www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-juuIldyZ0

You can hear a song, listen to all the words, perceive all the intonations in the vocals, and still come back to it after hundreds of plays over the span of years and have that “aha” moment where the soul of every hand that touched its creation infects and overwhelms you.

Dream on.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptuGJsoGQ3Y

I am happily biased on this topic and I agree wholeheartedly. My interest in math wasn’t sparked until I discovered the programming features of my TI-83 calculator. I haven’t reflected on my math education in many years, but I am now angry at the disservice my educators did for me. Once they learned that I knew how to write these tiny programs, they wouldn’t allow me to use the calculator during class or during tests. Every other student sat there with the same TI-83, the same access to utility, and I was forced to use a 10-key calculator and show all of my work on paper. The sad truth is, because I wrote the program, I knew more about the actual mathematic problem at hand than anyone else in the room.

I’m happy to say that I wasn’t discouraged. I still followed my fascination with being able to make real world problems more simple not only for me, but for everyone. I followed that path right into my current position, where making software is my full time job, and I love it.

We should be teaching children how to solve real world problems as much as possible.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGWC3aOH13Y

Lady Gaga asked for our video responses. Here is mine. Call your senator, ask them to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCI1YkP5zyc

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

[Download]

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

[Download]

UPDATE: Dancing On My Own link is fixed.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWvggPT46Xg

[via omg blog]

That may seem a bit harsh, but I hope you agree by the end of this post. You see, life can very easily become one mundane blur of beige. The problem with beige is people generally don’t hate it, so it ends up painting more than just the walls of living rooms. It ends up in our wardrobes (figuratively and literally), diets (hopefully only figuratively), jobs, relationships; it ends up permeating everything.

How do beige and NYC relate? Unfortunately there is a lot of beige in NYC. Go to any tourist area and you’ll see it all around. People travel around the world to visit and where do they end up? In bigger versions of the same places they frequent at home. Safety. Familiarity. Did you really expect to find wonder at Gap and TGI Friday’s?

But NYC has a lot that is vibrant, too.

One afternoon, three years ago, I was on a business trip in NY and decided to get lost in the city. I hopped on Yelp, looked up the best places in NY to get cupcakes, plotted a course that took me to three of them, and set out. Several hours later I had the sugary evidence to prove that I’d explored the city: a quarter-sized dollop of chocolate buttercream proudly displayed on my (literally) beige jacket. At the third bakery a rather handsome twenty-something took the opportunity to flirt with me while pointing out that I was a wreck. A year later my friends were asking why I disgustingly hadn’t washed the stain out, but I left it as a reminder to not get stuck in a rut.

So while I could recount my journey in diary form, I’ll save you the boredom. You’ll learn nothing from my stories of magic in bars, walking through Central Park until I had blisters on my heels, running into Zachary Quinto, or deliciously stumbling upon some of the tastiest Asian food I’ve ever had. If there is one thing I wish to share with you from a week in NY, it is purple gingham.

In other words: don’t live beige. When life is an adventure, you’ll always have a response when you are asked “what have you been up to lately?”