Since all this plodding through tax strategies can dizzy the mind and make the eyes glaze over, I thought I’d throw in some other stuff, just for fun. 

Coolest Website I’ve Found Lately
www.Pandora.com  

This website is all about music. It’s free and very clever. For me, it is a big part of my time at the computer.

Several years ago a rock star wanabe realized that he just wasn’t going to make it in the major league of rock stardom. He had been driven by an idea that there is so much good music that just isn’t getting heard. So he set about what he calls a genome project through which he and other musicians dissected more than 10,000 songs from artists all over the spectrum of musical styles. In this project they assigned values to each of dozens of attributes of the music and uploaded these songs into the Pandora website.

Users of the website set up their own “stations” (up to 100). You put a song that you really like or an artist for each station. So let’s say you input “The Beatles” as one station and “Waylon Jennings” as another. The website will put into play first a song by The Beatles and Waylon Jennings, each, then it would go on to play dozens of other artists that fit the very attributes of your personalized stations. About every 20 songs you’ll here one from Waylon or The Beatles, but you hear all these new artists that you’ve never heard before.

The music streams over your sound system until you stop it. And it’s all free with NO COMMERCIALS.

As if that wasn’t enough, it gets better. Some times you really like a song, or, you really hate a song. You get a chance to give the song a thumbs up or a thumbs down. If you do the former, that song and songs like it get thrown into the mix more often. Giving a thumbs down makes that song stop immediately, won’t be heard again and anything just like it won’t go into your mix. You see, the website conforms itself precisely to your liking. The more input you give it the more valuable the website becomes to your distinct tastes.

Check it out. I think you’ll like it.

If You’ve Found Something Really Neat on the Web. . .

Drop me an email. If I use it, I’ll send you a Barnes and Noble gift certificate for $25.