dennis yang dot com

Yes, yes, Halloween night isn’t even until tonight, but since it’s a Monday and all, most festivities took place Saturday — sure, there’s still going to be the huge street party at the Castro tonight, but I’ll most likely skip it since it’s not all that..

This year I dressed up as Kato, Bruce Lee’s character from the Green Hornet.. I originally wanted to be a superhero called “Doorman” (get it? Doooooooormaaan! He’s a super hero! Armed with a velvet rope and all…) I visited the doorman supply store in New York City and found the perfect doorman uniform.. well, almost perfect.. the main problem was that it would cost me like $800 to get it.. Ouch. So, plan B was to make a doorman costume, and after making the costume, I looked in the mirror and realized that I started to look alot more like Kato, than a Doorman… so, Kato it is.. Maybe I’ll start on my doorman costume for next year, complete with half cape and all.

Anyway, the 2nd annual holla’ ween party went really, really well.. We decorated the social club liberally with cobwebs, spooky wall hangings and mummy wrappings, so the place looked great. I played the early set in the back room, and I was a bit rusty considering that I haven’t really spun out since.. last November — man, how quickly a year passes. I accidentally opened the set with a drum n’ bass record, but I was able to get out of it gracefully, and frankly when I began only Mel and Loan were there anyway, so they probably wouldn’t have minded if I messed up.. After a few records, everything started to feel familiar again, and my set actually went quite well — it’s so fun to play on a huge, loud sound system… By the end of my set, the room was filled with happy halloweeners. I recorded my set, so I’ll master it and post it here soon..

The party was super fun, and well attended.. Just about everyone who came was in costume even; San Francisco sure does love Halloween.. We had to shut down the door at around 1am, since it was getting way too crowded inside, and then we had our own little bit of mayhem.. But, all in a nights work of running a big party, I suppose.

Anyway, the pictures are here, take a look.. and send me links to any of your pictures, and I’ll add links to them here..

More pics:

• Meredith’s Pics
• Julia’s Pics

Happy Halloween!

It’s nearing Halloween here in San Francisco… and once again, I’m throwing a Halloween party… Last year’s party at the Tenderloft was a huge success and this year we’re throwing it at Kane’s new bar, the Social Club at 1751 Fulton.. I haven’t spun out since last year’s party. I can’t believe it’s been that long.. how quickly a year passes, yah?

So.. come on out this Saturday (in costume, of course).. see you then!!

Here are the deets:
Bfamily Records, Moxie, & Fu Mando present:
Holla’ween ’05
Saturday October 29, 2005
9:30pm-2am, $7
1751 Social Club (1751 Fulton at Masonic)

Featuring:
Qzen (Groundscore, Fistfight, Moxie)
Bryan James aka Animal Style (Moxie)
Charlotte the Baroness (Fistfight, Sister SF)
Alan Keller (Fu Mando)
DJ Sinned (Fu Mando)
Ryan Wilber (Bfamily)
Bfamily Soundsystem (Bfamily, Samurai Soundsystem) – special live PA!

As I mentioned before, I’m here in New York for the Blogon conference, which is just now wrapping up.. It’s been a great conference. We announced our new service here at the conference, Techdirt InfoAdvisor. InfoAdvisor is a managed information service for corporations; take a look at the site and if it looks appropriate for you, drop me a line. The service is being well received and we’ve made a lot of great connections here in New York for interested clients..

It’s been great building this service over the past few months — a small, focused team (er.. “team” means me and Costanza, basically) free of bureaucratic hurdles means the project moves forward much more quickly… most of my time is spent actually doing work, wow.. Some of the biggest challenges actually came from the fact that we don’t have anyone dedicated to supporting the development effort on the IS-side.. like, we had to set up our own server, SVN, Mantis, wikis for documentation, etc… And while we did get it all done eventually, it definitely took away from the initial development momentum.. And yes, while there are managed services that provide all of these services, we opted to just do a lot of it ourselves (since we could). Ok, enough geeking for now, back to work….

Oh yah.. check out the new Techdirt logo that Jamie whipped up for us… cool, eh?

So.. I’ve been in New York for a little over a week now, staying at Audris’ house and then Korby’s house (thanks Audris and Korby!)..

As expected, NYC is awesome… The first week I was here was defined by the nonstop torrent of rainstorms. I mostly stayed in Audris’ house; thankfully Audris’ house is huge so that was pretty ok with me.. It was seriously raining a ridiculous amount, I’d run across the street to get lunch or something, and come back to the apartment soaked to the bone. Yuck. We did go see an awesome play called “Sides” though, which I highly recommend.. Audris also took me to a lovely film, called “Three Extremes“. And by lovely, I actually mean, the grossest, most disgusting movies that I’ve seen in a long, long time. Uh, thanks Audris.

On Saturday, the sun came out finally, and since then it’s been absolutely gorgeous here… On the recommendation of Ben, Korby and I went to the DUMBO arts fair in Brooklyn.. I’ve never walked over the Brooklyn Bridge (and neither had Korby), and since it was a nice day out, we did.. Man, that bridge sure is awesome, I can’t believe they built it over a hundred years ago..

Korby had bought a nightstand from some Russian furniture store in Brighton Beach, so he somehow convinced me to go with him that day and carry it back to his apartment in Manhattan.. I mean, I’m not very hard to persuade for such a journey, he and I are legendary for pointless trips like circumnavigating the entire bay area on public transit and driving to alaska and back, and at least this one had a purpose.

So we took the subway (of course) to Coney Island. I’ve never been to Coney Island, and the only real thing I know about the place is that hot dog place, Nathan’s (yes, of course I had one). Ok, Coney Island was… super super creepy. It’s the end of summer and all, so none of the rides were operating, and the brisk, cold wind whipping through the fences and ferris wheel made an eery howling sound reminscent of some sort of 1973 b-grade horror film. Check out this movie I took of Coney Island.. creepy, right?

Anyway, since we were in the hood, we had some Russian food in Brighton Beach (which, incidentally, is also a fantastic place to buy fur coats, fur boots, fur hats, fur mittens and fur socks) and grabbed Korby’s brand new nightstand from the Russian furniture store. Since it’s Korby, we take the subway back to his house, which includes three transfers, 7 flights of stairs (plus 6 flights of stairs that we went up, and then back down, since the 4-5 doesn’t run at the station we were at). Oh what fun.

It’s been great seeing all of my ol’ Cornell and SF friends here in NY — man, there are alot of us back here, which is great… There’s so much to do here.. Eric and I went to some speakeasy in Hell’s Kitchen yesterday that was sooo cool — it’s just a non-descript door on a side street, and you have to ring a buzzer to get in and everything. Fun. Miss Kittin is playing at the Maritime tonight and Liz Phair is at Irving Place. Tomorrow Death Cab for Cutie is at Irving place, and Thursday I’m trying to decide between Demetri Martin (the comedian) and Mates of State… Decisions, decisions… Hmmm.. yes, yes, I like the New York.

I’m headed to New York City for two weeks… I’ll be attending BlogOn 2005 on the 17th and 18th, so I thought I’d head out early and hang out in New York for a bit… A ton of SF folks have slowly made their way out to NYC in the past few years, so it’ll be nice to see everyone again..

After a few weeks of gorgeous weather here in San Francisco, I’m not sure what I think about the New York forecast… Hmm.. rain? Like, water falling from the sky? I think I vaguely remember what that is…

Upcoming.org is awesome… I’ve been using it for awhile now, and I keep track all of my events there (as well as find out about cool upcoming events)…

They’ve just been acquired by Yahoo! — Congrats to the upcoming.org folks!

That’s two of my favorite sites (Flickr was the other one) that Yahoo! has acquired this year… Yahoo!

So.. I found this amusing… tomorrow night, there’s a talk being given by three Dysons — Freeman Dyson, Esther Dyson and George Dyson are speaking at an event hosted by the Long Now foundation at Fort Mason (Long Now brings awesome speakers.. the last one was Jared Diamond).. It’s sold out, and should be a fantastic talk, if you can make it… Anyway, there’s a Boing Boing post about it today, but I guess at some point, somehow the picture of the 3 Dyson’s got messed up..

The Boing Boing post is now corrected… but Bloglines feed for Boing Boing currently shows this amusing picture — which is supposedly the three of them.. hee hee.. (caveat, I’m sure that Bloglines will update with the corrected picture anytime now…)

It’s been a crazy month.. The Indians made a valiant effort for a playoff berth, but alas, getting swept by the White Sox in the last pivotal games of the season didn’t help out the situation at all. Ack.. it’s so sad to see them miss the playoffs, they had a fantastic amount of momentum these past few weeks, that fizzled just shy of the wild card spot. Grr.

Anyway, the torrent of amazing live shows continues this week… M83 played at Mezzanine on Thursday.. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from a live show. After seeing Royksopp fiddling with computers for an entire gig, I was pleasantly suprised to see that M83 actually plays live instruments.. The show was barely attended, I guess the promoters didn’t really get the word out enough.. That said, it was really cool to see M83 with a small, mellow crowd, since their music isn’t really that dancey anyway..

Saturday started off with Sigur Ros in Oakland.. Again, I had no idea what to expect, since Sigur Ros is really electronic-y sounding and a bit eccentric (they made up their own language for a lot of their songs.. and the other ones are in Icelandic, which sounds made up anyway). Sigur Ros was the first “rock” show that I’ve been to where everyone sat quietly in their seats. Kottke had a similar experience, but yah — they did a song where there was 30 seconds of silence in the middle, and it was dead quiet.. It was an amazing show, although admittedly I was quite relaxed, and I’m not sure at what degree of consciousness I was in throughout the show (ie.. I think I might have dozed off). But, as Andy rightly explained, Sigur Ros has some wonderfully relaxing tunes, which are quite appropriate as falling asleep music, so… if you’re conditioned to hear Sigur Ros before you fall alseep….. Pavolvian instincts kick in. But, yah.. Sigur Ros is awesome — I just got their new Album, Takk, and it’s solid..

After Sigur Ros, we hightailed it back across the bridge to Mezzanine for the Z-Trip show.. Z-Trip is on the complete opposite end of the energy spectrum of Sigur Ros.. He was just here back in August, but the last show was at the Regency, which is a cavernous ballroom.. Mezzanine is a smaller club, so the overall vibe was much better than the last show. We got there early enough to see Goldenchyld, Dj Zeph open, and they both rocked as well. Z-Trip is soooo good, I can’t recommend him enough — his show at DNA lounge two years ago, and last night’s show rank as two of the best shows that I have ever been to ever… He’s definitely one of the most talented turntablists out there, and to this tour, he’s added dvd decks and live drumming to his set. If anyone has a live recording of last night’s show.. please let me know… And, if you want to check out some of Z-Trip’s stuff, download them here (this link is from Z-Trip’s site, so it’s cool.. he encourages the sharing of his music.. which is quite enlightened of him, imho).

This week brings the American Express Golf Championships to Harding Park — I’ve got tickets all week, so I’m looking forward to seeing Tiger and Phil tear up the local course..