dennis yang dot com

threadless + blik = threadless wall decals.

yay.

I’m thinking of getting the ambition killed the cat one.. or maybe the caged bird — but that one seems to work better on a darkly coloured wall.

I’ve been in like super home furnishing mode lately, as a result of moving to my new house… New blinds, new shelves.. Yah, I guess I’ve been ordering a lot.

The UPS man yesterday said to me:

“What do you do? Just sit at home all day and order stuff?”

But, I got a new piggy bank!

Hooray for nesting.

My friends Korby and Nancy were on Cash Cab this week… Awesome. They actually called me for the answer to the “SKOL” question, but the editors completely removed that from the show… so, instead, Korby looks like he completely pulled the right answer out of thin air, when, in reality, the answer was courtesy of my super quick and accurate google-fu. Korby, glad to be of help.. if this appearance nets you a girlfriend, you can add that to my tally too then.

Anyway… congrats to Korby and Nancy (oh, and the smiley guy Marvin too) on their rocking performance at Cash Cab.. Is it too late for me to get on Double Dare?

Here’s a happy little ditty for you on this fine wednesday…

Don’t Falter, by Mint Royale.

Enjoy.

p.s. Ooo.. here’s an animated video of the same song… I like the other video better though..

Cool.

So, Andy just sent me this awesome video, made by my cousins (ok, I think they’re technically like my 2nd cousins once removed, but whatever) Alex and Isis.

Isis was 5 when she composed and sung this song, “my hot dog floated in the water” and it’s just so frikkin’ cute I had to share. Her cousin Alex made the accompanying animation and put it on the YouTubes.

Record it!

So yah.. My house is now on the market.. The first open house this Saturday and Sunday, so that’s pretty exciting. I repainted the whole place, and I think the place looks really awesome now.. Man, I should have done accent walls when I lived there. Oh well. At least the new owners will get to enjoy them… I’m really gonna miss that place and the neighborhood. Hayes Valley has really become an awesome place to live, especially with all of the new restaurants opening up in the last few years. I still haven’t ever seen a place that has its loft-like feel, with two *real* bedrooms (as opposed to the “bedroom areas” that so many SF lofts seem to have).. But, I’m settling into the new place quite well now, so here’s to new beginnings..

If you know of anyone that might be interested in my house, please send them my way! More info at 419fulton.com.. (nice domain, Jess!)

Tonight, Steph and I went to check out the screening of Fully Flared, put on by the San Francisco Film Society at Mezzanine..

It was one and a half hours of some pretty sweet kick flips and other skate tricks with kickass cinematography and a really, really good soundtrack.

For me, it was a little long.. I mean, I have a short attention span and all, but maybe it’s cuz I don’t skate, but after about an hour, I got a little antsy. I mean, I don’t remember how long M.A.S.H. was, but that film left me wanting more, but I suppose that’s cuz I can’t really get enough of watching bikes.

That said, the opening of Fully Flared was truly awesome. M83, explosions, and jumping off stuff. Good.

So.. I’ve moved into my new digs here in SoMa, and it’s very exciting.. Andy has now graduated from being my housemate, to being my downstairs neighbor, so that’s pretty awesome. The new neighborhood is a bit different than Hayes Valley. The streets are a lot bigger here, with multiple lanes of one-way traffic running down many of them. That, and the bigger city blocks, makes the hood seem a lot less vibrant than my old hood. However, I’ve found that impression to be only skin deep — the neighbors that I’ve met so far are super friendly, and more people seem to stop and chat on the street than in the old hood (and not just to spare change you), so that’s kind of nice.

Also, there’s a ton of new development going on around this hood that will probably affect change in the coming years. Some notable developments in the new hood:

• The SoMa Grand is open now.. so maybe an influx of fancy people will bring some cool new shops and restaurants to the hood..
• Right next door to the SoMa grand, 1188 Mission is well under construction — it will eventually replace the old Trinity Plaza building next door (current residents of the Trinity are given the option to move into the new building with their rents staying the same). (Sidebar: Joe wrote a very interesting post about rent control the other day.. it’s worth a read.) The fate of the Moonstar Buffet is TBD, I believe. When it’s done, there’s going to be 21,000 square feet of retail and and nearly 1,900 housing units. More people = more stuff to support said people = good for the neighborhood, I hope.
  
• There seems to be a lot of vacant lots/unoccupied space around here… A lot more than in other neighborhoods. Given the super central location of this hood, it seems like an obvious place for people to start moving to. I’m just here a little early. What are the three most important things about real estate? Location, location, location — I’m told.
• Finally, there are some ambitious plans to turn Folsom into a more pedestrian-friendly retail zone. As these renderings show, changing Folsom from a 4 lane one-way through way to a 3 lane two way street would make it much, much nicer. We’ll see if it actually happens, but the plans look pretty cool to me.

So yah, I’m long on SoMa. Hopefully I’m right.

The food options in this hood are seemingly sparse, but actually is turning out to be not bad. There’s no “main drag” in this part of town, so there’s not like a critical mass of retail/food establishments. Then again, union square, the sf shopping center, and the new mall are like 3 (albeit, big) blocks away.. So, the food that I’ve found around here tends to be more pedestrian fare, which is good, cuz I’m actually looking mainly for places that I can grab a quick, cheap lunch. Coffee Mine and Harvest Urban Market are my two current favs, both within a block of my house. Woot. Finally, Bossa Nova is right around the corner, and I’ve heard really good things, so I will be checking that out soon. More food posts will come in the future, as I find the hidden food gems of SoMa.

Anyway.. pictures of the new place will come soon. I’m still buried in a sea of boxes.

I’d add “cut watermelon” to the magic quadrant though.. cuz that’s my fav.

Following last week’s post about milkshakes, here’s this week’s musical geekdom (click to enlarge):

The person that made this map also did some amusing additional analysis that you should definitely check out…

I like twitter. That said, I don’t have it sending updates to my phone, just to IM, so when I’m away from my computer (which, admittedly, isn’t THAT often), I don’t get twitter updates (which is fine for the most part). I used to dodgeball, but now that I twitter, I find that dodgeballing doesn’t really make that much sense anymore.. (although according to Willo, she and her friends still are hardcore dodgeballers)

Even Mike, who was originally a skeptic, is now a convert.

I thought that this video kind of explains the twitter allure.

My fav derivative twitter application? Tweetscan. With it, you can get kind of a neat view of the tweetworld — right now, I’d say that sxsw is a good term to be watching… (I’m looking forward to a whole week of empty bars and parking spaces in the mission, ftw!)

So yah. You can Twitter if you want. I like it.

Also of note from this year’s TED.. Philip Zimbardo (famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment) gave a really interesting talk about the “Lucifer Effect,” or, how good people turn evil.. Zimbardo, studied what happened at Abu Ghraib, and explained what factors could lead seemingly good people down a path of evil…

From the boingboing post:

What can be done about this? Zimbardo offers heroism as the “antidote to evil.” Teach kids to be ready to act heroically when the see evil. We need to give them real role models. Comic book superheroes are bad models, because they have super powers. A hero is the soldier who reported the Abu Ghraib abuses. People wanted to kill him. They threatened to kill his wife and mother, too. He had to go in hiding. Teach kids hero courses, teach them hero skills, make them heroes-in-waiting.

TED was a few weeks ago, and I think the coolest thing to come out of it this time is the wwtelescope.. It’s a Microsoft project, and looks like Google Earth for the nighttime sky.. Nerdy, sure.. Launches in the Spring..

So yah, I was a huge astronomy nerd when I was growing up.. Many a night was spent sitting in the freezing Ohio nights, splitting binaries, which really wasn’t nearly as exciting as I thought it was going to be. So, yah, being able to explore the universe from the comfort of your computer seems pretty awesome in comparison.

I love personality tests… My MBTI type is ENFP or ENTP depending on how feely I’m doing that day (I’m right on the cusp of F and T).. So, when Shooey pointed me to a new personality test, I leapt at the chance and took it..

It’s the Enneagram Personality Type Indicator, and it sorts your personality based on 9 types..

Here’s my sorting:
10: Enthusiast
4: Peacemaker
2: Helper
1: Motivator
-1: Thinker
-2: Skeptic, Leader
-3: Artist
-9: Reformer

I’m not really sure what insight this gives into myself.. I mean, as an “Enthusiast” I’m apparently ruled by happiness, so I should spend time looking for things that make me happy. I suppose this is why, in college, my friends all called me “F&GD” which stood for “Fun & Games Dennis.”

Yah, that sounds good to me. More happy please.

More song charts..

[found at kottke]

Mike was interviewed today by NPR’s Robert Siegel on All Things Considered (if you’re here on the West Coast, you can still catch it at 5:30pm)… go Mike!

graph showing likelihood of me watching a tv program versus the overall quality of the tv program

Yes, I realize that this is a nerdy endeavor, but I looked today, and I’ve fallen to 7th the google rankings for a search for “dennis.” I’m now nestled in between Dennis, MA and Dennis, NJ. Ack!

Grrrrr. Dennis Kucinich has TWO of the top 10 entries. Wtf?!

Yes, I’m like a super nerd. I directly attribute my falling in the rankings to the fact that I’ve not been posting as much lately. Grr. Anyway, I’m gonna give myself a dennis link just for some good measure, maybe that’ll help.

Eeeep! I just noticed that my friend Matt has fallen to 2nd (to the whereismatt dude) — could that be a result of his recent domain switch? (He switched from photomatt.net to ma.tt last year)

Anyway.. ok, that’s enough nerd talk for today.

Just got back from an awesome fun weekend in Sarasota, Florida.. Lynn and Hao got married, and it was a magnificent time.. Flew out on Friday — sheesh, Florida is kind of further than I thought, it takes like the whole day to traverse the whole SFO-ATL-SRQ trip.. I left the house at like 6:30am and didn’t get to my hotel until around 9pm… 12 hours, door to door. Someone should really get working on that transporter-type machinery quickly.

I’ve never been to Sarasota before, and I can now see why the snowbirds all retire there. It’s gorgeous. Saturday was spent on Siesta beach. The sand at Siesta Key is.. awesome. Hong has a great pic of it.. Supposedly, it’s made up mainly of quartz (99% according to a Harvard Geologic study), so it’s super fine, and incredibly white — which means that it reflects most of the sun, making it cool to walk on. It’s pretty awesome, and with the consistency of flour, it feels like you’re walking around on a comfy mushy surface. If I were designing a beach, I’d seriously just load up on that stuff, it’s awesome.

Sunday, incidentally, was my birthday.. so it was actually kind of cool to be able to spend it with a bunch of my friends in a sunny locale. My friend Dusty owns a golf course in Sarasota, so AJ and I played 9 holes in the morning. The last round of golf I played was last February in Vegas, so yah.. I was a little rusty (not that I’m actually any good when not rusty), but it was still fun. I think I came pretty close to hitting a baby alligator on the 7th hole. He was sunbathing just to the left of the tee box, and since Dusty pointed it out right before I hit, I guess I was thinking about it, and… the ball decided to shank off the heel of the driver and into the pond… Good thing momma alligator didn’t see that. The rest of the day was spent basking in the hot Sarasota sun by the hotel pool with Audris, frolicking in the ocean, and throwing the ol’ pigskin around with Korby and Mcc.

The wedding itself was in the backyard of the Crowley mansion, which is situated right on the water. Halfway through the ceremony, I felt the temperature drop, so I was looking around for the rain to come, but it never did, so the weather cooperated fully. Lynn and Hao have spent the past few years in various places all around the world, so this wedding was one of the most global crowds that I’ve seen… I really wonder how many cumulative miles were traversed for the event, but people hailed from San Francisco, New York, Zurich, Holland, London, China, and Chicago, amongst others… Pretty cool. Though I had aspirations of taking a ton of awesome pictures throughout the whole event, the frequency of my picture taking seemed to vary inversely with the amount of alcohol I consumed, so, I don’t have many pics of the dancey-general-goodtimery that I had near the end of the wedding.

Lynn’s mom was in charge of the music, and she found this live band that was really, really good. I actually haven’t been to many weddings with a live band before, and I was impressed that they were able to play music that appealed to a wide cross section of ages. Lynn’s grandma had a ton of friends there that were super good at dancing, so it was awesome to see them cut the rug to the many swing songs that the band played. I mean, the band didn’t play any live d’nb or anything approaching that, but I do think they did a good job of keeping the energy up and fun. Good work, wedding band.

Anyway.. my pics are here, mcc’s pics are here (he took some great ones), hong’s are here and korby’s pics are available good as well, but he doesn’t like me linking to them cuz then his veil of google secrecy is blown. That said, his picture set is the foil to mine, since his picture taking frequency actually increases with the amount of alcohol consumed.

Good times.

meredith and steph drove up north to look for cows.

cow hunting from stephawu on Vimeo.

this is my first music supervision “credit,” woohoo! the track is “Big Sky Lullaby” by Wylie & The Wild West Show — yay music.