Patrick

...or at least I think so, after spending the last few weeks playing with the great audio toy known as Pandora.

I may be late to the party on this one, but I haven't seen much mention of it in various places on the net, and it's truly impressive.

Pandora is a free ( ! ) user-customizable internet radio music service that allows you to create your own stations from artist or music seeds that you choose, and then share those stations with other listeners, while browsing their stations in turn if you wish. Yes, there are ads (unless you buy a membership, which does away with them), but the ads are silent (at least so far) and I usually have the window minimized anyway, so it doesn't really affect my enjoyment in the slightest.

Pandora is an offshoot of the Music Genome Project. What's that, you ask? Well, I'll let the founder, Tim Westergren, tell you in his own words:

On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Over the past 6 years, we've carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

So, yeah, a lot of good (and occasionally, subjectively, not-so-good) music. You basically listen to your station(s) that you create, and give as much or little feedback to the database (in the form of "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" per song) as you desire. You can add or delete additional song or artist seeds too, to modify your listening experience as you go.

I've created three stations so far:

Feel Good Rock: This station plays mostly older (70s-80s) rock that's not very hard or very metal--seeds include The Eagles, Journey, and Tom Petty. I am open to adding newer artists to this station, and have done so, so long as the music has that same sort of mellow, feel-good vibe to it.

This is music to listen to while watching a sunset and drinking a cold beer, or driving a vintage convertable down a lonely desert road and enjoying the warm breeze on your skin.

Laid Back Beats: This station is mostly very mellow music; lots of slow, relaxed vocals and songs that are emotional and from the heart without being angsty whinefests. Seeds include Shawn Mullins, Michelle Branch, Stephen Ashbrooke, and Sarah McLachlan.

This is music to listen to while watching the snow drift down outside your window, and drinking a warm mug of hot chocolate, and thinking about that guys and girls you knew in high school, and how cool it is that your life is as fun now as it was then.

Wide, Wide Awake: This station is all about music that contains serious energy. I'm not talking heavy metal energy--that's different--but energy that comes from speed and uncomplicated intensity and driving force. Seeds include Green Day, Live, Blink 182, and The Ataris.

This is music to listen to when you procrastinated for way too long and you have three hours of work to get done in an hour. Have some caffiene while you're at it.

One of the best things about it is that I've been discovering great new artists who have something in common, musically, with those artists I already like. My CD purchasing has been increasing at an alarming rate...

Check this out and tell me what you think; it kicks ass!

I didn't realize that it's been quite this long since I updated this page. Damn. There's such a thing as life being full and busy and all that stuff, and while it's tempting to make that sort of plea, it's more honest to just say I suck, and attempt to update more often in the future.

I will now attempt to placate everyone in general with a series of the cutest cat photos in the world--some with handy captions. *crosses fingers*

After seeing Trackmania mentioned in ydnar's recent post and Trackmania Nations mentioned in Pat's recent post, I decided that I should spend some time here pimping that latter game:

First and foremost, Trackmania Nations is a FREE GAME. That's right, free. Just click on that link, download, and install. (About 272 MB for the download.) My only caveat would be to mention that the game uses a version of Starforce copy protection (Why copy protection on a free game? Hell if I know. Good question; you get bonus points.). Starforce copy protection installs its own drivers and can be a bit of a pain in some situations. I've never personally had any serious trouble, but your milage may vary.

In any case, the game is a truly excellent racing game. Imagine F-1 racing, but in a wacky arcade-y world where the cars regularly jump hundreds of feet and manage to navigate loops and use quarter-pipes better than Tony Hawk. You can play single-player (try to get the best time on a number of tracks), or multi-player (race against others online on those same tracks). For me, the best part about the game is that it includes a very user-friendly track editor that allows you to not only make your own entirely new tracks via a simple tile-based system, but also to make your own intro and replay movies with relatively sophisticated camera work and effects.

There are now over 25,000 tracks available via the Trackmania Exchange site, and a lot of them are very, very cool and far surpass anything that comes with the original game. Below are a few screenshots from my tracks, currently 14 in number, and reachable on the Exchange site by searching by my author nick, pjw. Warning--most of them are pretty difficult, especially if you're just learning the game, so don't hate me.
(/me removes pimp hat).

The first pic is a big quarterpipe transfer, the second is one of my larger tracks, just to show some scale, and the third shows some truly insane air (note the car at the upper edge of the screen). Anyway, the game is pretty much the most fun I've ever had for free that didn't involve bodily fluids of some kind, and I'd love it if more people discovered it, enjoyed it, and made some fun tracks for it. If anyone has any questions about any aspect of using the editor, I'll be happy to help.

This is a bit of a belated response to the question of the day a few days ago regarding favorite games, but I couldn't really just let it pass without some sort of input.

My favorite games include

• the original LodeRunner for the old Apple IIe (yep, I'm old)
• all the Doom and Quake games
• Deus Ex
• Riddick
• Vampire: Bloodlines
  
• Half-Life and Half-Life 2
• the various Myst games
• the Elder Scrolls games (Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion)
• the various Trackmania games.

Games are a gigantic part of my life at the moment, considering they're not only my livelihood (I work as a level designer at Raven Software ), but also comprise a huge part of my leisure time, despite the fact that I have my face in front of a monitor all day anyway.

At one point, I was doing something entirely different to make a living. I have a graduate degree in counseling psychology and worked in a group home setting for about ten years, with troubled teens who had been removed from their families via court order. It was satisfying and challenging work, but at one point toward the end of that ten years I realized that when "John" came through the doors, and I read his file, I was already comparing him with all the other kids who had came through those same doors for ten years, and making certain guesses about how he would behave and how I would respond.

On one hand, this was a good thing, since the benefit of my experience allowed me to make certain educated guesses about these young men, and potentially avoid a number of dead ends in treatment. On the other hand, making guesses about individuals and reacting to them based on those guesses rather than what was actually going on in the moment can be a waste of time or, at worst, actually damaging.

Anyway, that bit of discomfort clicked into place with the realization that I was having much more fun making game levels for Quake 2 in my spare time than I was at work, and...well, I said "screw it" and switched careers. I've never regretted it.

So we're currently having tornado warnings here in Wisconsin, and I got to thinking about how much I actually like storms.

Don't get me wrong, I know they do damage and (in worst cases) leave people homeless or dead, but, all that aside, I love being (safely) in the middle of a storm. High winds, thunder, lighting, rain...it's all good. It kind of serves to remind one that oh, yeah, nature...that stuff outside that has nothing to do with the internet, work, making a living, obligations, goals and accomplishments--it just IS, in a big way.

Some storm pictures that I like (none taken by me):

WEATHER, n. The climate of the hour. A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned.
     -Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary

It's been a good weekend--nothing spectacular--just generally both relaxing and productive, which is a combination that's not as common as it should be. Usually it's either "Holy shit I have to hurry and get this done!" or "I think I'll kick back and relax and do nothing productive at all." When the two actually manage to combine with one another, it's like an eclipse or something--okay, maybe that's an overstatement, but it certainly doesn't happen all the time. Anyway, I really liked this picture when I first saw it, and it kind of looks like I feel at the moment:

Although he's sort of sideways and his world is a bit tilted, he's content and dealing with it just fine. Flexibility is good.

I just had to share what I thought was an extremely cool close-up photo.

Oh, and you, in the back, the arachnophobe who's all clenched up now? Sorry about that.

Re: the question of the day ("What books are on your nightstand?")--well...I just got through moving, and don't even have a nightstand at the moment, but I've been unpacking books lately, and my "cool stuff" shelf currently includes the following:

Now to just find some time to relax and read amid the boxes...

To answer the question of the day (favorite costume), I always kind of liked this one--it made me giggle.

...is really, really good. Especially when it's coffee ice cream with caramel and toffee bits.

I figure a nice way to get my feet wet here is to just make a simple statement like the one above that no one will have much argument with. If you don't like ice cream, then go back to your wacky other dimension. If you can't eat it, on the other hand, that's just sad. Sorry about that. *takes another bite*

I'm uploading a bunch of family photos tonight, that will only be viewable by family and friends, so if you're not one or the other, sorry about the lack of content. I'll try to upload some interesting something-or-other sometime soon for you too. But don't hold your breath.

Thanks for getting me involved with the ground floor of this coolness, Randy.