tell the difference between gravity and an accelerating reference frame.
  • Maxwell’s Demon? Even the observer’s computation cannot be separated from the physical system that implements it.
  • Quantum Mechanics? Observation collapses probabilistic wave-functions.

There is a simple irony in the above.

A 21st century paradox, shared among my friends and with constant teasing, is how someone like me could both emphatically claim and successfully test as a heavy introvert.

The solution to this slightly less prestigious paradox is: I carry a camera.

Like quantum mechanics, my data collection device changes the experimental design.

[How a camera collapses the social wave function after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 17

Brain error

Choco-phrenology

19th century German neurophysiologists successfully map out the brain after a transcontinental flight

Researching my last article was amusing, but doing so made me realize an error in something I said last month.

I didn’t recognize someone I should have because I was jetlagged and hungry. She was non-plussed with my behavior and threatened to “take me off her Facebook.” Now, if I were Scoble, I’d be just happy to have room to add a different friend. But I’m not, so I value every person I’ve managed convince into accepting a friend request. This led to this apology-cum-excuse:

“I’m sure you know how it is: visions of chocolate after a transcontinental plane ride will take over the entire parietal lobe of your neocortex—temporary prosopagnosia is an unwanted side effect. It’s a survival thing.”

Since you’ve read the last blog entry, you see the obvious error in my excuse. Clearly the fusiform gyrus is located in the temporal lobe, not the parietal. Doh!

Still, since she hasn’t unfriended me yet, I’d have to say, that it amounts to as good an excuse as any: when in doubt, blame the chocolate.

[Chocolate blogging and another nitpick after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 0

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:

Eating hot dogs at a bar

“Eating hot dogs at a bar” by Jeremy Johnstone

Moving forward…

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

Posted on by tychay 9

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 →

Posted on by tychay 15

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 →

Posted on by tychay 7

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 →

Posted on by tychay 9

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 →

Posted on by tychay 16

'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 →

Posted on by tychay 3