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.

Posted on by tychay 2

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

Posted on by tychay 6

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.

Posted on by tychay 1

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

Posted on by tychay 7

PHP anthem

IM from a friend:

See ya.
Oh, by the way in OS X shell:

say -v Good oh PHP ow ow oh PHP ow oh PHP ow ow oh PHP ow oh PHP ow ow oh PHP ow oh PHP ow ow oh PHP ouchie

for PHP anthem.

ROFL

Update (2010-08-05)

If you came here from a blog search, here is another anthem.

Posted on by tychay 8

Internationalization PB&J

I had to suffer, now it’s Andrei’s turn.


OSCON 2008

Badges, we don’t need no stinkin’ badges.

No, what I mean is that Andrei needs to practice his talk before OSCONdebut his talk!

Description of the talk:

PHP 6 brings fully functional and mature Unicode support to the Web world. This talk will cover all the layers of the PHP (bread)/Unicode (butter)/i18n (jam) sandwich. Come and find out how to work with locales, use collation to compare and sort strings, and format numbers, currencies, and dates for any country in the world. Bring your appetite because the toasty goodness is waiting.

What: PHP::$unicode->i18
When: Thursday, July 10, 2008 at 7PM
Where: CNET networks, 235 2nd street, San Francisco, CA
Why: Because I only speak one language and every character can be described with 7-bits. Plus. PB&J is yummy!
RSVP: The great thing is you show up. Just don’t give security the queer eye…PHP meetup, download iCalendar, whore this on Facebook., list on Upcoming

Unlike my talk, this one’s a new one. So even if you’re going to OSCON this year, you know you might miss it, so see it here:

(I hope he talks about “mojibake” (mo-gee-bah-kay) in the talk. I love that word. I’d use it all the time, but it gets me slapped in the face by girls at tech parties.)

This is awfully close to the the anniversary of a full year in the city—the Andreiversary! So be there!

Posted on by tychay 2