Short

Life is like Tetris; You do what you can with the crap that goes down.

Every year the NYTimes magazine puts out of listing of ideas from the past year. These ideas range from influential to important to odd, but almost all are really interesting. Definately check it out.

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I definately D-blocked this quote off of the away-message of a friend, but it was too good to pass up:

Cigarettes and chocolate milk
These are just a couple of my cravings
Everything it seems I like’s a little bit stronger
A little bit thicker, a little bit harmful for me

r u f u s w a i n w r i g h t

I love it.

Today I discovered that what type of music you listen to while playing tetris actually has nothing to do with the ability to “hear” it better.

While listening to Death Cab for Cutie’s album Plans, I was able to understand nearly all the lyrics, and imbibe them in a way i hadn’t before. I also concurrently achieved my highest tetris score of all time, 575, 365. This ranks 280th all time. Pretty good. Now back to work.

If you are musically bored and looking for new music that is actually good, and has a sound that you aren’t used to, check out Gnarls Barkley, the two man band of Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo. It’s fantastic stuff. It’s like 5 different types of music rolled into one, but not in an obnoxious way: it totally works. Also, I recomend the article in the New York Times Magazine on them…. extremely interesting.

What’s atypical about Gnarls Barkley is that the star is Burton, even though he’s barely visible onstage. Burton has the kind of paradoxical personality that’s weirdly familiar among creative types: he’s simultaneously confident and insecure, and he’s a natural introvert who elected to become a public figure. More significant, he’s a highly focused dude, and that focus is clear — Danger Mouse wants musical autonomy. He wants to be the first modern rock ‘n’ roll auteur, mostly because he understands a critical truth about the creative process: good art can come from the minds of many, but great art usually comes from the mind of one.

The D.J. Auteur – New York Times

Ok, so here’s a quick tip for making grilled cheese sandwiches.

Go out on a limb with me, and imagine that you are trying to craft a brilliant grilled cheese sandwich using only bread, cheese, a stick of butter, a spatula, and a pan. Note that no knife is needed.

Put your pan on the stove, and put on some heat (higher if you like burnier bread). Then take the stick of butter, and press the stick down on the hot pan. This will melt the tip of the stick of butter. Then quickly brush the outside of the bread with the butter until it cools. Repeat until the bread is covered.

Then just cook the grill cheese normally. If you are trying to move quickly, you can eat the grill cheese out of the pan, and you’ve only dirtied two utensils!

Good luck cheese fans.

For quite a while, I have been searching for the optimal programming accompaniment music. I can’t listen to the normal music that i usually listen to, because I start listening to it and stop paying attention. I have read that multitasking only works when using separate parts of the brain, so my theory is that programming and listening to some music use the same part of the brain.

My search for good programming music finally found something today. LiquidFM Trance channel. Its fantastic. I barely notice it at all. It fills my head, but lets me focus. I highly recommend it -  http://www.liquid.fm.

Today,  I was playing Tetris while listening to Bob Marley during a short break for work. First of all, I was having a great game of tetris, but I wasn’t paying any attention to it. I was totally focused on hearing Bob Marley’s lyrics, and for the first time in many of his songs, and heard every lyric and understood its meaning. I pretty much know the sounds of all the words, in that I can tell you what he’s saying all the time, but I never really listened. It made me reallize how great a medium music is to transmit something that goes against the establishment…It’s like transmitting a message on a frequency that those who will try to stop you can’t hear. It was truly amazing. After I realized what had happened, I looked up and realized I had just played the best tetris game of my 18 year career, ~194,000 points. It was crazy time.

nadir – noun

Apparently, nadir means the opposite of zenith, or apex. So you could say “Maroon 5 is the nadir of American Pop music”.

It is pronounced NAY-dir; nay-DIR, and it has nothing to do with Ralph.

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