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.

Okay, although I’m getting increasingly tired and grumpy, I’ve finished phase III of the basement project. For the past 2 weeks, I’ve basically been up till 11 or 12 each night working on all these projects. It’s the curse of being a perfectionist. The good news is that we’ve got everything finished off that we wanted to have done before the carpet goes down, which is on Monday. Of course we’re leaving on a bus to NY tonight, so timing was of the essence.

Earlier, I had lamented to Kev that I thought putting down the laminate should only take about 40 minutes. Well, while that may be true, it didn’t account for the prep of vapor barrier, cutting the pieces to the perfect size, trimming the lip on the edges where it was needed, installing the plastic track and mitring in for the trim and clean-up! Long story short, I basically worked on this from 7pm till 11:30pm! D’oh! So much for an easy project. At any rate, the finished product looks great in my opinion. I even thought we should’ve maybe done the whole rec room with this. I’ll probably end up renovating my studio with it next.