The lessons of life

I ran across the 6 Billion Others site in one of the feeds I follow a few weeks ago. Aside from being a good use of web technologies the content and the way it is presented feel original to me. It is very interesting, humbling and inspiring to hear and read the comments people have shared as they have been asked questions about family, happiness, tears, love and more.The available languages are currently English, Italian and French.

This is one of those sites that I hope to come back to for that occasional dose of global perspective.

http://www.6billionothers.org

Enjoying Slacker.com – effortless music

I’ve gently used various online music services such as Pandora or Last.FM in the past but none of them have stuck for me.
In some recent reading I came across the slacker.com service again. I originally read about slacker.com in March on various sites like Wired and Engadget. While I didn’t take the time then to check out the site I have done so recently and have been impressed. The service seems to fit the way I listen to music and does a nice job grouping together the right types of music and artists when creating your own stations.

I’m also intrigued by the notion of a portable player that works with the service. The portable player would be filled with music based upon your preferences and would automatically be updated when the player is able to access the service via WIFI. Nice. No need to add music yourself, update playlists, etc.

When I listen to music I am typically doing so in one of two roles. I am either digging for some good nostalgia tunes, or looking up something new in one genre or another. As I mentioned before the way I listen to music seems to fit the slacker.com model.

If the portable player isn’t enough they are also planning to compete with the Satellite set.

I did a search for Roger Clyne and hit ‘play’ which results in a station of like artists. I don’t think slacker.com did a bad job of building the station especially considering that Roger Clyne does not fit any traditional genre very tightly, but mixes into many of them. The screenshot below is the result of what has been playing for the last hour or so. Pretty Cool.

Ubuntu and Sprint EVDO

As I move along in making my Ubuntu install my own, and keep from reverting back to Windows, I am reaching some personal milestones.
Today I was able to get a Sprint EVDO PanTech PX-500 connected. It was not as difficult as I thought it would be. I was able to follow the directions in the Sprint documentation here. The KPPP (GUI) option did not work for me but the terminal based WvDial worked just fine.

Kudos to Sprint for creating Linux documentation for getting their devices connected.