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Nerdcore! Aww yeah!

Last Tuesday, I got to hang out with “the world’s 579th greatest rapper,” MC Frontalot, before and after he performed at a Stanford concert! He is best-known for coining the term nerdcore and basically defining the whole nerdcore hip-hop musical genre. As you can tell by picture above, I dressed appropriately for the occasion.

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Getting Immortal Technique's autograph for my brother.

Immortal Technique

Second famous rapper I’ve met this week: Immortal Technique — most famous for his political activism and political rap music. This guys’s a real rapper (unlike Chamillionaire, who is a commercial hip-hop artist sellout).

Immortal Technique is legit — he’s turned down half-million dollar offers to sign to major music labels like Sony and Def Jam because he doesn’t want to lose control over the content of his music. He’s often been criticized for the content of his music (listen to some and you’ll see why), but there’s more than a grain of truth to what he raps about.

I don’t have time right now to write a long blog post (I have 2 CS assignments due soon, 1 test on Monday, and 20 CS assignments to grade), so I’ll leave it at that. But, I encourage you to take a look at Technique if you haven’t heard of him before — he’s quite interesting.

Ridin' Dirty with Chamillionaire

I just saw Chamillionaire and Quincy Jones III talk about entrepreneurship at Stanford!

Chamillionaire is most famous for his single Ridin’ Dirty and the Weird Al parody that followed it. Unfortunately, he didn’t rap for us — instead, he gave us a bit of hustlin advice. Ahhhh YEEEAH…

My favorite part of the event was when Stanford president John Hennessey asked the audience “How can we change the world?” and someone in the audience yelled “By ridin’ dirty!” Anonymity for the win.

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I’ve long believed that modern hip-hop and R&B suffers from too much post-production. Average singers can wail away in front of the microphone yet sound amazing on the radio, after the post-production techs have fixed all the mistakes. This is why all the music on the radio sounds so similar — it’s all pitch-perfect.

Today, I discovered just how little talent it requires to make a modern pop song.

MacBook Pro + Built-in Mic + GarageBand + AutoTune + 1 hour =

Feross Aboukhadijeh - Amazing

VS.

Kanye West (ft. Young Jeezy) - Amazing

Go ahead and click PLAY above to give my cover song a listen.

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Shaking hands with Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer. Notice, he is wearing THE T-SHIRT I DESIGNED!

More info and a full story coming as soon as I have time to write a full blog post. In the meantime, enjoy this video of Steve’s speech!

Update 11/07/2009: It looks like the video of Steve’s speech has been remove from the ETL website. Next time I’ll download it and host it locally.

El Capitan of Microsoft

Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, is coming to Stanford on Wednesday. He’s going to give a talk about entrepreneurship in Memorial Auditorium at 4pm. If you’re in the Palo Alto area and you want to attend, you can get free tickets online. You can find out more on the ETL website.

Also, rumor has it that the ETL coordinators are going to give Steve an ETL shirt at the end of the seminar (that’s the shirt that I designed!!). If anything like this happens, I’ll be sure to take some pictures and let you’all know about it! Wouldn’t it be awesome if my t-shirt design was on the body of someone worth $11,000,000,000 — that’s 11 billion dollars?!

In the meantime, amuse yourself with some of his past antics. This dude’s an interesting character, without a doubt.

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"Nice to meet you. My name is Feross, what's your name?"

Condoleezza Rice gives a talk about foreign policy to my dorm at Stanford.

I met Condi today.

First of all, let me say that this is not an April Fools joke, even though today is April 1st.

Condoleezza Rice visited my dorm, Freshman-Sophomore College (or FroSoCo for short), to give a 1 hour talk about foreign policy and take our questions. She was invited to speak here by our awesome Dean, John Bravman, who is also the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education and my Academic Advisor.

She rolled up to our dorm at 6:00pm with at least 3 security guards (yes, they all had the little secret agent ear pieces in their ears). They escorted her into our dorm’s lounge through the back patio entrance to a waiting crowd of about 90 students. Dean Bravman introduced her and everyone applauded loudly.

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