It’s been awhile since I had a new design update. Drupal projects currently make up a bulk of my workload. WordPress is limited to one day theme implementations and whenever I feel like working at home.

Still, change must go on. So while I’m hashing out the layout, I present to you a refresh of the blog title and mascot.

Think of all that house music at the dance club you hear and wonder if you even know who sings them? Outside of electronica circles, the male and female vocalists singing for producers such as Basement Jaxx or Deadmau5 are mostly anonymous. Many people are probably surprised that DJ Sammy the dude that mixed ‘Boys of Summer’, not the singer.

So while looking forward to dubstep super group Magnetic Man latest hits, I discovered Katy B.

Electro-pop and dance-pop acts aren’t exactly uncommon, but it is rare for a vocalist to gain fame through dubstep, hardly a mainstream genre even in electronica.

It’s about time people start recognizing the electronic vocalists that help drive the beats in the dance club.

Everything was slow. Home screens takes forever to load. Google Navigator stopped working at the most inopportune time (trying to get out of NYC). And any JS site was slow to a crawl.

Today, Android 2.2 brought my phone back to life. Just when I nearly strayed into the iOS4 camp, I am proud to own a phone that now runs as quickly as iOS4 AND completes phone calls.

I don’t know why it took Google so long to implement Just in Time for Java, but I’m glad they did. And if can make an old Droid feel like new, what will Froyo do to new hotness like the Droid 2 or Droid Incredible?

If Bay Ridge lacked any particular ethnic enclave, one can easily point out Sunset Park’s distinct neighborhood, two of them to be exact. On 5th Ave is the Latin American neighborhood. A few blocks to 8th Avenue is the Chinese community. I, of course, went to the Chinese part hankering for Cantonese food after spending way too much time in the Belt Parkway.

I’ve always wondered what life would be like I never immigrated to America and grew up in Hong Kong. Actually, I know it wouldn’t have turned out as well, America is that awesome. However, I do truly wonder if I were like the residents of Sunset Park and be able to grow up around my people as if I almost never left home.

Alas, instead of Chinatown I ended up growing up in suburban Central Jersey, being just the second Chinese kid in 1st grade. Fitting in was tough. Hell, even today I take pride in the fact I will never fit in anywhere completely (and be totally alone… subject of another post).

The question is, given who I am currently, would I be better off growing up in Sunset Park? It’s complicated, and I will probably never know.

Lunch was good. I packed up some leftovers and went straight home to Jersey; the place that made me who I am; the place that will make me who I want to be.

I think I made it to the most remote place in Long Island. It’s no where near New York City and it’s right before the Hamptons. There is fly-over country, this is drive-over country.

But that’s not a criticism, for its remoteness breeds something that is uncommon in my part of the country.

As much as people of New Jersey disparage the cast of Jersey Shore, I managed to find common ground with them. Like Snooki, my social life is defined by a series of major episodes, and stretches of nothingness. Do you know what The Situation does in February?

Why was in Center Moriches? It’s another major episode in my life. I’m visiting a friend and participating in beer drinking, beer gaming, and beer abusing (f*ckin’ awesome btw, thanks). That was Saturday, and it was great.

Then came Sunday morning? Do you know my friends and I do on Sunday morning? We nurse our hangovers, find our ways back home, maybe have breakfast together, but ultimately going our separate ways and keeping Sunday to ourselves or our families.

But that Sunday I find myself a slighty different routine. Yes, I was hungover and my Jersey friends all left (after breakfast, of course). But I found myself with my LI friend and a couple of his friends playing a few innings of softball. Maybe it’s because it’s not football season, but at my age who hangs out with friends on a Sunday morning?

The game didn’t last long because not many showed up (hangovers, of course) and I was leaving LI by noon. But I find it surreal that I would be chillin’ with friends, playing a little ball, having conversations in the physical realm on a quiet Sunday morning.

That was what I remembered the most fondly… until the pictures of Saturday show up on Facebook.

I spent all of under an hour in Freeport, and I was already annoyed. I had the misfortune of following Google Map’s directions which took me through the local part of Sunrise Highway. So I (slowly) trudged through the various “villages” just outside of Queens.

Like every shore town, they love to impose their will on their summer tourist population, and the most noticeable display of power is their traffic rules. One town of Lynwood had a village wide 30 mph speed limit and essentially banned all overnight street parking. Freeport, where I was to meet up with my friends, had the most annoying traffic feature, it put stop signs in pedestrian crossings.

It is my belief that the best way to slow down traffic is to build roads for certain speeds. For instance, an ideal 25 mph road would have narrow lanes and sidewalks on the same level as the street. But many towns, in the interest of saving money and milking motorists of their money with traffic fines, would rather seek to promote road rage than driving safety.

So when I ran into these stop signs dotted every part of Brookside Ave, there were two outcomes. I either A). blew past them or B). slammed on my brakes in anger. Neither actions helped any pedestrians cross the street, as there were none at the time, nor made me a safer driver, as I was too busy cursing.

Still, Freeport looks like a nice suburb and their intentions about promoting driving safety seem legit. But there better ways to do it than just putting up a bunch of signs.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I went to Manhattan, but I could easily count the number of times I’ve been to Brooklyn with one hand. Part of the reason is that Brooklyn is a mainly residential area. Bay Ridge is no different, and I struggled to kill enough time in the morning before heading out to Long Island.

Still, I can see the appeal of living here. Like all NYC neighborhoods, Bay Ridge is quite diverse, but one thing I noticed is how there’s no particular group that dominates the neighborhood, at least on the block surrounding Ivy Bakery I was in. A Parisian cafe was next to a Chinese hair salon. Indian restaurant right by an Italian Pizzeria. In one block, a row of single family houses, in the next block, the Brooklyn location of Century 21. There’s something for everyone, especially if you are looking for a nail salon, which are all over Bay Ridge and contains every conceivable type of women.

Demographically, Bay Ridge is not the most diverse neighborhood in New York, and I have scant knowledge in the challenges of socialization in a diverse community. But from what I saw Bay Ridge seems like a good model for a multicultural society, where the Hawaiian Coffee Shop and Middle Eastern restaurant seemed destined to be together.

How to run. Wake up, get out of bed, get off computer, remove self from A/C… run 5 miles.

(ftp|http|https):\/\/(\w+:{0,1}\w*@)?(\S+)(:[0-9]+)?(\/|\/([\w#!:.?+=&%@!\-\/]))? now that’s a honkin’ URL regex.