So I got a PS4 and here's why

[This…](http://www.idigitaltimes.com/articles/21763/20140203/xbox-one-is-terrible-five-reasons-regret.htm)

> The Kinect Can’t Tell A Dog’s Ass From A Human Hand

> I wish that headline was hyperbole. I wish I was exaggerating. But in the two months of having an Xbox One it constantly confuses my dog’s ass for a human hand. Whenever one of my dogs hops on the couch, or even walks past it, the Kinect (more often than not) interrupts whatever I’m watching (because there’s no games, remember?) with a hand gesture icon. It doesn’t select anything, thankfully, but remains on the screen for a few moments and is generally just annoying. And the more it happens the more annoying it gets.

> And it’s not just my dog’s ass that the Kinect has problems with. Microsoft apparently failed to realize that actual human beings sitting on a couch might, occasionally, use their hands. I guess the Kinect test couch was in a setting without cellphones or snacks or lively conversation. If my wife makes a gesture while telling me a story, or I pull my phone up to send some texts, I usually hear the telltale “ding” and my screen goes dark and there’s the hand icon floating on the screen. And, according to Xbox support, there’s really no way to stop this from happening.

> So (nearly) every time my wife talks, or I send a text or my dog crosses the room I have to throw up a “Heil Hitler” gesture at my Kinect so I can continue watching what I want.

(I’ll tell you when it’s actually worth owning over a PS3. Right now, I’m still in [the first stage of grief, the best stage :-)](http://terrychay.com/article/relationship-clubs.shtml).)

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Mailing list talk has consequences

One of my engineers was leaving the building for a late lunch and held the door open for me and another director. Before we parted, we had a short chat in the doorway about approvals on a purchase order.

“Hey, I need to see your ID!” Building security yelled at us.

“Huh? What?” H— replied?

“That’s the new policy. I need to ask to see everyone’s keycard.”

“It must be related to that mailing list thread.” I told H—, matter-of-factly. (For over a week now, an internal mailing list thread has been going on about building security. I stopped reading when someone suggested that the only way to solve this was to install lasers to detect when two people enter with one card, and another one argued that we should just make an HR policy to fire anyone who lets anyone in without proper ID. The reason I stopped was because neither post was trolling us in jest.)

The building security guy continued indignantly, “Even if I know you, even if you’re a manager—and I know you two are managers. L—, the head of the company, said I must to ask for your ID or call her down to greet you in the lobby.” (Sidenote: L— is not the head of the company. On the other hand, poor L— suggested on the mailing list that any solution hopeless because building security is seriously underpaid by the owners, perhaps to the point of illegality.)

I joked, “Even if I thought the discussion that touched off this policy was a waste of everyone’s time?”

Building security apparently has about as much humor as our company mailing list. So I reluctantly dug through my wallet and and pulled out a blank white piece of plastic, that may or may not have been my car parking card—they’re identical and I do not have an RFID reader on my person.

He let me through anyway.

That’s good, because to this day I do not know the average airspeed of an unladen swallow.

Posted on by tychay 0

Happy Holidays: Web Programmer Complains SF Is Full of People Just Like Him

[Hat tip to the literary genius “founder” of DickWhack or whatever-the-fuck-it’s-called](http://valleywag.gawker.com/happy-holidays-startup-ceo-complains-sf-is-full-of-hum-1481067192):

I just got back to SF. I’ve traveled around the world and I gotta say there is nothing more grotesque than walking down (almost all) of San Francisco. Why the heart of our city and surrounding environs has to be overrun by crazy, entitled, money-grubbing, startup hipsters I have no clue. Each time I pass by one, my love affair with SF dies a little.

The difference is in other cosmopolitan cities, this lower part of society keep to themselves. They sit in their parent’s basements, eat cheetos, program quietly, and generally stay out of your way unless you need a leash in League of Legends. They realize it’s a privilege to be in meatspace and view themselves as guests. And that’s okay.

In downtown SF these ironic-t-shirt-wearing lib(ertarian)tards multiply like tribbles, give you the evil eye (when they bother to look up from their iPhones), and act like they own the city — as if it’s their place of leisure, gluten-free, grass-fed restaurants, and Belgian craft microbreweries… In actuality it’s the live-work city for a hell lot more than a bunch of VC-funded beggars trying to make a business model around helping similar lowlifes securely send dick pics to one another. It’s a disgrace. I don’t feel safe planning out my next meal without having my eyes accosted by their shitty reviews on Yelp or nasty “tips” on FourSquare on whether or not the place accepts BitCoin.

You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover of humanity in the world, but there is an area of town for self-entitled worthless drains and an area of town for the people trying to actually get shit done without being secretly stalked by some dude wearing Google Glasses. There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us with their hooded sweatshirts flaunting their fly-by-night social mobile gaming startup when their business is on the Internet and their money comes from Sand Hill. They can eat and “work” somewhere else. It’s a burden and a liability having them so close to us sucking up our LTE/3G bandwidth with their Instagrams of their latest bacon and truffle-oil infused lunch. Believe me, if they added the smallest iota of value I’d consider thinking different, but the young trust fund white male ordering a code monkey to make a website designed for other white 1%ers like them hasn’t made anyone else’s life better in a while.

Posted on by tychay 1

Role models, mistakes, and learning

On the way to work this morning, M— mentioned two contrasted successful people in public relations. She said, “When I think of X and compare him to Y, I’d rather take Y as a role model. Do you have any role models?”

*Do I? Feynman? Wozniak? Jobs? Mayer?* I paused for a long time.

“No,” I said.

M— laughed.Continue reading →

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Notes from Chapter 8 of the Power of Habit

## Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (244)

> It was Thursday, December 1, 1555, in Montgomery, Alabama and she has just finished a long day at Montgomery Fair, the department store where she worked as a seamstress. The bus was crowded and, by law, the first four rows were reserved for white passengers. The area where blacks were allowed to sit, in the back, was already full and so the woman—**Rosa Parks**— sat in a center row, right behind the white section, where either race could claim a seat (p.215)

The process of social movements (p.217) requires convergence of 3 parts:

1. Start: Social habits of friendships, and strong ties between close acquaintances
2. Growth: Habits of community, and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together.
3. Endures: Movement leaders give participants new habits that create fresh sense of identity and feeling of ownershipContinue reading →

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I'm speaking again!

After a couple year hiatus, I thought it’d be nice to start speaking again — the disconnect of basically stopping speaking at open source conferences when I started working at two companies producing some of the world’s largest open-source products ([WordPress][] and [Wikipedia][]) was becoming too much.

I decided to apply this year. Luckily, [Northeast PHP Conference][nephp] forgot to check the The Great Offensive PHP Speaker Blacklist™, and accepted my talk!

The talk will be: [Ten Evil Things: Features Engineering at Wikipedia][10 evil things]. Now with 30% less swear words, but don’t worry, it’ll still be fun. 😀

When registering, belatedly, I noticed they had an interesting preferences page, I thought I’d share my answers with you

[WordPress]: http://wordpress.org “WordPress: Blog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS”
[Wikipedia]: http://en.wikipedia.org “Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia”
[nephp]: http://www.northeastphp.org “Northeast PHP Conference 2013”
[10 evil things]: http://www.northeastphp.org/talks/view/156/Ten-Evil-Things-Features-Engineering-at-Wikipedia “Ten Evil Things: Features Engineering at Wikipedia—Northeast PHP Conference”

Continue reading my answers to their questions after the jump

Posted on by tychay 2

The Rubbernecking Theory of Google Glasses

[John Gruber writes][]:

One of these guys is wrong.

It’s [possible][wiki:false dilemma] that they’re both right in what they observed, but both wrong in trying to derive a conclusion from their observations.

[John Gruber writes]: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/05/20/glass-io “Two Takes on Google Glass at I/O—Daring Fireball”
[wiki:false dilemma]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma “False dilemma—Wikipedia”
Continue reading about false dichotomies and false conclusions after the jump

Posted on by tychay 0

Some of your clients are clearly misogynist tourists

She complains, “There’s just no appreciation on their end. I got them ___, and they’re still trying to tell me how to do my job. It’s so frustrating. I have clients that I feel I’m under-servicing and this one takes up all my time. They have a low retainer, but they act like they own me. That’s the last time I let them talk me down on my retainer.”

“You shouldn’t have let that happen so you shouldn’t be surprised.”

“How so?”

“I once visited Venice when I was a kid. Many stores didn’t have prices, but some of the stores did. No matter which, you didn’t have to pay the listed prices — there was an expectation that you could haggle over the price.”

“And?”

“Well with this client: they don’t know your field so they don’t know what the expectation is. **You** set that. Letting yourself get talked down on that amount is like buying something in Venice. Imagine if we were in the United States, and someone walked into your store and said, ‘Hey, I know it says it cost $15, but how about I give $10?’”

She laughs.

“Exactly! The only place you can do that here is at a car dealership. If you treated their counteroffer like you just treated this hypothetical, they would have learned to go somewhere else and be someone else’s problem, or deal with you on the terms you set. When you created your own business, it was because you didn’t want companies to feel they owned you, and you wanted to be free to be honest with them. You need to set those terms down in this way.”

“Yeah, they said that they wanted _____ in the long term but didn’t have enough money right now, so they wanted a two month contract at a lower rate to try it out. I should have known they never really valued the work I do.”

“That’s another thing right there! Imagine, I was single right now and asking you out. What if I told you, ‘Hey, I really want have a committed relationship and get married someday. Why don’t we fuck so I can try you out?’ Would you?”

“When you put it that way, definitely not.”

“Exactly.”

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