Immortal Technique Comes to Stanford

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 Chamillionare & Quincy Jones III

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’m Amazing – Feross VS. Kanye West

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 =

“Amazing” by Feross

VS.

“Amazing” by Kanye West

Go ahead and click PLAY above to give my cover song a listen.
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OMG, I just met Steve Ballmer!

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 removed from the ETL website. Next time I’ll download it and host it locally.

Update 9/24/2010: While looking through old blog posts, I realized that I never told the story of meeting Steve Ballmer. Here’s the short version:

After Steve finished his one-hour talk in Memorial Auditorium at Stanford, he went backstage to meet with some reporters and say goodbye to the people who invited him to speak at Stanford.

I wanted to say hi, so I hopped up onto the stage and walked right up to the room he was in. A guard at the door blocked me from entering, and I thought that I wasn’t going to get to say hi.

But, right then, Steve walked through the door — he was right it front of me! So, I just said “Hey Steve. I designed the shirt you’re wearing — can I get a picture?” It’s true. I designed the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders t-shirt.

Anyway, that’s basically the story. Only a year and a half late!

Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, is coming to Stanford

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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