if you ever listen to music on your computer and/or are interested in streaming internet radio, check out Pandora. it is unique because you tell it what artists and songs that you like and then it begins picking songs based on your tastes. the difference between this and other sites who suggest songs is that instead of just looking at what songs you and others share an interest for, they actually look at your musical tastes. they can accomplish this because they have had musicians categorize each song they play on many different factors (vocals, tonality, musical influences) and then take what you like and suggest songs with similar properties. its really a neat project. check out My Pandora Station

this is one of the coolest things i’ve seen in quite a while. of course that is the geek in me talking. Hamachi is a free program (that is technically still in beta) that makes setting up a secure/encrypted connection between two computers very easy. using this you are on a virtual private network where you can do anything you could if you were physically connected to the same switch. the big advantage if it is that it can handle going through NAT routers at both ends without doing any setup on the router or forwarding any ports. this will make using VNC or remote desktop to another computer VERY easy. check it out at www.Hamachi.cc

i heard about this on the Security Now! podcast with Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson.

the other day i downloaded the new Firefox browser (Firefox 1.5 was released tuesday. make the switch away from Internet Explorer here) and heard about this new extension that links to StumbleUpon.com. i tried it out and really like it. you sign up with them and pick the categories that you might be interested in. then you press the “Stumble” button on the toolbar and it takes you to a random webpage within one of your categories. then while you’re browsing the web, you give either a thumbs up or thumbs down to each webpage and it learns what kind of pages you like. last evening, i saw m.c. escher drawings, water balloons pop in space, the origin of english words and the latin alphabet, the gun the US military wants to replace the M-16 with, and this neat little site called SCRIBBLER all in about an hour. it was a complete waste of time but this kind of thing could make the internet interesting again.

Clark Griswold…eat your heart out.

if you haven’t tried it out, go get Google Earth and play with it a little. then go to either googleearthhacks.com or bbs.keyhole.com and check out what folks have done to enhance this product. my favorite at the moment is:
Google Earth Community: Live Tropical Data and NHC Storm Forecast Models

with this kind of stuff you can do your own weather channel graphics.

when you open the placemark in the above link, you may have to right-click it, go to edit, copy the link location, go to File -> Open… and insert the link into the open to actually see any graphics. its worth it, though.