Pandora Plug

I'm not exactly on the leading edge of technology. It was literally years after DVDs became available that I finally got a DVD player. And the one I did get cost $1 as it came as part of a cell phone sign up bonus. And the cell phone is a bare bones phone.

So this is hardly breaking technology news, but I wanted to put in a plug for Pandora internet radio.

The way it works is that it initially asks you for a "seed" artist or song, and then it picks songs based on that seed and streams them to you. You can set up separate radio stations seeded with different songs and artists, and a given station can have multiple seeds, and I just love it. As songs play you can "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" them, which will alter the parameters and tune the playlist to more what you want for that station.

I've got 8 stations so far, tailored for styles from Bruce Cockburn to Sonic Youth to Edgar Winter ("Frankenstein"!).

Pandora solved a vexing problem for me. I like music, but I despise commercial radio with its mass merchandized playlists and juvenile DJs. I literally gave up on it over 6 years ago. Public radio is overwhelmingly classical, except for Philadelphia's WXPN, which I enjoyed when I lived up there (they're on the Web, but I was looking for more variety).

So I could buy songs I knew from artists I knew, but how am I going to hear anything new then? I could catch the musical guests on the late night talk shows or SNL, but that's only a very limited number of venues.

With Pandora, though, having access to music old and new, they give me the exposure to the new artists and songs that fit my tastes; and conversely give those artists exposure to a potential new fan.

Highly recommended!

Kickout a Reddit Rant

I periodically submit interesting links I find to Reddit, most often in the programming or science subreddits. These are usually quickly downvoted into oblivion :-) While some of the links are admittedly a little off what I take to be the mainstream of interest there, I think that horizons ought to be expanded and that some of these submissions help in that area. I understand that some of the downvoting occurs for tactical, albeit selfish, reasons on the "New" pages, but I really don't understand why subsequent downvotes occur on stories that are right smack dab in the middle of the subreddit's subject matter.

A link I submitted from The Planetary Society containing a science professional's first thoughts on the first pictures the MESSENGER probe sent back from Mercury is a good example. As of the time I'm writing this the submission had 26 points, from 43 upvotes and 17 downvotes. 17 downvotes?? In the science subreddit?? This is about Mercury, the first pictures of it taken in 30 years, including photos of areas of the planet that have never before been seen! Other than the initial "tactical" downvotes, how can anybody in the science subreddit rationalize downvoting this? If someone isn't interested in astronomy or planetary geology, that's fine, ignore the submission. I don't go around downvoting biology or psychology submissions just because I'm not interested in the subject matter, there are probably others that are interested in those fields, and science is a pretty broad subject area.

There's no point in ranting about this on reddit itself, which others have already done, and my rant would almost certainly get downvoted anyway :-)

So, since I do have a blog there are two things I can do:

1. Rant it about here.
2. Introduce "Kickouts", which are simply the links I submit to Reddit that will more often than not get downvoted away.

Kickouts will be links to various articles and posts that I found interesting enough to submit to Reddit, the purpose being to keep them visible here, regardless of their lifespan there.

The next post will contain the inaugural set. Enjoy!