Pandora is described as a music discovery service based on the Music Genome Project, where peeps try classifying songs based on their qualities.  It’s like Amazon’s recommendation action with a brain – instead of making a recommendation based on consumption patterns, it makes a recommendation based on shared musical aspects.  Like a slow moving bassline, rap influences and use of violin.

This is how it works – you create an account, and then you can create stations.  Stations start with an artist or a song (though they will not play the exact song immediately – apparently requests are a no-no).  These are called seeds.  Whenever a song is played, you can just listen to it, give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down.  The more thumbs you give, the more personalized the station gets. That’s all there is to it.  If you give an artist 2 thumbs down on a station, they’re banned.  If you don’t want to ban someone, you can temporarily ban a song for a month.  I love this stuff – new music is engaging me and I’m bookmarking cool songs & artists (with convenient links to Amazon & iTunes so the Pandora peeps can make some $).

My favorite station right now is one I made consisting of dub and 80s-ish hip hop.  I started the station with DJ Vadim, added King Tubby, then Rae & Christian (based on some tracks they played that I liked), Horace Andy, Mad Professor and Gotan Project (not sure about whether I dig the last one’s influence in the station).  I’ve also added stations for rockabilly/psychobilly, irish folk & idm/chillout with good results.  Actually, I was surprised with how good the rock & folk stations turned out to be, and found some good new (to me) music to boot (though I was unimpressed that I couldn’t add Pete Seeger to give my folk station more flavor).

Pandora worked with Christmas music too – I started off with a swingin’ Christmas station, gave a thumbs down to modern crapmeisters like Harry Connick Jr & Diana Krall in favor of Ella, Louie, Sinatra and the like, and added Elvis and VOILA.  Instant Arp Christmas music.

Now this is all web-based, so it’s great for work or if you have some nice speakers hooked up to the home ‘puter.  They have started offering it on mobile phones too, which is pretty cool.  Overall, I totally recommend checking & trying it out.  I for one have started a nice list of new music & artists to shake me out of my 10 year old musical doldrums.

It reminds me of a camping trip we took to Casco Bay, Maine nearly 4 years ago. The campgrounds were on the coast, and our campsite was on an estuary. When we arrived, it was low tide and the 100ft wide estuary was almost empty aside from a trickle in the middle. I thought nothing of it – until a full moon woke me in the middle of the night and I got freaked out by the sound of water right near our tent. I looked out and it was high tide, and the estuary was full. By morning, the tide had started to go out.

Over the next week, I paid attention to the tides, lost my awareness of the hourly clock and got lost in the rhythms of nature. I realized what humans have lost by spending more and more time in cities. People as a whole would be much more concerned about the natural world and our resources if we lived more in touch with nature.

When we left I resolved that my children should grow up with a much greater awareness of nature than I did. I remembered how much I liked my occasional trips to state parks, or how fascinated I was the one time I found a praying mantis (lat summer I saw lucky #2). Homeschooling wasn’t on the radar at all, but the seed that suburban & urban lives are lacking something was planted. Blindly rushing out 5 days a week to pay the bills just seemed so empty. I wanted things to be different, and I look back at that week as being a catalyst for the dream of moving abroad and living in touch with nature that’s taken over my life.

Of course, credit has to go where credit’s due – I’d never been camping before meeting Trish. We went camping about 6 weeks after we met, and she wasn’t sure the city boy could hack it. Hack it I did, and who knows where I’d be if it weren’t for her?

I just found this yesterday and immediately fell in love. A little program called Desktop Earth that makes desktop backgrounds using satellite images of the earth. The kicker is that it can update them too, from every minute to hourly.

I love seeing the lights from space and seeing where people tend to live. It can also have clouds, which makes weather patterns much more apparent. Obviously, the bright lights indicate issues with overpopulation and excessive research usage in places, but it is still a pretty sight. It reminds me of being on an airplane at night except on a much grander scale.

If you’re not using Windows, you can get a still image to use as a desktop background from the same link. Attached is an example of the Americas at midnight last night.

Blogging systems like WordPress use a database to keep track of all the information. Every time someone goes to a page, the database is checked and the page is created on the spot. This requires the databases to be on fast servers – something that many budget website hosts don’t deliver. I’m glad to say that I found one host that costs less than $10/mo that does deliver (this site is hosted there).

A couple more things – all of these reviews are for Shared Hosting, where many websites are hosted on 1 server. This is why it’s so cheap, but it’s also the source of problems. If another site on the server is slowed by a lot of traffic, that will affect your site too. Basically – someone else having problems will result in you having issues too. A good host will be responsive to this and fix problems quickly.

Also, all of these hosts offer ridiculous amounts server space (how much room you have for your site) and bandwidth (how much data can be downloaded from your sites). It sounds like a lot, but it’s a practice called overselling, where they expect the average person to rarely use that much space & bandwidth. It makes their deals look better. It’s like inviting a bunch of 5 year olds to an all-you-can-eat pizza party – you tell them they can eat as many pies as they want, but you know that most won’t eat more than a couple of slices.

But all the space and bandwidth in the world doesn’t mean a thing if the sites are slow and unresponsive. Or if the host takes too long to respond to problems or service requests. Read on for some insight into 4 hosts that I’ve used extensively. (Note: websites involved ran on either WordPress or Drupal)

1. 1and1

1and1 was my very first host, back when they started their crazy 3 years free hosting promotion. They are still cost-effective, offering plans ranging from $4/mo and up. They also do domain registrations, which is cheap ($7/yr) and convenient. Unfortunately, the performance of database-backed sites on their shared hosting is mediocre. Of the 4 hosts in the review, 1and1 is easily the slowest. Every site that I moved from 1and1 to another host immediately became snappier and more responsive, especially bigger and more intensive sites. Differences in speed were less noticeable on smaller blogs. Overall, I would not recommend 1and1 unless money was the #1 factor.

Pros

• Cheap – plans as low as $3/mo
• Cheap domain registration ($7/yr)

Cons

• Pathetic site speeds
• Administrative area (where you go to create email accounts & stuff) slow, clunky and not intuitive
• Response time to emails & service requests ranged from 6-24 hrs
• Mediocre help documentation
• No one-click blog installs

2. DreamHost

When I started a web design & development partnership with a friend, I could not recommend 1and1. We picked DreamHost (DH) because they seemed to be a great deal – tons of space & bandwidth for $10/mo. We were green and didn’t know about overselling. Their performance, in terms of site speed and responsiveness, was middle of the road. Nothing amazing or horrible. What killed them was the downtime, of which there was a LOT. Within 4 months we had to look for a new host. I hope they’ve improved since then, but I’m not interested in trying them again.

Pros

• Reasonable domain registration ($10/yr)
• Clean & well-organized administrative area
• Good help documentation
• Reasonable response time for emails & requests
• Claims to be green
• Offers free hosting for non-profits
• 1-click installs, including WordPress

Cons

• Excessive downtime
• Average site performance

3. MediaTemple

MediaTemple (MT) were the step up from DreamHost, thanks to their GridServer. At the time, it was new & hot and, in their words,

replaces yesterday’s obsolete shared server technology. We’ve eliminated roadblocks and single points of failure by using hundreds of servers working in tandem for your site, applications, and email.

The gist is that instead of sites being hosted on one server, the load was spread out amongst multiple servers. Sounded like a smart solution, but did I mention that it was brand new? It wasn’t ready for prime time either. MT cost $20/mo, and for double the cost, I expected double the performance. Sadly, the performance was almost identical to DreamHost. Decent site speeds and excessive downtime. Again, they may have improved but I’ve found better hosting for less than $20/mo. On the plus side, their administrative are was purty, shiny and all Web 2.0-y. Recently, they offered a separate service to improve database performance – for an extra $20/$75/$150 a month!

Pros

• Fast responses to emails and requests, usually within 6-8 hours
• Offered free & helpful phone support
• Excellent help documentation (the best, actually)
• 1-click installs, including WordPress & Drupal
• The administrative area was REALLY attractive.

Cons

• Beautiful administrative areas don’t help sites run better or faster
• Site speeds were painfully average
• Excessive downtime
• Expensive upgrade for database performance

4. AN Hosting

After MT, I spent a lot more time reading hosting reviews. Trouble is, everyone seems to have different experiences with the same hosts. I read about DH customers who were thrilled and others who had experiences like me. So I looked for some more specific reviews. I noticed that my sites built on Drupal tended to always run slower than my WordPress sites. I assumed (correctly) that a host successfully running an intensive Drupal site would have no problems with WordPress blogs. That led me to ANHosting. Their price was right $6/mo (now $7/mo). A couple of the Drupal-based reviews noted significant performance boosts when sites were moved from other shared hosts. Since they offered a nice 30 day money-back guarantee, I took the plunge.

AnHosting has been quite the surprise. I doubt you can do better than the $7/mo Mega plan. Sites are snappy and responsive. Downtime is minimal. Response time to service requests is fast – and they offer phone support. And they offer Cpanel, a nice administrative interface, as well as a LOT of 1-click installs. I have no qualms recommending ANHosting. They’re cheap, fast and reliable and way better than anyone else in the price range.

Pros

• Sites are snappy and responsive – the performance alone is worth more than $7/mo
• Very fast responses to emails & other requests (often 2 hrs or less)
• Support by phone available
• Added an upgrade without charging (SSH)
• 1-click installs, including WordPress & Drupal

Cons

• Mediocre help documentation (practically non-existent)
• Some people don’t like that they are Russian
• Other people don’t like that they are owned by MidPhase

Conclusion

I recommend ANHosting first, followed by 1and1, Dreamhost and MediaTemple. ANHosting also has frequent promotions and it’s possible to get hosting with them for $5/mo. The price to performance ration with them is outstanding. 1and1 and Dreamhost are crapshoots, and MediaTemple’s performance may have caught up with its technology by now. It’s certainly possible to have good hosting experiences with any host, but the only I’ve had that I really feel confident about is ANHosting.