3 Things

Guilty Pleasures:

1) Toasty warm towel from the dryer every morning

2) Cherries (ON SALE FOR) $3.00 per pound

3) iTunes

Just Say No

I've been using Pandora for years now, but recently I started using it in a new way.

Once I discover a new song I like, I'll buy the song from iTunes, use the song to 'Add Variety' to the Pandora station I'm listening to, and then I give the song the thumbs down.

For all I know, this confuses the hell out of the Pandora database that's trying to calculate my likes and dislikes, but it's proven to be good way to find new music and minimize repetition.

Scuttlebleep

I read some scuttlebutt online recently - can't recall the site - but the gal who wrote the article had some pretty good evidence that there's something suspicious about iTunes programming and her iPod - namely, her iPod "is playing songs it wants me to buy more of".

With her 'all songs' playlist running on random shuffle, more than a random amount of the band Paramore was playing. Next, she opens iTunes to discover on the main page that the new Paramore album is now available for pre-order.

Only 50 out of 1,136 songs on the iPod were Paramore, yet the band came up one-in-ten times across 100 attempts when skipping to the next song. Hmm.

It certainly seems do-able that a 'random' function could be easily tweaked based on marketing decisions. Would that be underhanded on Apple's part? Or just another way advertizing has infiltrated our lives?

on a scale of one to ten

Just how wasteful is it, when there's a song you want to hear... and instead of digging through your closet to find your Giant Book of CD's (which hasn't been touched in a year) you just buy the song from iTunes?

...And what if you bought the whole album?

For perspective, keep in mind that this closet has never been cleaned since you piled it with shit when you moved in to the apartment a year ago. Something could fall on your head.