Cool site for music fans

A coworker sent me a link to Pandora "a music discovery service designed to help you find and enjoy music that you'll love." The service is based on the work of the ambitious members of The Music Genome Project (MGP) who, according the website, spent the past five years listening to and analyzing the music of over 10,000 artists, quantifying "everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony."

I haven't found a new favorite band yet, and I definitely don't like all of the music they've suggested, but it has a lot to recommend it. First off, it's free! There's also a subscription if you want to avoid ads, but so far they're quite unobtrusive. Maybe if enough people buy music (from Amazon or iTunes) through the service, it'll stay that way. Also, their player uses Flash, so you don't have to download some proprietary media player or get stuck with something awful like... Real.
You start by creating a "station", seeding it with the name of a song or artist you like. The player then plays what it considers a "typical" song by that artist, followed by those it considers to be similar. You can click on a song to get various options. Why did you play this song? gives you insight into how the MGP catorized songs. If you like the song, you can add it to your Favorites list, which can be printed and also includes links for buying the song from iTunes or Amazon. Finally, you can give the song a thumbs up or thumbs down to govern whether Pandora should play it again in the future.
You can have up to 100 stations and you can share them with others by clicking on the down arrow at its right end and selecting e-mail this station to a friend. I haven't tested it yet, but presumably you can e-mail them to non-friends too. ;P
Check it out!

Firefox 1.5 Released

For all of you Firefox fans out there (who isn't?), Mozilla has released version 1.5. I've already installed it on my home computer and will be the guinea pig for anyone wanting to wait and see if there are any glaring problems with the release. As with a lot of Firefox upgrades, not all of the extensions have compatible versions yet -- but since they're developed gratis in someone's free time, I don't think we can really complain.

On the topic of Firefox extensions, here's a quick list of some of the ones I find indispensable:
Bug Me Not -– ever have someone e-mail you a link to an item at a site that wants you to register just to view it (e.g. NY Times)? This extension lets you fill in dummy login info from bugmenot with a simple right click.
Copy Plain Text -– This one isn't yet compatible with 1.5, but it lets you copy the selected text to the clipboard without all the formatting. Great if the app you want to paste into doesn't have a "Paste Special" option.
IE View -– Another not-yet-available-for-1.5 extension. This one lets you open the page you're currently viewing in Firefox in Internet Explorer. Great for those sites you have to access, but that were coded specifically for IE. |P
Plain Text Links - this extension is even more useful in Thunderbird, but if you've ever come across a URL that wasn't a hyperlink for some reason, this extension will let you follow it without have to copy/paste it to the address bar.
Target Alert - I'd actually just installed this one shortly before upgrading to 1.5. Unlike another, similar extension which placed an icon after ever link on the page causing some ugly formatting issues, this one waits to display the icon until you hover over the link. Oh, and for both extensions, the icons give you a visual clue as to what the link is targeting -- another page, a PDF document, a zip file, etc.

Dagnabit!

I had an April Fool's post all ready to go and was working on the graphics when the folks at thinkgeek beat me to it. Worse, I found out that a British company called Anatomicals actually markets one called Snoozers Are Losers!

Just too fun!

I came across a link to South Park Studio when I was browsing for info on the next version of Windows Mobile. It lets you assemble parts to make your own South Park character. Be sure to read the instructions at the beginning for how to save your creations to disk, however. It's not exactly straight-forward.

Update Here's me, South Park'd:

It's Mozilla for me

I've finally done it. While I switched over to Firefox several months ago, I had been holding on to using Outlook as my e-mail client. My excuses were that it let me also check my Hotmail account and that I had carried it along with me through the last three changes to my ISP (TimeWarner, Adelphia, and now Verizon). After getting thwacked by a really annoying bit of spyware recently, I decided it might finally be prudent to remove the Admin rights from the account my DW and I use to logon. Urk. Outlook decided to be a chump and choke on that change. That was all the push I needed. I downloaded Thunderbird and restored Admin rights to my account long enough to import everything from Outlook. It's not perfect -- Outlook kept a bunch of my HTML messages seemed to come over as plain text for some reason -- but so far, I'm basically pleased with my decision. As for accessing Hotmail, I created a "Web Mail" folder on the Bookmark Toolbar and, with Firefox's wonderful "Open in Tabs" option, I can now check GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo in one swell foop.
Next up on the chopping block... the rest of Microsoft Office. Stay tuned!

RSS Feed of the RTP (Random Time Period)

As we close in on election day, many folks will be watching with bated breath to see whether less-than-inspiring aristocrat John Kerry can overthrow the truly moronic fascist George Bush (no bias here!). The electoral-vote site has an RSS feed which lets you quickly view how their predictions steadily decline towards W. Unfortunately, no one seems to have an answer for why we haven't had a good option for president in years. Maybe, instead of an election, we should institute a Presidential draft since, as Douglas Adams posits,

those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it... anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

Oh, wait a minute. Is that what we already have? Is W just a right-wing nutjob version of Zaphod Beeblebrox? Was the war in Iraq his Heart of Gold? If so, someone certainly screwed up when they picked the real power -- more of an Emperor Palpatine than the wise man of Adam's Galaxy. Oh well. Where's Han Solo when you need him?

New addition to the blogging family

DW has started a blog of her own. She totally rocks! See what I mean at Going Feral.

Death knell for newsletters?

I used to be a e-mail newsletter junkie. I still get quite a few, but have been whittling down the list as more and more sites are offering RSS feeds instead. If you haven't encountered RSS yet, it's a "pull" technology that lets web sites provide headlines or complete news blurbs in a standardized XML format that end-users like you an I can request when it's convenient for us. Rather than navigating to each site and trying to read the XML directly, however, you use an "aggregator" to configure the different feeds that it should gather and display them in a single view. My current aggregator of choice is SharpReader -- both because it's free and because, as a .NET developer, it offers me the opportunity to (someday) get in and play with the code. If you're a Mac user, there's a cross-platform option called AmphetaDesk that's received pretty good press.

So, why are news feeds better than newsletters? Anonymity for one. While news aggregators usually refer to configuring a feed as "subscribing", the site in question actually doesn't know who you are. This means one less source for clogging up your inbox (even a gmail one) with unwanted mail. The other benefit is that you're in control. Sure, you can set up rules/filters and route your newsletters to different folders within your mail client. For me at least, it is very satisfying to be able to separate my correspondence activities from feeding my news-junkie habit. I can check e-mail without worrying about getting sucked into some extensive link-a-thon. Then I can take the time to satisfy my info cravings when it's convenient.

One interesting aspect of RSS feeds is that, as a relatively new phenomenon, different sites approach it differently. Some, like zdnet, simply replicate their newsletters; this results in the same headline showing up multiple times if you subscribe to more than one of their feeds. Better sites provide more granular feeds that let you pick what you're interested in without having to wade through duplicate entries.