That bowl was super duper

So, I'm not much of a football fan. I'll watch the 2nd half of a game in the playoffs if either the Giants or Steelers are playing. Naturally, I was going to watch the Superbowl, but wasn't planning on paying attention. It's kind of amazing that people are more interested in the commercials than they are in the game itself. Some of them were kind of weird, a couple of them funny. But for the most part, pretty damn boring. Game had some excitement to it, when the Steelers actually showed up in the 2nd half.

The movie trailers were cool, but all too short. Lots of movies to look forward to over the next 5 months. Cowboys & Aliens, Captain America, Green Lantern, Transformers 3, some other alien invasion movie.

The Pepsi Max commercials were a little out there. Physically assaulting other people with cans of soda can be funny, but these were a little more disturbing than funny. And WTF is up with the name. Pepsi Max is zero calories, so what's the "MAX" for? At least Coke Zero is appropriately named.

In the battle of the local deals web sites, LivingSocial's commercial was funny, Groupon's was awful and in poor taste.

Half time show? Well, not much I can say about that. Black Eyed Peas make some fun music, but they really didn't sound good. And WTF Slash?

Pandora and Last.fm

I've been trying out both of these music services. These are both examples of how interactive radio is starting to bloom. Both operate under a similar premise. You type in the name of a band or artist you like, they find that artist and others just like them. For example, one of my favorite bands is the Descendents. On both services I searched for them and found them plus other bands like Black Flag, Pennywise, Less than Jake, etc. A whole bunch of punk and ska bands. Both services let you skip songs you don't like which is a huge plus. You can also tag songs you do like so the service can try to match your preferences.

The services vary in how they get the music to you. For Last.fm I downloaded their player, logged in and started looking for bands. I like the standalone player idea. It will even let you use Winamp or another medai player, but it still has to launch to connect to the service. I just wish it would minimize to the system tray like winamp does.

Pandora is a web based service. Flash is required, and I'm not sure, but I think java is too. I don't like the fact that if you skip too many songs within an hour, you can't skip anymore. I think I skipped 10 songs in a row and then got a message telling me that due to their license agreement, they can't let me skip anymore songs this hour. That's a load of shit.

So, I don't have any real conclusions or recommendations, just observations. I'd say I probably prefer last.fm so far though.