Wil Wheaton . . . what a slacker!

Wil Wheaton has a conversion on the road to Damascus:

I recently wrote that years of listening to Pandora and using social news sites like Reddit had conditioned me to expect a greater amount of control over the information and entertainment that I consume. Being able to train a service to give me more of what I want and less of what I don't isn't a luxury; it's a requirement.

One afternoon last December, after hearing "Eyes Without A Face" for the third time in five hours on a station that used to play great New Wave music, I looked at my radio and I said, "I wish I could train you like Pandora, so you’d stop playing this crap I can't stand and play more of the music I like. What happened to you, man? You used to be cool!"

My iPod, sitting unused on the passenger seat, said, "hey, I'm right here, you know. I have all your favorite music, all ready to go."

"That's not the point, iPod," I said. "I want radio. I grew up with radio. I've listened to radio my whole life. Radio is important to me, and you, iPod, are no radio!"

"I also don't play a lot of music you don't like, tough guy," my iPod said, nonplussed.

"Touché," I said. "Now, let's stop talking before the people around me think I'm nuts."

"They already think you're nuts. You have a bumper sticker on your car that says 'There’s no place like 127.0.0.1'. You frighten and confuse them. They've probably called the police already. Hey, speaking of The Police..."

That’s when I put my iPod into the glove box, kids.

As fate would have it, there was a Woot Off that day, and one of the items offered was the Slacker portable media player. I'd heard of it before, but I hadn't paid especially close attention to it; after all, I had XM and my iPod. Why did I need something else? What did the Slacker portable media player offer that I didn't have already? Well, after a bit of research I determined that, distilled to its most fundamental essence, the Slacker is like Pandora-on-the-go. It combines a web-based music player with a portable music player where all your ratings and custom stations are synchronized. I decided to take a chance, and bought one for myself.