The pocket digicam

I haven’t written about photography in a while. This is probably a bad sign for my soul because it means I haven’t been shooting much lately.

I am in the market for a new digital camera and was wondering if you could recommend a worthy one. I’m far from a pro, so a basic point and shoot of awesome quality, reasonable price, and lightweight for 100 lb. weaklings would work just fine for me. Someone said I should get a Sony Cybershot. Any recommendations?

I’m always getting e-mails and IMs like this. Because I carry around an expensive camera, people assume I have an opinion. It’s been years since I’ve actually written about this and I don’t even shoot this sort of camera anymore. So what advice to give?

Continue reading about Entry level camera purchasing advice after the jump

Posted on May 14, 2009 by tychay 13

bromance

I’m sorry I missed this word.

From DoubleX:

I agree that the Kirk/Spock dynamic was the richest in the film. But there’s another key relationship that I thought was even more fascinating—the one between Spock and Lt. Uhura. First off, it’s fantastic that Uhura finally feels like a major character, even though she still hasn’t graduated to wearing pants, and even though much of her role here is to provide romantic relief from the bromance and the action scenes.

(The rest of the article is similarly hilarious.)

From Star Trek Motivational Posters

If he got rid of the bromance, then J.J. Abrams would see some really outraged Trekkies.

Posted on May 12, 2009 by tychay 0

Leica No. 5

Saw this in Chanel’s new commercial.

Is that a Leica M8?

Is it wrong that I recognized the camera before the actress?

Nothing beats a rangefinder if you want to evoke “classic.”

Posted on May 9, 2009 by tychay 3

Fun things to do at a party

One time at a party in SoMa, I was chatting up a couple girls who were waiting in an inordinately long bathroom line. Since I didn’t have to pee and they did, this pretty much amounted to as much exposition on water flow I could think of—about how I like to take pictures of waterfalls, the time I got stuck in Big Basin in the dead of winter just after a rainstorm and had to crawl down the mountain on my hands and knees while holding a cell phone just above the creek water, and other things that would make their peeing experience, when it did come, that much more satisfying.

“Oh, I should ask Andrei if he’s wants to share a cab with me to after the party. Where is he?” Andrei lives in the building across the street and North Beach is the other end of the city.

“He’s right behind you,” one of them points.

I yell over my shoulder, “Hey, so are you coming home with me?”

At that moment, a guy passed between me and Andrei. He looked like he was new to the city.

Needless to say, the look of horror on his face as he thought I was hitting on him was priceless.

I love this city.

Posted on May 8, 2009 by tychay 0

Mouths Wide Shut

It’s been a while since I’ve shared some stories about growing up.

Halle writes about talking too much. It’s funny because I think the last time I had dinner with her, we talked too much about just that—how we both talk too much.

I talk so much that people have to remind me to finish eating. Heck, it’s probably why I’m so thin—my mouth is always open, but nothing is coming in.

Pownce Launch Party by magerleagues

The chewing gum in my mouth is the closest I can come to Freud’s “oral fixation” theory of talking.

Continue reading about on talking too much after the jump

Posted on May 8, 2009 by tychay 0

Writing and speaking

I can’t find the conference speaker badges so this will have to do. The fact that it feeds my ego doesn’t hurt either!

Paul wrote something nice about me. In fact, it’s so very nice, that I can (almost) forgive him for listing me sixth. 😉

Reading his description reminds me how grateful I am every time someone reads my articles. Writing is a craft that I’m not very good at and have to work at constantly. I hope my logorrhea has, in a small way, created a little context for you and perhaps inspired some of you to blog more.

Because when I’m not trolling the internets for my name, I’m reading your blog… and growing.

Mad talks

Paul also mentioned my that I’m a conference speaker.

In light of this, I better mention that in a couple weeks in Chicago at PHP|tek, I’ll be bookending the opening keynote of Andrei, my (a)cross-street rival, with the closing keynote. I have no idea what I’ll be talking about so this should be interesting!

After that, I’ll be racing to Berlin to catch up with Andrei, in order to give two completely different talks at the International PHP Conference. I’m noticed that Thies Artzen will be there—I’ll finally get to see if the rumors of him mellowing out are true.

Maybe Keith Casey will let me dry run my Berlin talks at the PHP|tek Unconference (I hope so). Even if not, I should probably participate in the Pecha Kucha—my speaking skills have deteriorated noticeably.

What killed the whom

Finally I noticed that in an interview, Andi Gutmans, the “nd” in Zend mentioned my company:

The Java disruption by PHP is well under way. PHP is everywhere, and Zend’s solutions are being used in business-critical deployments by companies such as Tagged, Fiat, BNP Paribas, and Fox Interactive Media, to name a few. The strategic adoption of Zend in larger accounts, often in favor of Java, is related to our strong return on investment and shorter time to market.

(I guess this means I’ll finally have to figure out the difference between him and Zeev, the “Ze” in Zend.)

One thing the writer, a Java developer, doesn’t notice is that a significant fraction of Tagged is Java. This wasn’t the case when I joined the company, but it was an architectural system I made because there are some things PHP isn’t good at.

If I had to guess, when Andi is saying “Java disruption,” I think he really means “Java/J2EE” disruption. It’s a minor distinction…and one of which I’ve been attacked for when I say “Ruby” and really mean “Rails.”

Posted on May 7, 2009 by tychay 1

401K

Two interesting programs about 401ks: FRONTLINE: Can you afford to retire? and60 Minutes: The 401K Fallout.

The big thing I learned is that our retirement system is heavily biased to people like me—not very egalitarian, not very American.

Posted on May 7, 2009 by tychay 1

Affirmative Action™ figure

Many people see affirmative action as a slippery slope to Harrison Bergeron. In light of a previous article and in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that twice in my life I’ve been an Affirmative Action™ figure.

Here they are:
Continue reading about Terry Chay affirmative action figure after the jump

Posted on May 6, 2009 by tychay 2

How much does a date() cost?

One of the fringe benefits of open sourcing an existing code base is that you have an opportunity to set error_reporting to E_ALL | E_STRICT, or perhaps rather to 2147483647. When you do that you find small problems with your code base you missed the first time you sloppily wrote it.

In my case, I noticed that date() was throwing strict errors. For example

error_reporting(E_ALL | E_STRICT);
ini_set('date.timezone',false);
echo date('c');

shows you

I’m sure if you’re Derick, you are intimate with date()ing, but I had forgotten about this wasted guess_timezone() sys call and the suppressed strict error (which still takes time in PHP 5).

I sent an e-mail with this bug, along with the one line fix to the php.ini, to site operations…and promptly forgot about it. That is until the ticket was sent back with the message that it needed to be “tested in dev and stage before making it to production.”

(The younger, less-tolerant terry would have blown a fuse at this point.) The older, jaded terry simply became curious about what the costs of date() really are.
Continue reading about Benchmarking date() after the jump

Posted on May 6, 2009 by tychay 14

The Woodwork

You tell that other boy, not to touch the woodwork