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.
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!
“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.
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:
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…
One May day, when I was visiting my college on a trip to the west coast, three former classmates said that they were headed to the gym for a workout. Would I like to come?
“Why not?”
It’s surprising how many bad ideas begin with that question.
See what they neglected to mention was that it was an aerobics class: Advanced Step.
I had never done aerobics, let alone an advanced class on step aerobics. It was a scene out of the movie—I kept trying to catch up as my brain tried to figure which one of the last moves we did was the “straddle down.”
It’s weird how worlds intersect. Here is some lobbycon dialog:
“I don’t know, but if you plot the points, there aren’t many intersections. I’ve noticed it on my Facebook: The Open Source world has different geeks, and then the Web 2.0 world is mixed up. Priorities are f’d—people like X, who are big in the Web 2.0 world, nobody knows here.”
“Web 2.0 is…not even geeks really.”
“If it were, every party would be like the Ars Technica/Gizmodo WWDC party.”
In condensed matter physics, there is an area called turbulence that has wide practical application: weather, golfing, navigation, bridges, building subs, boats, and planes.
In 1941, some Russian guy wrote a theory for the dissipation of vortices in highly turbulent flows:
Since then…nothing. Any significant contribution to turbulence has been beyond smartest minds in theoretical physics, despite the describing equations discovered by 19th century classical physics.
“Terry is single,” Alex declares to anyone who was interested. (Nobody was.)
Nelson Muntz voice: “Ha ha!” Maybe if you were a Nikon-toting hottie, I’d have given you a straight answer.
Party photography Q&A tree
Now, in my defense, when it comes to that senseless brand war, I have to represent. But I admit that it was a bit harsh, especially since, as an event photographer himself, he must get asked my most-despised geek-party conversation starter an awful lot: “Who are you with?” (i.e. “Who are you shooting for so I know if I should do a posedown.”)
We hates it, my precious, yes we do.
Coincidentally, just that day, I devised a customer support answer tree to turn this question into a lethal conversation-killer:
…then give them that dismissive look, like they just said something incredibly stupid.
It’s interesting how self-context can change a city.
Last time I visited Amsterdam, I was in a terrible relationship, living in South Bay and I got robbed leaving Schiphol. Three years later, I’m single living in San Francisco and am a tiny bit wiser.
