Student quote of the day:
Mozart’s dad’s name was Leopold? I thought it was ALPHA Wolf Gang Mozart!
New headphones day! I needed a lighter pair of earbuds to complement the sizable AirPods Max and Sennheiser Momentum 4s that I use much of the time, especially during the winter. I’m really enjoying these Denon Perl Pro earbuds and the price was right.
Easter morning: cleaning the house, then my youngest daughter comes over from Waterloo around noon. Dinner this evening is the long recipe for Beef Stroganoff with a full cook/prep time of 2-3 hours with three sauces which are eventually combined. But always worth it.
Morning coffee at 6:15am. 8 hours of teaching piano today as well as a 7am grocery run for Easter dinner (stores closed yesterday and tomorrow). ☕️
Micro.blog site is updated and ready to go with a new template and errors fixed. TIL Brave sometimes has caching issues with rendering templates.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in Aeon about the hypercurious mind about how our brains often feel constrained in some environments and excel in others:
What if we’ve been looking at this backwards? What if the question isn’t what constrains attention, but what captures it? In many people with ADHD, signals linked to curiosity – such as novelty, uncertainty, prediction error, informational reward – carry higher motivational weight. In plain terms, some cues feel disproportionately worth following. From this perspective, what looks like distractibility can be understood as rapid, stimulus-driven reallocation of attention toward whatever promises the greatest payoff. The delay aversion, the executive struggles, the altered reward-processing – they can all be seen as downstream expressions of a brain that has fundamentally different priorities about what deserves attention, priorities that may have served early human societies in certain environments long before modern medicine defined them as a disorder.
Really digging the improvisational vibe from jazz saxophonist Jasmine Myra and her ensemble on her latest release.
Matcha and tonic is my new favorite drink.
Morning is all about the coffee ☕️
There is proper authentic Mexican food in Windsor! Tonight’s dinner was chile rellenos at Mi Casita on Wyandotte Street.
From my lunch break on the Windsor waterfront earlier today.
Finished reading: Learn Like a Pro by Barbara Oakley PhD 📚
This was a really practical book that I’ll be putting to use in my own learning and teaching. I first found out about Barbara Oakley’s work on Ben Owden’s Why Lead? podcast. Highly recommended.
Currently reading: Brain Power by Catherine de Lange 📚
Currently reading: Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi 📚
A small cafe in Tokyo has a single time-traveling chair, but there are several rules which must be observed…
RIP Daniel Kahneman.
Had a fun morning teaching an adult piano student. The 4th through 7th Goldberg Variations, then Brahms' arrangement of the Bach Chaconne for the left hand. 🎵 🎹
Some Suno AI tunes shared on Facebook in the last day:
In der Weihnachtsbäckerei is the most 2024 thing I’ve heard so far: an AI-generated Japanese pop song, in German, about a Christmas bakery. 🎵
Espresso, a quick breakfast, shower, and then 8 hours of teaching piano students.
Rebecca Toh on how narrow points of focus can be the secret of this universe:
Having the discipline to sit down every day for a few hours to write can make all the difference between someone who manages to write a book and someone who doesn’t.
Let’s hear it for simple and boring systems.