Great taste tastes great

At San Francisco Brewing Company:

View from a room

View from a room
San Francisco Brewing Company, Financial District, San Francisco, California

Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G
1/60sec @ f/2.8, iso1600, 24mm (24mm)

I grab Marie’s glass and drag it toward me. “It smells like you squeezed a whole lemon.” I take a sip. “That’s way too sour! You should get another one.”

“Nobody can squeeze that much lemon.”

“The lemon is only there to cut the taste of the unfiltered yeast.”

Continue reading about beer talk after the jump

Unfortunate names

In college, I had a classmate and friend, Richard Chiu.

It hurts me to confess it, but it was two years before I dawned on me he had been given a most unfortunate name.

The boxes we are

A random post on my stalker feed brings me back of the last party

“Are you single?” It’s the second time at the party, Alex has asked that. The internal dialog is now in fine form.

This is San Francisco, shouldn’t you ask if I’m gay first?, “Stop trying to fill out my social networking registration page, Alex”

Somewhat less emphatically: “You are single?!” Then slightly more emphatically: “Terry is single”—as if repetition makes it true.

I’m in a relationship with my Nikon and it’s complicated. “My status is not some box you can check off,” I retort.

“Wait, you are single, aren’t you?” decidedly less emphatically.

That’s thrice! Damn Canon photogs! “You couldn’t even shoot my D3.” I laugh.

“Terry is single,” Alex declares to anyone who was interested. (Nobody was.)

Nelson Muntz voice: “Ha ha!” Maybe if you were a Nikon-toting hottie, I’d have given you a straight answer.

Party photography Q&A tree

Now, in my defense, when it comes to that senseless brand war, I have to represent. But I admit that it was a bit harsh, especially since, as an event photographer himself, he must get asked my most-despised geek-party conversation starter an awful lot: “Who are you with?” (i.e. “Who are you shooting for so I know if I should do a posedown.”)

We hates it, my precious, yes we do.

Coincidentally, just that day, I devised a customer support answer tree to turn this question into a lethal conversation-killer:

Party photography Q&A tree: “Who you with?”

…then give them that dismissive look, like they just said something incredibly stupid.

Continue reading Boxes and banter after the jump

All McCain’s Base

I mentioned it here and in an article with another reference to that wonderful meme, Seth Graehame-Smith says, “All McCain’s base are belong to [Obama and the Democratic Party][sic?].

I wouldn’t have mentioned it, except I ran across this quote:

I don’t care if footage of Obama snorting coke off Scarlett Johansson‘s boobs surfaces in late October. All it will do is bolster his standing with white males.

I swear when I read that, coke, of a different sort, went up my nose.

Generic scaling

“But one of the reasons we’re very lucky is our engineering team has selected to use PHP as the primary development language. That allows us to use a fairly generic server type. So we, with a couple of exceptions, have three main server types and run a fairly homogeneous environment, which allows us to then consolidate our buying power.”
—Jonathan Heliger, VP Site Operations, Facebook (in interview with Dan Faber)

I think homogenous horizontal scaling (when possible) is a great idea for operations.

Continue reading about How dare you profane Rails. A pox on your server (after the jump) after the jump