Getting around Pandora’s 40-hour monthly limit
In the past 6 months or so Pandora has implemented listening restrictions on their free service. It's really quite simple to get around this limitation, you just need more than one Pandora account. You might be thinking, well what about my radio stations?? Pandora allows you to share your stations with your friends, just share your stations with yourself. If you don't already have more than one email address, go out to gmail and register a second address, or even a 3rd or 4th. GMail let's you forward all email to a single account, so as an example, I would just set up webguypandora1@gmail.com, webguypandora2@gmail.com, etc. and forward them each back to webguy@greatwebguy.com. Whenever you hit that 40 hour limit, just simply logout and log back in with a different account. You're other option would be to just pay the $36/year subscription 
Ubuntu might give Linux a chance for those willing to try it out
It's no news that Ubuntu has been getting a lot of press lately for it's ease of install, ease of use, and fantastic packaging system, allowing you to install tons of software very easily. I'm writing this post from my newly installed Ubuntu laptop. I've done Linux installs before, many years ago and always ran into a slew of problems with driver incompatibilities and confusing directions, which usually ended up in me saying, "F- this it's just no worth it," and going back to good ole Windows without looking back. This install was nothing like those days, the long and hard part was the download, once the CD was burned I was 45 minutes from being connected and posting, it was a lot easier than installing Windows.
I just recently purchased a new laptop with Vista installed, I had a long internal struggle about whether I should buy a Mac and use it's virtualization features if I ever missed Windows. I don't mind Vista so much, it's pretty, but what's the point, do I really need a big fat OS like Windows (Mac commercial reference) to surf the web, and do what I need to do? I think with the negative publicity about Microsoft's latest demon spawn and the choices available, a lot of people are asking themselves whether or not they need to continue sticking by Windows. The thing that ultimately kept me from the Mac was the price, I would be paying a premium for the Mac's sexy form factor. My old laptop was still kicking around, so I decided to check out Ubuntu to see how easy it really was, and boy it was easy.
If you want to see what it's all about go out to Ubuntu.com and download the Desktop version, we all have DSL right, and burn the iso to a CD. The CD is bootable and will actually run the OS straight off of the CD, this way you can have a good look around, try out the included software and see if you think it'll work for you, without harming your computer. Once you decide you want it you just click the install to disk icon on the desktop and answer the questions and before you know it you'll be done. My install is on a Gateway 600YG2, 2.4 GHz, 1 GB RAM, it found everything, including my wireless card and wireless network and I didn't even have to be involved other than clicking the Forward button. It's taken some getting used to getting around the system so far, but my beloved Firefox 2.0 is here, and my delicious plug-in by Yahoo is installed, so I'm happy.
Google Apps Rocks!!!
I just signed up for the standard Google Apps account, which is free, and I'm extremely impressed. Any small business stands to save tons of money if they only used it for the email service. All you need to have to sign up is your own domain name, and the ability to modify your MX records.
The standard service includes:
- Google Homepage
- Google Calendar
- Google Web Publishing
- Google Docs and Spreadsheets
- Google Talk
- Google Mail
Now all of these apps can be customized for your domain and your users, there's a Management application that allows you to set up new users and configure custom urls for all of these applications. I moved all of my email hosting over to Gmail, so now I have the greatest Ajax web application for email access to my domain email, along with the same POP client support I had with my host before. I had been using mail2web.com to access my pop account because of the non-existent web mail access at my host. Not to mention that my mail took away space from my hosting account limit.
I definitely think that Google has something here and it doesn't hurt to try it out, heck it's free, and I do love free. To get to the sign up go to http://www.google.com/a