I Can Live With This

Which Princess Bride Character are You?
this quiz was made by mysti

Take My Photo's, Please!

This Site wants you to use their stock photo's, and only asks that you provide a link to them.

High Altitude Photo's

This is a slide show of a student project to launch a ballon to an altitude above 60,000 feet.

So Much Music, So Little Time

One of the nice features of Pandora is that you can email one of your personalized stations to a friend. With a couple of more steps, you can post your stations to your journal or web page. Just send the email to yourself, then open your mail and copy the URL to the appropriate location.

Here's a station I built around Jane Monheit.

Here's one based on Natalie MacMaster.

Besides Pandora, there are a couple of more sites that offer interesting music.

GarageBand.com offers indipendant music and free downloads.

Falling You has some amazing ethereal music available to stream or download.

What are your favorite sites?

Firefoxflicks

A very cool commercial by a Firefox fan. He did this for free to show his support for Firefox.

Hawaiian Sanctuary becomes a National Monument

This is good.

Here's a little inspiration.

More Chickens

Another Joseph Campbell Quote

The ego that sees others as "Thou" is different than the ego that sees others as "it."

From Wandering Visitor

The Music Genome Project

We had the chance to attend the Town Hall meeting with Pandora.com founder Tim Westergren at Seattle's Experience Music Project. If you are not familiar with Pandora, you should check it out.

The Music Genome Project now has more than 400,000 songs in the database and over 2 million subscribers.
Pandora.com has only been online for six months. That's a staggering growth rate!

• (Side note: Legally they can only allow US residents to subscribe; they use zip codes to verify residence. According to their demographic statistics, Hollywood, zip code 90210, has 4 million residents.)

Here's a summery of the meeting along with some of my thoughts in Italics:

They are working on the Classic music genome and will have it available soon.

Near and dear to their hearts is giving unknown artists a chance to be heard.

If you seed a station with an artist, expect to go through a process of sorting out the different styles that artist has used. Imagine (pun intended) seeding a station with the Beatles.

They are aware of the tendancy of a station to morph into "mush" over time with the use of thumbs up and down.

• If you want a station to stay close to a style, seed it with a song instead of an artist and avoid the temptation to adjust it with thumbs up and thumbs down. You can add a track to your favorites if you want to capture it for future study.

The business plan, for now, depends mostly on advertising, with Amazon, iTunes, and paid subscriptions, helping. Tim mentioned that if you link to Amazon from their site and purchase music, they get a percentage, but if you stay on Amazon and buy anything else, they also get credit.

• They're not profitable yet.

A long range goal is to have universal access to their music.

• I think this is a long way off, but I would love to be able to listen to my stations on my commute.

• It occurred to me that they have a huge database of what we, the subscribers, are listening to, the same way Google knows what we're searching for. This disturbs me a little, but not enough to quit using Google or Pandora. The potential for database mining seems very high to me. I also worry that some deep-pocket, like Yahoo, will buy them out.

I'm not an expert on this service, but, if you have a question or a suggestion about them, please leave a comment.

RC Plane video on YouTube

This is worth watching.