Just now, Mager messaged me:
“I am excited for Lunch two dot oh—I don’t say “point-oh” anymore.
Flashback.
…
In the summer of 1992, a friend was reading me a geek purity test he got from USENET.
One of the questions was:
Do you pronounce “*.*” as “star-dot-star?”
Of course, since he was reading it aloud, I heard:
Do you pronounce star-dot-star as star-dot-star?
Needless to say, I was quite confused. 😀
[More geek after the jump]Continue reading
All month, the closest Starbucks’s chalkboard has read: “Try a Skinny or Mocha Cinnamon dolce Latté A Non-fat, Sugar-free dairy delight!”
I had to stop ordering them because I dislike the sugar-free aftertaste. This means that I’m now faced with the question, “Do I want whip cream in it?”
Of course, when given an option for my food, I almost always say “yes,” and I started to realize that this is eating into my need for variety. How to balance those two?
[choice, choice, and more choice after the jump]Continue reading
At dinner with Morgan the other day, someone pointed out the past participle of “to twitter” should be “twat,” or perhaps “twatted.” As in, “That’s what she twatted.” Or, “I twat that.”
In an early draft an article, I tried the word out. But I ended up editing it—it felt uncomfortable writing about someone’s “twat.”
I blame Merlin Mann of 43 folders. He’s the one who popularized Moleskines years ago.
How else can I explain that right after I wrote about my analog blog that Brian Moon pointed me to the very next xkcd about that. Which caused my friends to point out the sequel article:
Which gave me this weird flashback to the Kubrick and Cupcakes Get Satisfaction/Songbird party, where I caught both Ramon and Dave McClure as being one of the few without hats.
Nikon D70, Tokina 16-50mm AT-X PRO f/2.8 DX, SB-800, ultimate light box
1/20sec @ f/2.8, iso640, 21mm (31mm)
Ramon is almost always styling with a hat. Since everyone else is with hat, I suppose he is doing without.
Nikon D70, Tokina 16-50mm AT-X PRO f/2.8 DX, SB-800, ultimate light box
1/10sec @ f/2.8, iso640, 18mm (27mm)
Dave wears 500 hats, but the only one he has on this day is his party hat.
[Why Merlin Mann is the anti-christ after the jump.]Continue reading
Hmm it looks like my rant touched off a spirited defense from the writer of Mephisto.
Hey, that’s my blogging system! I’m just curious what kind of error page a bad url should show? Something like this?
And yes, the mephisto title is me having fun. Lighten up, dude 😀 I never said it wasn’t shitty, but it scales just fine.
—rick, the creator of Mephisto
I’ll admit, I was a little harsh on Rick. Shit, anyone who calls himself “technoweenie” is probably someone I need to kick of few beers back with—preferably with the Plasq peeps so we don’t have to spring money when Skitch is out of beta.
Any way you cut it, it’s ballsy to say Mephisto “scales just fine” given that WordPress does not and it’d pretty much crushes Mephisto out of the box on on availability, ease of install, extensibility, performance, and scalability.
That’s typical of Ruby programmers, always making outlandish claims that aren’t true and then saying that I have the burden to prove the negative.
Speaking of Skitch, How’s this for “lightening up”?
You’re not going to demand that I prove that Mephisto isn’t “the best blogging system ever” are you, Matt? 😉 (This is a reference to WordPress’s funding.)
BTW, unlike his Ruby compatriots so quick to throw him to the wolves, I actually like that he is writing Mephisto in Rails. When Matt was forking b2 to write WordPress in PHP, I thought MoveableType had won and I was perfectly happy installing mod_perl. So what do I know?
As to Rick’s “curiosity,” Mephisto shouldn’t generate or allow a post slug with “/” or “:” etc or, if it does allow it, it should encode it. In the screenshot you linked, I don’t have that post slug on this blog with that URL and WordPress wouldn’t allow it so the screenshot he took is moot. It does, however, show my great taste in WordPress themes.
[more Ruby bashing after the jump.]Continue reading
Scott Beale notes the 50th anniversary of the LEGO brick.
Burka asks, what is our preferred LEGO theme?
Does it show my age when I mention that pretty much the only theme available at the time was SPACE:
Just so you know, the antenna in the back turns into a long range gauss gun. 😉
Look up the legos from your childhood on the LUGNET LEGO Set Database.
In 1977, there was a popular series of LEGO-like kits that allowed you to snap together models battleships, destroyers, and such. I don’t remember the name, but given the timing, they were the reason LEGO started to make themes. Here’s to that forgotten piece of toy history.
I’ve been a big supporter of Zivity.
My PHP friends tease me about this because Zivity is built on Rails.
Well, I got an invite to Zivity Beta the other day, so I figured I should subscribe to their blog. Today, I just wanted to link this great article from Forbes when I ran across this…
I mean it’s just a friggin’ blog! 😉
[Ruby stats after the jump.]Continue reading
After the merkley??? party, I went with some friends to Matt Mullenweg’s birthday party.
(Matt, for those of you who don’t know, wrote WordPress which over the years has become the premier blogging application on the internet. Matt also gets a lot of shit from me when I talk about programming)
My friends and I are chatting in line outside BigFoot, when this pretty girl, K—, who I’ve never met before, ahead of me in line, turns around and says, “Wait, is your name ‘Terry Chay?’”
“Oh noes!” Morgan says, “Terry, you’re internet famous!”
So this is what it feels like to be popular?, I thought. Is it wrong that I sort of like it?
[Internet Fame after the jump]Continue reading
Tomorrow, the stock market will crash. The fact of this crash is already written in the future’s market, but the depth and duration of the coming recession it may herald is the realm of the astrology and numerology that is part and parcel with macroeconomics.
Like Krugman, I’d like to mark this point in time with another one:
“The Reagan-Bush years have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”
—Bill Clinton, 1992
The “greed is good” of the 80’s has become resurgent in this decade under the banner of libertarianism. It has provided a rationalization for our irresponsibility with a wishful-thinking outlook via such self-deluding sloganeering as “socially liberal, fiscally conservative.”
And the cornerstone of this Economic Darwinism has been the myth of Reaganomics.
I can only hope that it is among the first casualties of coming recession.
[Bleeding hearts after the jump]Continue reading
PHP is a hacky piece of shit that gets the job done that somehow that suits me just fine.
I honestly don’t know why I support SF PHP Meetup.
Quite frankly, I find the whole “Meetup” website strangely-segmented, overly-restrictive, and a closed-off and archaic anachronism. I am counting the days until Facebook or Ning finally gets their s—t together and wipes it off the face of the earth. But there it is, and I still show up these meetups despite opening my mouth and subsequently drinking a whole Cup ’O Instant Regret.
The only valid conclusion is I have a huge ego and just like hearing myself talk. So when Touge invited me to turn the next SF PHP meetup into a “Terry Show,” I felt strangely compelled to say yes.
And just so that you don’t have to navigate that horrible website, I, in a weird spate of generosity, decided to copy down the deets…
What: OOps! The PHP Fear and Loathing Guide to Object-Oriented Design
When: Thursday, February 7, 2008 at 7PM
Where: CNET networks, 235 2nd street, San Francisco, CA
Why: Because someone has to provide the “asshole engineer” benchmark, it might as well be me.
RSVP: The great thing is you show up. Just don’t give security the queer eye…download iCalendar, spam Upcoming, and whore this on Facebook.
A small dilemma was, as an asshole engineer, I’m fundamentally lazy—that’s why I became a software architect in the first place: so I wouldn’t have to actually write anything and could just rip into other people’s code and claim credit for their hard work.
What to do?
How about recycle an old talk FTW? After all, George seemed to like it.
So you better go to this talk, because my ego isn’t big enough for the both of us and I’ll need you around to pop it. If you can’t make it, maybe I’ll install Profcast or someone will stream it so you can count my cuss words on #phpc again. Then again, maybe not. Because you obviously missed the memo wherein I revealed I’m a lazy sloth.
Perhaps I’ll actually delete the slides that are truly embarrassing, but probably not. Wouldn’t want to mess with my perfect record of regret at PHP meetups.
