A few more tools for the box

Off to the side you will find a new link to my Pandora Account. Pandora is an offshoot of "The Music Genome Project," which is one of those deals where you can enter a song and get a list of other songs that are sort of similar. Pandora is a jukebox thingy, that plays what it thinks you like based on what you say you think you like. If you click on the link, you can find your way to what it thinks my likes and dislikes are. They are really my attempt to game the system which seems to have its own ideas. I went through a big Country phase, followed by lots of women with husky voices. Currently, it is trending into lounge prog - which I like, but in smaller doses (It has been playing an awful lot of Cousteau for example). Still, when it went from Stereolab to Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich and then a cut from Joe Strummer's soundtrack to Walker, I knew that I had something set up right.

I've had a lot of fun with satellite photos, but I've been a little frustrated with the competing services. Now I've found FlashEarth, which pulls images from GoogleMaps, Microsoft VE, Yahoo, and others that I've not bothered with. You can toggle back and forth from service to service, which is handy, and if it goes belly up tomorrow the links have the latitude and longitude in them, so I can see where I was.

So here is a picture that I took, in the general direction of the satellite,



and here is the link to see from the satellite where I was when I took the picture.

Speaking of pictures I took, I've also set up a flickr account. I'll be using it for some of my scans and photos, so some of my posts are going to start to look sort of wonky as I work out how all the coding works and move some of the old photos over.

One of the added features of the Blogger Beta is that it has its own rss feed. But I already set one up with Feedburner. That link is restored to the side. I'm still trying to work out which one I like better.

Finally, Amazon has added a lot of functionality to their a-Store system. I can have more than nine items, and I can put things in sections - I can even ghettoize my Doctor Who section. It's sort of ugly and unorganized at the moment, but I thought I might mention it because it's live, and it's Christmastime. Go shopping.