Teich.Net :: All In

What’s with the low-bitrate songs on Pandora? I’ve been listening to a few different radio stations, and it seems like about 20% of the songs are 64bit max. It’s enough to make me want to stop listening! For example “Somewhat Off The Way” by “Dogs Die in Hot Cars” sounds just plain bad.

That sad, they’re making it better. I still am not a mood person though. Even after adding a bunch of different artists and songs to a random station, I’m still bored. Plus I love those last.fm stats!

After a few months of being a relatively happy last.fm user, I started reading some reviews and profiles of a new radio service called Pandora. Pandora, like last.fm provides you with your own personalized radio station. Unlike last.fm, it bases the music similarity on profiles of individual songs characteristics, input by musicians who actually listen to the music toiling away for YEARS to generate their 300,000 song library. An interesting concept to say the least! About 24 hours after submitting my email address on their site, I received an invitation.
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In addition to finally giving our blog a real name - a little odd, I know, but it’s not really about any one thing - we’ve updated the look and added a new feature: look, down the right side as little ways… Lists! Want to add a suggestion to our To Dos? Looking for a list of something else? Let us know!

A good friend was visiting this Wednesday and mid-way through a late lunch in Palo Alto, it came up that she had never been to Napa. We have been hearing great things about Pilar in Napa recently. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to check it out. Two and a half hours in traffic and a few glasses of Champagne at Chandon later (who knew all of the wineries closed at 5?), we were seated at Pilar.

The menu changes daily to use what looks best at the market and the style varies accordingly. The list of wines by the glass is short but both glasses we tried were unusual and delicious. The rest of the wine list, including a good selection of half bottles, had some unfamiliar producers and a very reasonable $15 corkage that is waived if you buy a bottle.
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It’s been a long time since we were late-night people, if we ever really were. At least when we lived in the city, we had a chance, but suburbia doesn’t really lend itself to a roaring social schedule after 10. On Tuesday night though, a friend arriving at SFO near midnight inspired us to venture out for a late dinner in the city. It turns out it may be just as well that we aren’t late night people because, unlike New York, there aren’t many obvious options for the uninitiated to eat after 10 in San Francisco.
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Only a few of my semi-regular spots (Zibibbo, Nola, La Strada…) are on this year’s Dine Downtown participant list, but it’s a good excuse for Monday night’s out in August and to try some of the places I haven’t been in awhile (Spago, Three Seasons…).
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I was looking at Yahoo’s self service ads today. Out of curiosity, I started going through the sign up process, and found that yahoo is sharing some interesting data.

When you are trying to choose your keywords, yahoo provides a nice way to see how popular those keywords are. This means you can also see how many searches they are getting for each term. For example, last month there were 30,051,991 for “google” on yahoo. Heck, there were 849 searches for “oren”. 676,724 searches for “xbox 360″ vs. 333,527 for PS3. It appears that Google just gives you an estimate on how many clicks you will recieve based on your CPC, without actually telling you how many hits that search will get.
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