dennis yang dot com

We had dinner at Great China on Saturday before Hersh’s housewarming. Great China is hands-down my favorite Chinese restaurant in the bay area, and basically every time we go, we order pretty much the same thing.. Double skin salad, Peking duck, and Crab with egg… Mmmmmm.

Here’s a video of what it felt like to be the lazy susan at our table:

great china dinner from merpeck on Vimeo.

Why is it called a lazy susan? I mean, are Susans statistically inclined to be more lazy than other individuals? I mean, Shel Silverstein had a fantastic poem called “Lazy Jane” that went like this…

Lazy
lazy
lazy
lazy
lazy
lazy
Jane,
she
wants
a
drink
of
water
so
she
waits
and
waits
and
waits
and
waits
and
waits
for
it
to
rain.

Why’d susan get singled out?

Hmm.. “Lazy Jane” seems like a good band name…. I’ve added it to my list.

So I’m headed to New York for a little east coast tour the first week of February, for a week, for Meredith’s birthday and to attend the O’reilly Money:Tech conference..

That Tuesday, is Super Tuesday, so I was trying to figure out how to register for an absentee ballot, cuz I really wanna get my vote in. Turns out, that you can vote early just by going to City Hall. Sweet! That’s frikkin cool. I mean, it’s super easy for me since City Hall is like 3 blocks away from my house, but yah, I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to get my vote in, which would ruin a perfect voting track record.. Since turning 18, I haven’t missed a general or primary election. I’m a good little citizen, I guess..

I came super close to missing an election in college — I had a prelim (fancy Cornell word for “exam”) on voting day, and I didn’t get out of my prelim until around 7:45pm. I sprinted down to Noyes center on West Campus, getting there at like 8:03pm, just as they were closing up the polls. I pleaded with the poll worker to let me get my vote in late, which she did… I’m not sure what that says about the strictness of our polls, but at least she only let me vote once..

Anyway, don’t forget to vote!

My computer is really pissing me off this week. Maybe it’s because I’ve been burning the midnight oil on a super awesome new project for work, but I feel like all things computer-y are annoying me. My brand new laptop is being bitch, even after “upgrading” from Vista to XP (which, by the way, is NOT a trivial operation). And, to top it off, my wifi card is dying and ThinkPad support is NOT being my friend on that. Dammit, I should have just gotten the MacBook when I had the chance, I’m being punished for being PC guy. Not that I want to be Justin Long… I mean seriously? Those are the choices we have? PC Guy or Justin Long? Hmm. I digress.

Firefox is on my poo-list for today. Why? Well, first, for some reason, today it was being an poohole and crashing all the time, and had to be fixed with the Flashblock extension. The web kind of is the suck without flash, imho. I like all of the little distracting little things that decorate the web all over the place. Although, it’s scary to see how many people use Flash for simple things like, um, a header.

But no, that’s not why I’m pissed off. It’s because of this:

Yes, it’s the Firefox password rememberer. It’s a fantastic feature, and I really like to not have to remember my passwords, but I think that the UI flow is all wrong. (And, thanks to my Windows XP upgrade, I’ve had to re-train Firefox to re-remember all of my passwords)..

Anyway, here’s what usually happens when I go to a site now:

1. I enter my username/password.
2. Firefox asks if I want to remember that
3. I say.. Yes! (Thanks Firefox! You’re so nice.)
4. It’s the wrong password. Crap.

I mean… shouldn’t it ask if I want to remember the password AFTER I am successfully logged in? C’mon.. that would make a lot more sense. Sheeza.

Yes, I could just turn it off, but that’s the easy way out.

With all of the hubbub about the so-called “mortgage crisis,” I guess someone wanted to write a story about people who weren’t screwed by their mortgages.. So, my friend, former boss, and now real estate broker Jessica forwarded my info to a reporter who was doing an article about people that did ok with their ARMs…

Dennis Yang, vice president for a corporate intelligence firm, has a similar story. “I didn’t need to pay for the security of a 30-year mortgage,” he says. “Why pay for knowing what your payment will be in 30 years when you know you’re not going to be there?” Yet, when he bought his Hayes Valley condo in 2004, this wasn’t the first advice he received. “I approached my boss for advice, and he told me I should always get a 30-year fixed no matter what.” Instead, Yang chose an ARM that would allow him to invest more money in stocks. “I didn’t want all of my savings to be in my home,” he explains. “This allowed me to be more balanced in my investments.”

Amassing the knowledge about house buying and mortgages is a whole lot of information to accumulate, and then once you’re done, you pretty much never need to know about that stuff anymore (until you buy another, I guess).. But yah, I feel like they make mortgages over-confusing, and they should just present them in clear terms, without ALL of the numbers.. Like, the way that I felt about the ARM, was that I pretty much didn’t see myself keeping my house for longer than 7 years, so I could deal with 2 years of variability.. That said, back when I bought, I had no idea that rents would come up so much in SF, so now, had I gotten the 30 year, renting my house out would be an interesting option — that said, I think renting a place with an ARM seems like a risky proposition.

[Thanks Ashley for forwarding me the article... Google news hadn't found it yet.]

LQTM, hank.

So, last night, I saw Ingrid Michaelson play a show at Slim’s… She originally was playing at Cafe du Nord, which would have been awesome since it’s such a small venue, but apparently her tickets sold out so quickly that they upgraded her to Slim’s — last night was apparently the biggest show that she’s played to date. Anyway, her show was awesome.. her personality shines throughout the whole show, as she intertwines funny stories with her sweet, sometimes melancholy songs. Excited to visit San Francisco, since she wanted to see the Full House house, she was disappointed when she only ended up visiting the Painted Ladies, which were the houses shown in the opening credits (so close! only 1.1 miles away!)…

She played only 1 encore song — I absolutely LOVE short encores. I find it kind of annoying when bands leave their best songs out of their set, and then play essentially a second set for their encore. Ingrid did a delicately sweet rendition of “Can’t Help Falling In Love” as her encore.. so good.

Anyway… if you haven’t seen it, here’s her video for “The Way I Am.” Good stuffs.

spinning from merpeck on Vimeo.

Marcy planned a super awesome surprise for me last night.. She took me to Concrete Frequency: Songs of the City at the Walt Disney Music Hall.. It was an amazing lineup with 14 musicians, each of which sang two songs. The songs were supposed be around the theme “Songs of the City,” and each artist was encouraged to talk a little bit about each song. Nobody had a full band — most just had a guitar or piano as accompaniment, and when they weren’t performing, everyone was just sitting around the stage on a bunch of sofas.

It was a really awesome show — my favorites were Sondre Leche, Money Mark, Marc Bianchi, and Zooey Deschanel…

Before the show, I was berated for taking a picture of the stage, but alas, someone was able to snag a recording of Zooey’s song and posted it to YouTube.

hooray for the internets!

Zooey is supposedly working on an album with M. Ward, that should launch sometime this year… In the meantime, here’s a few songs from seeqpod:

Anyway.. thanks Marcy for a super super night. xoxo.

Happy New Year! Ok, this is becoming somewhat of a tradition — I did it for 2005 and 2006.. Here’s a little list of the cities that I’ve spent at least one night in… This year had my Thailand trip, so that bumped up my city count a bit…

As per the previous lists, this is in somewhat chronological order of the first stay and *s indicate multiple stays…

West Hollywood, CA
San Francisco, CA*
Las Vegas, NV
Truckee, CA
New York, NY*
Ithaca, NY
South Lake Tahoe, CA
North Hollywood, CA*
Bangkok, Thailand*
On an Overnight Train, Thailand
Krabi, Thailand
Ko Phi Phi, Thailand
Phuket, Thailand
Pigeon Point, CA
Hillsborough, CA*
Princeville, HI
San Diego, CA

Wooo.. that’s a nice little list… and it’s awesome to go back through the year and remember everywhere I’ve been… and shudder at just how quickly it all flew by.

Happy trails, everyone.