dennis yang dot com

I haven’t done a link post in awhile.. it’s monday, and I feel like starting this up again… here we go…

• (techie) SF municipal WiFi is live
• (advice) evhead: Ten Rules for Web Startups
• (clocks) Pong Clock [thanks doug!]
• (tv) Lost for dummies
• (music) Q-Unit: Queen + 50-cent mashup

happy monday..

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

We had a bunch of people over the Yang family house for a good ol’ fashioned Thanksgiving day dinner with three turkeys and all of the fixin’s.. The initial plan was to do three different styles of turkey: deep fried, bbq’d, and rotisserie’d (on the Showtime rotisserie grill)…

The bbq was the first to get going — Jason works for Kingsford and brought a brand new weber, along with the latest in Kingsford charcoal technology.. The process is pretty neat; once you get the coals going, you push the coals to the side, and put a tray of water in the middle, underneath the bird. Then, with the lid on (and the mesquite chips added) the bbq turns into a smokey furnace for the next 5 hours… Mmmm..

The rotisserie turkey was the next on the list, but unfortunately, had to duck out of the race early on account of the fact that the turkey didn’t FIT inside the rotisserie. Ooops. Even after we attempted to hack off its wings, it still didn’t fit. Poor turkey. So, in the end, turkey #2 was roasted in the oven for awhile, and then finished up on the grill.. Kind of a hybrid turkey.. Andy also glazed it in some honey sauce of some sort, but it was really out of the race anyway…

The deep fried turkey was the main event… After seeing all of the news this week about the dangers of turkey fryers, we took extra precautions so that my parents didn’t return from their vacation (they’re in Japan for the week) to a burnt down house.. We thought having three fire extinguishers around was enough.. The turkey cooks in the oil at 350 degrees farenheight, so we all took turns watching the thermometer whilst the cooking oil was brought up making sure that it didn’t get about 450 (the temperature at which oil spontaneously combusts).. It was taking a long while for the oil to heat up.. maybe a little *too* long.. until, we noticed that we were reading celsius. Oh geez. well, thankfully we noticed long before there was any real danger..

The bbq turkey took about 5 hours to cook, the fried turkey.. 1 hour… and in the end, both were super tasty. The bbq had an awesome smokey mesquite taste to it, so I think that it was the winner.. You’d think that the bbq would dry out the turkey and stuff, but honestly, that turkey came out perfectly.

It’s two days after Thanksgiving now, and I’m still stuffed.. In addition to the three turkeys, we had a veritable cornucopia of food comprising of bacon wrapped dates, bacon wrapped scallops, tasty corn soup, some sort of fried meatballs brought by the designers, mashed potatoes of two varieties, sweet potatoes, three different green bean casseroles, homemade cranberry sauce, gravy, homemade stuffing, and at least seven different pies (pumpkin, pecan, sweet potato, mince, peach and apple).. and.. deep fried twinkies.

Yah, we have a few leftovers.

Ok.. so it’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything.. sorry codekitty! I’ve been really busy and this month has simply flown by…

Anyway, aside from the late nights coding the latest InfoAdvisor updates for Techdirt, November has been quite the crafty month… Shooey is the instigator I think, since she invited me to a craft day over at Willo’s house a few weeks ago. I was very ambitious and wanted to make new curtains for my room (since the designer-y blinds that it came with, while very hip and chic, do very little to darken the room)..

So.. first project of the month.. a curtain rod, after seeing the curtain rods in the P.barn catalog, they look easy enough, so I dropped down to Max’s studio to do some fabrication… It’s been a little while since I’ve welded anything, but it’s kind of like riding a bike, so the project didn’t take very long… the first time.. I’m pretty legendary for “measure once, cut twice”… and this time I didn’t disappoint.. I used the measurements from the wrong window to make the curtainrod. Ooops. I’m an idiot, yes. I wonder if it was my subconscious sabotaging the original project though — since this meant that I got to go back to Max’s and weld some more (more fun!).. The second curtain rod turned out even better than the first one.. wahoo…

Second project of the month… I made Natalie a warm fleece blanket for her birthday.. I was at the fabric store and came across this awesome US map and road trip fleece, and it was perfect for a gift for Natalie the adventurer.. Using the skills I had learned in 5th grade home economics (where I made a very nice pot holder), I fashioned the two pieces together into a plush blanket…

Since I was honing my newly re-learned sewing skills, Shooey invited me to help out with the furniture at the new club, Shine… Trip, Brian and the Sauce folks just bought the old Red Eye on Mission, and they needed a hand sewing covers for the furniture… So, I wandered down to Stitch, down the road, and joined in on the help…

Look how domestic I’ve been all month.. woohoo. My curtains still aren’t done yet though.. that’s next…

Oh, and Happy Yangsgiving to everyone!! Andy and I are throwing a big thanksgiving dinner at mom & dad’s house tomorrow… on the menu, THREE different styles of turkey… deep fried, bbq’ed, and rotisserie.. more to come soon, I promise…

Last night was La Dia de Los Muertos here in San Francisco… An estimated 15,000 people took part in the procession, which started at 7pm in the outer mission.. I joined up with Max, Nancy and Pang there. Pang’s friend Siouxsie is one of the organizers of the event, and one of the neat things is that a lot of it sounds relatively organic… I didn’t really see any promotional things about it, it just kind of gets known through word of mouth, including a lot of the bands and people that attend the events..

The procession was an assorted group of people, about half of which were dressed in some sort of skeleton-like or ghoulish costume.. This was very much the opposite of the festivities in the Castro a few nights before.. No hordes of stupid drunk people at all.. kind of nice. Lots of people were holding lit candles, giving the procession a kind of somber, yet celebratory feel to it. Nobody seemed to really know the route that we were supposed to take, but eventually we happened upon Garfield park in the outer mission, where Siouxsie and her crew had set up a bunch of altars..

But.. before going to see the altars, we took a little detour and walked through Balmy Ave, which was right there.. I’ve lived here for eight years now and I’ve heard about the murals in the Mission, but I’ve never seen them.. They’re sooo cool. I’m sure seeing them at night is a completely different experience, but being lit only by the streetlights (and the headlights of a passing SFPD car) was kind of cool too.. Jet (who I still have a box of beignet mix from NOLA for) has a mural on the avenue, so we got to see that..

Anyway.. after wandering on Balmy for a bit, we did make our way back to Garfield park.

It was a cool, but not cold evening in SF with clouds looming in the sky (the weatherman predicted rain, but was wrong, thankfully.. aj thinks that SF weathermen are slackers, but that’s a whole other story). There were numerous altars set up all over the park with all sorts of different themes. Wandering around in the dark looking for art amongst costumed folks listening to drums in the distance evoked comparisons to burningman-like feelings, so that was kind of nice.. There was an altar made entirely of rusted guns (obvious political statement), another where you could dress up in macabre costumes and lie in a coffin, and then this really cool one under a huge tree with suitcases full of paper cranes and other assorted things..

I took a whole bunch of pictures, so look at them here, but keep in mind that it’s really dark, and I don’t like using the flash.