Glom

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I found this comment amusing:

Finally, [Megan McArdle] as an approximately 6’ tall, moderately attractive woman — who likes guns — libertarian, objectivist, and conservative fan-bois glommed on to her like a million sperm all trying to fertilize the same egg, which provides its own kind of mockworthy spectacle

The college I went to had a 6:1 guy:girl ratio at the time. Being an institute full of socially stunted nerds just like me, they had their own word for when multiple guys talking to or associating with a single girl: “glomming.” While it has morphed beyond its original meaning—it is short for “agglomeration”—it has become part of our urban dictionary, and the above example shows it in its original definition.

One day during Rotation, I was hanging out on the Triple on the second floor, and watched “glom pools” forming around the night’s new batch of Freshman girls in the dorm’s courtyard below. The image of “a million sperm all trying to fertilize the same egg” is an especially apt description. I can trace a direct line to my intense shyness around women to that singular and instructive moment.

  • glom v.t. to accost a girl who is already surrounded by multiple guys
  • glommer n a male who gloms serially
  • glom pool n an aggregation of many guys around a single girl

Oh yeah, if any Techers at the time are wondering about all the hacked copies of CrystalCaltech Quest on campus—the one where ResEdit to add Caltechisms like the infamous and indestructable “glom monster” toward the end? That was me.

Crunchy granola-eating rib cages just asking to be nudged with a baton

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Stephen Colbert finds his humor best, when people are at their worst:

It’s amusing to read right wing defenses of these actions. My personal favorite is “the clip is too short”—as if you can’t use the googlez to find that the full clip is even worse.

Another interesting one is that this is okay because Berkeley “accepts about 10-12% public money (or 88-90% private).” A cursory use of the google shows that they’re one quarter state funding. The other three quarters are from public AND private funding. For instance, any professor who brings in a grant (most grant, but not all, are publicly funded), has about 40% siphoned off by the university as overhead. This has always been the case. The university is also supported by a $3.15 billion endowment.

(State funding used to be a much higher percentage of Cal’s budget, but was cut by the governator so the state could keep its prisons. The largest single private grant to the university was done by the hippies at British Petroleum. Those two facts explain why the “powers that be” at the University of California tacitly approved of these actions and the one in 2009.)

No matter, the discussion of “public” vs. “private” with respect to speech is a red herring. The Free Speech Movement, which began in exactly the same place, settled this matter. Arguing that “pitching tents” is a bridge-too-far isn’t really going to save a lost cause when videos of your police dragging people by the hair and beating 4’10″ asian girls in the stomach are going viral on the intarwebs.

But perhaps the most damning argument comes from this observation:

If we were to view the actions of police as Americans watching people attempting to gain their rights in a foreign country, we would find them appalling. Yet somehow there are those in this country who are all too happy to deny rights afforded to all Americans under the Constitution. The right of peaceful assembly is guaranteed and those who seek to deny them are ignorant of this “fact.”

Whether or not it is legal to “nudge with batons” to take down some students’ tents, it is clear what is right—which is why, I suppose it, is a Right.

“The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence.
—UC Police Capt. Margo Bennet

It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience.
-UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau

Good luck with that line of thought. Bull Connor approves!

Clearly these people needs to be “nudged” in the rib cage by a police baton.

Last-Place schadenfreude is short-lived

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It is said that the reason many poor are opposed to social programs that benefit them is a fear of coming in “last.”

If that is the case, the impending implosion of the euro, as predicted for years by center-left economists, offers a marked example of schadenfreude for us Americans.

Besides the obvious worry over whether the death spiral will reach our shores, there’s the question of how Rupert-Murdoch-on-steroids could run the third largest European economy (7th largest in the world) into the ground, what’s with right wing obsession with inflation in times of deflationary spirals, and why this prediction seemed to only have been made by liberals.

So my thinking is our laughter has a touch too much nerves.

Learning Programming Part 4: “Programming is Hard”

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Previously: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Programming, it turns out, is hard.
—Eloquent Javascript (and typical)

A few months ago, a girl expressed to me her frustrations about, in particular, the attitude expressed many engineers on her attempts to learn to programming.

“They act like learning programming is hard. They imply that if you haven’t been programming since you were seven, there’s no hope for you,” she explained.

I opined, “If someone can learn to program when they are seven, then it must not be that difficult.”

…

Think of all the things you couldn’t do when you were seven—programming is less difficult than all of those.

Super Tuesday

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When I first moved to San Francisco, the PHP meetup group hadn’t had a meeting in a year. That was before Touge took it up, and, along with Mariano, does the hard work of actually scheduling people to come shoot the shit.

Apparently, it’s time for my shit to be shot.

Tomorrow, I’m giving a talk at SFPHP on DevOps for PHP developers. I’ve giving this talk before as the closing keynote at PHP Community Conference and to sysadmins at OSCON.

Living without Your Linemen: The Programmer Becomes System Operator in the Cloud

If a website architect is the quarterback, then site operations is the offensive line—overworked, under-appreciated, and only noticed when it fails. They make you look good. However, four years ago cloud computing networks like Amazon Web Services and Slicehost have appeared. While deficiencies in frameworks in other languages have forced those worlds to adopt Infrastructure-as-a-Service, the PHP world—with it’s ultra-cheap shared-hosting (on one end) and tradition of dominance on some of the most trafficked websites (on the other)—has been slow to move. But as the technology continues to disrupt, modern web engineers will be expected to use their programming skills to not only build, but also provision and maintain fast, scalable websites.

The efficiencies of a web-based language and experience in scalable website architecture offer a unique opportunity for programmers to transfer their skills when wearing a sysop hat. Not to mention some of the best libraries for programming them are written in PHP! When going from a small pet project to a go-live site, maybe we can learn to live without our linemen.

Trust me, you’ll like it.

Please come!

Also, If you are an American citizen, go vote! :-)

Just keep shooting

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One brunch, I noticed that a trio of my friends all had single-letter twitter names. I asked them to activate their wonder-tweet powers. They obliged:

@a @c @k
@a @c @k Zazie’s, Cole Valley, San Francisco, California Olympus E-P1, M.ZUIKO Digital 17mm 1:2.8 Pancake 2 exposures, 1/60sec @ ƒ2.8, ISO400, 17mm (35mm)

After discussing the kissy ass face video, I asked my friends to pose one of the things that were “too dirty for College Humor.”

Do the kissy-anus-face
Do the kissy-anus-face Eddie Rickenbacker’s, SoMa, San Francisco, California Leica M8, Cosina-Voigtländer NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical 3 exposures @ 1/30sec, iso 320, 35mm (47mm)

One thing I like to do is keep shooting even after people are done posing, the smiles are more honest.

My cousin Juno

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It’s been four years since I last wrote about my cousin Juno. I haven’t changed much but a baby grows up a lot in that time.

While technically he’s my nephew, he calls me “사촌”—사촌 (sa-chon) means cousin in Korean, so I refer to him as my cousin Juno. And apparently I’m a big hit with him—Juno constantly pesters his parents before family get togethers, “Is Sa-chon Terry going to be there?”

The reason why is I have a secret weapon…

iPhone attention
iPhone attention Vicolleto, North Beach, San Francisco, California Leica M8, Voigtländer Nokton 35mm F1.2 1/60sec, ISO160, 35mm (47mm)

…an iPhone loaded with tons of free and $1 games.

Unfortunately because I never actually play the games, I hadn’t unlocked enough levels in Krazy Kart. Marie had to help out:

Here is how you do that
Here is how you do that Vicolleto, North Beach, San Francisco, California Leica M8, Voigtländer Nokton 35mm F1.2 1/60sec, ISO160, 35mm (47mm)

What an amazing device, and an amazing cousin. Oh, to be a kid right now! Wait a minute…

Photobooth - Me, Juno, Marie

We still are!

Focus on the eyes

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The eyes are the most expressive part of a person.

One thing people forget about smaller-sensor cameras is that it is easier to do close-up photography. Even if the subject is a person, it’s okay to crop everything out, just remember to focus on the eyes. The closer the subject the smaller the depth-of-field gets so even with a small sensor, you have to get the focus just right.

Eyes
Eyes The Richmond, San Francisco, California Olympus E-PL3, Lumix G 20/F1.7 1/60sec @ ƒ1.8, ISO500, 20mm (40mm)

What attracted me to photographing Marie was the way the light from the bay windows caught her eyes. Unfortunately, my camera blocked a lot of that.

This camera has face and eye detection. I can even select which eye to prefer (I always select closest eye of the closest subject), but it is not always accurate. This photo suffers a little because the camera mistakenly focused on the distal eye—probably because I am near the close-focusing limit of this lens (the sensor isn’t small enough and the lens is a pancake).

It is interesting my appreciation of this image is interrupted because as the photographer, I see my mistakes: the off-focus and camera gobo, but my friends don’t.

Other tips

Even though the image is highly cropped it’s okay. A closely cropped photo rarely suffers and you can crop a person anywhere as long as it isn’t near a joint. As with “focus on the eyes”, these sort of photographing decisions are derived from our evolution.

Just remember, you will have to retouch the portrait a bit. Soften the skin (a little, not too much) and add definition and saturation to the eyes and lips. You should probably remove some of the color from the whites of the eyes, but I didn’t need to in this photo. Note that retouching tools have gotten very good as computers have gotten very powerful. I didn’t even need to leave Aperture (or use the RAW image) to retouch.