Don’t laugh if you’ve known about these sites for eons but I am just pickled tink about Fitday.com and Pandora.com! Love them! They are my new BFFs!

And what’s really funny is that I PAID for software that does practically the same dang thing for each. Ha. Yea, that’s funny.

Anyhoo, right after dropping $50 for a really cool piece of software called Calorie King I discovered Fitday.com. Oh well. I like both but if I had known about Fitday sooner I wouldn’t have thrown down the $50 clams.

So, all you calorie counting types out there who want an EASY and fun tool then look no further. I can’t chastize old Calorie King for any reason other than it wasn’t free. It’s super slick and I love it. The big bonus there is that it has, like, every fast food and restaurant menu you can think of! I have to admit I would love it better if it was named Calorie Queen. Oh, and it has a free trial to see if you dig it. I think that’s nice!

Now let’s chat music. Oh music, muisc, music! I love thee. Of course, I’m incredibly discriminating about WHICH music is my passion. I’m not one of those ‘I love all music’ weirdos. Nope. I’m all specific and shite. In fact, I like single songs from many artists and poo-poo the rest of their catalog. Can you believe it? Yep. That’s me.

So, I pay a lot of clams for a music service called Rhapsody. I’ve been with them since, like, the beginning of time when I was a hip, cutting edge web-head type in Seattle. I’m much less cool now and frankly, so is Rhapsody. Since being bought by Real Networks back in the day they have continued to go down the downhill.

I tried to be optimistic but the service, especially in the last few months, is absolute garbage. The tech and customer service were never good but now I feel like they just read my pleas for help and laugh. They certainly aren’t taking the time to respond.

That means only one thing. I’m breaking up with them. It’s been a long, hard decision to come to but they leave me no choice. My big complaints are that one day an album will be available for ad hoc play (or whatever they call play when I want it). Then the next day. I have to pay for the same album.

I was willing to look past this little faux pas on their part. Sure it reduced the number of complete albums I have in my library for play, but that’s OK. They have great streaming radio. I can work past this.

But then I realized what the ‘coming and going’ of various tracks was doing to my MANY playlists. I have a lot. I’m not bragging but I make a playlist for the most mundane of reasons. Thinking about learning an esoteric foreign language? I’ll make you a playlist! No problem!

But with Rhapsody’s new ‘business model’ (or as I like to call it, the ’screw-the-customer-model’) I went from having 20 great songs in my playlist dedicated to hating my ex-boyfriend to having only 4 songs! All the rest have now become ‘buy only’ tunes. Ha ha! Jokes on me! Well, I’ll show them. I’m not taking it anymore!

And the point I’m trying to FINALLY make is that when one windows closes, another opens! I have discovered Pandora! Thank you Heather Edmondson for telling me about this fine streaming radio site.

Everyone go there now and sign up. It’s free! It has a very nice interface. You tell them what kind of artists or songs you like and they play similar artists on your station. You can vote on individual songs which further refines the playlist on the station for you. It’s freaking awesome! So I still can get great recommendations (like I do with Rhapsody), get excellent streaming radio of most any variety of music I want (like I do with Rhapsody) and I don’t have to pay any money for it (unlike Rhapsody)!

Now I’m gonna use Pandora to play my tunes instead of you-know-who and get myself a dang iPod like every other human on the planet. Then I can BUY my tunes and make playlists till my heart’s content. And never ever worry that my tunes will not be available for playing when I want them! Yay!