Personal Radio

Stumbler found me Pandora the other day - it is essentially a personal radio station. Pandora is tied into the music genome project, which classifies artists on a wide variety of musical criteria. Give Pandora a song or artist, and it will find and randomly play similar songs or artists. Unlike radio, however, they tell you what the song and artist are, and you can skip tracks you're not interested in. There are also feedback options to fine-tune the particular selections you are listening to. There are some limitations: like a radio station (and due to their license type), you cannot pause or rewind the songs - nor can you copy them. Also, their selection is somewhere between what you would find at the local best buy and what you can find at Amazon.com. Rare and hard-to-find stuff won't be in their database, nor is classical music. Of course, you can't play it in your car, either... still an interesting idea and a nice website.

Rite of Spring

The Hawaiian shirt, the love of flowers - yup this apple definitely didn't fall far from the trees. Happy Easter everyone! 

For the love of money (or at least stock certificates)

The stumbler extension for Firefox is a major timesuck, but occasionally you hit something worthwhile and/or interesting. For example scans of the artwork on corporate stock certificates. (One technical note about the link - some of the "last" and "next" buttons are reversed during the slideshow - if the "next" button actually takes you back, try the "last" button.) The images are really surreal when you stop and look closely, and some of the captions the scanner added are genuinely funny.

I can only imagine (thankfully) the corporate brainstorming sesssion that came up with some of these images: "Now, how about we have a giant romance novel cover model in a hard hat surrounded by piping, holding up a beaker and wearing a crown emblazoned with the hazard symbol for nuclear energy? That is sufficiently grandiose and technological. All is favor say 'aye'."

For those of you in the Massachusetts area, one of the stocks is from BostonGas, and it has the famous painted gas tanks in South Boston on the certificate (among other things).

Snow on the Daffodils

This is what makes New England weather so interesting - the seasons always come and go fighting.
I guess Old Man Winter isn't quite ready to spend another somnolent year - he hit us with (hopefully) one last largesse of snow. The early-rising bulbs can't be too happy about it, though.