Online Music Library

I want to share an awesome website called, “The Music Genome Project” aka. Pandora. It’s an online collection of over 400,000 songs by more than 20,000 artists and it’s free. To get an account all you need is an e-mail address, I’ve yet to receive a single e-mail to that address and they are the only site I’ve given it to so apparently they feel the same about spam as I do.

Starting is Easy. Just enter an artist or song name that you like. Pandora will then compile a radio station for you based on specific qualities of that song/artist. As new songs come into the station you can give them a thumbs up or down, you can even move a song to another station if you like it but don’t think it belongs on the current station.

With their specific music license, Pandora doesn’t allow you to rewind or go back to a song, or play a specific song on request, however, if you make a station based on a song, it will play sooner or later, just not right away. Pandora doesn’t have any classical or world music but I’ve made several great stations based on varying genres and I think any music lover will find something they enjoy.

There is also a standalone player called OpenPandora. It performs the same function as the website, without requiring a dedicated browser tab or window. There is also a website dedicated to helping you expand your Pandora stations and musical interests called (what else?) Pandora Stations. And finally, you can share stations with your friends that have a Pandora account and listen to their stations, though you can’t rate songs on stations you don’t own. So if you set up an account and want to check out my stations, let me know.

It’s done!

Today was the last day of qualifying exams. This process definitely sucked, it will suck even more if I find out I failed one of the exams and have to retake it in the fall. For the last three months I’ve done nothing but think about the past three days and prepare for them and when I left the final exam today I had no idea what to do. I was (am) very tired, but I felt like I should celebrate somehow. So I went to a campus bar and played some foosball while my brain decompressed. I noticed that even the most miniscule tasks seemed difficult, by miniscule I mean walking upright and breathing regularly, I may have done some serious damage to my brain over the past several days. Hopefully a solid 12 hours of sleep will fix that!

I do want to thank all my friends and family who supported me with “I’m sure you’ll do great!” and helped keep me on track with “Suck it up and quit whining!” I apologize for not returning any calls or e-mails during the exams but I couldn’t be distracted. Thanks!

I should find out in the next couple weeks how I did. Right now I’m only concerned with the fact that it’s done.

Charitable Searching

I just found a new search engine called GoodTree. It donates half the revenue generated by sponsored links (that’s how search engines make money) to charities that you select. We generate ~ $0.01 per search, a paltry sum? Consider that in March of 2006 over 2.4 billion internet searches were performed using the top engines. The beauty part: GoodTree’s searches are powered by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. So you’re still getting the same results (sometimes more) and you’re doing something good for others at the same time. You do have to start an account with GoodTree (just supply an e-mail address) in order for them to track how much searching you’re doing, this is how they determine how much of their total revenue goes to your charities.

To make this all even easier, you can utilize a little-known function of FireFox that searches directly from your address bar. Just type in anything you want to search for and your browser will do a Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” search on the term and take you to that page. You can change this action to search with GoodTree by changing your “about:config” file like so:

In the FireFox address bar type: “about:config”. In the “Filter” dialog type: “keyword”. Two lines of text will appear, keyword.enable and keyword.URL. Don’t worry about what these are (if it’s not obvious). Make sure keyword.enable = True, double-click it if it isn’t, and double-click keyword.URL and paste the following into the dialog box: http://www.goodtree.com/search?query=

That’s all it takes, now you’re a socially conscious web-browser!