Christmas Eve happenings

It’s Christmas Eve, and Marcella and I have been watching It’s a Wonderful Life on DVD. We’ve had a fairly quiet day. We each ran a few very quick errands, but for the most part we stayed at home, listened to Christmas music all morning, took a nice walk around the neighborhood, grabbed a couple lattes at Starbucks, and stayed relaxed and just enjoyed the time away from the office and the frenzy.

I think a little later tonight we will likely watch Little Women (1994), which is our own little Christmas tradition. I know it isn’t strictly a Christmas movie, but it somehow seems to capture the same sort of spirit of the season that makes it a favorite for me at this time of year.

I hope all of our friends and family out there are having a wonderful evening and are preparing for a great Christmas tomorrow.

Music online

I’ve been trying to listen to a little more music recently, and find new artists and songs. I signed up yesterday at Last.fm. It is a social music site. Basically it recommends music based on your listening habits and according to what others on the site with similar tastes listen to. They’ve got a bit of software to download, although you don’t have to, and that syncs with their website and communicates what you are listening to with iTunes. Eventually it builds up enough of a history that it makes recommendations of other music it thinks you might like.

But that’s not all it does. You can also type in an artist and it will play a song by them, but then it will keep going playing songs of a similar or related type. The idea is that you will discover something new.

And finally there is the social aspect. You can check and see what other users are listening to, and as you add friends you can see what they are listening to and communicate about what you like and share songs with each other and so forth.

It is a neat idea. I’ve got to spend more time playing with it to see how good a job it does at making recommendations, but I already had some fun by just typing in the word “blues” and seeing what songs it started playing for me. I did already dump my iTunes play history into it, but I haven’t yet got it sorted out with my iPod.