Pandora

Today I got a chance to meet Tim Westergren, one of the founders and CEO of Pandora. If you've never heard of Pandora, you should check it out. It's kinda like Internet radio, but you can define the kind of music you end up hearing. Starting with a song of your choice, it plays a string of songs that have a similar sound and feel to the original. It's a really great way of discovering new music, and it's pretty much all I listen to these days.

Listening to Tim talk, I was really surprised to find out Pandora works. They've got this huge database of music they call the Music Genome Project, and they use it to group together similar songs. This database has over 100,000 songs, and the crazy part is, each and every one of them is categorized by hand. They've got a group of people with a good music theory background that just do nothing but listen to songs and fill out around 200 characteristics about them. He said that a person can usually finish a song in 20 minutes, so the amount of work that's gone into this thing is huge. I can't help but think there's some way you could build a computer program to do this analysis, but then I bet the analysis would be pretty crappy. Their whole process is pretty labor intensive, but the quality is top notch.

I'm also surprised by the whole legal aspect of Pandora. All they have to do to get new songs is to go out and buy the CDs. Then, they're free to put them up on Pandora. Apparently, this is perfectly legal under the DMCA, and anyone could do it. What they can't do is play a particular song on demand. They also can't rewind, and have restrictions on how often you can skip songs, and how often you can hear songs from a particular artist. I guess if you're able to do those things, then there's no need for you to buy music at all. They compare themselves to the radio, and are trying to put themselves out as a music recommendation service.

I think they've got a good idea going, but I'm just unsure about their financial future. I'm not sure how much ads will get them, and I don't know if it's a service people would subscribe to and pay for just yet. It reminds me of satellite radio. Sure, satellite radio has hundreds of channels and no commercials, while normal radio sucks ass with crappy stations and 10 minute long commercial breaks. But whether or not it's something I'd subscribe to... I dunno. For something like Pandora, the recommendations are great, but I'd like the ability to hear those new songs I like a few more times, just something to justify the fact that you'd be paying for it. Otherwise you'll forget what you heard, and end up with nothing.

Snow

It's the middle of October, and it's snowing here in Ann Arbor. This is kinda cool since I haven't seen real snowfall in a while. This also sucks because it's freakin' cold outside and I have to walk home. I really need to get some winter clothes before I freeze to death.

Home

On Wednesday night, I flew back to the bay area for the GSRC annual symposium. It was being held at the Wyndham hotel in San Jose, and I spent Thursday and Friday there listening to professors present their research. I also went to a student poster session, where I had to present a poster about research one of my advisors' other students had done. The whole conference was actually a little boring, and from talking to people that have been to it before, it seems to be more of a formality than anything else. Professors go to it just so they can keep getting funding from GSRC.

Still, it was a good chance for me to get used to presenting research, and it was also a good chance for me to meet grad students from other schools. I met some cool students from UIUC and the University of Washington. Thursday night I went out with them to Gordon Biersch, and met up with some of their friends that were working in the bay area. It turns out one of them is a grad student from Purdue, and he knows my cousin who went there to get his M.S. Isn't that random?

Friday afternoon I had time to go hang out with the folks at Xilinx. It just happened that Xilinx was having its Virtex5 release party that afternoon, so it was really good timing. I hadn't gotten around to telling all my old coworkers that I was coming back, so I got a lot of surprised faces when they saw me, which was fun. I even managed to pick myself a nifty V5 shirt, which pissed Judy off since she doesn't have hers yet and I don't even work there anymore.

That night I went with my Xilinx friends to eat pho at Dac Phuc. I was kinda craving it since I can't find good pho anywhere in Ann Arbor. The one place I tried had broth that tasted like water. But Dac Phuc is awesome, and it was as good as I remember. All of us really like that place, and I think the owner can even recognize us because we've been there so much.

Afterwards we went to Clarence's house to play Magic. I'm an addict, I know. I blame Mike and Judy for getting me back into it. At least I've decided I won't play constructed with my own cards since that gets really expensive. Draft and sealed are fun though, even if I'm not that good. When we were done, Judy gave me back home. Thanks Judy! Now you know how awful my commute was for the last 2 years.

Saturday I finally got around to getting a haircut. I hadn't had one since I left for Michigan, and my hair was pretty shaggy. I was just afraid the barbers in Ann Arbor wouldn't know how to cut Asian hair. Then I met up with Ben and John in Fremont and hung out for a while. We realized that Howard owns all the board games and ended up playing cards. We played a trick taking game called 99, and by the end of it all, I didn't win but I had taken 1 trick more on average than John or Ben. I wonder if Bridge has anything to do with it...

Whew. I can't believe I wrote so much, and if you're still reading this, congrats. It feels really good to be back home, and I can't believe it's only been a month since I left. The one thing I can complain about my trip is the weather. It's as if the cold weather followed me all the way from Michigan >_<.