Pandora Radio

I've been using Pandora.com a lot lately, when I'm on campus and don't have any of my own music to listen to. I really like it. In fact, I like it a lot better than regular radio for a number of reasons.

1. I can make a channel that plays the music I want, rather than choosing from whatever channels already exist.
2. When a song I don't like is on, I can skip it (most of the time).
3. If none of the stations that I have is playing what I want, I can just create another channel that is almost identical to the other channels, so I can basically listen to whatever I want, as long as I have enough stations.
4. If I'm listening to a song I like, I don't have to worry about missing another good song on another station, because they all pause when they come to a new song.
5. No commercials.... At least no commercials I have to listen to. It does seem like their visual advertising has become even more aggressive over time. Maybe in a few months or years, you won't be able to find the player, because its buried in ads. :( But at least I don't have to listen to the ads. Or worse: the radio hosts.
6. They've got a lot of extra features that might be pretty useful, like being able to buy the song on iTunes, and bookmarking it and stuff.
7. If I really hate a song, I can have it not play it any more! How nice is that?! Now if only I could get it to completely ignore certain artists....

I really like it right now, though the total number of possible selections seems kind of small, so I'm sure I'll get sick of the available choices before too long. Hopefully they'll keep adding new songs. If you haven't ever tried it out, I'd recommend it. So thanks Dave, for introducing it to me!

Java Nimbus

OK, so I haven't posted anything in a long time.... That's because I know nobody is actually reading this! But I was just playing around with Java's new Look and Feel, Nimbus, and I'm quite impressed with it. The old L&F was absolutely horrible (it's main competing L&F was the Windows 95 L&F. So it is really out of date. But this new one looks quite nice!

It's been a while...

OK, it's been a while since I put a post here. I've been quite busy with finals, and now I've been working on my new website. Everything is transferred over now, mostly, and I've added a lot of things to make it look nicer. I heard they fixed the Pythagorean theorem. That's good. I don't know what we'd do without it!

My Wiki

Well, I've put most of the old stuff on my new wiki now. It's pretty much complete. So go take a look at it at http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com

My Wiki

Well, I've gone and created a wiki for myself. The cc stuff at Utah State is going to be going down over the summer some time, and I needed a spot to host my tutorials and programs, so that people could still get access to it. It can be found at http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/ Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to slowly be transferring the data from my school web site, http://cc.usu.edu/~rbwhitaker/ over to the wikidot page. Actually, I've been quite impressed with wikidot.com, and you guys should take a look at it sometime....

Krista doesn't like blogs

Here's some more sad news. Krista doesn't want a blog! What is up with that?! Well, maybe some day. I guess it took me a while before I got in to the whole Facebook think. We'll see....

Pythagorean Theorem Broken

Yeah, I'm sure you've all heard the news. The Pythagorean theorem broke. It's causing all sorts of problems. I've heard that they've got all of the best people on it. But they don't think it will be fixed for a couple of weeks. The last time this happened, they had to cancel school. I'm excited!

RSS

Well, I've been messing around with this Blog stuff a little more. Today I looked at RSS. It's pretty cool. Dave Kennedy had shown me it earlier, but now I have a use for it. As far as an RSS reader goes, Google's reader seems pretty nice. So I used it.