It's a Good Thing and a Bad Thing

Sometimes, I'm a little late to the party.

Recently "discovered" Pandora -- it's a website where, if you give it the name of a song or an artist, it'll put together a "station" based on music that's similar to that.  (It won't play the "All U2" station if you ask for U2 -- it'll play a few stray U2 songs and a bunch of other artists it thinks are similar.)  And you can continue to customize your stations, by voting thumbs-up or thumbs-down on each song that it plays.  You'll end up with a station that's very you.

I actually had to try four times before I got a station for which I vote "yes" on nearly everything it plays -- a station that threatens to makes my mp3 player obsolete, because it plays damn near exactly what I want to listen to (and is even reminding me of stuff I should download).

The good news is that I now have such a station -- it plays music that I already know and like, and it's all the perky stuff that I want to listen to in order to keep going when I'm slogging through something difficult at work.  It sometimes astonishes me that it will play two songs in a row that I would think have absolutely nothing in common except that I happen to dig them both.  (Like, "Mrs. Robinson" by Simon & Garfunkel right after "Vacation" by the Go-Go's.)  

The bad news is that I actually generated the station when I wanted to give Pandora a challenge and asked it for songs similar to "I Will Survive."