Gareth's Weblog

Pandora

Finding new music is something I always try to do. When I was younger, I used to listen to a lot more variety than I do now, mainly because I had more time to go to more Indie shows. Now days I turn to the internet to recommend new music to me.

Every service I've tried so far basically uses associative recommendations. By looking at the music you listen to, and music other people listen to, it tries to recommend music that someone else with similar tastes to yours listens to. The problem with this system is that it tends towards main stream, and blandness. I've never found one that really works the way I want it to.

But now I've found Pandora by The Music Genome Project. What makes this new is that they have an algorithm to analyze music, and recommend similar music based on the way the music sounds. So far I'm really impressed. Sure it gets some wrong, but every song it plays you can either give thumbs up, or thumbs down to. That way you can evolve it exactly to your music taste. Most of what I've heard so far I've never heard before.

Update

I haven't posted to this blog in a long time (ignoring the post about Slam City Jam I just posted).

I know, it's bad, might as well not have a blog. The main problem (as it usually is with these things) is laziness. I need to fix so many things about the blog for it to work as well as I like. I upgraded to a new version a while back, and that broke my formatting. I had to disable comments because of comment spam, which sucks because without comments the blog is pointless.

But I will endeavor to start writing again, and fix the problems that exist.

My latest hobby is photography, so expect to see more writing/musing about that. I currently use Smugmug for my gallery and I can't say enough good things about them. One of the things they have is an RSS feed, which I'm trying to integrate into this blog, which (for those of you that didn't quite understand what that meant) means that when I update my gallery, people reading this blog, will get notified.

Slam City Jam

On Sunday, Karina and I went to the Slam City Jam, which is the local skate boarding tournament. It was great, the "marketplace" area had some great deals, the vert ramp had some very big names, and the street guys were pretty cool.

I even got so caught up with it that I bought a new skateboard, the first time I've done that in about 14 years!

I took a lot of pictures, and put a lot of them up, the next step is to find 10 or so that i really like, crop, straighten the horizon, and play with curves to make them "pop".

Here are some samples, hope you like them.

Vert Ramp: (Gallery)

Street: (Gallery)

Hope you enjoy.