Pandora

lately i've been using this free music streaming service called Pandora. it works by asking you for an example for music you like, and providing you with similar pieces of music. by similar i mean having similar traits, not by the same artist. it's called the music genome project and it's fueled by a ton of people listening to music and tagging it for its attributes. there are other free music streamers out there that work automatically by comparing your listening preferences to those of people listening to similar stuff (obtained through monitoring their players). there are dynamic considerations that might support any of those very different models. bottom line is i like the pandora interface and performance. most of the time they manage to surprise me with nice new stuff. if you try it out and like it, i can send you my stations as well.

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Maya the good fairy

sometimes when you type a URL, you forget to switch back from hebrew to english. this results in something like:
נםשדדםמץנךםעדפםאץבםצ, which of course would get you nowhere (although it's very nice and biblical looking).
capitalizing on the fact that many browsers automatically query a search engine in case of a weird URL (like google), Maya created a series of webpages that would cause google to link to her webpage upon such unfortunate event. which is fortunate because she doesn't use it for her own advantage, but rather to provide a link to the actual web-page you were looking for :)
this is great because it's selfless and because it utilizes something (google, automatic search and automatic linking) to perform a sort of metatask that was not planned by the creators of the search scheme.
this is also cool because i've complained about this for so long and finally someone does something about it that does not require the obvious plugin. respect!
URLazy