Category: about me

Pure Vanity.

Servant leadership

Lunch and dinner are brought in every day at work. It is a wasteful affair in both cost and utility that, because of its quotidian nature, breeds laziness to a high order at the price of spontaneity and camaraderie that is often associated with eating meals.

Every week, a different group of three employees is assigned to clean up the lunch mess. It takes about thirty man-minutes to accomplish this. This week it happens to be me. Today the other two forgot so it was only me.

Thirty minutes of busy work is a long thinking time.

Continue reading about Servant leadership after the jump

Posted on by tychay 0

Seven things: Basura and Bathrooms

This is part one of a seven part Seven Things post. (I’ll explain later.) This first one was inspired by Andrei’s affinity for languages.

#1. I once peed in the women’s bathroom.

At work, a blue trash can reads “SAVE. Recycleable cans and bottles. Custodians do not throw out.”

Then, it “helpfully” adds: “NOT BASURA.” Basura being the Spanish word for trash.

I walk by amused.

Continue reading about Linguistics isn’t logical after the jump

Posted on by tychay 3

Wishing for compliments

I went to a prep school starting in middle school.

It was the sort of place out of Dead Poets Society. East coast, jacket and tie required, all boys. The only way you could loosen your tie was if the teacher gave you permission to, and if you got caught with it that way between classes you got a disciplinary report and detention. The only way you could avoid the sportcoat was if you won a letter in athletics and had it sewn onto a blue crewneck by your mother.

Since the school was expensive, I took it rather seriously. All I did was study and do a head-down zip between classes nearly cutting off the kneecaps of the upperclassmen. I was, by all rights, the ultimate geek, and the middle school hovered dangerously close to the rule of 150 that seems to herald clique-formation.

Luckily it was just south of Dunbar’s number.

(Well that and my brother went to the school. When I got admitted, he forced me to exercise until he was satisfied I wouldn’t be put into the “PE” group. He also said that if he caught me wearing both straps on my backpack, he’d “pound on me”—obviously aware sibling physical abuse is a much more effective geek-motivator than being a social outcast.)

Continue reading about All about a compliment after the jump

Posted on by tychay 4

Terry the bully

Am I an intellectual bully?

The two faces of PHP
District Bar, South of Market, San Francisco, California

Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G
f/2.8 at 1/50 sec, iso 12800, 45mm (45mm)

Certainly some of the comments expand on that by attributing all manner of atrocities to me, the accusation by “Joe” is especially amusing:

funny, i’d never heard of chay but stumbled upon a few posts he made about ruby on rails whilst researching the value of ror vs php. i found his posts fit very much into the “intellectual bully” category. he was more concerned with “being right” as you put it, with fairly basic arguments actually “the top 10 companies use X, therefore X is right”.…i agree with the previous poster, coding is not a competition. we want to solve problems with the right solutions. there are many solutions to a given problem, much as that would break chay’s heart.

Yes, Joe, I’m a bully! 😀

Let’s take the evidence at hand (i.e. reality) instead of the arguments based on fallacies (ad hominem: “i’d never heard of chay” or false equivalence: “there are many solutions”) and such. As I see it, the examples of bullying referenced in the discussion are:

A) Asking a candidate to define design patterns
B) Asking a candidate to distinguish C++ vs. Java
C) Writing an article comparing Rails vs. PHP

Continue reading about my bully nature after the jump

Posted on by tychay 3

Voting in America

California is the swingiest of swing states. In recent memory, two Republican presidents were governors here. Now it is bluer than the balls of all those fratboys voting for Sarah Palin. Even though the Presidential election in this state is a foreground conclusion, you still get a lot of mail

Voting mailers

Election mailers
North Beach, San Francisco, California

Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S, Canon 500D diopter
1/80sec @ f/2.8, iso 360, 28mm (28mm)

Especially egregious is the phone book the city of SF gave me. Not that the California ballot measures were that thin either. Luckily, I had a stomach flu this morning, so I had time to read and research this stuff.

Election packet

Election Packet
North Beach, San Francisco, California

Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S, Canon 500D diopter
1/80sec @ f/2.8, iso 320, 32mm (32mm)

There was no line at my polling place. It was next to Trader Joe’s.

My polling place

My polling place
North Beach, San Francisco, California

Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX1
1/200sec @ f/4, iso 80, 6.3mm (28mm)

Yes, I voted for “That One.”

Yes, I’m voting for “That One.”

Yes, I’m voting for “That One.”
North Beach, San Francisco, California

Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX1
1/30sec @ f/2.8, iso 80, 6.3mm (28mm)

After I scanned in my ballots, I grabbed an “I Voted!” sticker. At the street corner an old lady noticed me holding it and thanked me.

I’ve never been more proud to be living in America.

Posted on by tychay 5

The economy is not an Ayn Rand novel

We were up all night at my house working on the school newspaper. It was my house because I was the only person in the entire high school who had a copy of Pagemaker and a laser printer.

The other editors started to complain about which things would be caught by our faculty advisor this time and we would be forced to change. One of them started calling her the “Fat Raging Bovine” or FRB for short. At that moment, I had a gap in the layout that no amount of finagling could cause me to get rid of. I filled the tiny space in with a line drawing of a bull overlaid with the text “FRB” crossed out.

We laughed, and moved onto the next page.

I never did get around to removing it.

Continue reading about I’ll get to the economy stupid after the jump.

Posted on by tychay 5

Presentation-Fu (Making Frameworks Suck Less Part 1)

People ask me all the time how I make such awesome conference talks, so I decided to give you the gory step-by-step. Along the way I’ll even include my top-sekret speaker notes which I never share! It’ll give you an idea of the intense mental preparation it takes to be a top conference speaker in the PHP world and general PHP hero.

Rated R again!

“Rated R again!

“Making Frameworks Suck Less”
by Terry Chay
– howto/controverse
– Rated: R (Drama, Sex, Language, Vilence)

I thought I was done with speaking for the year. I have milked my last talk for over a year now and it was time to retired it. Since I had used this talk at the conference last year, that meant skipping ZendCon. In fact, I was a little worried because I hadn’t had a clue what my next talk (to milk) was going to be about so maybe I’ll just sit out next year.

That was because I had forgotten Keith had asked me to give an unconference talk there and I had said Yes. Then, a week before said conference, I get this e-mail asking if I’d be willing to move my slot to a different day.

Doh!

I had better find out what my talk was supposed to be about. When I did, my heart sank, it was a new topic and one I had no clue what to say.

Continue reading about preparing presentations and the introduction after the jump (click)

Posted on by tychay 10

You’ve been hacked!

Well, Yahoo! Open Hackday has come and gone, and I’m still avoiding telling my Dave Filo story, so I suppose it won’t hurt to mention a fun pre-hackday hack I saw last August.

When the hackday registration page went up, it looked like this:

Yahoo HackDay 08

Notice the sample fields in grey? The one for the URL reads http://jrandomhacker.com/coolproject. If you go to that URL you will see the following…

Where the page goes

text reads: terry wuz here

No, it wasn’t me…honest!

Continue reading about The story behind the hack after the jump.

Posted on by tychay 0