Pure Vanity.
Her: Let me finish the episode of this Korean drama.
Me: Why you watching that? You have Korean drama right here! *points at self*
She laughed, so I had to tweet it. đ
I think the drama was Scarlet Heart: Ryeo, which she described as, “Kdrama version of Outlander.” All I could tell was everyone looks like a girl, and since all asians look alike to me, I wasn’t going to get my head in a knot watching it.
My aunt started an e-mail thread in my family. I’ll include excerpts here periodically.
I am cleaning the house of more pictures â so many. In the album Grandma Omma left, I found some pictures your mom. I will send another email of your mom and dad’s wedding that you probably have seen already.
My mom, like her father before her, loved science. She started in physical chemistry like her father but her heart condition caused by rheumatic fever led her to work in biophysics studying the neural network of the heart and heart arrhythmias.
Continue reading about and seeing more photos after the jump
Compiled from three separate discussions on IRC, twitter, and in person:
âWhatcha do with your time these days? Learning Rails? ?â
I did pick up Objective-C again after an aborted attempt at learning Swift. Mostly Iâm trying to catch up on the javascript frameworks that have come out since I stopped coding. Right now itâs AngularJSâI figure I can jury-rig React into it if performance becomes an issue.
On the non-programming side, Iâve been messing with Ansible because I just got tired of doing things by handâand I never needed to learn this because Iâve always had operations engineers working with me.
The ripping on Rails thing is over with me because thereâs no point in arguing over how to solve a solved problemâtoday, the web problem is the easy part. What I find strange is people still feel the need to defend Ruby on Rails. I mean who the fuck cares what your middle layer code is written in when everything is an API to something written in Javascript?
âI don’t like that everything is an API to something in Javascript. As a user, the Web feels slower and flakier than it used to.â
I donât like that everything on the front-end is pushed toward a single-page application. The reason for this is that the DOM-based model of front-end javascript (e.g. jQuery) gets so taxing when the application gets big because youâre bolting feature-on-feature, library-on-library to get it to work as smoothly as you envision. At a certain point, a true MV(VM) javascript framework (e.g. AngularJS) gives you much more because it abstracts all that in a consistent manner.
As soon as you buy into one of these, youâre invested into a huge initial javascript payload which causes you to not want the user to leave the page to unload anything, which then forces you into an API-based model with HTML partials and a client-side route/sitemap and more crap in the payload until you have a single-page application.
And then pretty soon your website is like Flickr where I swear every tenth click Iâve got to reload the page because the UI became non-responsive and Iâm deciding to open the app in my iPhone just to do something without that frustration. How fucked up is that?
But then I look at Bootstrap and I figure, Iâd rather have a SPA than everything looking like it was designed by some Apple-loving hipster (and this coming from a person who has used and loved Apple products longer than theyâve been alive).
âIâve always enjoyed your talks and lamented that you didn’t remain on the PHP speaking circuit.â
Maybe Iâll start speaking when I have something to say. Like Iâve said before, PHP solves the âweb problemâ very well, but the web-problem is not a hard problem anymore.
Remember, itâs been four years since Iâve done any UI programming so everything is new to me. Basically, Iâm a newbie, and I donât think anyone wants to hear from someone who doesnât know what theyâre talking about.
But I did notice this from managing engineers: the worst problem a coder can get into is fear of having to start over. You get good at what youâre good at and when things pass you by, you feel the need to protect what you have because its what you know.
Thatâs how I feel about Ruby on Rails and thatâs how I feel about me and PHP.
So, Iâm a beginner again.
Photo from February 28, 2015
I had just written an article mentioning my old high school, when a classmate of mine messaged me on Twitter when he realized why he friended me. It turned out he was in Mountain View on business, so I drove down to visit him. The last time I saw him was 25 years ago!
We picked him up at his hotel and I suggested Clarkeâs because itâs one of the best burger joints around. While waiting for food, I snapped this photo.
Leica M8, Cosina-VoigtlÀnder NOKTON 35mm F1.2
1/350sec, iso 160, 35mm (47mm)
I keep forgetting the razor-thin depth-of-field, so though one eye was in focus, the other one wasnât. As I mentioned, I prefer monochrome images when I shoot with my Leica, so I used nik Silver Efex Pro. Control points helped me separate his hair from the background and add some sharpening in the blurry eye.
Photo from August 27, 2007
In the fall of 2007, my friend Megan McCarthy wrote an amusing article on valleywag on the wardrobe of Silcon Valley: a blue oxford button down dress shirt and khaki pants. Itâs basically a safe bet at tech meet ups that youâll see more white guys in blue button downs than anything else.
Later that month, I hadnât ironed my clothing in a while so all that was usable in my closet were those aforementioned blue button downs. So this particular day, as I was wearing âthe uniform,â I took a self-portrait to show Iâm as original as all the west. Granted, itâs a little bit different, but thatâs because San Francisco is a bit colder than valley 40 miles to the south.
Panasonic DMC-LX1
1/4 sec at f/4.9, iso 200, 23.2mm (103mm)
I actually took and processed this image a long time ago for a blog post I never did.
Continue reading about how this photo was taken and processed after the jump
Photos from December 15, 2007
The end of my much-beloved Aperture and the start of a new year means a migration to Adobe Lightroom CC is in order. The Python developer who coded the Aperture import plugin for Adobe was clearly underpaid as it is underperforming and crash-prone when you have an Aperture Library as corrupted as mine.
So after a week of failure upon hard disk failure, upon Aperture Vault recovery, upon backups and more backups (lesson learned). Iâve resigned myself to moving one project at a time into Lightroom. But which project?
For that, I wrote a simple Applescript that selects a random project. And then I move it, verify the map, redo the face detection, and fix the keywords. As a reward, I process and post an image from it and hopefully write a little something. Youâve noticed a few over the last week, and this will continue forâŠ
(If I manage a project a day, itâll be a couple years before Iâve fully migrated. Such is what happens when youâve been shooting digitally for over 16 years.)
âŠ
Jonathan Abrams kindly invited me to the christmas party of his startup at a bar he is the co-owner of. For some reason both my main camera (Nikon D200) and event photography lens were broke at the time. I think I was attending so many events and doing so much traveling, I was extremely hard on my equipment.
That day I dug up my old Nikon D70, and my landscape photography lens, try to put the biggest flash diffuser I could find, and started shooting anyway. I really tried to push the camera and lens for all it was worth. Slide is a really great venue, but pre-D3 ISO range and a small aperture lens canât really do it justice. Oh well, just focus on the subjects lit by the flash and ignore the rest, because who can see anything else?
Nikon D70, Nikkor 12-24mm f/4G
1/20 sec @ f/4, iso 1250, 12mm (18mm)
Me: *grabs the Victoria Secret flyer out of girlfriendâs hands*. Oh, itâs just a LâŠ
Her: Yeah, they always have that free panty deal.
Me: You thought I was looking at the underwear? I was looking at the modelâŠ(long pause)⊠of camera! Hahaha!
Her: *rolls eyes* (sarcastically) Oh, very funny.
(It was a Leica film camera, of course.)
A classmate from my high school must have found my Facebook and put me back on my high school alumni list because a month ago I got an e-mail that the president of my high school was doing a swing down the West Coast. Since one of the meetups was only two blocks from where my girlfriend works, I decided to drag my unemployed ass to see whatâs what.
(I managed to sneak in with jeans and sneakers, both of which violated the dress code of the building the meetup was in as well as would have earned me enough disciplinary reports to get detention in my high school â but part of being voluntarily unemployed is not giving a shit.)Continue reading about a small kid in a small, but too big prep school after the jump
Avast ye landlubbers!
It be Talk Like A Pirate Day, anâ in (dis)honor of me favârite day o the year, I be givinâ meself the black mark, anâ be walkinâ thâ plank off thâ ship oâ the Wikimedia Foundation a fortnight hence, on the 3rd of October.
Thâ scurvy dog Jared demands a parrrrrrrrlay of a photo of each of me sprogs after I shanghai âem onto the Foundation. In keeping with that grand pirate tradition (and because I suspect the scallywag hornswogglâd me cloak of invisibility), Iâll appease thee with a last glimpse of me visage on the crew page before I visit Davy Jonesâ Locker. Now maybe ye wonât be confusâd betwixât me anâ me powder monkey, Howie.
Iâll leave ye buccaneers tâ fight over me booty1 anâ give no quarter as ye guide the Wikimedia Foundation tâ safe haven. Aye, she be a leaky old hulk, but take the light and liver of any aâ addled bilge-sucking blaggard that try anâ scuttle her!
In the meantime, you cân read about me plunders on thâ seven seas on me blog. Here be the UarrrrrrrrL: http://terrychay.com/.
So letâs raise the Jolly Roger and drink some grog!
Arrrrrrrrrrrrr!
the dread pirate terry
âŠ
Pirate to English translation: Iâm leaving the Wikimedia Foundation. My last day is Friday, October 3. A more official email will follow with background on the logistics surrounding my departure. (I also finally posted a staff photo.) Arrrrrr.
~~
terry chay  ì”í늏
PHPirate
Wikimedia Foundation
âImagin’ a world in which ev’ry single lad and lass c’n smartly plunder in the sum of all intellectual booty. That’s our commitment.â
i: http://terrychay.com/
w:Â http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tychay
My aunt, when doing cleaning, came across an essay answer to a questionnaire that my cousin Alex wrote in 2001 for a high school entrance application.
Two years ago my aunt died of heart failure. I began to grow closer to her a few months before her death because I became old enough to understand about family ties, and respect. She was a biological chemist who contracted rheumatic fever when young, and she had to fight her weak heart all her life. Her field of work was in heart rhythm. She devoted most of her time to studying ways to automatically revive hearts that go out of rhythm (called arrhythmia) with medicine instead of using machines that shock the heart into beating regularly. She conducted extensive research, wrote many scientific papers, and gave numerous talks at scientific conferences on her work. Her death impacted me in ways that were greater than my grandparents’ deaths. I was old enough to see that life can leave unexpectedly. During my time on earth, I want to achieve notable goals, like my aunt, and when it is finally time for me to move on, I hope I can leave this world as peacefully as she did â while resting from studying â her heart simply stopped beating.
That aunt was my mom. I love you too, Mommy Chay, this mother’s day, and always.
