The line @ at&t store outside my building.

Went out for a drink Tuesday night after BJW with some fellow jazzers and got hipped to some new albums and a great website called Pandora.

All you have to do is enter a favorite song or artist and it will create a streaming radio station that plays similar songs. It’s a great way to get introduced to new artists and albums. It’s a 128Kbps stream, which is decent enough for ripping and putting on an ipod, or get an Airport Express and pipe it into your living room stereo.

If you want to check out my radio station, here’s the link:

http://www.pandora.com/?sc=sh171743072027460312

It’s called Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum because that’s the first song I entered (from the Wayne Shorter album Speak No Evil).

I’m not so sure about the technology used because the songs it comes up with are not always a match with the vibe I’m looking for, but it’s interesting to click on the “Why did you play this song” link to see how they picked a song. Also, I’m not sure it’s possible to find songs similar to the masterpiece that Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum is, or the whole Speak No Evil album, for that matter. If I keep removing songs from this station that I don’t think are a match–and we’re talking songs that are excellent, just not the same vibe as Fee–then what songs will be left?

I hope the record labels are not behind this. They are probably profiting from the statistics compiled from this website. I’m sure that’s how this website makes their money. They also provide links to amazon and itunes.

Well I can’t argue with the fact that I’ve heard some cool songs in the last couple of days and know what albums I want to buy the next time I go to the record store.

I’ve dropped iWeb in favor of wordpress, which has gotten incredibly robust and is so easy to use. I remember way back when I first started my own website I had contemplated using wordpress but it seemed so basic. Now there are hundreds of great themes and plugins available. Two plugins I really like are podpress and Flickr Photo Album, which basically give me the same functionality that my iWeb site had.

Speaking of Flickr, this is a great website that I just found out about recently. You can store all your photos and share them with friends, even total strangers. There are photo groups that you can join, and there’s also a geotagging system that allows you to see photos from all over the world. I love this kind of technology that brings people together. YouTube, podcasts, del.icio.us, digg, even craigslist. These technologies are what make the Internet great! Wouldn’t it be great if the next revolution took place on the Internet? We could overthrow governments and fight evil corporations from our laptops!

Well, I’m relieved this update is finally finished. It took the better part of this weekend. Now I can get back to practicing and, well, let’s just say a promise I made a long time ago and need to complete.

Everyone’s buying Macs these days!