Here’s my most harrowing moment of the day, when I took turn 11 a little hot… It was the first lap of the session so my tires were still cold, and I may have even blipped the throttle through that very tight turn. Oops. I remember thinking to myself, “hmm.. uh oh. the car is pushing through this turn.. here we go..”

I went fully off the track into the dirt and grass, slid sideways for a bit, but was able to smoothly apply countersteer (weee!) and get myself right back on to the track (and manage a 2:30 for that lap, not bad, considering my best lap from the previous session was 2:29 — I was able to get my time down to 2:22 by the end of the day though).

Weeeee!

Running turn 11 a little hot at Thunderhill. from sinned on Vimeo.

Enjoy.

2014 was another good travel year, although most of my destinations were reached by car this year, instead of plane, as evidenced by me missing out on my United Silver status this year. By six days. So close!

Anyway. It was a good year. Patrolling in Tahoe. Backpacking in Tahoe with Shooey. A cross country roadtrip with Jablow. And a few weddings in Healdsburg, Hawaii and Seattle. Fun fun fun.

Here’s my list..

Dennis’ 2014 Year in Cities. Asterisks mean multiple trips.

• San Francisco, CA*
• Rubicon Bay, CA*
• Jackson Hole, WY
• Dillon Beach, CA
• Kenwood, CA*
• Austin, TX
• Palm Springs, CA
• Hillsborough, CA
• Healdsburg, CA (Congrats Meredith & Adam!)
• Destination Wilderness, CA
• Steep Ravine, CA
• Las Vegas, NV
• Dalhart, TX
• Overland Park, KS
• Lawrenceburg, KY
• Alexandria, VA
• Kailua, HI (Congrats Lester & Karen!)
• Seattle, WA (Congrats Alex & Kerry!)
• Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean
• Taipei, Taiwan (Happy birthday grandma!)

And with that.. Happy New Year!!

No. I’m not really running for the school board. But this Dennis Yang is. And, the other day, I was at a meetup at Udemy, where the *other* Dennis Yang, who works in Technology in San Francisco is the CEO.

I should drop him an email and get coffee or something. And while we’re at it, we should get this school board Dennis to join us. And then we can have a big party. And, if they’re nice, maybe I can give them some dennisyang.com email addresses.

The instructions..

Ok, so, here’s what you do to get WordPress running on Heroku:

1. Fork my repo: https://github.com/sinned/wordpress-heroku
2. Clone your forked repo:

   • git clone git@github.com:sinned/wordpress-heroku.git awesome
     cd awesome

3. Create the heroku instance

   • heroku create

4. Add ClearDB

   • heroku addons:add cleardb:ignite

5. Push to heroku

6. • git push heroku master

7. Go to your heroku app in a browser

   • heroku apps:open

8. Follow the instructions to set up your WordPress.
9. Log in to WordPress and then set up the S3 and Mandrill/Mailgun plugins (because of reasons we explain below)
10. Done!

The details..

For those of you that are familiar with running WordPress on your own server, deploying it to Heroku should be pretty easy to understand, with a few main things to remember:

• My github build is meant for you to be able to run a local version of WordPress and then push it to production. I find this handy for development — that said, if you are only going to push to Heroku once and then never redeploy, then I urge you to check out Mark Chung’s WordPress Buildpack.
• The file system on Heroku is ephemeral, meaning that each time you deploy to it, anything not in the github repository is blown away. Most notably, this means that if you upgrade WordPress through the Admin UI, unless you upgrade your local repo, if you redeploy, bad things will happen. Additionally, your beloved /wp-content/uploads/ directory will also disappear.
• So — to combat the file system issue, I’ve included an S3 plugin — that way, any media you upload is stored at S3 instead of your ephemeral Heroku file system. And, it’ll be faster that way anyway — S3 is much better at serving static content than Heroku dynos are. The WordPress Read Only plugin is another one to look at for this purpose.
• The php ‘mail’ function on Heroku does not work — so, in order for the emails to work, you need to use something like wpmandrill or  mailgun (which I have included)

To dos

Mark Chung’s wordpress-on-heroku build is really fast, but mine is slightly different in that it allows you to run a local version of WordPress (with the MySQL credentials wordpress-heroku/wordpress-heroku). That said, I do have some things that I need to address:

• The security salts are still stored in wp-config.php — I should probably move these to a Heroku setting of some sort for better security.
• The AWS credentials are stored in the DB, so if anyone gets access to your database, that could be bad. Move these to a Heroku setting as well.

Anyway.. hopefully you find this post useful. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

In keeping with a tradition that I started back in 2005, here’s a list of all of the places that I’ve stayed over the course of the past year. And, of course, I just now found out that Dopplr shut down last year — I suppose the fact that I never noticed is indicative of why they did.

In any case.. 2013 was a great travel year, as it started off with a bang in Taipei, underneath the fireworks at 101. Then, Chris & Jerry’s wedding in Redondo, Front Sight Training, a big trip to Basel & Provence with my parents, Hersh & Alexis’ wedding in Napa, a Montreal Dude Trip, and Big Sur Backpacking with Niki. Thanks to diligent FourSquare checkins, I’m able to remember some of the exact places that I stayed.

Anyway.. here’s the list, in rough chronological order (multiple stays indicated by an asterisk):

• Taipei, Taiwan
• Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
• Nah Trang, Vietnam
• *San Francisco, CA
• Las Vegas, NV (Chris’ Bachelor Party)
• *Rubicon Bay, CA
• *Los Angeles, CA
• Redondo Beach, CA (Chris & Jerry’s Wedding)
• *Kenwood, CA
• Pahrump, CA (Front Sight Training)
• Basel, Switzerland (ArtBasel)
• Apt, France
• Gargas, France
• American Canyon, CA (Hersh & Alexis’ Wedding)
• Chicago, IL
• Montreal, Canada
• Felton, CA
• Monterey, CA
• Big Sur, CA (Niki’s Birthday!)
• Carmel, CA
• Beachwood, OH (OHS Reunion)
• Agonda, India
• Anjuna, India

Wow.. that’s a lot of places last year. And so many amazing memories!

And… I just realized that I forgot to do this for 2012.. oops! No better time than now to do it.. so here we go:

• Vail, CO
• *San Francisco, CA
• *Kenwood, CA
• Coalinga, CA (Pheasant Hunting!)
• *Rubicon Bay, CA
• Los Angeles, CA
• Phoenix, AZ (Spring Training)
• Las Cruces, NM
• Marfa, TX
• Austin, TX (SXSW)
• *Chicago, IL
• Hillsborough, CA
• New York, NY
• Ithaca, NY (Cornell Reunion)
• Rochester, NY
• Basel, Switzerland (ArtBasel)
• Pescadero, CA (Ed & Zoey’s Wedding)
• Hunter, NY (Audris & Dennis’ Wedding)
• Seoul, Korea
• Taipei, Taiwan

Phew!! That was fun. Here’s to a great 2014! Happy New Year Everyone!

*Dennis walks up to retrieve his willcall ticket, wearing his bicycle helmet*
(Thanks Ed !)

Ticket Lady at AT&T Park: “Have you ever tried your helmet?”
Me: “What?”
TLaAP: “You know.. tried it? Like.. fallen on your head? Does it work?”
Me: “Uh. No. Not yet.”
TLaAP: “It’s a pretty helmet. I wonder if it works.”
Me: “Uh. Thanks.”

Happy Wedding Alexis & Hersh!

dennis’ fall 2012 mix from sinned on 8tracks Radio.