Category: about me

Pure Vanity.

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

Yogapalooza this Sunday

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.”

Continue reading about [Yogapalooza after the jump]

Posted on by tychay 1

Ogres Select Consumption Over Networking (OSCON)

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.”

“Haha.”

Continue reading about [More OSCON dialog after the jump]

Posted on by tychay 0

Making a contribution

In condensed matter physics, there is an area called turbulence that has wide practical application: weather, golfing, navigation, bridges, building subs, boats, and planes.

(Most of you know turbulence from those random unexplained dips you get when your plane is in flight.)

But for theoreticians, turbulence is different.

In 1941, some Russian guy wrote a theory for the dissipation of vortices in highly turbulent flows:

Kolmogorov’s Theory on the disipation of vortices

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.

In physics, we like to say:

Turbulence is the graveyard of great physicists.

Continue reading about What are you afraid of? after the jump.

Posted on by tychay 9

The boxes we are

A random post on my stalker feed brings me back of the last party

…

“Are you single?” It’s the second time at the party, Alex has asked that. The internal dialog is now in fine form.

This is San Francisco, shouldn’t you ask if I’m gay first?, “Stop trying to fill out my social networking registration page, Alex”

Somewhat less emphatically: “You are single?!” Then slightly more emphatically: “Terry is single”—as if repetition makes it true.

I’m in a relationship with my Nikon and it’s complicated. “My status is not some box you can check off,” I retort.

“Wait, you are single, aren’t you?” decidedly less emphatically.

That’s thrice! Damn Canon photogs! “You couldn’t even shoot my D3.” I laugh.

“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:

Party photography Q&A tree: “Who you with?”

…then give them that dismissive look, like they just said something incredibly stupid.

Continue reading Boxes and banter after the jump

Posted on by tychay 6