hang the personal dj
Since it’s spring break, I’ve finally gotten around to messing around with Pandora, which is a music recommendation system that doesn’t work in Safari1. It reminds me a bit of the old Firefly project way back when2, but it actually plays tracks after you tell it a band you like. It makes some weird choices, though. I told it I liked the Krautrock band Neu!, and, after playing what it thought was a representative Neu! song, it segued into a Fleetwood Mac track. It wasn’t as awful as the Fleetwood Mac I know from classic rock radio, but its selections seem to be slanted toward corporate rock and the generally bad. (When I told it I liked !!!, it played Peter Gabriel’s “Steam.”) I suspect that licensing issues prevent the operation from playing too much indie rock, especially music from smaller labels. For example, it didn’t even recognize the band name Faust. Still, it seems like a useful tool for when I need anything to distract me from the environment around me.
1.I really should dump the native Apple apps and go back to Firefox and Thunderbird full time.3
2.I remember using HOMR in my dorm room via a SLIP connection freshman year.
3.Are these footnotes completely stupid? In the time I spend marking them up, I could probably figure out how to integrate my brain’s little tangents with words instead of anchor tags.
