dennis yang dot com

So AJ is looking for a cheap car, and i’ve been helping him look… man, i love shopping for cars (and if you have a great car for less than a thousand bucks, let me know… come on.. AJ needs a nice car).. anyway, in the search, we came across this… man… i suppose i shouldn’t make fun.. i do have a disco ball limo afterall (which happens to be the raddest thing in the world tho)..

1988 HONDA CIVIC, converted to mini pick up truck, custom blue flame job, 150k mi, 5 spd, ac, well maint, runs perfect, $1,000 obo, 510-658-7161

i love egg! but.. the i love egg song is the best.

so.. i was inspired by this story over at autoweek about toyota’s desire to “shake things up” with design (via autoblog)… they have this picture of the toyota cs&s concept car.. which is totally rad..

i’ve always dug the whole roadster with the chopped windshield.. something about that arrangement that makes it look totally rad.. reminded me a lot of two of my all-time favorite cars, the italdesign formula 4 — toyota should take a look at that car and adopt its back seat — see how the back seat has its own little cockpit? so cool! the other cool thing about the formula 4 was that it had easily a removeable body so it had a few iterations, depending on your mood…

And… romeo’s car in the movie with leo dicaprio in it.. remember that car? it was the yellow convertible.. so rad..

anyway.. i hope toyota builds the cs&s, i’d consider it..

kudos to the kind folks over at news.com… they’re now officially supporting trackback and pingback for links to the news.com stories… sweet!

update

and now.. the thunderdome has trackbacked to me for trackbacking to news.com.. fun fun fun.

it’s just like a turducken!

ooo.. got something to confess? method has just the site for you.. if only lady macbeth had this…

man.. so cool… “Nanotech golf ball corrects its own flight“

hmm.. nifty.. after playing bandon.. maybe we should head over to afghanistan.. looks like they’ve got a golf course there now.

fore!

so we’re having a little change drive here at work to try and raise money for the local food bank… a bunch of people decided it would be a good idea if vin ate 100 mcnuggets — all in, people pledged a total of about $20 per nugget..

he made it to 53… whoohoo! good job vin! he raised over $1,060 for the food bank… and now he never will tough another nugget again. yum.

so.. here at cnet, we started a LIVE broadcast every day from 11am-12pm PST. i’ve got it on now.. today’s show was about digital music and stuff. i really want us to do a podcast, but nobody seems to want to do one. hmmm..

in any case, we featured a great deal on a MuVo today.. $89.. woot!!

anyway.. check out dan in this vidcap I took of the show today.. i hope ditto is proud of her pop.

ahh.. it’s good ol’ peanut butter jelly time! boingboing has a wonderful little list of earworms — those little web-u-licious jingles + flash animations that are so catchy…

so fun!

ok.. so maybe my brain is a little burnt today, but i found out that it’s possible to have a YIM conversation with yourself. neat. i think.

so this weekend brad, clint and i headed up to oregon to play a little golf at bandon dunes.. bandon dunes is way up in the southwest corner of oregon, so we decided to drive (since i love road trips).

according to Y! maps, the trip should take 7 hours, 8 minutes — not bad — but, according to mapquest, the trip should take 8 hours, 53 minutes. Odd. The difference is that Y! has us taking the 101 the whole way (463 miles), while mapquest takes us on the 5 (533.21 miles)… here’s the weird part.. Y! wants us to drive an average of 66 mph — whereas mapquest has us travelling 533.21 iles at an average speed of around 59 mph.. an *average* of 66 mph? the whole way on the 101?? sure, sounds reasonable enough, until you factor in a) traffic (ok.. that’s not fair) b) we’re driving in the dark (ok.. that’s not fair either) c) crazy winding roads on the side of the ocean (ok.. that’s fair). in any case.. the drive up there took about 11 hours (ack).. and then on the way back instead of driving the 5 back, we opted for the 101 again since we wanted to see the pretty ocean (which, incidentally is much prettier during the daytime than in the dead of a moonless night).

Enough driving talk… on to the golf. we played 2 and 7/18ths courses this weekend. Saturday morning, we played Bandon Dunes — magnificent course, incredibly difficult, especially the greens, which were SUPER fast. I putted right off the green many, many frustrating times (in one case, the ball rolled off the green into a bunker).

just as we finished and walked into the pro shop, someone called and cancelled their tee time at bandon trails.. bandon trails is the new course they’re building up there and isn’t even done yet. they had 7 holes open for preview play… so we jumped on the opportunity. AND we even got a free hat!!! w00t! bandon trails was pretty awesome too — most of the holes seemed unreal — they’re really trying to not change the landscape too much — it felt like we were just hiking in the woods.

sunday we played pacific dunes, which was my favorite of the three… pacific runs along the ocean for many of the holes, and was much more scenic than the other two, though tough as well…

so.. this weekend was my first time playing with a caddie.. i must say, it’s pretty cool to have a bunch of people walking around with you as you play golf. granted, you pay for it and stuff, but it’s just neat having the entourage with you on the course. very very very cool, actually. i could get used to it.

ok.. well, take a look at the pics and see for yourself why i <heart> oregon.

ok, so i just noticed today that all of these signs appeared all over the city:

now… is this sign really necessary? i’m all for documenting how things are supposed to work, but i honestly think that the whole “walk/don’t walk” sign thing is fairly self explanatory, no? i mean, if i were the designer of the “walk/don’t walk” sign, i’d be pretty annoyed that someone found it necessary to make an instructional sign for it. yah, they recently added a countdown timer to the whole process, but am i putting too much faith in my fellow person when i venture to say that most everyone was able to quickly figure out what the countdown timer meant?

hmmm.. and actually, looking at the sign, the explanation of the number is “TIME REMAINING TO FINISH CROSSING” — TIME? what kind of time? seconds? minutes? parsecs? ok.. maybe i’m being super nit-picky now, but *they* put the sign there in the first place.

argh.

of course, this whole rant spawned a whole different debate about what should actually happen when the count reaches zero. currently, when the count reaches zero, the sign changes to “don’t walk” and then the light turns red. jen thinks we should get a 3 second grace period (ok.. in context, i think she actually said that if these were in the east coast, they would need a 3 second grace period, since they’re crazy). i disagreed — i really like the fact that when it says you have 3 seconds left, you have 3 seconds left. at crosswalks when you need a bit more time to decide, it’s nice cuz they actually start the countdown much earlier. i’m not one of those people who sets their watch 5 minutes ahead. it’s set as close to the “real time” as i possibly can set it.

then again.. maybe that’s why i’m always late to things.

wahoo! i’m headed to oregon for the weekend to go play bandon dunes and pacfic dunes, both in the top 10 of america’s greatest public golf courses.. whooppeee. this week has been crazy busy, but i guess busy is good..

i’ve finally imported most of my cd library into my itunes on my new laptop.. and my listening queue is now visible at audioscrobbler — i’ll incorporate that data directly into this site soon (as well as my netflix queue), but i suppose i have some golfing to attend to first.

a few weeks back, matt, the main developer of wordpress started at cnet… he’s inspired me to flip this MT installation over to wordpress, so that will be added to my personal work queue (along with comment flagging for techdirt).. as if i wasn’t already busy enough with work, golf, halo2 (on my brand new xbox.. whoohooo!), and trying to maintain some semblance of a social life.

in other news, andy and i ordered a tur duc hen for thanksgiving dinner.. we’ll be celebrating thanksgiving down in the HB with the family, and everyone is invited.. so if you’re around the bay area for thanksgiving, you’re invited. i mean, if hanging out with yangs all day isn’t enough incentive… can i entice you with a turkey.. stuffed with a duck… stuffed with a hen??? i’m tres excited about the turducken — especially after missing out on the turkey soda yesterday — grrrrr… if anyone got a pack of that soda and wants to give it to me… um.. yah, please do.

ok, that’s it.

oh yah.. i finally posted my halloween 2004 pics.

Whooohooooo! I just ordered my strongbad DVDs.. they’re on their way. very exciting. I’ve been doing my part this week in supporting the online retailing industry. My new XBOX just arrived, with a bunch of games — although Halo 2 wasn’t in the shipment. GRR. The noise you hear in the background is Dennis’ social life fading into non-existence.. (or, it could be the INFERNAL jackhammering going on right outside my office.. ALL DAY LONG)

taken with the cameraphone, with the binoculars for zoom…