At Last

I tend to be a latecomer to all things online, so it's with equal parts joy and shame that I'm professing my new found love for the social music website last.fm. I had certainly heard of last.fm before, though I'm not sure when or how it entered my consciousness. For whatever reason, I never checked it out until I searched for a recording of Freddie Hubbard's Up Jumped Spring to link to in a post I wrote last week. The first relevant search result that came up was from last.fm and needless to say, I was impressed with what I found. I've really been jonesin' for new music since I'm no longer able to listen to the greatest terrestrial radio station on earth (via the internet) at work anymore and I haven't been making it to very many live shows lately. I've already heard more interesting new (to me) stuff on last.fm in the past two days than I had heard in the previous year. If you're sick of listening to the same old stuff, give it a try.

Vayama

I came across a relatively new travel website this week. It's called Vayama and it's targeted for international travelers. It seems to have some pretty good deals. We just booked a trip to Europe for early June and saved about 20% off of the prices we were seeing on other air travel websites. The interface could be better, but it's very web 2.0. They have a 3D seat selector that nearly brought my relatively powerful laptop to its knees, but it looks very cool. My other gripe is that, at least for our trip, there was about a 24 hour delay between clicking 'buy' and the itinerary getting ticketed. If you're planning some overseas travel and you don't mind playing the waiting game for a little while after selecting your trip, Vayama might be worth a look.