The latest internet radio station I tried was Jango. The Jango experiment didn’t last a week like the other ones; it only lasted one day. Jango was just that terrible.

Seriously, that's a lot of ads. And so ugly!

Their main page has quotes from sources like USA Today and Wired Magazine, which make it sound like a decent system. There seems to be an emphasis on the “social” aspects of their system — you’re supposed to add your friends, and let their musical tastes influence what you listen to. Hey Jango — have you heard some of the crap my friends listen to? No thanks.

Compared to the smooth black layout of Slacker and the bold red design of Last.fm, Jango looks like it was cobbled together by a Web design student. Or worse, software like Pagemaker. It has a weird layout, a weird color scheme, and more ads on the page than any other player I’ve tried so far.

As with every other internet radio player, I started with a solid base of Duran Duran and built my station from there. Jango gives you lists of “related” artists, and you have the option of clicking a plus-sign to add them to your station, or a trash can to ban them. I clicked a lot of trash cans, because the likes of Pantera and Def Leppard are hardly “related” to Duran Duran.

As songs play, you can click a frowny face, smiley face, or big grinning face to rate them. But if you click the frowny face, which means “never play this song again,” the song doesn’t stop playing. Every other system, they immediately move on to a new song when you ban the one playing. Jango makes you fast-forward yourself after banning. Nice. Then every couple of songs, a pop-up window stops all music playing and reminds you to check out their fabulous sponsors. Radio will be available again in 15 seconds. After that 15, you have to click a link to continue playing. It makes Slacker’s audio ads seem like an absolute dream.

On Jango, you have to add in artists as a whole; you can’t pick a single song or album to add to your list. And when songs play, you’re told the artist name and song name, but not the album name. Also, every few songs they’ll throw in a song from an “independent” or “emerging” artist, which you’ll almost always have to fast-foward through, because nothing in this new indie artist’s style has anything to do with the style of the music you’ve already selected.

Bottom line, Jango is at the bottom of the heap. The worst of the internet radio stations so far. I won’t be back, so I won’t be able to see their ads for: Zune, Wal*Mart, L’Oreal, Seventeern magazine, VoiceFive, Olive Garden, and Zune (again). And those were all on one page.

This week, I’ve been trying out another web-based free internet radio system, Slacker.

Slacker, just like most other free services, also offers a paid system with more features. But I’m cheap, so I’m just trying out the free radio.

The banner and side ad are both animated, which is dizzying.

To start out, Slacker has you type in the name of an artist or group. As usual, I started my radio station with Duran Duran. You can then go through a list of “similar artists” and click a little heart icon next to the ones you’d like to hear. You can also select specific songs to mark with a heart, but they limit the number to something like 20.

Well, that’s not entirely true. You can mark additional songs with the heart, but only as they play on your radio station. The limit is on the number of songs you can specifically seek out to mark. Unlike the previous champion Last.fm, you can only mark favorite artists in general; not specific songs or albums from those artists.

A nice feature is that they show you not only what artist is going to play next, but they give you a little thumbnail of the album cover. So I know the next song up is not only Duran Duran, but it’s going to be a cut from Rio. The software also updates the title of the Web page reliably, so I can be surfing on another page, but see the Slacker tab displaying the title and artist. Handy.

Slacker doesn’t appear to have a limit on the number of times you fast-forward or “ban” unliked songs, which is great. Overall, I’d say it’s comparable to Last.fm except for one thing: actual radio commercials. Every few songs, Slacker plays one or two quick ads (the system usually feeds me one PSA, followed by an actual product ad). There are also ads galore on the Web page where the player lives.

Overall, I’m putting Slacker in a close second behind Last.fm — Slacker’s better at keeping the page title updated and showing me the thumbnail of the next album, but they play audio ads and don’t let you favorite just one album from an artist; you have to “love” the artist’s full catalog.

A couple of months ago, my hard drive crashed. Fortunately, I’d backed up all of my documents and pictures to an offsite service (Amazon S3, if you’re wondering) but I didn’t back up my music. There was just way too much of it. So the end result is that I kept the important stuff, but lost a lot of music I probably didn’t listen to very much anyway.

I reloaded what music I had on a few MP3 CDs, and I still have some old backup DVDs full of stuff, but for the moment I’m trying out a couple of internet radio options.

We used to use the Napster service for our internet music needs. For $15 per month, you could download as many rights-restricted WMA files as you wanted, and play them on your computer as well as an MP3 player (such as my Creative Zen Micro). But I’d been using the MP3 player less and less, thanks to a new phone that plays MP3s very well. That, combined with the idea of saving almost $200 per year, led us to cancel the Napster full service and check out the free services.

Right now I’m trying out two services: Last.fm and Pandora. Both sites have free and pay services, but I’m only looking at the free services for now. So far, here are my thoughts:

Not too many ads; the slideshow of band images is a bit useless.

Last.fm allows you to build a station around a single artist. I started out with, surprise surprise, “Duran Duran radio”. The system feeds you very occasional songs from your chosen artist, as well as a multitude of songs from artists they judge to be similar. The player has a little heart icon you can click, which marks a song as “loved”. You’re also given a library in which to store music. The biggest issue I have is that every song the system feeds you is put into your library; even if it’s something that you’re not terribly into, but allow to play while you go make a snack.

You can only make playlists if you’re a paid subscriber, and those playlists need to have a minimum number of artists and/or albums and/or songs in them. But the alternate is to cull through your library, manually add only those artists/albums/songs you like, and have it play the “Your Library” station. You definitely need a large amount of music in your library, but you can pack it with only stuff you like, and get around the paid-playlist system. The only problem with playing your library is that since it’s only stuff you’ve chosen, you don’t get to discover any new music from similar artists.

Last but not least, Last.fm allows you to listen to some full tracks on demand, up to three times.

There's a lot of empty space off to the right. Weird layout.

Pandora works with the “music genome project”, where the system analyzes songs and gives you a much better selection of similar artists. For example, when it plays a Duran Duran song (I started with Duran Duran radio, natch) it tells me that Duran Duran has “synth rock arranging, a subtle use of vocal harmony, and major key tonality.” Just like Last.fm, you can’t make a playlist (even with a paid account, although you can get a stand-alone software player instead of having to use a browser if you pay), but you can give songs a thumbs-up or thumbs-down rating and add those songs to a bookmark list.

Sadly, these bookmarks don’t seem to do much for your listening experience; it appears that they’re just there so you can remember what songs you might want to buy. You can’t listen to any of them all the way through on demand — only a 30-second sample.

You can add variety to your station by adding in other artists and songs, so that Duran Duran radio can become Duran Duran/Jonathan Coulton/Poe/Alanis Morrisette radio. But the more variety you add, the more weird “related” stuff Pandora will throw at you. And they have some limits on their free service — you can only skip a certain number of tracks per hour, so if they throw you a bunch of crap early on, there’s no fast-forwarding for a while. They also cap your listening at 40 hours per month, which seems like both a lot of time and not enough.

Conclusion: out of these two services, Last.fm comes out a distinct winner. I can both listen to a band-related station that allows me to discover new music, and also to my personally-built library to listen to only the stuff I like. I just have to be vigilant about letting them add in other songs to my library as I’m discovering.

There are many other internet radio services to check out: AOL radio, Live365, ShoutCast, Jango, Slacker, and several others. I’ll continue to poke and prod at more options to see if any of them is perfect for me.

I’m listening to the live Pink Floyd album Delicate Sound of Thunder as I’m doing some work on updating the Basic Instructions site. A hell of a good album.

As for the BI site — we’ve put in a lot of work this holiday weekend. Not only are we moving the whole site to a host whose come-on includes the fact that they’re ready to handle big traffic surges, but we’re also moving the whole operation from Blogger to WordPress. About time — WordPress has a system specifically for Web comics, and so far it’s a dream to work with compared to Blogger.

Right now I’m tickling the RSS feed, getting it to forward through FeedBurner. Yesterday, we set up and designed the new site, and moved all of the archives over — two years’ of comic strips and news blogs. It was a busy day of computing.

Today we finally were able to go out together and see Wall•E. As expected, I laughed, I cried, I enjoyed the crap out of it.

I also checked out the first act of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. I didn’t know what to expect from it, and so was pleasantly surprised. Scott and I discussed the fact that in the last couple of years, the bad-guy-as-good-guy has really taken off. Especially recently, with misunderstood evil genius types like in Skullcrusher Mountain or Soon I Will Be Invincible. It reminds me of the horrible 80s film Love at First Bite, where the “bad guy” gets the girl in the end. I always dug that ending.

Tonight is the premiere of Project Runway 5. I hope it’s a fierce, hot tranny mess.

Movies: I just watched Stranger than Fiction the other day, and it was surprisingly sweet and lovely. I’d only ever seen Will Ferrell in stuff like Zoolander, so it was nice to see that he can really ACT act. The rest of the cast was excellent as well.

Books: I started reading Soon I Will Be Invincible yesterday. I got it for Scott, so it was only right that I let him read it first. Good so far — I like bad-guy protagonists. In upcoming book news, just over a fortnight until Harry Potter 7. It comes out on a Saturday, so I can sit down and read it that whole day.

Music: Since my old ukulele was cheap and one of the tuning pegs broke, talk has once again turned to getting me a new one. I have to decide whether I want a soprano or a baritone. Right now I’m leaning soprano, but that may change. I’ll have to hit the local Guitar Center and see what they have that I can put my hands on.

Games: Did you know that Mercenaries is now on the backward-compatible list for the Xbox 360? Yes indeedy it is! Sadly, it does have some freezing problems. But so far it’s still fairly playable, as long as you don’t spend too much time in Pyongyang. And come this holiday season, we may have to pay full price for Mercenaries 2 when it comes out, instead of waiting for it to drop in price.

1. Today’s our 10th wedding anniversary. Bring on the tin and aluminum!

2. Reality TV has been really good to me so far this summer season. My chosen favorites have won both Hell’s Kitchen and So You Think You Can Dance, and my first-episode favorite is still doing well on Rock Star: Supernova. I don’t have a favorite for Project Runway yet, but the guy I really disliked already got the boot. Haven’t watched this week’s yet.

3. I was going through my MP3s this morning, to make changes to my playlists. I came across some of the songs from the 70s cartoon movie Animalympics, and was just delighted. Man, I loved that movie. The music was done by Graham Gouldman, lead singer of the 70s wussrock band 10cc.

4. I was going to put in a movie and watch it, but “Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts 1-7)” just came on, so now I’m stuck listening to the awesomeness for 17-1/2 minutes. Like that’s such a chore.

5. Snakes on a Plane opens tomorrow, after a thousand-year wait.

6. The On-Line Guitar Archive is offline due to legal issues. I really wish I’d printed out all of my favorite bits of tablature, instead of just bookmarking them. Son of bitch!

TV: I tried to get into the new show Windfall, but it’s an ensemble piece, and I don’t give a crap about most of the characters. Oh well, at least I have Hell’s Kitchen and So You Think You Can Dance and the not-too-awful Treasure Hunters to get me through the summer. And the new season of The Venture BrothersProject Runway starts THIS Wednesday. So get in from the beginning, it’s a great show — Emmy nominated! Did you guys know that there are now TWO reality TV categories at the Emmys? Both “Reality” and “Reality Competition”. Crazy.

Books: Right now I’m nearing the end of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, which started out kind of slow but is now really good. I just requested a library hold for the second book in the trilogy, The Subtle Knife. I’d heard of the trilogy before, but never got around to reading any of the books.

Music: I’m in another Duran Duran upswing. I have my playlist stuffed with a dozen albums, extended singles, live versions, unreleased demos and various other Durantastic stuff.

Movies: I’m going to wait to see PotC, at least another week or two. I just don’t like the movie theater experience, more so since people get more rude all the time. The next big movie I’ll slog out to the theater to see will probably be Snakes on a Plane.

Games: We just passed the 50% complete mark on Sly 2: Band of Thieves, which makes me sad. The Sly Cooper games are so damn good, I wish there were more. Oh well, we can always replay through them in a few months, just like I did with Psychonauts. It wasn’t shiny and new anymore, but it was still very enjoyable. I love gaming as a team; one of us will play through a mission, but the other one helps by spotting.

From my lovely friend Kerri comes a fellow named Jonathan Coulton and his sensitive new age guy version of Baby Got Back.

I’m importing some old posts from an old blog. Even though I’m giving them their original dates, they may still feed out now. This post is from March 10, 2005.

The Duran Duran concert last night was just awesome.

Do newspapers still do concert reviews in the arts & entertainment section? I never understood why, since the concert is already over and done. It’s not like people are going to be able to read the review and say, “Let’s go see that concert!”

My friend Amanda and I started out with dinner, in which she took me to Claim Jumper. My goodness, those portions are huge. But I felt really skinny while walking through the restaurant to the restroom — there were a lot of very large people there to eat those very large portions. The food was pretty good, but I’d definitely want to be able to box half of it up and take it home to the fridge if I ever go again.

With time to kill, we went up to Everett and hit the Goodwill. I didn’t find anything good, but Amanda scored a couple of nice items. Then we moseyed over to the Everett Events Center, parked in a garage nearby, and headed in. They searched our purses on the way in — I figured I couldn’t bring a camera, but I think the guy was just looking for guns and knives. He didn’t ask to see what was in the binocular cases or anything.

We got overpriced stadium beers and stood in the corridor people-watching (alcohol wasn’t allowed in the seats, which sucked). I ran into two comedians I know, one of whom I was totally not surprised to see at the concert, knowing what a big 80s fan he is.

The opening band was an LA-based punk group called I Am A Robot or something like that. The guy sitting next to us said they’d been on Saturday Night Live recently, and were going for an 80s punk sound. I didn’t care for them — their music wasn’t my bag, and they severely lacked showmanship. Most of the band had a garage-band look, t-shirts and jeans and sneakers. Then the lead singer wore an ill-fitting suit straight out of the 80s (huge shoulder pads and tapered ankles) and took off his jacket at one point to reveal a tattered and torn t-shirt with a huge dollar sign on the front. The sleeves of the t-shirt had been cut mostly through, but were still connected to the shirt under the armpits, so it looked like two floppy goiters hanging underneath the guy’s arms. He may have been drunk, too, from the stumbling and saying of weird things between songs. They did 10 songs total. I remember one DD concert I went to, the opening act was The Cranberries. Now there was an opening act you could really sink your teeth into.

While the roadies moved the offending instruments off the stage and got it ready for Duran Duran, we chatted a little bit with the guy next to us. He was all, “When they were really big, I was like in kindergarten!” Nice. He said he thought they’d open with “The Reflex”. I told him no way, they were totally going to open with “Sunrise”. I thought about wagering cash. I should have. But I didn’t.

Duran Duran took the stage at 9:05, and played just over two hours. They were absolutely amazing — not only did everyone sound great, but they looked like they were having a fun time, too. Our seats were in the front row of the 2nd level, so we could sit and enjoy without anyone standing and dancing in front of us (though the broads next to me stood and danced several times, and the people behind us were on their feet a lot too). I’ve never been one for standing and dancing at concerts, and I hate having to stand because the people in front of me stand, because the people in front of them stand. When I saw Rick Springfield a few years ago (and he was delightful!) I had to stand through the whole thing because everyone else was. Ugh.

My cell phone camera can’t do justice to the five diamondvision screens they had behind the stage — at times, they would just show background patterns or images. But for “The Chauffeur”, the actual music video was played on the screens, and during “Careless Memories” they showed a pretty darned funny anime/computer animated video in which the band members, drawn in huge-eyed anime style, battled ninjas and space aliens and Godzilla. Other times, it would be live video footage of the band or the crowd.

I’m glad I brought our two small pairs of binoculars — our seats were great, but it was also fun to be able to zoom in and see everyone up close. Even though the picture is crappy, you can see how “close” we could get with the binoculars.

Nick Rhodes had a nice setup with a Korg, an Apple laptop on a cute little stand, and four keyboards. Plus he had a video camera set up behind him, so that live footage could be put up on the screens. He and Simon passed the camera around to show everyone during the intros and solos near the end of the show. I realized how long it’s been since I’ve been to a big arena concert, because I thought it was cool how all the mikes and instruments were wireless, they could go anywhere on stage and not be hindered by cords.

They truly did get everyone back together for this tour — not only Simon, John, Nick, Roger and Andy, but there was a bonus surprise for real purists — Andy Hamilton is touring with them as the sax player.

Set List
(Reach Up for the) Sunrise – not surprising, as it’s the first single from Astronaut.
Hungry Like the Wolf
Hold Back the Rain – a great album cut from Rio I didn’t expect.
Union of the Snake
Astronaut
Come Undone
I Don’t Want Your Love – I was pleased they didn’t just shove Big Thing under a rug.
Chains
What Happens Tomorrow – they said this will be the next single from Astronaut. One of my faves.
Planet Earth
Tiger Tiger – a nice break for Simon to go change shirts.
The Chauffeur
Ordinary World
Save a Prayer
Nice
Notorious
Is There Something I Should Know?
Careless Memories
Wild Boys

Encore
White Lines
Girls on Film – included band intros and solos
Rio

I have one degree of separation. This is local comedian Rodney Sherwood with Duran Duran — I’ll be going on a fun poker trip with Rodney tomorrow morning. I’m so jealous of him I could just go bite my pillow.