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Well, I’m back in SF now from my brief East coast tour… I was out there for AJ’s 30th birthday party in Philly, so Happy Birthday AJ!! 1976 rocks!

A bunch of us descended upon Philadelphia for the AJ-fest, and we went out in Philly’s old city to celebrate the 30 years of AJ that have transpired so far.. Well, we didn’t really make it that far in old city cuz we really just stayed in at AJ’s friend Dave’s house and drank there… I’ve never really been out in Philadelphia before, it’s pretty nice… kinda feels small towny hiphoppy, but the whole Old City part seems really rejuvenated… Then, Sunday AJ’s parents had a lovely BBQ at their house in New Jersey… The whole weekend was documented very, very, very, very well…

What was also exciting about this trip was that this was the first time I got to travel with the whole new broken (now mended) ankle.. I still have this huge walking boot on there, which has a ton of metal in it, so when I walk through the metal detector, the thing goes crazy. On my way out east, the SFO folks were very thorough in asking me to sit down, remove the boot (which they then sent through the x-ray machine, along with my fancy new cane)… And then they ran the metal detector wand thing over my leg, and when it got to my ankle.. yup.. BEEEP. Oh boy. Everyone always jokes about the whole screws in the ankle setting off metal detectors and all — I guess it’s true. I just wonder if I’m gonna set off the metal detector every time now (after I get the boot off)…

Now, contrast my SFO experience with the friendly folks at JFK… I walk through the metal detector, which beeps like crazy — I now know to walk over to the “wait here cuz the thing beeped” line.. I wait there patiently for a little bit, and then am motioned to sit in the “sit here cuz the thing beeped” chair. I sit patiently for about 5 minutes, and then one of the security people is like.. “What are you doing there? You can go now.” Oh. Um, I don’t argue or anything, but… yah, I suppose there’s a few holes here and there in the whole security process, which is slightly disconcerting. Yah. Hmm.

So, I’m off to the airport again tomorrow.. flying down to LA for Nancy & Mike’s wedding on Saturday.. Then, back here Sunday morning so that I can head up to Sonoma for Dan & Anne’s wedding. Yup, it’s a crazy wedding weekend… woo.

Last night Chromeo rocked the house Mighty — the show was originally intended as the grand opening party of the new Poleng Lounge, but due to some delays with permitting or something, the party had to be moved to Mighty, which was too bad since it would have been awesome at Poleng. That said, Mighty is a fantastic venue with a badass soundsystem, so all was fine…

Best known for their songs Rage and Needy Girl (which has an awesome video that was shown at ResFest a few years back) Dave One and Pee Thugg played an awesome set, energetic and engaging.. Pee Thugg is such a master of the talkbox, so it was pretty cool to see it live.. Chromeo actually brought along a drummer, who apparently didn’t come with a drumkit, so I had to bring up Kane’s drumkit which he’s had since like high school.. haha..

Bfamilysoundsystem played an awesome set to open, and it apparently was Joe Encarnacion’s final SF set before he moves to NYC.. Alan Keller spun in between the live sets..

Anyway, I was still in my cast, but I managed to dance one-legged just fine, although since I figured I wouldn’t be dancin’ crazy, I brought along my camera and took a ton of pics (man, i love that 50mm f/1.4 lens)… I go and see the doctor next week, so hopefully I get my cast off soon, it’s been 6 weeks already..

So.. I was reading Valleywag today, and found this link to MyHeritage, where they have some facial recognition software (supposedly to find people who are related to you, I assume).. Anwyay, the demo they have compares your face with their celebrity database, and has provided me with at least 7 minutes of fun this morning. So, I thought I’d share the results with you…

I uploaded a picture of my brother Andy and me…

Turns out.. we’re none other than Gerard Depardieu and Takeshi Kaneshiro (the dude from House of Flying Daggers)..

Woo.. this is fun.. so I dug around, and just for kicks.. I uploaded an old baby picture of mine…

And… who did I resemble when I was a bouncing, little 1 year old?

David Hasselhoff.

Uh.. yah. Facial recognition software stuff is cool and all, but I guess this one only has about 3,500 celebrities in it — I would imagine for a better match that you’d need a lot more people in it. That said, I’ve been dying to try out Riya — I’m fairly fanatical about tagging all of my flickr photos, so I’m sure I’d be a great test subject for them… C’mon Riya folk, send me a beta login please.

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..

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.

Though the week has been peppered with nasty not-so-nice weather, New York has delivered a fantastic experience in every other aspect of the trip.. Actually, the occasional bouts of freezing rain have kept the whole city blanketed in that damp movie set like quality, so maybe that’s a good thing.. So it was quite the accidental reunion here in New York for a whole bunch of my friends — somehow, like 20 of my friends from San Francisco ended up here for the new year.. good times..

So, for new years, I first headed over to Kevin’s for a little party with Eric and his friends.. They made a bunch of tasty food, but I had to leave before they got the the fondue… Damn, missed to boiling cheese-fest. Like I mentioned before, a bunch of us headed down to the Falls in Soho for the evening, so I had to join up with them (especially since I paid the $90 for the open bar, and I had to get my money’s worth).. The Falls was packed by the time I got there. Although from what I hear, it was packed at 8:55 since the open bar started at 9pm, I guess everyone wanted to get as much drinking in as possible.

As for shenanigans… as any evening with an open bar promises, there were plenty… Granted, Andy and Meredith left at about 11:50pm and celebrated the New Year on the PATH, but as for the rest of us, I’m pretty sure we got our fill of the open bar.. So yah.. there were a lot of shenanigans that I won’t get into, but at least one has made it onto the glorious Internet. And the others are probably best left in our collective foggy memories happily ringing in the new year…

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.

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!