Category: wordplay

Stuff about words or phrases

Triumphs of the Human Spirit

Blurb is hosting Lunch 2.0 today on Valentine’s Day!

Reading people’s twitter’s I think

Am I the only single person who loves Valentine’s day?

Oh the gifts, flowers, chocolates, singing telegram, and the the restaurant dinner reservation! I love watching the public trauma this day brings to two people in love. Sometimes it is like a romance sped up. Other times it is a romantic comedy in miniature, but mostly it is a complete disaster—still memorable in a “visit the inlaws” sort of way.

To that last one, I remember how my friend Jay broke up with his girlfriend by taking her to McDonald’s for Valentine’s—given how I love fast food, this would probably be my ideal date. 😀

I thank that I never have had to privately experience that public trauma. Historo-mathematically, it should have happened—I know that I’ve been in a relationship during some February 14th of the past, but somehow I’ve been spared any compulsion to participate.

Instead, I normally celebrate it by spamming friends and family with an e-card.

Not this year.

[Triumphs of the Human Spirit]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 4

Geek. Set. Match…

Just now, Mager messaged me:

“I am excited for Lunch two dot oh—I don’t say “point-oh” anymore.

Flashback.

…

In the summer of 1992, a friend was reading me a geek purity test he got from USENET.

One of the questions was:

Do you pronounce “*.*” as “star-dot-star?”

Of course, since he was reading it aloud, I heard:

Do you pronounce star-dot-star as star-dot-star?

Needless to say, I was quite confused. 😀

[More geek after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 5

Twat

At dinner with Morgan the other day, someone pointed out the past participle of “to twitter” should be “twat,” or perhaps “twatted.” As in, “That’s what she twatted.” Or, “I twat that.”

twat

In twitter-speak, OH means “overheard” which is a polite way of saying, “I don’t want to embarrass the person we all can guess must have said this. *wink* *wink*”

In an early draft an article, I tried the word out. But I ended up editing it—it felt uncomfortable writing about someone’s “twat.”

Posted on by tychay 11

…surrounded by reality

At dinner the other day, A— quoted someone saying:

“San Francisco. 14 square miles surrounded by reality.”

I thought that was rather clever as I seem to like a slight self-effacement now and again. I bothered to look up the full reference. It turns out the quote was by our very own Mayor McDreamy and he really said:

“San Francisco, a wacky wonderful place, a place of dreamers and doers. I think someone described San Francisco as ‘49 square miles surrounded by reality.’ I kind of like that.
—Mayor Gavin Newsom, Speech at the Sierra Summit

I guess they didn’t have Google in San Francisco in 2005, because Gavin is quoting a saying about Madison, Wisconsin—the Left Coast of Wisconsin.

Sometimes, reality is a big old let down.

Parting shot. I love this city.

Posted on by tychay 3

The purpose of pr0n

In the early 90’s, random dot stereograms made really popular geek posters.

I haven’t a clue what this really looks like. click here to view larger. You can view more and get other stereogram paraphernalia here.

To view them, you had to unfocus your eyes a bit and then stare at infinity. I could never do this so I never saw the fucking giraffes, giraffes fucking, or whatever that others claimed they saw. This caused me to develop quite an elaborate conspiracy theory around the Magic Eye corporation.

When I walk to work, I have this insanely long internal monolog. During a twelve minute walk, I create at least one blog entry I’ll never write and come up with three clever turns of phrases of which maybe I’ll remember one of them in the future and someone will say, “I’ll quote you on that”—but they won’t and we’ll forget it together forever.

However, if you stuck one of those posters in front of me right then, my eyes are so unfocused, I’d probably be able to see the fucking giraffe fucking and finally dispel a conspiracy theory of my youth.

[The Blog Post Who Lived. After the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 6

Every so often you need to be reminded

(For my cousin Alex who asked I blog more often about politics.)

On Obama’s Iowa win:

“Hope could give way to fear once again. But, for tonight at least, it holds a mirror up to the face of America, and we can look at ourselves with pride.…It’s the kind of country we’ve always imagined ourselves being — even if in the last seven years we fell horribly short: a young country, an optimistic country, a forward-looking country, a country not afraid to take risks or to dream big.”
—Ariana Huffington, “Obama Wins Iowa: Why Everyone Has a Reason to Celebrate Tonight”

I mentioned before that I chose the category “religion and politics” because I am a strong believer in the separation of Church and State in the body politic, but never in ourselves.

Our morals inform every decision.

[Fear and Morals, Death and Triumphalism, Silence and Responsibility after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 3

All your codebase are belong to Jenga

Someone designed the framework like a big game of Jenga. Every time someone went into fix something they pulled it out of the core and put it on top. Now the whole thing is unstable.
—Mark Jen, talking about building code on top of bad OO architecture

Posted on by tychay 8

Discussion and Democracy

“…our democracy is in danger of being hollowed out. In order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum. We must create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future…Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the rule of reason.”
—Al Gore, from The Assault of Reason in Time Magazine

I started this blog after the 2004 election with a purpose to “write to create context for another to think.”

Whether it is morals, politics, technology and industry, or every day life, each of us has both a right and obligation to participate on the public forum. Thank you, the reader, for taking some of your time to be a part of this conversation.

Posted on by tychay 4

Ed Finkler agrees with me

From Pro PHP Podcast:

Q: What do you think are the three largest failings of PHP and Security?

“I agree with some things that Terry Chay has said about this: that the things that tend to make PHP insecure also tend to be the things that make PHP easy to work with.”
—Ed Finkler, PHP Security Expert, CERIAS

Thanks Ed. 🙂

Listen to the podcast. It’s a realistic assessment of the state of security in PHP.

[Some comments after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 6