dennis yang dot com

I’ve been watching “When We Left Earth” on the Discovery channel, and been having nostalgic thoughts to my youth when I really wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. I think at this point, the only way I’m getting up into space is if I follow Dennis Tito’s lead as a space tourist… Not a bad goal, I guess..

Anyway, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been sending back some fantastic pictures of our own planet..

Inspiring.

So, last night we were watching a recorded program (So You Think You Can Dance FTW!) on my Tivo when suddenly, an emergency broadcast message comes on… I go to fast forward through it, but the Tivo gives me the “BONG” noise..

WTF? Why can’t I fast forward through this emergency broadcast message… I mean, this isn’t even timely anymore, since this was recorded like an hour before…

Or.. wait.. Could it be? The Tivo is actually playing a *realtime* emergency broadcast message whilst I’m watching a time-shifted program?

And indeed, it was… apparently, even if you’re watching a recorded program, when there’s an emergency broadcast message, Tivo will interrupt your watching… It automatically pauses the program that you’re watching and shows you the emergency broadcast message.

Pretty cool.. The only thing that I’d suggest to Tivo would be to somehow let us know that it was indeed doing so..

Maybe something like an announcement a la “We interrupt this recorded program… this is not a test….”

Ever wonder how “people find the time” to create things like Wikipedia? Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk a few weeks ago about the so-called “cognitive surplus” that is finally being tapped into with the many changes in interactive media that we’re seeing in recent years…

Definitely worth 10 minutes of your time to watch.. and then, go blog or twitter about it or something. Here’s the Techdirt angle on the subject…

I’d add “cut watermelon” to the magic quadrant though.. cuz that’s my fav.

Following last week’s post about milkshakes, here’s this week’s musical geekdom (click to enlarge):

The person that made this map also did some amusing additional analysis that you should definitely check out…

I like twitter. That said, I don’t have it sending updates to my phone, just to IM, so when I’m away from my computer (which, admittedly, isn’t THAT often), I don’t get twitter updates (which is fine for the most part). I used to dodgeball, but now that I twitter, I find that dodgeballing doesn’t really make that much sense anymore.. (although according to Willo, she and her friends still are hardcore dodgeballers)

Even Mike, who was originally a skeptic, is now a convert.

I thought that this video kind of explains the twitter allure.

My fav derivative twitter application? Tweetscan. With it, you can get kind of a neat view of the tweetworld — right now, I’d say that sxsw is a good term to be watching… (I’m looking forward to a whole week of empty bars and parking spaces in the mission, ftw!)

So yah. You can Twitter if you want. I like it.

Also of note from this year’s TED.. Philip Zimbardo (famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment) gave a really interesting talk about the “Lucifer Effect,” or, how good people turn evil.. Zimbardo, studied what happened at Abu Ghraib, and explained what factors could lead seemingly good people down a path of evil…

From the boingboing post:

What can be done about this? Zimbardo offers heroism as the “antidote to evil.” Teach kids to be ready to act heroically when the see evil. We need to give them real role models. Comic book superheroes are bad models, because they have super powers. A hero is the soldier who reported the Abu Ghraib abuses. People wanted to kill him. They threatened to kill his wife and mother, too. He had to go in hiding. Teach kids hero courses, teach them hero skills, make them heroes-in-waiting.

TED was a few weeks ago, and I think the coolest thing to come out of it this time is the wwtelescope.. It’s a Microsoft project, and looks like Google Earth for the nighttime sky.. Nerdy, sure.. Launches in the Spring..

So yah, I was a huge astronomy nerd when I was growing up.. Many a night was spent sitting in the freezing Ohio nights, splitting binaries, which really wasn’t nearly as exciting as I thought it was going to be. So, yah, being able to explore the universe from the comfort of your computer seems pretty awesome in comparison.

I love personality tests… My MBTI type is ENFP or ENTP depending on how feely I’m doing that day (I’m right on the cusp of F and T).. So, when Shooey pointed me to a new personality test, I leapt at the chance and took it..

It’s the Enneagram Personality Type Indicator, and it sorts your personality based on 9 types..

Here’s my sorting:
10: Enthusiast
4: Peacemaker
2: Helper
1: Motivator
-1: Thinker
-2: Skeptic, Leader
-3: Artist
-9: Reformer

I’m not really sure what insight this gives into myself.. I mean, as an “Enthusiast” I’m apparently ruled by happiness, so I should spend time looking for things that make me happy. I suppose this is why, in college, my friends all called me “F&GD” which stood for “Fun & Games Dennis.”

Yah, that sounds good to me. More happy please.

More song charts..

[found at kottke]

graph showing likelihood of me watching a tv program versus the overall quality of the tv program

Yes, I realize that this is a nerdy endeavor, but I looked today, and I’ve fallen to 7th the google rankings for a search for “dennis.” I’m now nestled in between Dennis, MA and Dennis, NJ. Ack!

Grrrrr. Dennis Kucinich has TWO of the top 10 entries. Wtf?!

Yes, I’m like a super nerd. I directly attribute my falling in the rankings to the fact that I’ve not been posting as much lately. Grr. Anyway, I’m gonna give myself a dennis link just for some good measure, maybe that’ll help.

Eeeep! I just noticed that my friend Matt has fallen to 2nd (to the whereismatt dude) — could that be a result of his recent domain switch? (He switched from photomatt.net to ma.tt last year)

Anyway.. ok, that’s enough nerd talk for today.

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.]

Wow… it really is like the week of super nerd-dom or something… Google announced the launch of their Google Charts API today, which is really kind of cool. You can make simple charts by simply passing a bunch of variables in the query string.

This reminds me of my favorite Venn diagram ever:

Hehe..

Anyway.. although the API is very straightforward, its not *that* easy to whip up a Venn diagram of your own… So, because I heart Venn diagrams, I’ve created a handy Venn diagram creator for your convenience.

C’mon.. make me some witty Venn diagrams please.

Like, wow, this is super geeky. Like super geeky. Like, wow.

[Thanks Mike.]

Woohoo!

So, my buddy Brian has created this awesome podcasting solution (that anyone who is audio or video podcasting should definitely check out…)

Anyway, I’m giving it a try for my holiday mix…. This way, you don’t have to download all of the tracks, and you can listen right through your browser! Castfire rocks.. I’m gonna start making more shows, methinks.

Thanks Brian!!

Enjoy!!

So, I found story today about teleportation.. seems like at the quantum level, scientists have been able to teleport things around. Pretty frikkin’ awesome. I sent it to Marcy, who then brought up time travel… which then made me think of this movie about the tenth dimension that mcc showed me like a few years ago..

Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Man.. this video is awesome… it makes my brain hurt a lil’ bit, but it’s super cool to think about this stuff… Yay geeky stuff.

Ok, this is a fitting close to this post.. a geeky joke, courtesy of our favorite punster, Audris:

2 atoms are rushing down the street and they crash into each other
atom 1 goes Are you alright?!
atom 2 goes, yeah, but i think i dropped an electron
atom 1 goes For realz???
and atom 2 goes yeah, i’m POSITIVE!

Sweet. Tonight was the lunar eclipse. So frikkin’ cool. It was a little foggy, and it took me a little while to figure out how to really take pics of the moon properly… But, about 5 minutes before it hit total, the entire sky cleared up.. and I was able to get a few decent shots of the moon as it got eclipsed by the earth.. I started out with a large aperture, but then figured out that it was a lot better at f/8.0, and a pretty fast shutter, like around 1/30..

I put together a little montage of my best shots, but it’s not at good as this one.. But, for my first lunar eclipse shoot, I think it’s pretty decent…

All the pics are here.

Ok, I guess I should get to sleep now.