dennis yang dot com

So, I was emailing back and forth with my friend Dan this morning, an efficiency expert.. A long-standing debate between us has been whether or not IM increases or decreases one’s work efficiency.

Anyway… of course, as per most conversations that involve me, our discussion digressed.

On Sep 17, 2008, at 9:39 AM, Dennis Yang wrote:

see? this is why IM is better than email.

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 9:45 AM, Dan wrote:

ah yes…. but like a sword, IM has two edges. as long as you’re using the right edge, you’re okay.

On Sep 17, 2008, at 9:47 AM, Dennis Yang wrote:

i dislike that metaphor. who says that there’s a “wrong side” of a double edged sword anyway? i mean, last i checked, a double edged sword affords the wielder *more* cutting power, both in a thrust and a backhanded swashbuckle. i don’t think that having a sharpened opposing edge of a sword really increases the danger to its wielder appreciably. sword wielding skill is still paramount, and if you’re hitting yourself in the head with a single edged sword, it’s really your fault, and not the sword’s.

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 9:54 AM, Dan wrote:

Touché! (So to speak.)

Ahh.. summers in Ohio. What did that mean? Trips to amusement parks and carnivals, mainly: Cedar Point (the gem), Geagua Lake (since closed, sadly), and Sea World (closed for awhile apparently, even though on my last trip to Ohio, I happily advised my row-mate to “definitely go check it out” — oops. Figures, it never really made sense to put an ocean park in OHIO of all places, did it?).

Anyway, without further adieu, here’s my list of carnival games that I love. I was talking with Steph the other day and that Roller Bowler game came to mind, and that was inspiration enough for this post. Thanks Steph!

Roller Bowler.
Man, this game was awesome. Deceptively simple, yet wickedishly hard. Oooo.. There’s one for sale on eBay! Only 104 days till Christmas! Act Now!

Whac-a-Mole.
Ok, even though I said that Steph inspired this post, that’s only half true. Cuz Masnick wrote up a post last night that mentioned this game, and I was like “Wow, two mentions of carnival games in one week — yah, I should write this up.” I do remember that it was fairly easy to cheat at this game though. At some kid’s birthday party at Chuck-E-Cheese’s in like 1986, I recall four kids, each with their hands holding down a mole. The moles had no chance, and the machine was streaming out tickets like a mofo, natch.

That Spinny Rope Ladder Game.
I did love this game, although apparently being a fat, nerdy kid does not prime you for a career in spinny rope ladder walking. I never did get even remotely close to that darned bell. Oh, the bell!

Other games that I love, but this list is getting long.
Shoot Out The Star (man, I love that game). Shoot The Clown In The Mouth With A Water Gun. Throw Darts At Balloons. Throw Rings At Bottles. Throw Balls At Bottles. Throw Dimes On Plates.

Hmmm. It appears that I love all carnival games. I can’t really think of one that I don’t like. Man, I’m a sucker. Or maybe just a huge aficionado of ginormous stuffed animals.

Oh, SNAP! I just found this: Wii Carnival Games.

good stuff from james, jablow, korby, hersh, paul and chazzy.

(wait for the image to fully load, since it’s animated… or click here to view the full size version)

apparently someone was wet or sweaty or something, so the shirts all ended up slightly damp.

eew.

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….”

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.

LQTM, hank.

oh.. recovering from so much eating and general goodtimery this weekend… here’s what went down..

bbq’d turkey, honey baked ham, and all of the fixin’s (well, except for mashed potatoes for some reason, but that was ok. oh, and no GBC either.. harumph)

steph, amit, marcy and me joined 20,000 screaming teenage girls for ’so you think you can dance’ at the oakland coliseum…

and.. we got a christmas tree. and decorated it. wooo.

and then, marcy and i went to the devil makes three show at the independent… awesome.

and then finished up the weekend at bi rite creamery… yum.

happy holidays.

So, Saturday night, a bunch of us went out to Berkeley for dinner — we hopped on the BART and went to Great China, which is quite possibly my favorite Chinese restaurant in the entire Bay Area. Yah, it’s THAT good. If you do go, I recommend the double skin salad and the crab & egg dish — the peking duck is also awesome, but those two dishes are really quite unique to Great China..

It was a great dinner (afterall, it’s not called *Good* China), but one scene keeps replaying in my head, and I keep laughing to myself about it all morning…

A little back story.. since we were kids, Andy has always had a thing about sharing food. He thinks is super gross or something. It’s not that he’s selfish, I think it’s a germy thing. Like, if you ask for a sip of his Coke, he’ll be like, “Yah.. um, ok..” (takes a huge gulp of coke, and then hands it to you.) “here you go, you can have the rest.” Hehe.. It’s one of those quirks that makes Andy, Andy. Anyway…

So, we’re about midway through the dinner, and there’s a big plate of food that is just about finished.. They come to clear some dishes away to make room… Seeing that there was still some food left on the big plate, someone suggested that they transfer it to a smaller plate.

The server nods, and then looks around for a second, searching for a utensil of some sort. She looks down, and seeing that Andy’s fork was sitting idly on his plate, grabs it.

Andy looks up at the server with like a concerned look, and I can just imagine what is going on in his head:

(Ed: This is what I imagined Andy to be thinking, and by his expression, I really think that he was thinking it… that said, I haven’t really asked Andy if he, in deed, *was* thinking this. I guess I could, but this version of the story has been running through my head all morning, and providing me with a lot of amusement.)

“Hmm.. um.. she’s really using MY fork to push the communal food? Eeeew. That’s gross. Wait.. It’s MY fork, so I guess I don’t have a problem with that, do I?”

I could totally see the internal debate going on inside Andy’s head. He kind of looked over at me, and I tried to give him a knowing nod to let him know that I knew what he was thinking, but who knows if he was actually thinking that or not.

Haha. Ok.. see, just writing up this post, I’m sitting here smiling. So if you’re not finding the amusement in my story, then here’s something that you better find funny… STAR WARS TRUMPET!!!

If you are not laughing now, then yah.. um. I can’t help you..

A few months ago, a fantastic project, the Panhandle Bandshell, was installed in the Panhandle here.. It’s made of recycled water bottles, car hoods, and computer parts, and it makes me smile every time I run, bike or drive by it.. The idea of it is to be a kind of community performance space — something to bring the neighborhood together with music.. That’s kind of nice. I’ve stopped by a few times now, and seen a few small performances here and there. Nothing too huge and spectacular, usually just a few people playing to a crowd of about a dozen or so people. It was funded by a generous grant by the SF Department of the Environment and the Black Rock Arts Foundation, of which I’m a happy sponsor.

I love community art — here in Hayes Valley, we were blessed with the temple for a few months in 2005.. I was sad when that went away, but now we have a funny little mini golf course… It’s little things like these that me smile. I really want to upholster a tree stump one of these days.

Anyway — so, the panhandle bandshell failed to get an extension on its permit, so on September 15th, it’s coming down. Neighbors complain that it’s never really used that much, except as a homeless sleep shelter. Um.. grrrr. This kind of thinking infuriates me — I mean, the bandshell did not create our homeless problem here in SF — that’s a completely different issue. But yah — it’s not used THAT much, so the noise complaint is kind of moot, but that said, let’s give it a chance at least during the REAL SF Summer (which everyone knows is September-October)..

WTF is up with these people and their assault on fun? Halloween is canceled in the Castro this year (ok, in all fairness the fun was killed by lame people, and not by the administrators).. At least they haven’t messed with Bay2Breakers (yet). But the Panhandle Bandshell seems like the exact kind of good, clean, community, musical fun that we should be promoting, no?

Anyway… as for what to do about this, I’m not quite sure. The extension was already denied on Thursday, so I guess I’ll be going this weekend to check out a few shows before it’s gone. Chicken John is running for mayor, and if his fundraiser is any sign, I think he understands the promotion of fun and art in this city. I think Gavin has done a pretty good job, but I’ll have to look into things more before I make a decision.

Argh. Stop making my fun city less fun you not fun people.

[Found at sfist]

So.. We’re loading up the dishwasher the other day, and I put the silverware into the dishwasher.. I noticed that there were some pieces of silverware in the little basket that were upside-down… or so I thought. They were handles up, so I turned them around, so that the fork tines were sticking up out of the basket.

And immediately a debate flared up in the kitchen.

There were two camps..

The handles down camp (my camp) claims that by having the business end of the silverware sticking out of the basket, they get cleaner. I mean, seriously, if you cram all of them in the basket like that, there’s no way that any self respecting water stream is gonna weasel his way in there and clean everything.

The handles up people claim something about the danger during unloading caused by the business ends bristling everywhere.. Yah, ok. I’ll probably get gored the next time I unload the dishwasher, but at least I’m being gored with a clean fork.

So yah.. anyone? Opinions? Can we all just get along?

ps. Yes, I know the image on this post has nothing really to do with the post, but I thought it was funny.

This comic just about sums it all up. Hooray for dating. It sure is fun. yah.

Anyway.. more good stuff from this dude can be found at ingredient x and his YouTube page. Enjoy.

[Found at sfist]

Whilst having lunch at Golden King (mmm. tasty vietnamese food) today, we noticed that there was a midway setup right across the street right on the edge of Portsmouth Square right in Chinatown. How odd. Why would there be midway games? They had most of the classics — “shoot out the star”, “balloon dart toss”, “football through the toilet seat”, “basketball shoot” and “ping pong ball in the fishbowl”.. I was sad that they didn’t have “shoot the water gun in the clown’s mouth” game though — that was always my favorite, although now that I think of it.. that game isn’t really found in the traveling midway, just the more permanent ones at like Cedar Point and the like..

Anyway, $5 for a whole basket of ping pong balls seemed like a pretty good deal…

And after that whole ordeal, the group only got ONE ping pong ball in a bowl (good work, James). The prize? 2 goldfish, of course. In a plastic ziploc bag.

Meredith has named them Ping and Pong. I believe the over/under on their lifespan is.. um, 2 weeks right now. We’ll see how they do.

Hmm.. So, 20 copies of this book just arrived at my house today..

Carlo astutely pointed out that the book isn’t even out yet… Hmm.. So, a little more detective work leads me to find that the author is having a book signing tomorrow at the bookstore around the corner.

Hmmm.. Interesting…

Update:

Aha.. so it turns out that Amazon thinks I suck. I ordered this radiator last week to deal with the latest cold snap we’ve been having here in San Francisco.. And instead of sending me the radiator, Amazon sends me 20 copies of this “You Suck” book.

And the best part is.. Amazon refused to send it out via a faster shipping method, so I have to wait another week! Thanks Amazon! You must really do think I suck!

Update 2:

Ok, after calling back to complain about what I thought was a poor resolution to their mistake (sending me another radiator via standard shipping — so it would take *another* week *brr* to get here), I got a much more helpful customer service associate.. They still couldn’t ship it via 2-day, but she gave me a refund on the original shipping cost, so I guess that’s something. The first Amazon dude didn’t really appreciate the humor of them sending me 20 copies of a book titled “You Suck”, but Michelle W. was certainly more friendly. Thanks Michelle W!

Whoa.. this is so meta..

Oh, and the iPhone? Enh. I’m gonna wait and see how it turns out in real life first.. I’m skeptical about how the whole no-buttons approach is gonna work out. I didn’t get an iPod until the 3G-no-click-feedback model, and that interface wasn’t exactly the best. True, I love my nano now, so I’m thinking I’ll give Apple a few years to work out the kinks in the phone before I make the leap. That said, I’ve been a Nokia loyalist since 1997 (ok, with one slight motorola lapse, but only for a few months) so hopefully Nokia will get its act together and make a good phone again.

So I’m back from my Christmas in Vail trip, and oh what a blast it was.. In the few days right before I get to Vail, it’s just my luck that a HUGE storm blew through Denver, dropping 3 feet of snow on the mile-high city, closing the airport (which is known for its ability to deal with inclement weather).. But, lucky for me, my flight went without a hitch.. SFO-DEN actually landed early, and I caught my connection to Eagle in plenty of time. The drive from Denver to Eagle is only about 3 hours, but when I was looking for plane tix, it wasn’t that much more to just hop the 26 minute flight. And I was upgraded to first class… So, it sounded like a great plan… except that my bag didn’t arrive. Ugh. I arrived at like 10pm, so they said that my bag should arrive by noon the next day, but for that night, I was SOL. Crap. I joined Kathee and her friends at Garfinkel’s for a drink, where luckily, I saw that they sold t-shirts, so I was able to procure myself a Garf’s t-shirt to at least sleep in for the night.. Thank goodness I had my big winter coat cuz it was 1 degree out when I landed.

The next day I tried contacting United (and got their call-center somewhere in India, which is actually my first time dealing with an Indian call center..) — anyway, United had no idea where my bag was, so I was forced to buy some new gear and rent a snowboard in order to ride that first day, which was AWESOME since they got an additional 8 inches of fresh powder that morning… wahoo.. So, I looked a little goofy riding in my big non-snowboardy city coat and rented board.. as Elena explained it, I was a snowboarding contradiction — I looked like a goofy first-timer tourist, but I was able to snowboard.. My slopestyle didn’t match my riding.. I guess that’s a compliment. In any case, I’m hoping that United will recoup at least a portion of the money for gear and rental that I was forced to shell out because of their pooeyness.

So after that day of epic snowboarding, we drove over to the Super Walmart where I was soo excited to buy myself some new underwear and maybe some sort of cheap Walmart clothing.. but, it was Christmas Eve, and they closed early. Ugh. We ran over to the supermarket, which was still open, where I was faced by a dilemma. Hooray, the supermarket had some clothes. But the only thing they had was a Denver Broncos sweatshirt and sweatpants. Ugh. I can’t do that. The Broncos caused so much pain and anguish to this lil’ Cleveland Browns fan, that I actually decided that I’d rather just go snowboarding another day in my jeans and button down than wear the blue and orange.

Luckily for me, at that moment, I got a phone call telling me that my bag had arrived. Phew. Crisis averted.

Anyway… The next two days of snowboarding were equally epic. Vail is a magnificent mountain. The snow was plush, and the trails through the trees were sooooo awesome.. Vail is huge.. Just one of the peaks would be comparable to one of the mountains in Tahoe, and they have like six or seven of them or something. I guess it IS the biggest ski resort in the nation.

One of Kathee’s friends, Amanda, drives a cat for Vail (she’s the crew lead, actually), and… I got to go along with her for a bit. How awesome is that? I hope she didn’t think I was too goofy for being so giddy whilst I tagged along, but it was really, really cool going along with her as she groomed the mountain.

She leads a team of like 7 cats as they drive in formation, grooming as they go.. Since Vail grooms 24 hours a day, and they don’t close the slopes when they do, they have to constantly sound the siren and shoo skiers and boarders away. Anyway, it’s pretty damn cool sitting in the cat as they drive headfirst down a black diamond. Woo.

So yah, that was pretty damn cool. Oh, and to top it all off, I saw some wicked aspens. Aspens are the coolest trees evar.

That is all. Vail. Cool. Yah.

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas or Hanukah or Festivus or whatever..

I thought I’d share a little gem that i came across today…
http://www.cayugaswaiters.com/new/downloads/mp3/harvard.mp3

omg. scary. wow. simply. stunning.

And why, pray tell, was I looking for acapella.. Well, the xmas party I’m going to tomorrow just emailed everyone saying that the evening’s entertainment is going to be provided by this super hot acapella band (yah, I know you’re jealous.) And well, yah, one thing led to another, and I found this track… to think that in almost 10 years, i hadn’t thought about acapella, and in an instant, I was transported back to Cornell Night. Whoosh.

See all you kids at reunion, right? (well, I guess not *all* you kids, but all of you Cornell ‘97 kids, I guess.. although I think Kim’s coming and she didn’t even go to Cornell)

Woo.. I voted today. Pretty exciting stuff.. I’m trying to keep my streak alive since I haven’t missed a November election yet. Looks like the dems are taking control of the house, and Arnie is now a two-terminator (as coined by sfgate).. I actually was mulling over prop 87 for a bit — yes, Clinton and Gore both were behind the proposition, but I’m wasn’t sure that it was the best way to go about pushing for alternative fuels… but, in the end, I decided to vote for it. But, it looks like it might not pass. Hmm. Oh well.

Anyway… since I’m on the subject of voting, I might as well share some vote-y linkage..

• Freaknomics on the irrationality of the vote [thanks doug]
• CNN’s roomful of bloggers [thanks penelope, who says that voters make better employees]
• Sonicliving’s I Voted Contest

And look.. Willo, Ali, Brian voted too!

Wow… so tonight the subject of Geocities came up in conversation, so I decided to see if my old Geocities page was still up… Amazingly, it’s still there… but, the coolest thing that I found was this…

Some sites that Dennis found.

Back in 1995, I worked for a summer at a pharmaceutical company, but my job was to investigate new technologies that could be useful to them. So, I basically spent the entire summer surfing around what was a very young web. And, whenever I found a cool site, I would add it to my list here.. My little list of sites actually got a good amount of visitors (for back then), and I was even named the “Beverly Hills Internet Site of the Day”..

But, the summer ended, and I went back to school, and neglected this list, and went on to spend most of my time at school building cars instead of internets. Ooopsie.

It’s quite amusing to look through this list of stuff… A ton of URLs on here are at .edu domains and live in people’s user directories… Neato. Funny to see the original urls for stuff like Lycos (http://fuzine.mt.cs.cmu.edu/mlm/lycos-all.html), SavvySearch (http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~dreiling/smartform.html), and IMDB (http://www.msstate.edu/Movies/)..

So yah, this list is a little over 11 years old, so most of the links don’t even work anymore…

Well, that was a fun little trip down memory lane…

So.. I have a cameraphone, and the great thing about having a cameraphone is that I pretty much always have a camera with me, so.. when the inspiration strikes, it’s right at the ready… The not so good thing is that I never really seem to get around to ever downloading and looking at the stuff that I’ve captured with the ol’ cameraphone.. Until tonite… woo.. so here’s a few cameraphone pics. Exciting.

A few weeks back, the SF Opera set up a HUGE tv screen right in front of City Hall… it was pretty rad, and they simulcast the opera that was playing just a half block away on the ginormous tv screen. Opera-riffic.

My friend Vanessa had an extra ticket to see The Killers at the Warfield… so I went. James and Uyen were also there… The Killers played a pretty rad set, although honestly I now know why they’re called “The Killers” — it was soooo incredibly loud that had it not been for the earplugs that I thankfully procured, I would have been deaf for like a week. Eek. I’m complaining about how loud a show was. I MUST be getting old or something. But, actually.. I really have started to get concerned about my hearing. I do go out a lot, so I’ve started wearing ear plugs whenever I think it’s going to be ringingly loud. My friends Shooey and Erica have both actually shelled out some ducats for custom earplugs like these… Hmmm.. supposedly the hi-fi earplugs reduce volume, but they don’t muffle the music. I mean.. I like music. A lot. I suppose that losing ones hearing would really, really suck. Still feels like I’m coming to grips with my non-invincibility though — and I think that *really* means I’m getting old. Sheesh. Just sign me up for some comfy shoes and big sunglasses now.

Ok.. this third picture is from just last weekend… My friend ChrisK had an extra ticket to go see the circus at the Circus Center San Francisco and I lept at the opportunity to join him. (rimshot) ChrisK met this girl at Burningman who does trapeze, so we went to go see her perform. Turns out, it was the farewell performance of the Mystic Pixies — a kid contortionist group who are leaving San Francisco to join Cirque Du Soleil. They actually performed at the Supperclub 1 year anniversary party too… Anyway.. it was a really cool show, and I’ve been meaning to go check out the Circus Center, since I’m kind of toying with the idea of taking some circus classes myself… Looks like a lot of fun.

And finally.. tonight, Stepha and I went to the Say Hi To Your Mom show at the Bottom of the Hill.. It was a great show, but honestly, the picture isn’t that great, so I won’t post it here… SHTYM is kind of a funny “band” cuz it’s just one dude. But he’s good, and it was a fun show… His last album is about vampires, and my favorite song of his is “Blah Blah Blah” — the chorus of which goes “And I… am gonna drink your blood”.. hehe. Here’s a clip. Vampires are cool.

So yah, that’s it. The ol’ cameraphone is downloaded and happy now.

So, I didn’t go to burningman this year (since I’m here hanging out with grandma in Boston)… After going for 4 years in a row, I took last year and this year off. Honestly, last year I didn’t miss or even really think about it very much, but this year, I definitely was feeling the urge to return… And all week, I’ve been scouring flickr, awaiting for tales and pics to start to be posted, and alas…. it looked like it was an amazing time, so yah.. I think maybe I’ll be going again next year..

Check out some of the pics that I found from this year… Oooo.

Yah.. only 362 days till the man burns…