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.

Quotes from Chamillionaire and Quincy Jones III

Here are some quotes I found amusing from the event:

“All the other rappers called me a nerd for using the Internet.” — Chamillionaire (on promoting his music online)

“I hope that someone in this room wins the Entrepreneurship Innovation Contest …so then I can steal their idea.” — Chamillionaire (when asked to give some motivational advice to the students)

“My job was a lot easier before I was a boss.” — Chamillionaire (on becoming a manager at Chamillitary Entertainment)

“Why would I want to sell something with my face? I wouldn’t even wear something with my face” — Chamillionaire (on selling merchandise)

“It’s crazy… I’m in the business of making money. But not every dollar is a good one – sometimes it’s about values & authenticity” — Chamillionaire

“eHustling is available to everybody” — Quincy Jones III (on the power of YouTube as a way to go directly to customers)

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AP Study Notes

I’m planning to completely rehaul my AP notes site, APstudynotes.org, and rebuild it from the ground up. Right now, it has a bunch of awesome notes for 3 popular AP classes (US history, US government, and English Language/Literature), but it’s still lacking in quite a few areas. The site is still in development, and I’ve got a lot of work to do on it, but it’s already been extraordinarily popular. Right now, it’s getting 1,200,000 page views and 520,000 unique visitors annually! I haven’t advertised it at all, but the feedback has been overwhelming. I get emails every week from thankful students, and even some from eager students asking why the notes for a particular AP class aren’t posted yet!

My goal was to keep adding new notes (my own or purchased/donated notes from other students), and over time, slowly build up a huge database of quality notes. At some point in this process, I realized that this method simply doesn’t scale very well. There are simply too many classes, too many textbooks, and too many types of notes (outlines, vocabulary, unit summaries, practice quizzes, etc.) for me to create and format all by myself. So, I stopped updating the site for a while.

My goal in re-hauling the site is to allow users to add their own notes to the site, and let the community decide what the good stuff is. My hope is that the good stuff will float to the top.

I have a a bunch of really neat ideas (I think!) that will make this the best AP notes site on the net. I don’t want to divulge too much here, but I believe that when it’s finished, it will be an invaluable resource to high school students taking AP classes.

Music site

My second project is still in the planning phase. But, for now, just imagine one website that will satisfy ALL of your musical needs: MP3 downloads, online streaming, concert tickets, music videos, album art, lyrics, music suggestions, and social features. I have a vision for an awesome online music experience, and I can’t wait to start working on this one.

I know that there are plenty of great music sites out there right now, like Lala.com, Last.fm, iMeem.com, iLike.com, Pandora, and others, but I believe that I can build something unique that brings plenty of new ideas to the table. Plus, I think this will be a great way to practice a whole slew of important web dev skills: Javascript, web crawling, data mining, large-scale database management, and more. I can’t wait to see where this idea goes!

Blog might not be updated for a while…

I’ll try to keep you guys updated as I work on these projects. If you don’t hear from me for a while, now you’ll know why: I’m coding like a madman!

If you have any ideas or suggestions for me, please let me know in the comments! Thanks a ton for your support!

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

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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.

The Microsoft Dance

I hope he does his Microsoft dance for us…

or his Developers chant…

or tries to sell us some Windows…

But seriously…

He’s a really interesting guy. There’s no doubt that he’s an important guy in the tech industry. I’m really curious to hear what he has to say, given his past history of questionably sane predictions:

Steve Ballmer Laughs at iPhone

I’ll let you’all know how the talk goes — especially if he says anything interesting.

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They will be printing my shirt design and giving shirts away FOR FREE to all ETL students! (It looks like they have the whole Nike trademark issue sorted out. After all, Stanford has one of the largest Nike sponsorships in the world!) Here are the final images for the shirt.

Front of shirt:

Stanford Entrepreneurs. Just Start Up.

Back of shirt:

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders - Back of the T-Shirt

They wanted Adobe Illustrator files of the design, so I had to learn to use Adobe Illustrator, which I’ve never used before. After about an hour, I was fluent with many of Illustrator’s powerful drawing tools. The most difficult part was drawing the Nike logo. I had to use an example Nike logo which I decreased the opacity on and then traced. Illustrator’s drawing/tracing tools are tricky at first, but very intuitive once you get the hang of them.

What do you guys think of the designs? I’m curious for some feedback since I’ve never designed a t-shirt before. Leave me a comment and let me know!

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This is the t-shirt concept I submitted for the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders T-Shirt contest.

The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminar that I attend every week at Stanford is having a T-Shirt contest. The winner gets to see their design on the class shirt and gets a $50 prize. I’m assuming that students will have to purchase the shirt (unless the sponsor Draper Fisher Jurvetson is really generous and wants to buy shirts for 100+ people, which wouldn’t surprise me).

I decided to throw together a quick design. The idea was inspired by a fellow CS section leader, Aditya Acharya, who used a similar design for the section leader t-shirt contest.

UPDATE (4/23): I won the T-Shirt contest! Read this followup post for more info.

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