I think it's been about a year and a half since I stopped using Pandora and switched to Spotify.

In an attempt to lazily build a new playlist, I thought I'd give Pandora and its magic song-picking algorithm another shot – I'm off to a slow start, but it's still going much faster than if I had to actually think of songs and curate them myself.

I have a bit of a beef with Pandora though:
They don't display the title of the current playing track in the browser title!
Looking at the browser tab and seeing "Pandora Internet Radio – Listen to Free Music You'll Love" is not terribly handy.
Looking and seeing "Awesome song – Some band I've never heard of | Pandora" would be so much more useful.

This has always bugged me, and I think I've been using Pandora since at least early 2006. I think that puts the chances of this feature ever being added at just under 0% – which means that I'm satisfied with the number of songs I've found using Pandora… it's right back to Spotify for me.

If you work in a place that has tile flooring, or some other non-carpet flooring, you've probably learned to tune out the noise of everyone walking around. Maybe. I can't.

High heels, boots, or flip-flops; tip-toers, striders, or stompers – there are tons of different shoe sounds made every day. I think it would be neat if someone sampled a bunch of people walking and turned it into a complete song. Melodies, percussion, maybe even lyrics (not easily) all created from the sounds of people's shoes hitting the ground.

I bet there's an entire album of shoe music somewhere… there almost has to be!

And before anyone suggests that I take this on and make a FAWM song in this style… the idea is neat, but actually doing it seems incredibly tedious. I'd like someone else to do it.

FAWM.org – the February Album Writing Month, is a challenge for song writers to write 14 songs during the month of February.

My bud Cacti introduced me to this (and has participated in it) for several years now, and I think I might try my hand at it, although not quite the 14 song goal. I think my target will be 1-2 songs, and if I have a surge of inspirado, I'll try to hit the full 14.

With (Cactus) Joe's help, at one point I felt like I had the creative chops to take on song writing, but my comfort zone ended up pulling me back down to feeling like a source of inspiration rather than a recipient of the inspirado. We'll see if February can pull me out of that comfort zone a little.

My normal "creative" outlet has been programming. When I get bored I churn out a few lines of Python code, and if I finish a project I then marvel in whatever it does. To anyone looking, it's just a bunch of code that maybe does some screwy processing with some random data source, spits out a bunch of numbers, whatever – but to me it's almost like writing a song, or creating a painting (painting a painting sounded weird).

So… if you have any great ideas for a song – do tell!

Cactus Joe (who you may know from his comments posted here) has submitted the song "A Face Like Yours" – by his band The Guppy Effect – to be in the new movie "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" (starring Michael Cera).

You can listen to the song, and vote for it by following this link: Listen to/vote for the song! and then clicking the "Vote now" button. You'll need to check your email and click the link it contains for the vote to actually count.

As of this posting, the song is #34 of 100. The top 100 go on to the next round, where the judges will weed the selection down to just 8, 1 of which will ultimately make it into the movie.

You can vote once per day.

DO IT!

Rocking.. I always forget how much I enjoy it.

It's been quite some time since I've done anything musically, and for some reason I'm always reluctant to jump back in after any sort of extended hiatus. I guess it mainly has to do with my incredible knack for being way too insecure – it doesn't matter how many people come up and say "Wow! You were really good!" or "That was awesome!" – part of me is convinced that compliments are given out of pity. Ridiculous, yes; hard to get over, definitely.

This Saturday I went out with one of Madison, WI's top 10 rock bands, Guppy Effect, and had more fun in one night than I've seen in a long time. There was talk of me guest singing on one song, which I fully planned to do. We didn't get around to that song until the end of the night, but that was fine with me.. because I ended up doing another 3-4 songs earlier in the night. During the first break, the guitarist mysteriously vanished, so I got to open up the second set to a pretty receptive crowd. I stepped up to the mic, stage fright set it, and I did my part to create some serious ear-candy.

I'm sort of lacking the motivation to actually post about anything, so here are some links to some stuff that I found interesting. Enjoy – or not.. it's up to you. 😉

Acrobots – This is ridiculously amusing – for a few minutes.

What to do in an emergency – A parody of ready.gov.

Poor Pluto.. he just wanted to hang out with the other planets.

Color Hunter – Automatically creates color palettes from images. I like stuff like this.. so there.

Bedtime Tunes – Mellowish songs. Great when you wanna take a nap, like now. I'd recommend clicking on the "Highest Rated" rather than the "Latest" songs.