dennis yang dot com

so.. it looks like us wax slingers will be SOL by 2009… the petroleum byproducts needed to make vinyl will no longer be produced by 2009… guess i’ll have to step up my goal to convert all my vinyl to mp3…

as matty so eloquently put it… “yes, i’ll go to prom with you“.

neat… it found my mySimon-ness… easy.. but cornell sailing? i’m impressed.

look! it’s ditto! apparently, she ate something bad that dan fed her, and she fell asleep for a long time. poor ditto. bad dan!!

so… my phone has been acting very strangely ever since i’ve gotten back from the cruise in miami (maybe it’s seasick).. so i called “611″ to try and get the problem fixed…

so, they have this whole automated voice recognition thing that i’m not sure is actually THAT much better than the old fashioned “push 1″ menus.. or hell.. i just want to talk to a real person…

automated voice: “please describe your problem”
me: “my text messaging doesn’t work”
voice: “ok, are you having a billing issue?”
me: “no”
voice: “ok, main menu, please describe your problem”
me: “technical support.” (after listening to the choices of what i can actually say)
voice: “ok, technical support. are you having a problem with making a call? or something else?”
me: “something else.” (hmm.. it’s texting, so it’s not really making a call, right?)
voice: “ok, something else. are you having a problem with email? or entertainment features?”
me: (ok, i’m confused at this point, so i just say nothing.)
voice: “ok, main menu.”

AAARGH!

So.. I finally get a real live person to talk to, and they have no idea what’s wrong with my phone. At one point, the nice lady asked me “Sir, do you know how to send a text message?”. Grrrr.

Ok, so I’ve just been put on hold by the nice customer service lady and now she’s telling me that I have to go to the Cingular store to try and figure out what’s wrong with my phone. That’s fun.

man.. so masnick just showed me a totally kickass timewaster game, Geosense.. It’s an online world geography game - yes, it sounds totally nerdy, but it’s actually quite addictive… and educational! it’s much, much harder than you think..

well… a few months back, matt mullenweg joined cnet — he’s one of the main developers working on wordpress.. anyway, i’ve decided to move dennisyang.com from movable type to wordpress.. it was pretty straightforward to do.. i helped ditto move her blog from blogger to wordpress yesterday, but supposedly the ISP accidentally wiped the mysql db or something.. oops.. ditto will be very mad.

anyway.. props to photomatt for putting together a great blogging system… from what i can see so far, it’s really good..

so.. as many of you know, i was on WWTBAM a few years ago and missed the question.. “What type of animal is a snook?”.. anyway.. since i do love the trivia, i’ve signed up to one of their AOL Instant Messenger “lifelines” and I get regular IMs from them asking me whenever a contestant needs help.. it’s a pretty neat lifeline, imho, and I would hope it’s a good one, since usually googling gets you the answer within a few seconds..

which reminds me, I still think someone should create an internet enabled trivia show — or maybe jeopardy should have an “internet enabled” week, kind of like “college week”)..

anyway, back to my point.. just now I was just IM’d this from the “MillionaireIM”

MillionaireIM: Hi! A contestant is in the hot seat and needs your help.

“Blog,” Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2004, is an abbreviation of what term?

A: Tablog
B: Joblog
C: Weblog
D: Fiblog

Ha!! blogs have made it big time if they’re on WWTBAM!! whoohoo! and this knowledge was only worth $300!!! Man, only worth $300? Blogs must be super mainstream now!!

I think my $300 question was:

Which one of these insects is a close relative of the grasshopper?
A. Butterfly
B. Housefly
C. Cricket
D. Ladybug

or something like that…

oh yah.. and if you didn’t know, a “snook” is a fish.

so i found this awesome movie producer software, muvee.. it basically automatically produces a movie with any video clips and images you have — setting it to the music of your choice. sooo cool!! it supposedly picks out the “important bits” from the footage that you’ve given it…

it seems to do a pretty good job — it looks like it takes hours of work to make this video, but it only took about 10 minutes.

yang in asia 2004 video

so we’re back from our three week trip to asia, and more pics posted.. exhausted and jetlagged, but it was good to be home. we returned to san francisco, where it has been raining nonstop for the past few weeks (which means there’s more snow in tahoe than they’ve seein in 100 years)..

hong kong pics
china pics

some highlights:

hong kong skyline, at night:

sunrise over beijing:

shanghai, at the magic hour:

sunset over hangzhou:

and… there’s a movie in the making.. i just ordered this really cool software called muvee — they’re “authorizing my order” right now, whatever that means, but it’s really frikkin’ cool..

in the meantime, check out the movie of the greatwall andy made..