Personal music players like the iPod are great. Thanks to these nifty little gadgets we are able to carry around more CDs worth of music than ever before, of course there are also unfortunate side effects. Take for example my current project of ripping various children's music CDs and loading them on the pod. While it's great to have kid friendly favorites on tap and at the ready these infectious songs unfortunately take up a lot of space and have a bad habit of finding their way into my "shuffle" play list. The other major problem with a portable music device is that the more you listen to the same old playlists the less time you spend discovering new music.

Thankfully there are services available that can help even those stuck in the 80s to contemporize. Various coworkers have recommended Rhapsody, Napster and even XM radio but by far my favorite is Pandora. I like the service not because it's free but because it uses a very sophisticated system called the music genome project. The function of the "project" is to assign gene characteristics to every song in its vast catalog and to therefore identify relationships between similar types of music. The result is a music searching system that relies less historical purchase data or user recommendations and more on limited criteria and the kinship of music.

By far the easiest and most enjoyable way to use the service is to simply look up your favorite artist and create a station. Pandora immediately plays another "related" artist that it deems to be in the same vein and for the most part the recommendations are spot on. In fact I decided to put the service to the test and created a station with two seed artists which comprise a large portion of my music collection. What I found is that 80% of the time Pandora played songs within an acceptable range and at least 25% of the time recommended tracks from artists that I already own.

Obviously there is a learning curve involved as the system adapts based on feedback in the form of thumbs up / thumbs down ratings. In most cases I found that Pandora would stop playing crap music when I thumbed down two or more tracks that I didn't like. But the system is not perfect and in a few cases I had to use the "this isn't what this station should play" rating to rid myself of troublesome music. I found that if I first asked "why is this song playing" I could isolate the characteristic that lead Pandora's algorithm down the wrong path and retroactively thumbs down any songs of similar style.

The major draw back to Pandora is that it streams, albeit with very light network traffic. The service is also ad supported and features Flash and JavaScript ads that are sometimes annoying and occasionally prone to malfunction. I also found the volume control the be a bit awkward and the limitation of skipping only six songs per hour frustrating when I backed myself into a corner of bad music.

The verdict is that if your looking to discover new music on the cheap Pandora is the way to go. In most cases if you start with music you really like and that is limited to a specific genre you will very easily find tunes that you are happy with. Sure your station may take a bit of tweaking but in the end you'll have something you can listen to for and hour or two and discover great new tracks. If you're curious you can check out my test stations Great Big Folk (featuring Great Big Sea and Stan Rogers) and Country Troubadour (featuring Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Steve Earle, Billy Joe Shaver, Doc Watson).

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Despite your best effort most of the time you're left feeling like you were swindled.

Saturday was the official "buy a car day" since we are near month's end and the next few months will be very busy. After extensive research the family settled on a Chevy Equinox as the vehicle to service our needs for the next few years. After only three months of working in a car industry related field I felt like I had a decent understanding of the car buying process at least as an outsider looking in and was excited to finally hit the dealerships. Strategy is everything and the wife and I headed to our first choice dealership armed with every conceivable bit of knowledge.

However as Murphy says, no plan survives the first engagement and as such we quickly found out that the single bargaining chip of trim package that we depended on was moot. As it turns out the only different between a $23k vehicle and the $28k version is a bit of faux wood trim, fog lights, different rims and some window tint. To make matters worse my wife actually didn't like the upgraded trim and was unhappy to find that she'd have to accept it in order to purchase other features. Since the Equinox isn't selling well we already knew that the vehicles were priced to move. As I figured it our only option was to haggle over options but since factory options were out of the question all were left with were some basic add-ons.

After approximately 2.5 hours of negotiating we managed to get into the F&I (finance) department and to finalize the deal. It still amazes me, especially since I work for a company that sells car dealer CRM, that so much of the process is still on paper. At several junctures we were forced to sit and wait while salespeople scribbled notes and forms information by hand, often redundantly, when it would have been immensely easier to enter the data once and print the multiple forms.

At any rate I feel like we got a pretty good deal not only because of our negotiating and smart buyer tactics but thanks in some part to my wife's company's GM supplier discount. There are still a few "to-do" items to take care of but for the most part we got a vehicle at a rock bottom price. Still I have a wonder if we got the best price possible, which we may never know. I will say though that after looking at various sales reports for GM dealers in our area the gross margin that most dealers make on this vehicle is low or non-existent. On the flip side most dealers are making huge profits on larger SUVs and pickup trucks which would explain why family and friends often report huge "discounts" when haggling with dealers. In my opinion a dealer is going to knock more of the price of the vehicle when the margin is greater. When going after a car or truck that won't move there will be less wiggle room and more of a discount built in since the manufacturer and dealer is simply trying to move inventory.

Unofficial Holiday

Not everyone observes either Good Friday or Easter Monday but in my opinion they should. Regardless of your religious orientation the holiday provided a much-needed break in the spring some three months after the last official "day off", New Years day.

Crab Season Opens

The NCDMF declares a two-month close on the crab fishing season between January and February. March marks the official start of the 2008 season and I'm excited to head back to the beach and to try my hand once again at find tasty crab.

Still Recovering from the Sebring 12

Over the past week I've collected a few choice gallery links as the images have trickled in from Sebring. Be on the look out for those here a little later in the week.