I listen to it all the time. It's wonderful. I used to listen to music, but lately I've realized that I'm not smart enough to think of two things at once.

Re: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: You're projecting. The whole book is about following a system that teaches you to draw.

Actually it is deeper than that. It's really teaching you how to see... (and then draw what you see).

Exactly. It teaches you how to draw. An orange is just an orange to me unless I'm drawing it. Then it becomes an orange I have to focus on while I draw.

What the book is really teaches you is to not see an "orange" at all. The process is pre-verbal. By the time you see "an orange", the information you need to produce an effective drawing of it has already been condensed down into a verbal token and your attempts to draw it fail because you're drawing the visual archetype stored in your brain instead of the specific spatial pattern of hue and value that is in front of you. The exercises in the book are intended to help you gain access to your visual processing pipeline at a lower level before object recognition has been applied.

To answer your questions:

1) The same way a programmer learned to program.

2) Yes. As practice, draw from real life everyday.

3) If you want.

4) If you want.

5) I recommend reading Drawing on the Right Hand Side of the brain, Don't Make Me Think, and Design of Everyday Things to start.

6) Whatever you feel works best for you.

If I'll learn design the same way I learn programming. Personally, I learned a lot from participating programming contests such as ACM/ICPC and TopCoder. Learning from and taking part in open source projects also give me a lot. Are there equivalences for graphic design? Thanks.

There's plenty of forums and design contests. http://www.drawar.com/crits/design is an ok place to start. I'm sure there's more.

It's going to come down to practice, like everything else.

As one programmer to another -- you may want to rethink your point of view. "Art" is as much about craft as anything else.

1. Measure what you eat. 2. Brief, intense, and regular workouts. 3. Repeat every day.

Don't workout every day, only twice a week.

5. It matters what you eat. 6. Stay dedicated to the routines partly through limiting your choices and partly through creating accountability

dat soundtrack :E

Such a good idea!

This is awesome, but it would be great if they also told me what places are sausage-fests so I'd know where to avoid!

Yeah, and perhaps one that tells me where all the creepy guys who use this app "are at" so I can avoid them. :P

It's the same app. Just don't go where the compass points.

But go 90 degrees away from the compass vector, otherwise you'll encounter the oncoming wave.

Brilliant. Now change up the UI a bit, make sure you change the name to something like "CreepAvoider" and then it'll be marketable to the ladies :)

And I'll create a service for users of Wheretheladies.at that shows them both where the ladies currently are and where CreeperAvoider is sending the ladies so that they can try to stay ahead of the curve and get places right as the ladies are migrating there :)

It'll be like a dating arms race.

Now I am getting visions of a bunch of Ladies huddled in a bunker somewhere while hordes of Creeps throw themselves against the doors and windows. Sort of Resident Evil style.

Terrifying. :|

Soon, all the ladies and all the creeps will be sitting at home, afraid to do anything, waiting for the other party to make a move. We've now got Dating Cold War!

Clearly CreeperAvoider needs to upgrade to using a true random number generator to generate its dispersion direction ..

Unfortunately just going somewhere else won't work, because the app will follow you. You need a strategy to disperse.

Then you'd be trying to avoid yourself.

Back in my day, we had to use our eyes to find girls. And it was usually dark.

You had to use eyes to find girls? Why, in my day, we hadn't evolved optical receptors, we all had to track girls by scent.

We would have killed for a sense of smell. We just had to move in one direction and hope there was a girl there.

Leave the sunglasses off. It helps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXw4qqQqTrY

Truly painful. That felt a little like a rick roll.

I went from not being able to draw a smiley face to drawing myself in a way that resembled a human and was even recognizable with that book.

A good book to read after you are done with Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is Nicolaides The Natural Way to Draw. It's a lot of hard work, but it's worth it in the end.

I don't like to listen to music while coding because I'm not smart enough to think of two things at once.

But when I'm done, I'll pop in some Bone Thugs & Harmony.

Hate the zebra stripes. The yellow bg-color on the even-numbered rows leads me to believe that those stories are more important than the ones in odd-numbered rows. Like everyone else said, in threads, the metadata is over-emphasized.