Sprint has made some headway since the Sprint/Nextel merger. This streaming service with Pandora is a good example:

How it works

To start you off, Pandora is a great free audio service that learns about your audio tastes as you listen to music then rate and bookmark said music. Simply go to the website, type your favorite artist in the text box they give you, and Pandora collects a list of similar songs and plays them back at you. If you don’t like a song, give it a thumbs down and you’ll never hear it again. If you love a song, give it a thumbs up; you’ll get more.

For $3/month, you can now get your Pandora goodness through your phone–and use it as an mp3 player with the world’s largest library.

How Much It Costs

Like I said–the service is $3/month. This is…

• $3/month less than Yahoo! Unlimited
• $10/month less than Sirius
• at least $7/month cheaper than XM (that’s if you buy 3 years at a time)
• $7/month cheaper than Napster (basic, not unlimited).

…and basically a good buy provided Sprint and Pandora stay in business.

Conclusion

I hope the GPhone gets something like this! 

I posted earlier this month about the problems of having too much data going at me at once, and literally thought “I feel like I’m drinking kool-aid” from a fire hose.

There are a lot of information sources on the web. I’m sure you’ve figured that part out by now. Blogs like Lifehacker and BoingBoing are extremely prolific, to the tune of about 20 articles daily. However, there are less prolific blogs, like Self-Made Minds, that put out rather useful content that I’d really regret missing.

Unfortunately, value in content is extremely subjective. Literally, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Some blogs are going to put out posts that you’d hate yourself, in hindsight, for missing; yet there are blogs out there that you could really care less if you missed a week of articles.

Efficient & Lazy Strategy:

The best way I found to do this is to use two major categories for every single blog I read: Junk and Value. I ended up re-categorizing all 86 (and growing) of my RSS feeds into the two categories. Interestingly enough, the Value category only has 24 feeds in it, and they are definitely not the prolific ones. Since I use Google Reader, I set it up to load the Value category by default when I open my RSS reader.

Result:

When I open my RSS reader for my fix of feeds now, I usually look at the text of the 10 or so truly valuable posts. If I have another fifteen minutes to kill, I might occasionally open the Junk folder and scroll through the titles of the 100+ articles, open one or two, and star the ones I want to read later when I’ve got the time to dive into a pile of articles.

In a nutshell, I get the maximum return on my time after the 30 minute investment in categorizing my feeds in a way that is extremely functional.

So after watching the latest TiVo-ing of The Daily Show, I’m both surprised and annoyed to find that Jon Stewart, while still being current, doesn’t have anything new at all, and really hasn’t had anything particularly groundbreaking since, oh… seven years ago when we didn’t elect Bush. Remember the Bush vs Gore debates, the “fuzzy arithmetic” retort to practically every statement Gore issued involving numbers, the fact that we didn’t elect Bush in the first place? I do, and I was 14 at the time. New year, different bullshit.

Yes, it is really sad that it would have been better off taking a public speaking class than 99% of what he actually did, but it is worth that people have this annoying tendency to forget Bush’s greater offense–being a slimy bastard.

Our Viacom-owned news organizations are stuck with mocking Bush’s inability to use his native language while we have a president who is guilty of at least:

• Authorization of a war of aggression without any real premise
• Authorization of the use of torture and abuse in violation of the international humanitarian and human rights law and domestic constitutional and statuary laws.
• Authorization of the transfer of persons held in U.S. custody to foreign countries where torture is known to be practiced.
• Knowing failure to adequately maintain and upgrade the levees directly contributed to the foreseeable loss of life and suffering of many people when Hurricane Katrina struck.
• Distortion of sound science and attempts to suppress medical research studies in HIV prevention when it conflicts with the ideology of the Christian Right.
• Re-instation of the “gag-rule” policy which restricts foreign organizations that receive US funds from using their own, non-U.S., funds to provide legal abortion services or even provide accurate medical counseling or referrals regarding abortion.
• Imposition of Abstinence-Only HIV Prevention Programs: The Bush administration is using its political influence, aid, and funding in the sphere of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment to advance policies and programs that worsen the AIDS pandemic.
• Use of military forces to seize and detain indefinitely without charges U.S. citizens, denying them the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts.
• Insertion of secret clause in Terrorist Tribunal Act to pardon himself from war crimes

…and many more!

This, perhaps, is why my boyfriend is catching the next plane to Germany right after he wins the lottery.

No, I will probably never buy a Sony Bravia, but their commercials still rock the house.

This is the new one:

Wait… didn’t Apple use that song when they were introducing the tie-dyed CRT iMac?