Pandora Now Limits to 40 Hours

For the last two years, For Pandora has been on the bubble of legality. In their defense, they were and still are doing their best to be legal by signing contracts with big music. While they were able to exit this state of limbo and once again be officially legal, their recent renegotiation has a significantly bad clause.

On July, 7th, 2009, Pandora contract renegotiation includes a clause that free accounts can only listen to music for 40 hours per month. After you have listened to 40 hours of music in a month, you can pay $1 for unlimited music for the remainder of the month. While this is not that much money (it is at most $12 a year), I will be taking the path of least resistance.

I have heard great things about Last.fm and their free accounts get to listen to an unlimited amount of music. I just created my account and started listening as I started this blog post.

I heard about Pandora's new limitation last night. I did not listen to music that much this summer, but I must be listening to lots of music at school because I only have 10 hours left for this month. Sorry Pandora, I have enjoyed the last two years of music, but you are no longer the number one, personalized, online radio station.

UPDATE:
It has not even been a whole day since I switched from Pandora to Last.fm and I can already tell the Last.fm is way better. The best feature of Last.fm is the ability to play whatever song you want (there my be some kind of limits to this, but I have not found any yet).

Car Accidents

I am 22 (almost 23) years old. I lived in Sioux City, IA (population ~80K) for 17 years, I lived in Ames, IA (population ~50K) for 4 years, and I lived in Cedar Rapids, IA (population ~125K), Rochester, MN (population ~95K), and White Bear Lake, MN (population ~25K) for a summer each. Never, in all these cities in all those years, do I ever remember even hearing a car accident happen.

I am now living in Madison, WI (population ~225K) since August 17th (that is less than four weeks) and I have already heard three car accidents happen...and all of them have happened within 100 feet of my apartment building.

What gives? Is it because Madison has such a larger population (i.e. more drivers = more opportunities for accidents)? Is it because I live on a bottle neck in downtown Madison (Gorham is the best way to get from NE Madison to SW Madison)? Is it because Wisconsinites are such bad drivers (which indirectly implies that Iowans are good drivers)?

I do not know, but I will be SO pissed if some Wisconsinite hits my Prius!

My Acer is Back

This happened a long time ago...as in about three weeks ago, but I got my Acer Aspire One back.

Acer replaced the motherboard. They did not say what was wrong with the motherboard or why it happened. However, on the positive side, Acer did not restore the hard drive to the OEM state...which means that I did not have to reinstall Ubuntu.

I hope that I do not have any more serious problems (ones that I cannot fix myself). My warranty expires at the end of this year. I really do not want to buy an extended warranty.

My Netbook Stopped Working

In a recent post, I mentioned that my netbook stopped working.

I have an Acer Aspire One with 8 GB solid state drive (really, it is compact flash) and an 8 GB SDHC card using Ubuntu. On July 31st, while waiting for our flight to Washington DC, I tried to use my netbook, but it did not work. When I pushed the power button, the power light would come on, one of the two WiFi buttons would flash, and then the power light would go off. Everything I tried (including batter, no batters, wall power, no wall power) had any effect. My netbook is still under a year long warranty until Christmas time, so I sent it to Acer to get fixed. I will post again about this when I get my netbook back and know what was wrong with it.

The Best Movie Line I have Ever Written

When going out to eat Shannon says that she does not like when the waiter/waitress says "Hello, my name is John/Jane and I will be taking care of you today." She does not like the "taking care" part because its too broad. As if your response should be, "Awesome, because I have this knot in my back. Would you take care of that for me?" Instead, she prefers it if they should say "I will be serving you today" or "I will be your server today".

Well, inspired by the original line that annoys Shannon, I came up with a great movie line - the best movie line that I have ever written. It would be in a movie about the mob and it goes like this:

[A man with the appearance of a waiter walks up to the table of a notorious mobster.]

Hello, my name is Big Fat Paulie and I will be taking care of you today......*pop*..*pop*

[Big Fat Paulie successfully executes the hit by shooting through the menu he was holding with his silenced pistol.]

Now all I need is a movie to go with my line :/

This Should be an Unecessary Service

My Acer Aspire One stopped working recently, so I began the process to send it to Acer for fixing. It is strictly a hardware problem, so everything on my hard drive should be fine. However, Acer's documentation says that they will clear the hard drive and return it to its factory state. I do not have any important data on there that is not already backed upped by Dropbox, so that is not my concern. I just do not want to have to reconfigure my system if I do not have to.

I wanted to call Acer and tell them that if the hardware problem was not with the hard drive (which it is not), then I would appreciate it if they would not mess with my hard drive. Well, to do this, I first need a phone number, something that has alluded me to this point of the troubleshooting process. I decided to Google "Acer tech support phone number"....and I was extremely supprised by the first hit.

The first hit is a website called Contact Help. The service provided by this site is "fact access to customer service numbers". Now, I know that every company tries to suggest alternative ways to solve your problem other than calling them. However, when companies make it so difficult find their phone number that a service like Contact Help is required, they have gone too far.

US Go Congress (3 of 3)

The congress finished yesterday. I lost on Thursday (by only about 10 points). I did my best but still lost. Later on Thursday, Ramon and I got our books signed by Takemiya. On Friday, I won my game, partly because of Maeda's sabaki lessions. Going into Saturday, I was 4-1. My game was against another 9k that was also 4-1. I did not do so well in the opening, but took the lead near the end of the middle game. Then, on the very next move, I did not notice that my opponent's move thretened to undo what I had just done. My next move (and one later move) caused me to lose by over 80 points. My opponent in this game placed second in our band (11k - 9k) and I did not place.