children of men

just saw children of men (94% on rotten tomatoes) and it's a great science-fiction movie. set in the near future, women have become sterile, and no children are born. the world has gone crazy, with most countries war-torn. however, england soldiers on, holding back many refugees that want to come in, trying to maintain a standard of living for the remaining brits.

anyway that's the background, but of course with just that background the movie could be awful. however, clive owen is fantastic, and the movie maintains a steady pace and doesn't get off track.

highly recommended. the trailer is below:

new year's resolutions

i don't have any. i don't believe in them. i try to think about my life goals as is appropriate, and so focusing on these goals at the change in year (06 -> 07!) doesn't do me much good.

i think it's the same with my family, but you can be the judge.

my father's new year's resolution is to quit smoking (my father doesn't smoke).
my sister's new year's resolution is to make her husband vegan again (he went local-organic in march and he's made their house practically a butcher shop ;) )

ours is not a family of resolutions.

happy new year!

pegs and holes

my family bought a new cabinet and we were placing the top on the cabinet. this was proving difficult as the cabinet makers had not properly aligned the holes on the cabinet with the holes on the top. this lead me to comment that it's like fitting a "round peg in a square hole." there was some dispute concerning this comment. see the video below:



now, obviously there exists round pegs which won't fit in square holes. certainly the main complaint is that the interfaces are not commensurate, and so problems will ensue. the question then becomes which fit is worse: the round peg in the square hole, or the square peg in the round hole?

take your time and think about it.

...

...

now, you could just work it out yourself, or you could pull a naive-google, or a thoughtful-google. now, a naive-google would use the result count to determine which statement is used more often, and then say that the statement used more often is likely the better analogy (why would people, since we are such smart beings, use poor analogies? ;) ). so here are the results:

"round peg in a square hole" : 41,700
"square peg in a round hole" : 91,900

so clearly square peg wins out.

now if we do a thoughtful-google and click on some results, we find this problem solving for kids site that after some simple geometry declares:

Hence the circle covers more of the square than the square does the circle. It’s therefore better to be a round peg in a square hole than a square peg in a round hole.

thus, since we want an analogy that describes something that is very difficult to do, we must conclude that i made a weak statement, and should've said it's like fitting a square peg in a round hole.

merry christmas.

UPDATE: someone recently commented that google is dumbing us down, because instead of just working out this simple geometric problem, we just ask google and get an answer that's already written up on the web. certainly there's some merit to this complaint (in this case, though, i worked it out myself because these little problems are fun. indeed, the circle in the square uses a larger percentage of area than the square in the circle). it's very tempting to be as curious as the answers google gives you. however, i also think we can now ask much deeper questions and build on all the knowledge that's easily available.

Blog Search and LDARank

(editor's warning: this is quite a technical post. don't freak out at me -- after all, this is my life and i need to share from time to time!)

this semester i took a machine learning class. the class has a project requirement, so i decided to tackle a problem that's quite near to my heart (and likely important to many people in the blogosphere as well): how can we make blog search results better?

if you've ever used technorati, or google blog search, you'll immediately agree with me when i say that their results are complete junk. in fact, i was using these poor search engines to get the lay of the blogland regarding the recent inflammatory and bigoted comments of congressman virgil goode concerning muslim immigration. needless to say the linear results didn't give a very good lay of the land, though my digging around did.

so my project aimed at improving this, and i came up with a simple mechanism called LDARank. i've posted the full writeup here (note that it isn't very formal as the class itself wasn't very formal, but you'll get the idea). the introduction is quoted below:

In recent years, blogs have been rapidly growing in popularity. The world of blogs, called the blogosphere, has been gaining many users because of the ease of publishing and the desire of users to have their own personal stage. However, the rise of blogs and blog postings has not seen a commensurate rise in the quality of the ranking of results from blog search engines. It is still very difficult to browse through blogs with a targeted search query.

In this paper we propose a new ranking algorithm for blog posts based on topic modeling, called LDARank. In the first section we describe some of the problems with blog search. In the second and third sections we propose our solution and a technology to implement the solution, LDARank. We then examine the results of using the LDARank algorithm with various blogs and queries. Finally, we assess the practicality of using LDARank in a production setting, and examine its limitations.

my friend nikhil made the good point that i should make the mechanism available on some website, so people can give it a whir. maybe i'll do that over the next week or two, as i have some time.

making and remixing movies

the time is now for making video footage readily available for consumption by the public, for the public creation of movies from this footage.

oohohoh. that sounds grand.

details

i doubt many of you have seen the yahoo research berkeley's international remix site where they made clips from various san francisco film festival movies available for remixing. users can select parts of movies, put them into a little bin for later use, and piece together parts from their bin into a full length feature. a brilliant app, perhaps a few years ahead of its time. see the demo.

now here's the idea. movies, when shot, produce massive amounts of unused film. it's edited out. hours upon hours. why not make available online all the footage, along with a script and storyboard? give the public a tool like international remix, of course with more features to manage all that data, and let them piece together a film. short films. long films. funny films. spam films. any film. give prizes for the best films. provide user forums. make sure the system surfaces the most examined portions of footage. let people recreate via cutting and pasting video, as they do today with text. let them incorporate other clips. their own clips.

i feel very inspired by this. youtube should do this with all the clips on their websie. of course, those clips aren't coherent like the all the footage for one particular movie. but this is something users would love to fiddle with, and i assure you that excellent movies (along with crappy ones!) and interesting and new ideas would emerge from such a space.

some reflection

now, don't get me wrong. i think movie directors, editors, cinematographers, the whole bunch, they do an excellent job. certainly there's need for these highly skilled people. however, just because we have journalists and writers doesn't mean the blogosphere, which is largely a reframing of various texts, cut and pasted, is worthless. it adds a new kind of worth. what bloggers work with is largely text, with some images, audio and video thrown in. i think it's time to throw in a lot more video, and changeable video. the unit is not the film, it is the frame (and even the frame could be changed, but let's start with the frame). i want the possibility of video spam, just like there are video blogs. you know when the spammers come that something worthwhile has been created.

it might be worth pointing out that i give some credence to lanier's thoughts concerning digital maoism, i just think he's a bit too reactionary. the public, typically a bunch of non-experts, can add a lot of value.

the optimist, from the new yorker

the new yorker's shouts and murmurs section (ie the funny pages of the new yorker) has a dear abby-like column in this issue. instead, it's dear optimist, and there are some extremely funny letters and responses. here's one i really liked:

Dear Optimist:

When I go to the zoo, I feel so sad. All those imprisoned animals sitting in their own feces. What do you suggest?

Animal Lover

Pasadena, Calif.

Dear Animal:

What I suggest is, stop going to the zoo! But, should you find yourself tricked into going to a zoo, think about it as follows: All those animals, coated with their own poop, pacing dry grassless trenches in their “enclosures,” have natural predators, and might very well be dead if they were still in the wild! So ask yourself: Would I rather be dead, or coated in my own poop, repetitively pacing a dry grassless trench? I certainly know what my answer would be!

eyes of honesty

in this week's new york times magazine (the ideas issue) one of the year's noted ideas is titled eyes of honesty. it's quite insightful, especially with the implications concerning how our minds function in certain situations where free-riding is easy. i post the whole article here for your reading (should i quote this much? well, it's small). my comments and idea come afterwards.

In the psychology department at Newcastle University, there is a coffee station where people can help themselves, so long as they leave money in the tray — 50 pence (about $1) for a coffee and 30 for tea. It operates on an honor system.

Alas, not everyone is honorable. “The woman running the station was a little disappointed at the level of contributions,” says Gilbert Roberts, a professor in the department. Psychologists have long been aware of this dismal aspect of human behavior: people are more honest if they know they’re being observed — so when nobody’s watching, they feel they can get away with murder, or at least with a free cup of coffee.

This problem gave Roberts and two colleagues an idea for an experiment. For 10 weeks this spring, they alternately taped two posters over the coffee station. During one week, it was a picture of flowers; during the other, it was a pair of staring eyes. Then they sat back to watch what would happen.

A remarkable pattern emerged. During the weeks when the eyes poster stared down at the coffee station, coffee and tea drinkers contributed 2.76 times as much money as in the weeks when flowers graced the wall. Apparently, the mere feeling of being watched — even by eyes that were patently not real — was enough to encourage people to behave honestly. Roberts says he was stunned: “We kind of thought there might be a subtle effect. We weren’t expecting such a large impact.”

The paper prompted a British police department in Birmingham to slap posters of eyes around the city as part of a campaign called “We’ve Got Our Eyes on Criminals.” The researchers are studying the campaign to see if the posters have an effect on things like car crime and vandalism.

i took a class this past semester where we talked about social psychological selective incentives for improving people's contributions to public goods (in the idea above, the public good is the coffee setup, which everyone agrees to help pay for via their coffee purchases). this sounds like a mouthful, but essentially you selectively encourage people to contribute more by sending appreciative notes, thank yous, etc.. only if they contribute in the first place. hence it's a selective incentive.

the eyes of honesty idea sort of turns selective incentives around -- how do we impel people to contribute because that's what they should be doing? i wonder if there's a way to use less intrusive ideas (ie, not so big-brotherish with the eyes) to make people contribute more to, say, yelp. ie "you've looked at 50 yelp reviews lately, and you haven't written one new review, or rated any of the comments. shame on you! the eyes of yelp are watching." ;)

now i wish this kind of thing worked on cats: raja tends to scratch things he shouldn't scratch when no one's around. if only some random picture would deter him.

presentations, miscommunication and bias

recently i've been giving some presentations. giving a presentation is more difficult than one first thinks: you need to gauge the audience, determine what you want them to take away, meet time constraints, and in those few moments, convey the major ideas.

now i was giving a project presentation today and must have done this somewhat poorly in what little time i had because at the end a student asked, "and what did you do?" the implication being that i essentially just presented background work, when in fact i had actually connected ideas and done much thinking. the presentation was supposed to convey that. i guess it didn't -- i think there were a few chuckles in the audience that felt to me like people agreeing that i hadn't done anything.

sigh :(

first, i need to take most of the blame. it's my job as a presenter to make things clear, and i clearly didn't gauge a somewhat sizable portion of the audience. that being said, i think the question and the laughter betrayed something about what people think are the "proper" activities of a graduate student in a computer science class.

one of the problems is that engineering folks often think that a project is about a tangible output. indeed, in this class most of the projects had neat visualizations, or programs that did something. my project could have gone in that direction, but i decided to do something quite different: read much of the background theory in my area and try to construct a framework for reasoning about the design that i initially set out to build. if i had more time, i might have built something. but to me, the more interesting thing was rigorously reasoning about why what i conceived may or may not work, prior to digging in deeply and designing and building it. that can wait, in my opinion. you can disagree with that, and think my line of reasoning is unproductive, but acknowledge that there is work in my ways!

if it isn't obvious at this point, i'll come out and say it: i felt hurt when i was asked the "and what did you do?" question. it made me feel like an outsider, and it made me feel like my work isn't valued. but then again, i guess in the same way that most engineers don't think about their bridges as cultural artifacts that engage people (and how!), many computer scientists seem focused on doing things with computers (or computing automata, you theory folks), and not so interested in what others do with the things they create, beyond that it is functional/useful, if that's their goal. the creation comes first! though i suppose my creation came first as well, it just wasn't the tangible creation venerated by many people.

the american citizenship ceremony

my friend became an american citizen on tuesday. feeling very happy for my friend, and interested in what happens at the ceremony, i decided to go.

in san francisco, the swearing in ceremony is done at an old freemason building. as i walked in, i marveled at how the building was designed so that the light hit the masonic eye and lit it up. it was actually a bit eerie.


but as for the ceremony.. well, there were over 1300 people receiving their citizenship that day, so i was initially freaked out that they would read every single person's name. thank god they didn't. instead, they read originating country names, and people from each country stood up. can you guess what the top 4 countires were?

there were oaths and anthems and singing and dancing.. well, no dancing, but people, understandably, were quite excited. the swearing in itself was actually quite moving. it was nice to see so many family and friends in the audience (and many, many babies. the crying was non-stop!)

a few things struck me as odd, and i wanted to record them here:
- the Department of Homeland Security laptop used for the presentation was running Windows 98
- certain parts of the oath might go against people's religions beliefs, and so certain parts can be stricken from the oath you agree to (it wasn't clear to me which parts could be stricken.. maybe just the god stuff? obviously you can't strike the defending nation parts). anyway, they only read one oath for everyone to repeat, so the moderator suggested that when they got to the part that the person could not swear to, they should put down their hand and not repeat the words. i thought that was interesting
- the citizenship certificate is really quite beautiful. very well designed
- now the keynote speech. this speech was weak, in my opinion. the speaker, a judge, used a trick you learn in grade 1. namely, take a word or set of words (in this case "US citizen") and use each letter in the words to anchor your thoughts. so in this case we had:

U - united
S - strength
C - community
I - initiative
T - trust
I - integrity
Z - zeal
E - education
N - new

i think readers will agree that there are some weak spots here. for "e," i would've expected something like "equality." on the other hand, it is a broad audience with differing education levels and english literacy levels
- finally, they played the song "proud to be an american." now, this is a very patriotic song, with what i think are some odd lyrics. this line "i'm proud to be an american where at least i know i'm free" gives me a lot of trouble. why the words "at least"? i suppose it's trying to suggest that the baseline is freedom, which cannot be said for many countries. however, it also suggests that all you might get is freedom, but what good is freedom if you can't enjoy it? but that takes us into a wholly different topic, which i won't broach here.

more on academic social networking

i was reading reading a paper today titled "No More SMS from Jesus: Ubicomp, Religion and Techno-spiritual Practices" by Genevieve Bell.

before i get to the meat of my post, first i'll give an amusing quote (the paper is full of them):

In mid-January 2004, the Reuters news service flashed out the headline "No More Text Messages from Jesus" signaling the demise of a distinctive Finnish mobile service. According to the wire story, earlier that month, Ville Nurmi, the Ombudsman for Finland's mobile services and regulatory watchdog organization, shut down a mobile service provider that offered text messages from Jesus Christ. The company, which was not named in the proceedings, promised to answer people's prayer with a text message from Jesus [1]. This service, ruled spam through a complex set of maneuvers that included a determination that Jesus did not own a mobile phone, is but one manifestation of the increasing visible intersections of spiritual practice and technological development world wide.

ok, now for my point. i'm not going to comment on this paper, however i did take quite a few notes, and i wanted to store and compare my notes, maybe post them so others could see them.

there is no where you can easily do this now.

and i'm not just talking about posting comments -- then everyone who ever has a comment, even if it has been said, will post it again. rather, i'm thinking of something more along the lines of post and response. so first, you'd compose your notes on the paper, and they'd be stored as your private note in the academic social networking site (let's give it a name.. i'll think of a name for my hypothetical site soon enough). now, if you wanted to make the notes on this paper public, you could, but if you wanted to add them to a conversation about the paper, you'd click the "add to conversation" button. now, what this would NOT do is blindly add your comments to the end of some big list. instead, it would first show you similar comments and any responses to those comments.

why do i think this would be useful? personally, i've been doing some trading on td ameritrade, and they have a fantastic help system. if you have a question and can't find the answer, you can type in your question and have it sent to a representative. but before they send the question, they show you possible answers and ask you, "do these satisfy your needs?" about 75% of the time they do.

in this academic case, if you find a thread that satisfies your comments, you may not post; otherwise, you might follow-up on that thread. or you might just give some sort of props (a la yelp's "cool, helpful, etc.." links) to the original commenter or responder.

this mechanism is especially important for academic papers, where comments and responses are often quite detailed, and are written anyway (whether others have written something or not... though having these comments available and reading them first might generate better discussions). more generally, this is a technique that should be broadly applied online. sometimes when i want to post a comment on a highly-trafficked blog or digg or slashdot i first read through every single comment to find if my comment has already been stated. this is extremely inefficient -- there should be much better comment search (either via search, or automatic collapsing of comments that are similar so i can explore the unique things that have been said more quickly).

night at home

tonight raja and i stayed in and drank chardonnay and watched the L word. now, i haven't seriously had any chardonnay in quite a while; i went off chardonnay a while back because i just hated the way the smell knocked me over the head: "i'm chardonnay -- pay attention to me!"

however, my friend gave me a bottle a recently and so i decided i would give it a try. the big oak (vanilla) and creaminess flavors definitely hit my nose, and they were nice! i really enjoy this bottle. i'm back on the chardonnay bandwagon, at least for a bit.

now the L word: the show is about a bunch of lesbians living in los angeles. it has some interesting characters, but my overall feeling is that i could drop it at any moment. not compelling enough. i like how they did a bit more with shane in the 4th episode. hopefully they pursue that (i haven't made it past episode 4). i'm not liking the main couple, to be honest. but i'll continue with it for a bit.

uplifting quote on education

i've been down a bit of late on my phd program. sigh. anyway, i read this line by the times magazine ethicist, randy cohen, and it brightened my day:

Education is meant to help us examine even our fundamental beliefs -- this can be disorienting, perhaps, but not as unhealthful as silence and obscurity.

you can find the whole commentary here.

cute butts and housework

in the new york times magazine this week, annie murphy paul examines the societal effects of the trend for marriages to be increasingly between people with similar incomes. the article looks at some recent research analyzing this trend, and is informative in that regard. however, the title and byline are ridiculous and inflammatory, a noticeable trend in the times magazine of late: "The Real Marriage Penalty: Husbands and wives are increasingly likely to have similar incomes. Is a more divided society the result?"

then again, catchy bylines are what news editors cut their teeth on.

more interesting is a quote in the article that says women today may be looking for "'cute butts and housework' -- that is, a man with an appealing physique and a willingness to wash dishes." when i read this, i thought to myself, "hmm, i'm lagging. i can do dishes, but who can't?"

ucla student tasered

john told me about a recent, horrific incident involving the police and a student at ucla. the student was in the library after 11pm. at ucla, they can do random checks on people in libraries after 11pm to ensure that they are students. this student was asked for his id, but he felt he was being targeted because of his middle eastern descent. so he refused to provide his id, and refused to leave. when the library called in the campus police, things went crazy. the student was repeatedly tasered (5 times) even though he was not putting up any active resistance. the la times has a good summary of the incident.

there's a youtube video showing parts of the tasering, though what's happening is not always clear (but the student's shouts of pain are quite clear). below i've embedded a youtube video made by a local news station. they extract the key parts of the video and get some commentary from those involved.



my feeling: this is insane. there was no reason to use a taser on this student. sure, he was being an idiot and a jerk. but this video is a great example of excessive force. the students surrounding the officers seem scared out of their minds -- this just shouldn't happen.

bank of america jails fraud victim; victim fights back

i found this on boing boing.

matthew shinnick sold his bike and received a check from the buyer that was for much more than the agreed upon price. suspicious, he went to his local bank of america branch to ask if the check was real and if the account had sufficient funds. the teller found that the account had sufficient funds and so shinnick decided to cash it. when the teller began that process, she found that there was a fraud alert on the account and that the check was in fact fake. things went crazy from that point:

From SFGate, Check from a scammer bounces victim into jail:

The teller contacted the business and was informed that no check had been written to Shinnick for $2,000 or any other amount. She immediately passed the check to the branch manager. "I saw him talking on the phone and staring at me," Shinnick said. "A few minutes later, four SFPD officers came into the bank. They didn't say a thing. They just kicked my legs apart and handcuffed me behind my back." The police report for Shinnick's arrest says he was taken into custody "for the safety of the bank employees as well as the bank customers."

shinnick had to pay thousands to get himself out of jail and clear his name, and bank of america refused to reimburse him. so he went to a consumer advocate radio host, and this host implored his listeners to close their bank of america accounts and let him know how much money they removed from bank of america. so far, the consumer advocate says $50 million has been removed from bank of america because of this incident.

this is crazy. i closed my bank of america account years ago because of their awful customer service, but this arrest takes things to the next level. there must be a better procedure for dealing with these problems. indeed, a few questions could have cleared things up. he could've more clearly indicated his suspicion that the check might be fraudulent, and was given to him as part of a transaction. was this kind of response really necessary?

the coffee shop

i used to dislike coffee shops as places to work, but that has changed. recently i've been accomplishing quite a few things at my local coffee shop, coffee to the people. i have some ideas concerning why this might be.

first, i don't think i ever gave coffee shops enough of a chance. the noise isn't distracting, in fact, i feel quite at peace in the coffee shop. no one is going to interrupt me, and if they do, it will almost surely be something very quick. furthermore, the coffee shop disabuses me of my bad habits, like browsing the web (i don't take my laptop) and putzing around with things in my room (like my squeezebox). in fact, i think i actually get more done than i would in my room or office at school, because the distant hubbub of the coffee shop is actually energizing.

i'm going to continue with coffee shops and see what other magic they might inspire.

some links:

1. this guy might have the right idea about the coffee shop buzz
2. this book isn't exactly on topic, but it discusses the "third place," where people can have a good time and hangout and converse
3. i think this might be going to far: Lexmark transforms Toronto coffee shop into small office for Small Business Week

Sale Starts Tomorrow

i saw this digg post on windows vista titled "Windows Vista GOING GOLD TOMORROW"

going gold means that the final version of the software is ready to ship. no more code changes. now, microsoft has been saying this for a long time (though i think this time they actually mean it). but in any case, this reminds me of a story my father told me about a store in india.

outside the store there's a sign that says "Sale Starts Tomorrow." of course, that might get you interested to go in and check things out. so you go in, see some things you like, and then wonder, "will i actually come back tomorrow, or should i just get them now?" so you buy them now.

the trick is, the same sign is always outside. the sale is always starting tomorrow.

now, i'm not sure how this makes regular customers feel. maybe they just get a laugh out of it after a while. i think it's quite amusing.

doubt

doubt, a feeling i'm sure we all have had, is also the name of a play that met rave reviews in new york city. it's now playing in san francisco, and i had the opportunity to see it tonight, on its opening night. it stars the fantastic cherry jones (pictured above in character), who really steals the show.

here's a blurb about jones and the show from the chronicle:

In the 90 minutes Cherry Jones spends onstage as Sister Aloysius, in John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama "Doubt," she inhabits a deeply dimensioned space of fierce will, spiritual righteousness, crinkly humor, granitic isolation and blinding determination backlit by an existential unease. It's all played out in a lean psychological thriller about the fictional principal of a New York Catholic school in 1964 and the priest she accuses of "interfering" sexually with a male student. The play, featuring Jones' eagerly awaited San Francisco debut, opens this week at the Golden Gate Theatre for a four-week run.

it's playing at the golden gate theatre in san francisco for 4 weeks. check out the official website, which has a nice video about the show.

the play is only 90 minutes, but it hits on a lot of ideas and makes you think. my take away was a lot of thought on despair, loneliness, and, of course, doubt. it's very well written.

highly recommended!

academic social networking

have you ever tried to navigate a professor's web site? or connect papers between people, and figure out who's working on what? or tried to figure out if a professor is around, working on X, or completely incognito?

academic work is very public, as it should be. these days, you can find most papers online, as well as many courses and teaching materials. yet there is little sense of presence online. furthermore, the online academic world is supremely disorganized.

now, don't get me wrong: there's lots of academic work available online (google scholar is quite a good source, as well as various publishers). but what about the connections? between the works, between the peoples, through time... and what about evaluation? that seems hidden.

here are some questions you might ask of an academic: what are you working on now? who are your students? what are they working on? what do you think of paper P? can you give me a list of reading material that would provide sufficient background for your paper on doodads?

it's unlikely you would get a timely answer. you might eventually get a good answer.

so i was wondering why there isn't a good network site for academic information, and for academics and researchers? it could be a social networking site, but it would also be a public place for browsing and searching, because after all, academic production is supposed to be public. furthermore, much academic data is online, just waiting to be surfaced more effectively. for instance, if we think of the social networking possibilities for a moment, consider that many academics have a web page, where they list all their publications, as well as their students. couldn't we build a resource that simply effectively connects these pages, people, and papers? and what if we let people contribute directly to this resource? what if we tried to build a community around it? there's a cite called rexa that's supposed to do some of this for the computer science community (their slogan is "Research * People * Connections"), but i can only tell you how poor it is because to find out for yourself would require signing up and logging in, and who wants to do that?

what about a service for effectively publishing, detecting, and supplementing the act of doing background research on a topic? building communities around papers and people? there's some work in tagging for the academic domain, see citeulike

why haven't many academics got in on the online video craziness? are they that far behind?

i tried to see if others had commented on the lack of such spaces online. i found one blog post, with some good ideas.

i have a whole 2 or 3 pages of notes of ideas around this... as a graduate student, as an observer of research getting done (and not getting done), i can see the potential for something in this space. anyway, i may do something about this if i get riled up enough.

Squeezebox: great music, easy access

that's me, trying to kiss my newest music gadget, the squeezebox. the squeezebox can wirelessly connect to your computer, or directly to the internet, and stream music. you connect the squeezebox to some speakers and you've got a sweet setup.

it comes with a fantastic remote, and so i was sittin back on my bed, browsing the internet world of music. first i found an all 80s radio station, then i jumped to a dance station out of amsterdam. then i wanted to do more directed exploration, so i used the remote to key "justin timberlake" into the radio's pandora interface, and it made me a JT station. oh, and there's a software interface for your computer (both offline and online) so you can configure your music tastes from your computer, as well as from the device directly.

now, i've only had this for an hour or so, but i'm already loving it.

what inspired me to buy this slick little device? pandora. if you haven't seen pandora, you really need to check it out. pandora's musicologists have characterized tens of thousands of songs, and so you enter a band or song into their system and it will connect you with similar songs. you create "stations" around your favorite bands or songs.

UPDATE: i just encountered two small downers. after 90 days, to continue the pandora connection i need to pay $36 annually. that's actuallly not that much money, but still.. the other thing is that pandora seems to limit the number of skip-to-next-tracks i can do in an hour. that's annoying. still, i'm enjoying myself. it brings me back to the day when my sister had a stereo in her room, and sometimes i'd go in and just put in a cd and browse that or the radio. except now i have a lot more options, and can do directed exploration, not just random wandering.