Ecce Sigum

Immanentize the Empathy

Month: November 2005

Pandora

John Winkelman

This may be old news for those of you on the Bleeding Edge of the internet. I have just discovered Pandora, a totally nifty little tool for discovering new music based on music you already like.

It works like this: Enter the name of an artist or song you like, and then click “create”. The rest is pretty self-explanatory. You are given a large list of songs by a large list of artists, and you can listen to those songs and vote on whether or not you like the songs which Pandora selected for you.

For instance: I chose to create a station with the seed “Richard and Linda Thompson”. The first song was “When I Get to the Border”, by Mr and Mrs Thompson. Next was “The Only Living Boy in New York” by Simon & Garfunkle. Then “Little Hands” by Alexander Spence. Number four was “Pro-Girl” by Janice Ian.

All in all, an exciting (and potentially extremely expensive) site to have discovered.

About Pandora
Pandora developer’s blog

Life Upgrade 2005

John Winkelman

Last Friday I bought a house. It is 100 years old, 1800 square feet, with manymanymany new and improved features, thanks to the hard work of the previous owners. I took possession immediately, and spent most of last week moving. I don’t have very many possessions, but I have been terribly busy for months now, so available bandwidth for Stuff Transfer Protocol (STP) has been limited to evenings and weekends. Most everything I own was able to fit in my car, but I have a small car, so what STP bandwidth was available was limited to about 8 cubic feet per hour. You may think that is pretty good, but considering most of my Stuff is in the form of books (over a ton of them), that amounted to many packets sent out. Fortunately the slow line speed (~25mph) was over a distance of only four blocks.

I was able to pick up some extra signal strength in the form of Mr. Bock and his truck, which allowed the transfer of some of my larger files—bed, bookshelves, ego, etc.

Right now I am sitting in my old apartment, taking a break from removing any evidence that I ever lived here. Knowing that I would be moving sometime this year, I let some of the more irritating cleaning projects fall by the wayside, and now I am paying for that lack of attention. Yesterday I spent about an hour chipping old stir-fry from the top of my stove.

A week into it, and I think I have made a good decision. It is a lot of house for one person, but as many homeowner friends (some more than others) have demonstrated, it is not difficult to expand to fill a space.

The address is 629 Innes Street, just around the corner from Martha’s Vineyard and the new Nantucket Bakery. I will post photos in a few days, when I get myself a little more unpacked. If you see lights on, stop on by!