dennis yang dot com

Ok… this was kind of in the first of the three posts I made about my 30th birthday weekend, but I’m moving it into its own post.. hope this doesn’t mess with any of you out there in RSS-land…

In summary…

In the first 72 hours of my 30s:
Number of Bars Visited: 2
Number of Drinks Consumed: 16
Number of Budweisers Consumed: 15
Number of Hours Slept: 17
Number of Cars Wrecked: 2
Number of things Jason set on fire: 2 (1 car, 1 bbq)
Number of Calls To AAA: 6 (it was a fiasco getting them to come and get me, they thought I was *on* the bridge)
Number of Miles Driven In Car: 5
Number of Miles Ridden On Bike: 43
Number of CostCo Chickens Eaten: 1
Pairs of Pants Worn Forwards: 2
Pairs of Pants Worn Backwards: 1
Kris Kross Will Make You: Jump! Jump!
Number of Dudes Tackled At The Hip Hop Party: 3
Number of times “Big” was heard screaming in the background: 7
Number of people crammed into my house for the bbq: 68
Number of Candles Blown Out: 33 (3 on the first cake, 30 on the second)
Number of Birthday Wishes Made: 1 (ok, 2, but they were both for the same thing)

So yah.. thanks everyone for everything! You guys are the best!

Ok.. on the final stretch.. on the third day of my 30th birthday weekend, I decided to have a little bbq at my house… Since there were like 70 people who said they were coming on the evite, I had to do some furniture re-arrangement… I figured since it was a bbq, people could hang out in the main room and outside on the patio and it’d be all fine. Except for one thing.. weather.

We’ve had like two weeks of unseasonably gorgeous weather here in San Francisco, and when does it all break? Of course.. on the day of my birthday bbq… but, not to let the weather thwart my plans, I go right ahead and still plan on bbq’ing. Jason saves the day and brings a Kingsford sponsored tent for the patio (along with two packs of their most advanced mesquite charcoal, available at your neighborhood grocery store). So we’re all set. Awesome.

The bbq went off without a hitch.. everyone showed up, ate a ton of food, drank lots, and had a great time, and I’m so happy to have so many awesome friends who braved the yucky weather to celebrate my birthday.. You guys are the best! Although, I do realize that Bailey did steal most of the attention once people got here though, which is fine with me…

So yah.. that’s my birthday weekend… spent exactly the way that I wanted it to be, with marvelous friends and family.

After that crazy first 30th year day, any normal person would have just stayed in and relaxed the next morning, right? Well, I didn’t really realize that and I had made plans to go for a big bike ride with Dana Saturday morning.. After a few hours of sleep, I met up with Dana at the Presidio and we headed out..

We met up with her friend Matt and decided to ride up the Marin headlands and cross the Golden Gate Bridge. I feel chills as I return to where I’d spent four hours the day before waiting for the AAA tow truck to come and fetch my battered automobile. Needless to say, after my birthday (and since I’d ridden 20 miles the day before on my fixie) I was dead tired. I made it to the top of the headlands, but instead of going down the back to Rodeo beach, I just headed home cuz I was dead tired yo.

To get ready for the next day’s birthday bbq, Steph and I headed over to CostCo, magical land of super fantastic deals on a whole bunch of stuff that you (a) probably don’t really need and (b) you definitely don’t need 250 pounds of even if you really did need it. Standing in line ahead of us was this older couple with the following in their cart:

Three (3) 25 pound boxes of Apples
Two (2) 2 gallon tubs of Mayonnaise
Three (3) 5 pound packs of American Cheese Slices

Stephanie likes to play a game called “What’s their deal?” where you basically people watch, and try and figure out what they’re doing and stuff. I had no idea what these people were doing with that stuff in their cart. Gotta love CostCo.

Anyway… after devouring the $5 CostCo rotisserie chicken that we got for dinner (that thing is DA BOMB).. we headed over to Jablow and James’ house for their old school hip hop party..

Yaaa.. old school hip hop.. I went as one of the kids from Kris Kross, not exactly old school, but it’s old enough (and that makes me feel old, which is fitting on my 30th birthday weekend…). I learned that pants are really designed to be worn forwards. Trying to buckle a belt behind you is damn hard. Dipasquo dressed up as Vanilla Ice, complete with the haircut and everything.. haha.

Yo.

So.. I turned 30 on Friday.. wahoooo!! And what a crazy few days it’s been.. it’s been three days of non-stop fun and excitement…

Thursday night, I met a whole bunch of peoples at The Page for a drink, which has apparently become the neighborhood hangout on Thursday nights… So, since I happened to be there when the clock struck midnight, everyone was nice enough to greet the first minutes of my birthday with a raucous shot.. of something.. I don’t remember what it was that we drank. That said, I didn’t have a crazy night out since the next morning I was waking up at 5am to head up to Infineon Raceway (formerly known as Sears Point) for a track day…

So, I woke up at 5am, as planned and headed towards the Golden Gate Bridge to meet up with Jason, who was also going up to the track, at the first parking lot right across the Golden Gate Bridge. As I’m driving towards the bridge, I notice one of those tall cylindrical cones lying on its side in the MIDDLE of the freeway (Paul later informed me that it’s called a delineator) — there was a car in the lane next to me, so I couldn’t swerve to get out of the way, so… I went over it. *THUNK*

You know all of those lights on your dashboard? The ones that inform you when something’s wrong? Well, they all started coming on. Alternator light. Temperature light. Coolant light. Yah.. shit. Something was bad. Very bad.

It was a good thing that I was meeting Jason at the next exit right after the GGB, so I pulled off the exit (only narrowly missing the wall since, as I then found out, my power steering was out too).. We open up the hood and find that, somehow, I hit the cone just right and it managed to knock the serpentine belt off the engine — which powers the alternator, power steering, water pump.. lots of important stuff. Ouch.

So yah, my car was knocked out *before* we even made it up there… how sad is that? (But wait, there’s more) We decided to not let a little setback kill the day, and since Jason had his S2000, we parked my car at the vista point parking lot and continued up to Sears Point.

The morning was cold, and so was the track, so Jason started driving the laps around Sears Point gingerly. After about five laps, at about turn 4, he started to open it up a bit more.. and then… I look behind my shoulder (it’s a convertible) and see black smoke, and a huge FIREBALL. One of the spotter dudes that watches the track from up atop a tower shouts out “Fire! Fire!” so we pull over to the side and open up the hood, finding that the entire engine bay has caught fire. Do we have a fire extinguisher? No. Uh oh. The entire track is under yellow flag, so a few cars drive slowly by us, kind of looking at us with an “oh shit” look on their faces. It seemed like an eternity, but it must have only been a minute or two, but the fire trucks came by and finally put the fire out. Oops.

An oil gauge that Jason had installed to monitor the s2000’s oil pressure had most likely sprung a small leak, causing oil to be sprayed all over the engine bay. Once oil gets hot enough, apparently it catches fire. Crazy. Two cars out of commission, and I didn’t even get to drive (although, lucky for me, I’m getting a credit for the event, and I get to go back in July.. whoohoo!) Good thing I brought my camera.. since otherwise, I’d have nothing else to do up at the track besides watch everyone else drive around the track. So, I did get some good pictures.

We had to call AAA that day. Twice. On the way back from Sears Point, I had Jason’s tow truck drop me off at my car, where I waited for my tow truck. Woohoo.

Since I had some extra time now, since I was home early from the track, I went on a little bike ride with Jason (who was also home and not wanting to be sitting at home looking at his burnt car), we went on a nice bike ride around the city.. It was a gorgeous day, and I didn’t want to waste it. I met Mom, Dad, Andy, Meredith and Stephanie for dinner in South City (bacon-wrapped anything is good in my book) and then headed back to my parents’ house for cake. For my birthday, my parents got me the Digital Rebel that I’ve been taking pictures with for the past month — thanks mom and dad! Stephanie made me some awesome books by printing out the past two years of dennisyang.com — it was actually really cool to see all of this stuff that I’ve written in printed form.. What a great gift! Meredith got me an awesome book of the Golden Gate Bridge, which is completely ironic considering I spent like 3 hours sitting at the vista point waiting for the tow truck. And, Andy got me a new tennis racquet, since I’ve re-found the whole tennis thing lately. We broke out the ol’ VHS tapes and watched some home movies and I headed for a drink at Jade for the last few minutes of my birthday..

Whooo.. tired. So, to re-cap, the first 24 hours of my 30s wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, but.. exciting nonetheless..

So Andy thinks that radio buttons should turn off when you click on the selected one again… and after playing with this a bit, it’s kind of intuitive…

Pretty cool, eh? To get radio buttons to kind of work like checkboxes, here’s what I had to do..

First, since the onClick event always evaluates a radio button to “checked” when the radio button was unchecked or checked before you clicked (which is a little weird, but I guess it makes sense since any function you call with onClick happens *after* the click, and therefore .checked would evaluate to true) — anyway, I put an onFocus to set the “ischecked” variable, and then used that to determine whether or not to turn the radio button back off…

so, add:
onFocus="javascript:woop(this);" onClick="javascript:woot(this);"
to all the radio buttons… and then add the javascript functions:


function woop(radiobutton) {
ischecked = radiobutton.checked;
}

function woot(radiobutton) {
if (ischecked) {
radiobutton.checked = false;
ischecked = false;
} else {
ischecked = true;
}
}


W00t! Maybe there’s a simpler way to do this, and if there is, lemme know. Happy Geeky Friday.

Woohoo! Techdirt is on a Roll. Mmm.. rolls.

So Mike sent me this link to this article about how people with ADD are more inclined for careers in high tech because their ability to hyperfocus, amongst other things (I guess when you can’t focus very well, you learn to hyperfocus, maybe?) Anyway… I’ve never really been officially diagnosed with ADD or anytihng, but maybe I do exhibit a lot of the signs… I mean.. isn’t my desktop ADD-land?

Yah, that’s what my desktop usually looks like on a normal day.. usually about 5 or 6 active IM sessions, like at least 3 files I’m coding at a time, emails mid-sentence, fun fun… and.. there always needs to be music playing (it’s not on my desktop since I use XM these days).. I can’t concentrate in silence… I don’t really process the actual song that is playing, but I definitely need something on in the background…. People have commented that watching me work is bewildering because I’m constantly switching between windows..

So yah, I dunno, maybe I’m one of the 85 percent of adults that don’t know they have ADD, but if I am and (as explained by the article) if these traits help me be successful in my job, then why is it a “disorder” then?

But, part of me wonders if I’m a product of my environment.. working in tech definitely encourages the multi-tasking-ADD-like environment that I’ve become accustomed working in, no?

Yesterday morning Pius and I went down to Half Moon Bay to catch the big wave surfing competition.. it was a gorgeous day, 70 degrees, sunny, and we joined about 30,000 people on the cliffs trying to get a good glimpse of the action happening half a mile offshore.. good thing I had a 300mm lens.

Wahoo! so for alot of my friends’ 30th birthdays, it’s a big deal, so we’ve been going on a trip somewhere to celebrate and stuff.. Last year, Jo’s was in the Bahamas on a cruise, Korby’s was in Vancouver, Jablow’s was in Vegas.. fun fun fun.. So, since my birthday is coming up, i’m planning to hit up Austin for south by southwest. I was in Austin last year, but missed SXSW by a week, and it looks like mad fun.. 1,100 bands!!

In looking through the list.. Hmm.. most of these bands I’ve never ever heard of, but I guess that’s the point of SXSW.. I really want to see:

• The Avalanches
• Her Space Holiday
• Hey Willpower
• Morningwood
• Belle and Sebastian
• Mogwai
• Cat Power

Of course, Mongolian Candidate will be there.. so don’t miss their show, for sure. Uh, they’ll be playing at whichever hotel or house we’re staying at.

So, come on down to Austin and celebrate my birthday with me! And.. Let me know if there are any other bands on the list that you think I should see — 1,100 is a lot to look through!

Here’s some great links I’ve found about SXSW:

• The Unofficial SXSW Blog
• Great Forum Post about what to expect

Crap.. since I just decided yesterday to do this whole trip thing, I’m realizing now that most people have booked their accommodations like months ago. So, um, if you have a place for us to stay (as in, can we rent your house for the weekend), then let me know please…