Activesteve.com is Born…

Wow, to think I call myself a music fan and didn’t know about this fantastic service available online! Have I got your attention yet? I decided that I had better write a blog post about a most excellent music service available for free on the good ‘ole cyberspace. I’m talking about Pandora, and my best advice to give any readers right now is to just go there and learn about it. What’s that? Not enough information you say? Okay, how about this in a nutshell: Pandora is a music-matching service of sorts, call it musical ESP. You like a certain song or band? Well, pop in that name, and instantly, the service creates a ‘radio station’ for that kind of music. First, they play you a tune you likely know very well, then the fun starts. Pandora will follow that up with different songs and artists which fit into the musical genetics of the song or artist you input. How is this possible you ask? Well, the roots of this service has to do with the Music Genome Project. To quote wikipedia:

The Music Genome Project, created in January 2000, is an effort founded by Tim Westergren, a 1988 graduate from Stanford University and spearheaded by a group of musicians and technicians to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” by using over 400 attributes to describe songs.

Yup, each an every song in the database is catalogued on many different levels to classify it, like a unique living creature. This enables the new stations you create in Pandora to play music you are highly likely to enjoy.

Hello all. This will be, for all intents and purposes, a short blog entry. This past weekend was spent getting ready for our upcoming vacation in Argentina, as well as spending some time with family, including a visit with Andrea, Patrick, and Helena (now 6 months old!), as well as a couple hours chatting with dad. We talked about blogs and other seemingly innocuous things. It got me thinking about my family history, and why I am who I am. The answer is fairly obvious, it seems. My father (who by the way, is indeed an inspiration to me) shares with both Andrea and I a never-ending desire to explore the world around us. I was talking about my upcoming 6-month odyssey in New Zealand, and I’m pretty sure there was a bit of pride on behalf of my father, seeing that the man I’ve become is truly linked to him in both body and spirit. In the ‘spirit’ of that, I invite you to read more about my father, and his youth, at his blog. Yup, at 65 years young, my dad is always ready to learn new technologies and their use. Last week, he gutted his old blog site, and started a new website on his own domain. The result is what I hope will become an archive of sorts for both his present-day, as well as past tales. Curious? Click on over to his blog for the latest stories. Most interesting (in my opinion), is his brief personal autobiography, as well as the developing short stories section.