Yo, you need this record if you don't have it already. Trust me! I know this stuff!



This too. Man, check out that bass guitar work - it's freakishly good.

It's around 4 in the morning here. A couple hours ago, after D. had gone to bed, I was sitting here singing along to this stuff. Falsetto and everything, ha, and woke her up. Oops, sorry. I get carried away, being a frustrated wannabe R&B singer trapped in a geek.

For you kids that might not know the story - Marvin Gaye was probably the greatest soul singer ever, a huge star, until his own dad shot & killed him in the early '80s. Crazy, tragic.
Wikipedia entry!

My favorite Motown material is what they were doing in the mid-late '70s. Their biggest hits were in the '60s, but as great as it was, that stuff became pretty formulaic. By the next decade, just before it all imploded, their producers and musicians had gotten so incredibly adept and boundary-pushing that I don't think anybody's topped their work in the pop/dance fields ever since.

Guess that's all I really wanted to talk about tonight. That and the glories of the pizza we're blessed with here in this neighborhood, but more the music.
Hope you're having a swell day; see ya.

Hey. Wanted to drop in here and send a few links. This one's worth watching - it's Charlie Rose interviewing Marc Andreessen of Mosaic/Netscape fame:

..


Moderately interesting article from Om Malik:
http://gigaom.com/2009/02/26/ipod-kindle-facebook-and-a-nomad-called-me/

...which refers to this thing about "ambient intimacy":
http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/

Neither are super-profound, but worth scanning through.

This guy Etherington talks about changing your work location if you can, including working at museums:
http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/03/03/shake-things-up-alter-your-routine-to-improve-productivity/

...which is pretty fun. Last year I was hitting many big museums & libraries in NYC weekly in the afternoons, just for the sake of the environment change & being out and about. More recently I've been tied closer to home, as I'm making trades now every hour from about 7pm (wake up) through to next-day noonish. Collecting more data. Trading is frustrating as ever, though I'm still getting better so that's a'ight. Hoping for the light of stability, so I can continue on to some sort of real-life-type doings.

So it's 5am-ish Saturday morning and I'm waiting for D. to wake up. Friday was stay-up-all-day-to-invert-sleep-schedule-around-to-that-of-normal-people (or the Monday variant, "back-to-nocturnal mode", which I do twice a week and sucks. We'll probably go out to eat breakfast, hit the gym, go on a walk to the park and later go off to a mutual friend-couple's baby shower thing. Never been to one, so I don't know what to expect. The gifts have already arrived and been opened, so I guess we'll just hang out and marvel at the wife's giant belly, or something.

Just finished reading Daniel Goleman's Social Intelligence which was good and am _finally_ on the home-stretch for Neal Stephenson's System of the World. Totally fascinating and really freakin' long. I'm not in any hurry to start another 900-page novel, that's for sure.

Turned D. onto audiobooks which is exciting because I have tons of them, and she gave me an iPod Touch she'd scored as a bonus. Haven't jailbroken yet, which I understand is finally truly possible as of last week. Was putting some videos on it yesterday - holy crap, does transcoding video suck. There's a VLC port which would alleviate the problem, but as of now you have to have a liberated system to use it. Anyways, it's a nifty device as I'm sure you know. Also great is the mighty Sonicare electric toothbrush. I bought the cheapest one recently to try it out (around 30 bucks) and it's like having a bunch of bees in your mouth.

Hooray?!


..

Your humble and obedient servant,
G. Ratte'/cDc

God Save The Queen.

I'VE BEEN HYPNOTIZED BY THIS SONG!!! SOULJA BOY TELL 'EM! I CAN'T STOP!!!!

Hey there. D. gets back home from Hong Kong on Monday-ish and I'm super happy. She's been gone for three weeks and saw a lot of neat stuff.

During that time I've been completely socially isolated. Sometimes I feel like I'm practicing for if this whole "people" thing doesn't work out; at least I know I'll be alright either way. Don't really get bored or lonely; always chillin'. The problem is that every week I experiment with some new ridiculous sleep/work schedule and generally end up starting my day when most people are settling in for the evening. Going to bed at noon on weekdays or somesuch. And it shifts during the week too; seem to get tired almost randomly. Hard to make plans w/other people. Though I did talk for a few minutes w/this guy Raheem at the Subway shop, who bummed $1.25 off me and was impressed I knew his uncle from around the way who has giant arthritis-hands and is a loan shark. I also met "Smurf" one morning while out on a walk, who was fixing to sell his cart full of bottles & cans he'd scavenged to the recycling truck that comes by every day. The truck stops a block to the south of home and all the (semi?) homeless people who scavenge the recyclables gather there and sell their stuff. Around the back of the grocery store they have machines that take can deposits too, which is also a really popular spot.

Anyways, Smurf said he was glad to be his own boss and have his own hours. There was also some woman cussing out her little kid at the curb before they drove off, and Smurf commented negatively on her parenting skills. I agreed with both his observations. It was bro-tastic.

Trading is being frustrating. The huge majority of books & advice out there is aimed at a long-term, "inverstorly" approach which doesn't help with my stuff at all, 'cuz I'm making 10-20 trades a day. There's no clear career path with this - no obvious curriculum I'm missing. Read piles of books, put in 6-ish years so far. Just have to "get better" somehow. Improve my win rate a bit. That's the difference between scraping by as I do, and becoming... Scrooge McDuck. 'cuz compounding is the Godzilla of Finance, no joke.

Then I have all these fancy plans and whatnot, that get paused as my concerns tumble down to the base of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Damnit. I do that a lot. Sometimes it's psychological, and others I really need the time - like now. So that's that.

Every day I've been going for a walk down to the park which is muddy, and the gym, and sometimes to eat at the tiny diner or Dunkin' Donuts. It's pretty good. Listening to Malcolm Gladwell's _Outliers_ book as I'm out, which I'm liking a lot so far. Gotta go to Texas for a week starting Thursday, bleh. What are you up to, person-who-is-reading?


This is fake, but neat anyways.
Explanation:
http://www.viralmarketing.de/2008/12/23/the-best-air-race-pilot-ever-facts-about-a-viral-fake/
(NSFW!)

Heya. I'm diggin this new Metallica video at the bottom - it's a sci-fi disaster thing about the Tunguska meteor and deadly alien spores.

Just made this new cDc blog post about Chinese New Year.

Working on improving my bacon & eggs technique, most every day. They're getting better. Big help is to put a bunch of Cajun spice and pepper in the egg mix before you put it in the pan. THEM'S GOOD EGGZ.

Been trying to improve my execution in general of the things I want to do every day - M-F best days I'm maybe hitting 75% before burnout. It's helping to avoid random Internet reading, which is probably my biggest time sink. It's become apparent that I could "happily" spend every waking moment reading random stuff and be fully entertained & engaged, so I'm more newly aware of this and purposefully refraining from going off. It's the weekend so I'm gonna try and get out of the house mostly, and then next week work on improving my targets some more.

Misc. link: "Hiring for Emotional Intelligence"

Metallica - All Nightmare Long

Hey - I just made a big fat post on the cDc blog about sprint training and the Tabata protocol and a couple tools to do it with.
Check it out there if ya want:
LINK!

I've been on Twitter for a little bit. If you're on there too, send me your info so I can read yer stuff!
http://twitter.com/gratte -me

Here's a link to the whole thing. It's nasssty.
http://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/2009/01/new-cdc-text-file.html

We've also got a new song by Punkle, called "Dr. Poo."
http://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/2009/01/number-272-dr-poo.html
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Personal stuff. "Hey." I was in Lubbock for a long time over the holidays, mostly doing the grind of family stuff. Back in home in NYC now where it's colder. The other night, it snowed and I went out at 2am to go be in it while it was still falling down. Rode the subway to Columbus Circle and then walked a square-ish route down to Rockefeller Center and then back up to Central Park south and across from east to west. Took lots of great pictures of dark, snowy hills and whatnot in the park illuminated with the streetlights. Awesome. I love how it's so quiet w/the snow, since it deadens the sound so much and nobody's out. The next afternoon, it snowed some more so D. and I went up to the woods in Inwood (northernmost tip of Manhattan) and walked around in it. Fantastic overlooking the Hudson River on the big rocky outcroppings and paths up there; you couldn't even see Jersey across the way. Just snowy haze everywhere and clumps of snow in the river.

Here's a pic of that by sjmcdonough, who I don't know:
http://flickr.com/photos/sjmcdonough/3211183746/

Yeah, so I love snow.

Also recentish: D. and I went canoeing in the Bronx River a few months ago, and went on road trips to Boston, Philly, and Plymouth (Pilgrim World). Now she's in India for work and then will be stopping for a few days in Hong Kong on the way back; cool. I'm here working.
London market's about to open, so I gotta get to it. See ya.

Hi there. Not much is new since the last time I posted - had to go read it again 'cuz I'd forgotten what it was about (not much). I'm in Lubbock, TX for another week of a two-week stint, and D. is in India for work. Our main cDc stuff will be online in a day or some such; bummed about the downtime. It's weird - I miss the outlet and the people a lot, even though I often don't feel like I have much to contribute - especially more recently that I'm not really producing anything.

So here... same deal as at home. Trade all night, sleep all day & help my folks with their stuff. I've been running outside every other night and it really struck me how deserted this place feels. I'm wondering if neighborhoods age together? The subdivision where my parents live was built up in the early '80s and it was almost all families with kids. I'm wondering if the houses are owned by the same people mostly, but their kids have grown up and moved away? Seriously, at about midnight in the summer I could have just sat down in the middle of an intersection and taken a nap. Nobody came by; I didn't see a single vehicle or person in the hour I was out. Growing up there, there'd always be tons of teens tear-assing around all the time; you'd have to be careful. It felt really odd to be that quiet.

Standing out on the front lawn, sweaty and getting bit by mosquitos, made me remember the time I saw a couple-three crazy lights zipping around in the sky off to the west for at least a half-hour. Never again, though. I've seen the same sort of lights on some Fox show 'bout UFOs. Who knows, shrug.

Anyhow, run-down of stuff
* drove to Washington, DC with D. and met up w/her family there, 'twas really cool
* read a good book called _Spark_ about the effects of exercise on the brain; book 30 of the year
* saw Indy Jones and the first season of Star Trek
* played some Fire Emblem for the Gamecube, and that Rise of Nations RTS on the Mac
* I declare that BBQ is my favorite ethnic food, and I like beef jerky a lot. There are two BBQ joints in our neighborhood in NYC - one mediocre, and one totally crappy. There's a great one called "Dinosaur BBQ" down about 20 blocks though.
* also been lifting dumbbells in my parents' backyard with their picnic table bench; that's pretty fun
* there's a fantastic park about 5-10 minutes away by foot from where we live and I've been running there a lot in the afternoons and reading and picking up trash sometimes. It's built on giant rock outcroppings, where George Washington led his troops in the "Battle of Harlem". Heavily wooded, with big wide paths and all sorts of rocks to sit on. I love that place.

That's the fun stuff I can think of; kinda reaching. Mostly work & sleep. Can't wait to get back home and see D. It's also 'bout that time to make the two-hour subway ride to ROCKAWAY BEACH if I can set up my daily routine for it. Man, that'd be great.

Take it easy. We'll have stuff posted up when our sites go live; should be cool.

G. Ratte'/cDc

Hey. Been mega-isolated, even from 'net stuff. Just trading and going to the gym.
For those that don't know... I don't work a regular job and thus my "schedule" is pretty subjective and floats depending on intl. market times & news and whatever goofball scheme I'm using at the time. I come up with little routines and things but they're very fragile and cascade into a total mess whenever I miss my "sleep window" and then a week goes by and I'm all "hurr hurr lol wut?".



Whatever that means - I've been pretty oblivious the past few weeks. Anyways, so for my birthday, D. got us both set up with the startup fees at the big chain gym that's miraculously in the ground floor of our building and that's been like the coolest birthday present ever. She likes the classes and I'm super stoked 'cuz I haven't been a member at a real gym with a squat rack and lots of free weights in a very long time.
I've just been gimping along w/whatever and now I'm excited to be making progress. My shins are scraped up from deadlifts and I sweat like a pig. Totally fun.

Been watching some Star Trek I guess (original) and saw a play ("Boeing Boeing") and a musical (the ABBA one) with D., thanks to her work connections.

Following this story from a few days ago, which could be huge:

from Wired - get smart

"Brain researchers for the first time claim to have found a method for improving the general problem-solving ability scientists call fluid intelligence, otherwise known as "smarts."

Fluid intelligence was previously thought to be genetically hard-wired, but the finding suggests that with about 25 minutes of rigorous mental training a day, healthy adults could improve their mental capacities."

So these guys are claiming that their training with "n-back" tests (a memory test) is improving general IQ. If so, it's freakin' amazing.

Thanks for the birthday-happiez. I am sleeping, and watching lots of THESE wonderful people:



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