Dave's PhotoJournal for Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

I'll try my best, but don't expect captions or anything.. Sorry..

Thanks for reading though!!

Okay so this picture (and the next one) deserve some explanation. So, I listen to a lot of music at work. But I'm really not good at listening to the same things over and over again. I mean, if I bring in a stack of 10 cds, I'll be so sick of them by the end of the 2nd day that I'll never be able to listen to any of them again for years. It's sad, really. A long time ago, when I was working at Expedia, somebody introduced me to Launchcast. It's one of those customized internet radio station things, that would play music it thought you'd like, based on the ratings you had given previous songs that it had played. For the most part, it worked out really well. I wouldn't get sick of listening to stuff, and it would play a lot of stuff I liked. It would of course slip up from time to time and play stuff that was really bad, but it's just an algorithm, it can't be perfect. However, there were two problems with it: 1) Sometimes you really want to hear a particular song, and with Launchcast, you couldn't. 2) Sometimes my patience for skipping past bad songs was just not there, for instance if I was doing something that needed a lot of concentration. So, that meant signing up with a service that would cost a bit more, and would allow me to listen to whatever songs I wanted. I looked around a bit, and settled on Rhapsody, because they supposedly had support for Linux. (I run Linux at home.) Turns out, that support is just a browser plugin which is super lame and is essentially unusable, but I didn't know that at the time. Anyway, I started using Rhapsody, and quickly determined that their recommendations engine SUUU-HUUUU-HUCKED. It was worse than worthless. I get the shivers when I think about how bad it was/is. But, not all was lost, because I could still go through and listen to the whole catalogs of a bunch of artists that I knew I liked. Soon, this was extended to include compilations that included artists I liked. Now, when I'm listening to stuff like that, I invariably run across other songs that sound cool, which leads me to want to check out those artists as well. So, I got into the habit of writing down the name of bands that I wanted to check out. It started out on a post-it note, then it overflowed to two, then three, then.. well... these. I decided I need to take pictures of them from time to time, because if, say, the janitor gets a bit overeager one day and throws away all my little scraps of paper, I'd be SCREWED.

Back Up Next