Author / dmacias

by dmacias

What happens when you hit the Pandora 40 hour limit?

You get on of these:

Hey, Tim here –

We’re very sorry about limiting your listening last month – I’m writing to let you know that, starting today you can listen to the free version of Pandora again. We hope you’ll come back!

Sorry if this limit is driving you nuts – it’s the last thing we want to do, but it’s the economic reality of streaming. We pay royalties for every song we play, which we feel good about, but it means that for our most consistent listeners, like you, advertising revenues don’t cover the costs. If you want to listen more than 40 hours a month, we’ve come up with two options:

  • For unlimited, ad-free listening, along with a bunch of other cool features, you can upgrade to Pandora One.

OR…

  • If you run out of hours in any given month, you can pay $.99 to listen for the rest of the month (you’ll still have advertising). This is a one-time fee: we won’t charge your credit card again.

We really hope one of these options works for you. To check on how many hours you have remaining, just click the ‘account’ link above the Pandora tuner. There’s also more information on our blog.

Thanks again for listening and, I hope, welcome back!

Tim Westergren
Founder
Pandora

by dmacias

Pandora sets a 40 hour a month cap.

So, I received this lovely emails this morning.


Hi, it’s Tim -

I hope this email finds you enjoying a great summer Pandora soundtrack.

I’m writing with some important news. Please forgive the lengthy email; it requires some explaining.

First, I want to let you know that we’ve reached a resolution to the calamitous Internet radio royalty ruling of 2007. After more than two precarious years, we are finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates – thanks to the extraordinary efforts of our listeners who voiced an absolute avalanche of support for us on Capitol Hill. We are deeply thankful.

While we did the best we could to lower the rates, we are going to have to make an adjustment that will affect about 10% of our users who are our heaviest listeners. Specifically, we are going to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the web. Because we have to pay royalty fees per song and per listener, it makes very heavy listeners hard to support on advertising alone. Most listeners will never hit this cap, but it seems that you might.

We hate the idea of capping anyone's usage, so we've been working to devise an alternative for listeners like you. We've come up with two solutions and we hope that one of them will work for you:

* Your first option is to continue listening just as you have been and, if and when you reach the 40 hour limit in a given month, to pay just $0.99 for unlimited listening for the rest of that month. This isn't a subscription. You can pay by credit card and your card will be charged for just that one month. You'll be able to keep listening as much as you'd like for the remainder of the month. We hope this is relatively painless and affordable - the same price as a single song download.

* Your second option is to upgrade to our premium version called Pandora One. Pandora One costs $36 per year. In addition to unlimited monthly listening and no advertising, Pandora One offers very high quality 192 Kbps streams, an elegant desktop application that eliminates the need for a browser, personalized skins for the Pandora player, and a number of other features: http://www.pandora.com/pandora_one.

If neither of these options works for you, I hope you'll keep listening to the free version - 40 hours each month will go a long way, especially if you're really careful about hitting pause when you’re not listening. We’ll be sure to let you know if you start getting close to the limit, and we’ve created a counter you can access to see how many hours you’ve already used each month.

We’ll be implementing this change starting this month (July), I’d welcome your feedback and suggestions. The combination of our usage patterns and the "per song per listener" royalty cost creates a financial reality that we can't ignore...but we very much want you to continue listening for years to come.

Please don't hesitate to email me back with your thoughts.

Sincerely,
tim_signature.jpg

Tim
Founder

This is a one-time account message.

This is a shame, perhaps it’s time to get back to listening to the radio more often.

david

by dmacias

WordPress Plugin “The plugin does not have a valid header”

I use an excellent plugin to display my Last.fm recently listened to tracks.  You can find the plugin here.  After the upgrade to WP 2.8 I kept getting this error when trying to activate the plugin “The plugin does not have a valid header.”  After trying a few different things I ran into this post that actually makes sense.  Ultimately, if your plugin is contained within a two folders it will be a problem.  For example, plugins\lastfm-records\last.fm\ will create a problem, you need to remove the lastfm-records folder and keep everything within last.fm.

 

~david

by dmacias

Cisco ICM Admin Script Will Not Run

I ran into an issue yesterday which I’m still not 100% sure as to why it happened, but I at least was able to clear it  up.  I created an administrator script which did run even though it was scheduled to run every 30 seconds.  The script even when down to a start and end node only and still no response.  So, when making changes in ICM the first place to look at is the router.  Did a quick “cdlog ra /last /o” and the ra.log showed the following:

   1:  21:02:40 ra-rtr Trace: Undefined symbol: Global.userMy_UserVar. 
   2:  21:02:40 ra-rtr Add of ScriptData warning. 
Unable complete script load 7300: Undefined symbol: Global.userMy_UserVar. 
   3:  21:02:40 ra-rtr All configuration operations complete.

So, if nothing else, this lets me know that there is something in my config which is not right and it’s possible that new changes might be queued up and that’s why my admin script is not running.  I went through all references of my user variable and removed them.  I then deleted the user variable and created a new one with the same name and put it back in every script.  Looked at the router log again and it looked clean.  After that, the admin script ran fine.

 

~david

by dmacias

David get’s a silver badge

I try to stay involved with Cisco’s forum as to try to give back to the community a bit as well as trying to get some knowledge from the masses.  While I’m not a know it all it’s nice to have a little bit of recognition.  Last week i went from Bronze to Silver, which based on points others award you for the answers you provide. :-)

BadgesI have a long way to go before getting those 25k points… wonder if I could turn them in for cool Cisco gear?

~david

by dmacias

The Palm Pre – Five Days Later

As many of you might know, I was an early adopter of Sprint’s Palm Pre here are some of my initial impressions.

palm pre

  1. It’s a completely new way of navigating and getting around to different menus.  You’ll either spend all your time running your finger across the bottom or figuring out how close to the corner to tap to bring up preferences.
  2. The screen is amazing and very responsive.
  3. Integration with Exchange is great, the only thing I’ve not found is how to edit meeting invitations acceptances or rejections.
  4. Setting up your initial contacts is a pain as it imports the contacts from every account which you set up.  I manage my contacts through Exchange and had to delete all of the Gmail contacts.
  5. The keyboard is rather small, but really shouldn’t be a huge issues unless you have monster paws.
  6. No T9 or similar program to auto guess what you’re trying to type.  You have to do it the old fashion way and type out the whole thing.
  7. When browsing the web and you zoom in and click on a link the page goes back to it’s tiny view and you have to zoom in again.  It would be ideal if once you zoomed in, all subsequent pages were zoomed in too.
  8. Palm decided to have a tiny little cap over the charging port.  I’m awaiting the days for this cap to fall of or be ripped out by accident.
  9. Palm didn’t really use a standard Micro-USB port.  I have 4 of these chargers and they are now only good for my GPS.  Thank you Palm for having me have to carry just another charger.
  10. Alarm clock will go off on the weekends even though it’s set for weekdays only.  Sprint acknowledged this bug and said an update should be out by the end of the first week of the Pre’s release.

That’s what I have so far.

~dmacias

by dmacias

Windows Live Writer WordPress Editor

It has been some months that I’ve been working on trying out different offline WP editors. I was getting tired on having to be online in order to add new stories. After much searching and much trial and error on stumbled upon Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer. I have to honest, I figured since it was Microsoft’s and it had the whole "Live" tag with it, that it would somehow be tied to MS Messenger, Hotmail, etc. However, that’s not the case, it is completely stand alone and a great tool. Per it’s Wikipedia page it supports:

  • Windows Live Spaces
  • SharePoint blogs
  • Blogger
  • LiveJournal
  • TypePad
  • WordPress

Needless to say you should see a bit better formatting on my posts. Here’s a quick screen shot of the UI.

WindowsLiveWriter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notice the Edit, Preview, and Source buttons at the bottom of the main window, this allows you to quickly switch to different views and thus modify your page accordingly.

Another thing I love is how you can open any currently posted article and edit it very quickly.

WLWOpen 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ultimately, I’m extremely happy with it.  It’s fast, has a very small memory footprint and it has a lot of plugins.

~david

by dmacias

More Fun with ICM Script Editor

I really debated calling this, “How ICM Script Editor Allows You To See The Forest Through The Trees”, but I try to make titles which are relevant to my post.  Regardless, here is my latest fun encounter with Script Editor.

I was working on a script, which all of a sudden didn’t work as it originally did.  I checked the ToD routing logic, it was right.  I checked the admin scripts, they were right.  I checked every single node leading up to that step and they were all right.  I had two co-workers check it for me and they could not find the error either.

This is a small example of what I was looking at:

Script Editor Wrong

Now, in the above example it should be really apparent what is wrong, if you haven’t caught it, I’ll let you see what a correct script would look like:

Script Editor Right

Yep, no connection to the If node.  Now, you’re probably thinking, what is this guys thinking, that’s so easy to spot.  You’re right it is easy to spot when you have 4 nodes, but when you’re script spans multiple pages and has hundreds of nodes, it’s a little harder and honestly after starting at a script like this for weeks

Lost

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

you become crossed-eyed.

~dmacias