Peer pressure, Last.fm, and life-changing rest

I did not work this weekend. I felt sick and decided I needed the rest (I wasn’t scheduled; I just didn’t go in when asked). I didn’t have school yesterday and don’t have to go today until later this afternoon. I have slept…repeatedly, unapologetically, and lengthily. I did not make my bed until this morning, and I’m an inveterate bed-maker. Consequently I feel like a different person! I have cooked and eaten real food. I have cleaned my house. I have read books not relating to nursing. I dimly recall how I used to have a life that included these things by default…perhaps when I am done with nursing school I can even have time to do things like bake fabulous sourdough bread! I dare to hope.

I guess I’ll give up on Twitter. It looks fun the way other people use it, but not even one single real-life person I know will agree to try it. I’m keeping my account because I like getting updates from CNN and stuff, but otherwise I guess I’ll just nestle into Facebook with everyone else I know. One must bow to peer pressure online as well, I suppose.

In my slightly increased amount of free time in the last few days I have messed around with Last.fm (it’s a social music site that scrobbles everything you listen to and makes recommendations and a LOT of other stuff). I registered and set everything to scrobble about 2 months ago (ScrobblePod lets you scrobble the stuff you play on your iPod[s]) but haven’t revisited it since, because it’s friggin’ boring until you have a lot of data collected. Well, now I have a buttload of songs scrobbled, so I reinvestigated. In the meantime they have added a feature that lets you stream full CD tracks three times (much like the free Napster feature), which is wicked cool. The downloaded app, Pandora-like, lets you listen to radio stations created from an artist or song title or (less Pandora-like) by tag or genre. Much cooler is that when you’re all scrobbled up you develop a “neighborhood” of other users who have similar listening interests, and you can listen to a neighborhood radio station, which contains stuff you don’t necessarily have but statistically will probably like since your “neighbors” listen to it. I am having WAY better luck with this than with Pandora, which has begun playing the same damn songs all the time. Also cool is that whether you are playing stuff through iTunes or the Last.fm app, the app shows you album and artist info…kewl. You can tag your music and Last.fm’s if you’re into tags, which, theoretically, I am, but the idea of tagging my 2,297 songs is insurmountably daunting. Anyway, I’m pleased at Last.fm’s progress. I checked it out about 18 months ago, and it was so buggy as to be not useful. If you haven’t yet and you like music, check it out!