I'm really digging my Pandora stations lately. I have my stations pretty much right where I want them in terms of moods and musical styling. I have my "Damien Rice" station for studying, my "Radiohead" station for mellowing out and my "MGMT" station for rocking out. Over the past couple of months I've been actively tweaking the songs on each station via the basic 'thumbs up/down' functionality and now I finally have them in a good place where I don't have to 'thumbs down' too many songs.
I like the simple 'thumbs up/down' feature of Pandora, but at the same time I wish they had an advanced user mode for filtering songs. Sometimes I like a song but don't love it enough to give it a 'thumbs up'. Sometimes I really dislike a particular song from an artist I like but don't want to give it a 'thumbs down' because I'm afraid it might negatively impact the other songs from that artist. Sometimes I like an artist's older material but not their newer material, sometimes it’s the other way around. In each of those cases I feel that the basic 'thumbs up/down' feature just isn't enough. I wouldn't mind a 1-5 scale for ranking songs, or maybe an advanced filter to block out certain albums & songs from an artist. My geeky side actually just wants direct access to the Pandora algorithm, but I know that would probably be way too overwhelming for everyday use. Still, I wouldn't mind a 'smarter' Pandora. I might even be willing to pay extra for such features.
Random tidbits:
- MGMT Radio: I thought I liked Modest Mouse, but it turns out I don't. I've had to give a 'thumbs down' to a bunch of their songs lately.
- Damien Rice Radio: I really don't like Jack Johnson. I'm sorry, but all of his songs sound alike to me, and I really don't care for them. Pandora fed me a lot of Jack Johnson early on, but I think the algorithm has finally purged all of his songs from my station. I wish there was an "I don't like this Artist" button somewhere on Pandora for these types of situations.
- Damien Rice Radio: I was surprised to find out that I really like Ray LaMontagne. I had heard some of his songs before but I guess never in the right context. Ray's music is great for studying and relaxing.
Ideation
I've been doing a bit of brainstorming lately on some new ideas and initiatives I want to explore. Some of them are really random and out there (heads-up glasses display for sports electronics) and some are a bit more common and practical (Twitter widgets, Facebook apps). Some of these ideas have been floating around in my head for a while and some have just sprung up recently. Regardless, I'm trying to actually write down some of the details from my head onto paper and flesh them out a bit. A lot of them won't go anywhere, but some of them might actually find a spark of life in the real world.The creative process of generating, developing, and communicating new ideas, where an idea is understood as a basic element of thought that can be either visual, concrete, or abstract.
-B. Jonson
Evernote, you're so slow and clunky
I'm really starting to dislike my Evernote desktop client. It's so slow to start up and it hangs all the time that it makes me not want to have it open sometimes. Don't get me wrong, I love the service, but Evernote really needs to improve their desktop client. They rolled out an update last month that promised to be faster but so far I haven't seen much improvement.
While my normal monthly usage is still well below the 40MB limit, I did come dangerously close to that last month when I decided to add a year's worth of PDFs from Trendwatching's monthly briefings to my Evernote archive. To date I have 371 notes and ~60 MB of data.
I think I might also be dangerously close to becoming a Level IV digital hoarder. :)
While my normal monthly usage is still well below the 40MB limit, I did come dangerously close to that last month when I decided to add a year's worth of PDFs from Trendwatching's monthly briefings to my Evernote archive. To date I have 371 notes and ~60 MB of data.
I think I might also be dangerously close to becoming a Level IV digital hoarder. :)
Snippets
I have just been having the hardest time putting together an entire blog post lately so I think I'm going to adjust my blogging style to fit my swamped lifestyle. Instead of writing long entries, I think I'm switching to quick snippet entries, like this one. Longer than a tweet, but shorter than a page-long blog entry. When I have more free time I'll try to write full entries but for now I'm going to try out this snippet approach.
Swamped
I've been so swamped lately with work and school that I haven't had a chance to update my blog or do much else. School has actually been going well this quarter, but its work that has been killing me lately with crazy long hours and weekend work. I've set aside this weekend to try to get back on track with all my non-work activities, and on my list of things to do is update my blog. Here's the update:
The classes I'm taking this quarter have been a lot of fun so far. I'm taking a Leadership (MORS-430) class and a Statistics (DECS-433) class and I'm really enjoying both. In my leadership class I'm learning a lot of great things about leadership techniques, persuasion, negotiations, and creating effective work groups. These are skills I've actually been able to use the very next day at work, so this whole part-time business school idea is finally starting to pay off. As for my statistics class, well... it turns out I'm good at stats and actually enjoy it. What more can I say there?
Work has been crazy since late December. We have a big project release coming up in April and unfortunately the team I'm on has fallen a bit behind schedule. To catch up we've had to work long hours and weekends. There have been some days this past month when I've put in 8 hours at work, gone to school for 3 hours, and then logged back on when I got home to put in some more work time. Not an ideal scenario to say the least. My school work hasn't suffered too much, but anything else with a lower priority than school and work have taken a hit. I'm pretty much tired all the time these days and feel like I've been at about 75% of my max output all this year. Hopefully once this project wraps up I'll be able to slow things down a bit and get a better handle on things. Until then, I just have to keep charging along.
The classes I'm taking this quarter have been a lot of fun so far. I'm taking a Leadership (MORS-430) class and a Statistics (DECS-433) class and I'm really enjoying both. In my leadership class I'm learning a lot of great things about leadership techniques, persuasion, negotiations, and creating effective work groups. These are skills I've actually been able to use the very next day at work, so this whole part-time business school idea is finally starting to pay off. As for my statistics class, well... it turns out I'm good at stats and actually enjoy it. What more can I say there?
Work has been crazy since late December. We have a big project release coming up in April and unfortunately the team I'm on has fallen a bit behind schedule. To catch up we've had to work long hours and weekends. There have been some days this past month when I've put in 8 hours at work, gone to school for 3 hours, and then logged back on when I got home to put in some more work time. Not an ideal scenario to say the least. My school work hasn't suffered too much, but anything else with a lower priority than school and work have taken a hit. I'm pretty much tired all the time these days and feel like I've been at about 75% of my max output all this year. Hopefully once this project wraps up I'll be able to slow things down a bit and get a better handle on things. Until then, I just have to keep charging along.
