We're in Albuquerque New Mexico!  Next Stop AZ.

On the heals of GOOGLE Apps having persistent storage Amazon decides to add it as well. This was the only major issue I had with EC2 as I didn't "get" how it would all work with S3. It seems they are planning to add an unformatted harddrive that you can partition and format to your heart's desire. There will even be an API to backup the harddrive to S3.

This is a very exciting development, I can't wait to try it out.

Amazon's Announcment

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=21082

As an avid fan of Pandora for a long time, I think I am finally converted to Slacker. Pandora is cool in theory. It lets everyone vote on a song and can select similar music for you. I can honestly say I listened to things I would have never chosen because of it. That's kind of it's downfall also. I HAD to listen to some weird stuff I didn't like.

With slacker you can create a station of things that you like. This has the same skip limitations, but I find I don't skip much. They have programmed stations, but they seem to repeat themselves a lot. I will probably still listen to Pandora when I am in the mood to be adventurous, but for my "coding" music I much prefer Slacker. Check it out.