Free Candy For Everyone

I’ve talked about different music discovery sites, but somehow I neglected to mention Pandora. I first heard about it when it was in beta in August of 2005. At the time I was much enamored of Last.fm/Audioscrobbler (which I still like for it’s music tracking capabilities, I love being able to see charts of my most listened to songs, artists, etc.) and wasn’t as into Pandora. Both offer streaming music stations, but I wanted more control over what I was listening to than Pandora provided. You could make a music station and specify a few artists or songs that you wanted to hear more like, then it would stream you songs. I found it didn’t do a very good job of providing me with music I actually wanted to listen to.

While, I was catching up on my backlog of blog reading today and there was a post about Pandora at Zatz Not Funny so I decided to go see how it’s changed in the year+ since I last looked. I started up a radio station I’d created last year and to my surprise, I liked almost everything it played. I knew maybe a third of the songs they were playing, but of the rest I found many pleasant surprises of people I’d never heard of but where quite excellent.

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Hey all, I’m still here. If you don’t read me through an aggregator (like Google Reader), then you might notice the site looks dramatically different. I’m in the midst of a change to a new theme. Some things are still not quite right, so if you notice anything weird, please feel free to drop a comment right here! Or if something is missing that you’ve come to know and love, let me know. I’m also fixing and cleaning up the many plugins I’ve installed at various times and used half-heartedly. So check out the archive page for some potential coolness. Oh, and the lifestream, which isn’t really all that exciting and may just have to go the way of the do-do.

Things to do:

1. Create a header graphic, I’m not unsleepable, I’m Free Candy!
2. Fix weirdness on the Archives page where the category stuff shows up all on top of itself
3. Get a search box in the sidebar all the time
3. Figure out what all the special case code is for the sidebar and when to hide it all together
4. Clean up defunct addons
5. Get comment previews enabled again
6. Fix horrible broken-ness of header on IE
7. Fix Now Reading library pages

Ok, I’m about to leave, but I saw this through a link on Penny Arcade and couldn’t resist a parting word. Or image.

Don’t feed your Wii after midnight.

Sorry, I haven’t been doing the best job of keeping up the blog recently. What with the Thanksgiving holiday and an upcoming vacation, I’ve been keeping pretty busy. I leave this weekend for a full week of relaxation in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. I can hardly believe that I’ll have nothing to think about but if I have enough sunblock on or not.

Needless to say, there probably won’t be more posts in the next week. But when I come back, I’ll … probably finish FFXII and maybe start playing WoW again to prepare for the imminent release of the expansion pack. Oh, and maybe do some blogging as well. I’ve been doing some experimenting with a new theme - I’m pretty tired of this one. So maybe a new look in the new year!

I had my 10 year high school reunion over Thanksgiving weekend. I’ve had some people tell me they thought it was a strange time for a reunion, but it makes sense to me. Everyone is back in town visiting their parents anyways. If I had to decide to fly all the way across the country just for the reunion, I’m not so sure I’d go. But fortunately, I didn’t have to make that decision.

Overall, I’m glad I went. There’s a core group of people that I’ve stayed in touch with since graduation, and we all went together. Other than that small handful, I haven’t seen anyone else in 10 years. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it wasn’t quite what we had. I was surprised by how much people were the same. There were more hairless heads, a few extra pounds here and there, but mostly people looked a bit older, but not all that different.

I had fun chatting with people, though it was a lot of going through the motions. “Oh hi, person-I-haven’t-thought-of-in-10-years! So, where do live? What do you do? Oh really, I live here and do this. Ok, nice, good to see you. Next!” Most people didn’t really listen all that much at all. We were all just making noises and going through motions. How many of those people will even think about each other over the next 10 years, let alone get together again?

One person I spoke to was interested, however, in my job. I mean, I do have a pretty darn cool job. I make video games. For George Lucas’ game company. When you think about it, it’s pretty awesome. Sometimes I need someone’s reaction to remind me of that. So we started talking and he got all animated, “Oh, do you play video games?” And I answered, “Definitely. Always have.” He was impressed.

This was so interesting. If he’d known 10 years ago that I played video games he wouldn’t have thought it was cool. It would have just reinforced his perception that I wasn’t all that popular. We’ve really come a long way. Games haven’t just entered the mainstream, they’ve successfully become hip. I’ve known that, it’s been pretty apparent from my experiences. I have no fear of talking about my love of gaming (um, hello, I have a whole blog about it). But to actually talk to someone I knew back when it wasn’t cool and see the change has affected my past as well really drove it home.

I game. And that makes me cool, right? Right.