Big Trouble in Little OSCON

It turns out two of my talks have been accepted at OSCON this year.

OSCON 2k6 speakers

They are “0 to 60 in 45 minutes: A Down and Dirty Ajax Design Patterns firedrill” in the new AJAX track and “The Underpants Gnomes Strategy Guide: An Ecards Case Study” in the PHP track.

Given my penchant for working on my talk during the conference, I figure I am royally screwed this time. How am I supposed to cram two talks worth of slides during OSCON week? Does this mean I’ll actually have to prepare my talk beforehand? *shudder*

I knew I should have submitted my MAMP talk (Mac Apache MySQL PHP). That one has been rejected for six different conferences in a row.Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 3

A good idea gone wrong

Flickr a few months ago created a good idea: they inject a div into the landing page of login that allows them to send arbitrary messages to you that you can dismiss. I definitely think more websites should do that.

Imagine my surprise when I found this notification today:

Flickr account expired

Umm, guys according to your records and mine, my Pro account won’t expire until June 6th. It’s March 22. This isn’t exactly a good thing to be sending to your paying customers. A two word change would do wonders: “…your Pro account has expired” to “…your Pro account will be expiring soon.” As it is, it appears your messaging system clearly has the wrong Type II type error in it (erring to your advantage instead of mine).

What sort of impression does that give me of Flickr’s priorities?

Posted on by tychay 2

Ghetto tips

Mike, a friend and former co-worker pointed me to Go Ghetto. I looked at it and promptly forgot about it.

I should have read Mike’s blog closer because at Lunch 2.0 today, I found out that my friends Holly and (a different) Mike are the instigators of GoGhetto. (What a weird small world we live in.) They even gave me a bumper sticker which I had in my hand for all of 10 seconds. (They were too ghetto to let me keep it, because Mark already had one.)

Ghetto product shot

“Ghetto product shot” by tychay.
Nikon D70, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D
f/1.8 at 1/60 second, iso 200, 50mm (75mm)

Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 3

Shooting people at work

There has been a movement in Plaxo recently to make the blog “more edgy” and less bland corporate PR crap. I can only say that’s a good thing.

One little gem of that outgrowth is a wonderful entry by my co-worker Michael Rowley on photographing people at work. Actually, yesterday we had a “Haxo” day where we spend our time working on a project not related to my current work. Michael spent his Haxo Day photographing at Plaxo so in many ways this blog entry was an outgrowth of his Haxo project.

If you are curious as to Michael’s style, here is a candid he took of me:

Terry 0277

“Terry 0277” by Mnemonix
(Sony Cybershot DSC-F717) f/2.2 at 1/100 second, iso 400, 7.2mm (69mm)

Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 3