dennis yang dot com

Last week Dana scored us some free tickets to the Snoop Dogg show down in San Jose. Turns out that our pal Murphstar was also opening for Snoop that night, so it was one of those small world things.. I’m not exactly sure how Murph got the opening gig, but from what I understand, Snoop is tight with Moby, and Murph played Moby’s New Year’s Eve party last year and rocked the house (as he usually does) so Moby recommended that Snoop give Murph a call.. Now Murph usually spins breaks, but he was all happy to pull out some hip hop for the San Jose kids.. Except.. Snoop was late.. and instead of an hour set, Murph had to spin for like 3 hours… which meant that some breaks records came out.. I mean, we were perfectly happy to dance to the breaks records down in San Jose, but man, those San Jose kids sure didn’t like them.. Granted, they were all impatiently waiting for Snoop to arrive and all, but still.. Booing? That kinda sucked, and by the end Murph did not look very happy.

Snoop finally did arrive, like 2 hours late. He said something like “Yah.. some people are telling me that I’m late… That’s not possible cuz I’m always right on time..” or something to that affect… Ahh.. that’s Snoop for you. He took the stage with his diamond encrusted microphone and everyone in San Jose was happy. From what I hear he was late because he had to coach his son’s soccer team. Man, can you imagine Snoop as your kid’s soccer coach? it’s notizzle if you winizzle or loseizzle, it’s howizzle you play the gameizzle.. Ice Creamizzle for everyoneizzle!!

So one really neat/geeky thing we saw in San Jose was this vending machine.. We parked in this hotel parking lot near the SJ civic center, and were stopped in our tracks when we saw this vending machine…

Yup.. You can buy an ipod shuffle or mini right from the vending machine.. right along side other hotel staples like condoms and toothpaste. Rockin!! Man, everything you need for a crazy party right there in the hotel!! Well, maybe not everything.. oh wait, there was one of those Sharper Image sound machines… that IS everything… Kickass!

The only thing is.. can you imagine if you bought the shuffle and it got stuck in the machine? Man, I’d be pissed…. Trying to rock the machine to get your stinkin’ shuffle… And then the next dude who came along would get the vending machine 2-for-1 deal of a lifetime..

So.. I’m not usually THIS geeky, but Doug pointed me to this geourl service where you can add latitude and longitude information into the meta tags for your blog… But.. ok.. yah, I’m geeky.

Strangely, the MSN terraserver thinks that my house is 2 doors down from where I actually live. If you look at the picture, the red dot is NOT where I live.. My house is two houses to te left. The large construction site behind my building is now finished and is a bunch of new condos.

I’m at latitude 37.77854 and longitude -122.42398, and with this information, you can see my blog neighbors. What purpose does this really serve? I have no idea, but it sure is neato.

Here are Doug’s neighbors in San Diego..

There.. don’t you feel sufficiently geeked out for today?

grrr..

So, my phone line and DSL have been down since yesterday morning.. I called SBC to ask them what the problem, and supposedly there was some sort of massive explosion somewhere, and lots of cables were cut. So.. they’re repairing the cable, pair-by-pair, and the estimated date that I’ll restore phone and DSL access is.. May 10th. I talked to the SBC guy and he said that it’s a major event, but as of now I see no articles mentioning anything about it at all..

Aaargh.

5 days?!?! That’s insane. I’ve not heard of an SBC outage lasting THAT long. Considering I work from home, this is going to be a big pain in the arse.

Luckily for me, I’ve found that the public library has free WiFi, and that’s just a few blocks away from my house. The library is nice, but I think I might seek out a cafe with free WiFi instead, since I’m getting hungry and thirsty.
Actually, I’m sitting right here near the CD library.. Ooo.. Maybe this is gonna work out just fine afterall…

But.. this means I can’t work until the wee hours of the morning.. and, I actually have to put on pants now.

Leave it up to the crazy kids at MIT to make cool stuff with LEDs and stuff… this dancefloor they made is pretty rad.. make sure and check out the video.. I wonder if these kids know the folks who made the MIT LED wall at burningman. That one is called the tensor and has 64,000 LEDs (as compared to their 1,536).. crazy…

google maps + craigslist.. so so cool.

[found at futurismic]

I tivo’d today’s final rounds of the Masters, so I could watch whenever I wanted…

So, I’m watching the match, which was awesome… DiMarco was doing a great job on keeping right on the heels of Tiger, despite great breaks like Tiger’s awesome birdie on 16… They get to hole 18 and.. “bu-boop!”

Tivo had stopped the recording before the Masters was over.

Man.. I was so pissed (after watching 4 and a half hours of the masters) to find that tivo had stopped recording the masters RIGHT before the 18th hole. Um. yah, so I didn’t get to see DiMarco tie Tiger, nor did I get to see the playoff. Grr.

Yah, yah.. I know that I should have told tivo to keep recording after the scheduled time, and blah blah blah blah.. But, it didn’t record, and I’m mad. Tivo should really figure out a way to figure out when to properly stop a recording. Hmm.. now that I think of it, maybe they have in the newer tivos — and since I have a series one tivo, this complaint is moot. Well.. in that case, they should let me transfer my lifetime series one subscription over to a new tivo.

Well, tivo was good for one thing..

it allowed me to replay tiger’s snot rocket. eew.

Google continues to impress… Now they’ve integrated keyhole into google maps… Same AJAX interface, same google speed.

Ten points to the first person to identify what this is… (shouldn’t be that hard):

Go go google go.

Man, this is fun.. I grew up here. And went to school here. And live here. And… my family is originally from here…

nice.. evdb launched into “very early beta” (thanks doug!) — it’s the “events and venues database” — I’ve logged in and looked around, and I’m finding it very difficult to use. upcoming.org is a little more intuitive, but to be fair, I found upcoming.org at a slightly later stage (and not on its first day of the beta). But.. neither is really the viable complete calendaring solution that I’m yearning for…

In other news, Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us announced that he has quit his job and is going to be working on del.icio.us fulltime… Best wishes, Joshua!! I’m a big fan of del.icio.us, so I’m happy to see Joshua taking the plunge..

“Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.” – Woody Allen

Since starting with my new job a few weeks ago, I’ve been bemoaning the absolute dearth of a great shared calendaring application… When supported by a large corporate IT department, I was happily using Microsoft (gasp!) Outlook’s calendar to manage both my work and social schedules. I looked around and really couldn’t find anything much better than the standalone Outlook. Mozilla Thunderbird was a valient effort, but there was nothing in there that was compelling enough for me to warrant a switch.

I even considered switching back to the good ol’ fashioned paper calendar. Eek.

Why is it so hard to make a great calendaring application? Companies have tried again and again and again to create a fantastic calendaring application, and as such, nobody has really succeeded… Jump.com was actually founded by a fellow Cornellian — I wonder what happened to him…

Recently, there has been quite a lot of buzz around new calendar apps in the works, like upcoming.org, trumba, evdb (which I think is some sort of calendaring/event management application, but I really have no real idea).. even a google calendar is rumored (thanks julia!)…

So what exactly does a “calendaring” application do? It tells me where at when I need to be somewhere. The new “web 2.0″ calendars integrate calendaring with all the latest and greatest buzzwords — tagging, social networks,

To figure out where I need and want to be and do, I use:

• my brain

My brain is obviously my primary what/where/when device. Ultimately, no matter what calendaring tool I use, I transfer the information to my brain. Problem with my brain is that it’s quite unreliable and affected adversely by external factors like alcohol, sleepiness, and just the general fact that I forget a lot of stuff. I mean, if my brain ultimately worked really well, then I probably wouldn’t need a calendar (but arguably, I wouldn’t have any of the cool “web 2.0″ stuff)

• microsoft outlook

I use microsoft outlook as my primary non-brain calendar. I try and put all of my meetings (both personal and work-related) in outlook.. But, lots of times, I forget to put them in.. and lots of times I forget to check my calendar since I no longer have a pda that is connected to my outlook. Hmm.. mental note.. need to figure out how to integrate my supposed “smartphone” with my outlook.

• evite

Since I live in the bay area and have hyperconnected geeky friends, most of the larger privately organized events are in my evite. That said, sometimes I forget to check evite or put an evite’d entry into either my brain, or my outlook.. which means I forget about something. It slipped my mind that my friend matt was having a party last week, and I didn’t remember until brian sms’d me and told me he was running late.. I was like.. hmm.. running late to what? Oops.

• alarm clock

My alarm clock tells me every morning what time I need to wake up. Unfortunately, I need to tell it every night what time I want to wake up the next morning.

• refridgerator door

My fridge door has lots of pieces of paper sticking on it that tell me where I could be.. like yoga class schedules, buffet menus, and a few “save the dates” from my to-be-married friends. Although I do snack a lot now that I’m working at home, I don’t really look at the fridge door too much, and now that I look more closely, a few of these “save the dates” are from 2001. Hmm.

So…. what would MY ultimate calendaring application have?

Hmmm.. I’ll have to do some more thinking about this, but this post has rambled on for way too long already.. But, right off the bat, I’m thinking integration with all of my non-brain applications (outlook, evite, alarm clock, fridge door) would be the first thing.. I don’t want to have to use this new, cool application.. I *like* the way I currently interface with all of my different calendar tools…

So, maybe that’s the killer app of calendaring.. something to just glue all of these calendar applications together… into my brain.