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I have recently been listening to the Last.FM radio service powered by Audioscrobbler which is really cool. This offers free high-quality personalized radio that you can listen to online.
You need to have an account to use the service. After picking a username and signing up, you should install the Audioscrobbler Plugin for your media player (iTunes, Winamp etc..) which sends the name of every song you play on your computer to Last.fm. Over time, this list of songs grows larger and larger – you can see your personal listening charts on your userpage. Last.fm automatically finds people with a similar taste, and generates music recommendations for you.
Based on these recommendations, you can then listen to a personalised radio station tailored towards your musical taste. To do this download the Last.fm Player. In fact, you don’t need the Audioscrobbler plugin if you have installed the player – you can create a custom radio station based on the artists you like on the Radio page – but you will get better recommendations over time if you use it.
There are dozens of other entertaining and useful aspects of Last.fm, but you’ll have to sign up and explore them for yourself.
To get an idea of how this works view my profile by clicking here. If any of you sign up let me know the address of your profile page by posting it in the comments section.
On Sunday Ivan, Robbie, Slobodan, Kendall and myself drove out of Beijing in Ivan’s Merc and went for lunch at ‘The Orchard’ restaurant about an hour away from the city. We then drove towards Huairou in search of a place called “Intelligence Valley” which Robbie had heard about. Eventually, after a few wrong turns, and a lot of jokes as to whether we were clever enough, we managed to find it – a picturesque valley in the mountains with beautiful run-down farm houses and fields of corn. We then spent a peaceful afternoon relaxing in an attractive guest house, talking shit and drinking Yanjing beer before heading back to Beijing after dark. You can view all the photos by clicking here.. At risk of beiing lynched, I should emphasize that Kendall took some of these. Credit where credit’s due….
