Pandora Radio!

I just discovered Pandora Radio via a recent Rocketboom post in which Joanne interviews Tim Westergren, Pandora's Chief Strategy Officer and Founder.

The heart of Pandora is the Music Genome Project, a vast and ever growing taxonomy of musical information started back in 2000. They analyze songs according to nearly 400 attributes on aspects such as melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, and lyrics.

Pandora then lets you stream and explore music. I started by giving Pandora a list of seed artists that Patti and I like, and Pandora took it from there - playing those artists, plus other artists and songs that are related via the Music Genome Project taxonomy. In just a couple of days Patti and I are already hooked - hooked enough to pay the $36 annual subscription to have Pandora advertising free.

There's a social networking and sharing aspect to Pandora too, and I've already bookmarked the Folk Holidays and Contemporary Folk shared music streams. And there's lots more to explore too. Like I said, I'm hooked - and excited.

The only complaint I might have so far is that Pandora's web UI is killing my "music PC", which is a 6 year old Pentium 4 with 1 GB of RAM running Windows 2000. Pandora is pegging the CPU on that old machine, and I can only assume it is due to its very nice, very slick, very modern Ajax web user interface, not the music streaming.

Oh, and if you are curious, the artists we seeded our Pandora stream with are Bruce Cockburn, David Bromberg, Diana Krall, Eliza Gilkyson, Lucy Kaplansky, Natalie Merchant, Ollabelle, Richard Shindell, Susan Werner, and Tish Hinojosa. I'm sure I'll add more, but those were no-brainers.

Boston CHI November Meeting

BostonCHI, the New England area chapter of ACM SIGCHI Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, is holding its monthly program meeting this coming Tuesday night, November 13. Socializing over tea, coffee, drinks, and food starts at 6:30pm, and the featured talk starts at 7pm.

This month's featured talk is:

"'Umm, No, I Don't Actually Think That's Such a Good Idea'
OR How to Say Things your Client Doesn't Want to Hear"
Ilise Benun, Marketing Mentor

Read more about it on the Boston CHI monthly meeting page.

But, no, I won't be going. Instead I am heading to Seattle to visit some customers this week.

Manchester City Marathon and Half Marathon

The inaugural Manchester City Marathon and Half Marathon was held in Manchester, NH today. Surprisingly enough for a first time race, registration was sold out several weeks in advance. Over 800 runners were registered for the half marathon, and 600 for the marathon.

We had beautiful fall New England weather for the race. Tropical storm Noel blew through here yesterday, mostly off to sea, but still with a good amount of inland rain and wind. But Noel was gone this morning, and we had temperatures in the mid 40s and plenty of sun at the 8:50am race start.

I ran the half - my first half ever, as up to now I've preferred the 10k race distance. My target finish time window was between one hour and forty five and one hour fifty minutes. I'm still waiting for official times to be posted, but my watch says 1:47:11.

I ran all but the last mile with my work running partner, Dan, who was running the full marathon. I think I paced Dan through the first ten miles, but I know that he was pacing me in miles 10 and 11. We hit a hill somewhere around mile 11 that just made me feel like crap, but Dan kept plowing on. He got me to mile 12 and told me to get going and finish strong. Thanks, Dan!

Here's a shot that Patti took of me and Dan at mile 6:

And here's a shot of me in the final stretch, somewhere between mile 13 and the finish line:

Dan kept up our first half pace on his own through the second half of the marathon, and finished somewhere in the three hour and 30 minute range. Way to go, Dan!

I'll update the post when official finishing times show up on Cool Running.

Oh, and I feel great! My quads are just a little sore, but no big deal. And I developed a blister on a toe, but again - no big deal.

Update: Both the marathon results and half marathon results are now posted on Cool Running. I finished in 1:47:10, giving me a pace average of 8:11 per mile; I was the 144th finisher, out of 816 total, and 15th out of the 40 in my age group. Dan finished in an amazing 3:36:49, which is just 6 minutes short of a Boston Marathon qualifying time; considering how frigging hilly the course was, this was a fantastic finish time for Dan. His average pace was 8:17, so he did slow a little in the second half of his race. He finished 98th out of 517, and 14th out of 49 in his age group.

Hello, Blackberry. (Bad news for Palm)

I have been a loyal Palm user since day one. Since that very first Pilot. But with my ongoing hotsync crash problems, and with a recent upgrade at work to Exchange Server 2007, well, the time had come to give Crackberry, err, Blackberry a try...

There are a lot of Pearl devotees where I work, but I'd rather a full keyboard. So a just recently released Curve 8310 was delivered to my office yesterday:

Initial impressions? Compared to my Treo 650, it is light. And thin. But the plastic housing doesn't feel quite as high quality as the Treo. The keyboard is superb - even better than the Treo's keyboard!

I'm still waiting for my IT department to set up my Exchance syncing, so I cannot comment on that yet. But I found it very interesting that the first three things I added to the device were Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Maps.

The Opera Mini browser is probably next. Then it is off to find the best news feeds, discussion forums, and software repositories...

NH UX October Meeting

(I know, I know. I was supposed to post more often, not take the entire summer off. What can I say? Here's to a renewed effort to post more often...)

I spotted notice of this NH UX October Meeting in a recent post to the IxDA discussion list. I'm pretty sure I'll be attending.

Topic:	Bias in Usability Testing
Speaker:	Carolyn Snyder
When:	Tuesday, October 30, 2007 6:30 - 7:00pm Food, Beverages & Networking 7:00 - 7:15pm NH-UX Info Update 7:15 - 8:15pm Presentation
Where:	Fidelity, 2 Contra Way, Merrimack NH
RSVP:	Please RSVP to Amy Cueva

Abstract:
In usability testing, we strive to eliminate bias so that the results will be accurate. But what is bias anyway? How does it affect our results? What can we do about it? And are we, as usability specialists, truly objective? Usability consultant Carolyn Snyder will lead a stimulating discussion about bias in usability testing - something we encounter on a daily basis but may not consciously think about. There are many sources of bias in usability testing, from users to tasks to reporting. Every testing methodology is biased, and so are we as facilitators. But bias is not something to be shunned. Instead, we need to understand its sources and weigh its effects. Sometimes, bias can even be harnessed to serve our purpose. Come to this presentation and you'll never look at your testing methods the same way again!

Bio:
Carolyn Snyder is an independent usability consultant in the greater Boston area. In the past 15 years she has conducted hundreds of usability tests on dozens of products and interfaces. Carolyn is the author of the book Paper Prototyping (she'll give away a copy at this presentation) and co-author of two books on web site usability. She has a BS in Computer Science and an MBA, both of which have biased her perspective :-). More information concerning Carolyn's consultancy is available at Snyder Consulting.

Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth

I'm really surprised I haven't seen more buzz about Photosynth from Microsoft Live Labs. Photosynth "takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next." This is the most "holy crap, lookit this!" new technology that I've seen in a long, long time.

Go visit the site and give it a try. They have a growing number of photo collections, but I recommend starting with the Piazza San Marco, Venice collection.

Google Does It Again - Drag and Drop Driving Directions

Google Maps introduced draggable driving directions sometime in the past couple of days. Don't like the route suggested? Then just drag the blue route line to another road and have it all recalculate automagically. This is the same type of capability as available in Garmin MapSource, but as one would expect from Google, the interaction design is easier and more elegant.

Check out the video introducing the feature.