I've never really wanted to customize my Pandora experience to that extent. To me, that just defies the purpose of Pandora in the first place. If I wanted to listen to just Slim Whitman, I'd just get the album! Same thing for picking songs, I have a music player and playlists for this. The only reason I would choose Pandora over my own playlists is to discover new music I've never heard before. If I like a song enough to want to listen to it again, I'll find it elsewhere!

I have to say that I don't agree that credit cards move lines faster. Perhaps they used to when all you had to do was sign, but many of them now require you to enter your PIN, and make a bunch of selections on badly designed and non user-friendly pads. (I guess it doesn't help that the location of the "yes" button tends to change on every machine.) The sole reason I usually do pay cash is purely for speed. Handing over a 20 and taking your handful of change back tends to be quicker. Have you ever witnessed the speed of those machines that still run on dialup? Stand in line at a merchant listening to dialup tones for a while and you might change your mind quickly on which one's faster.

Managed IT services and support companies also seem to be recession-proof. While the client companies may be laying off their employees, they still need their IT services to monitor their servers, reset user passwords and keep their networks spyware free. Managed IT services are going to be one of the last things those companies can cut before they tank. I work for one of these companies and so long as we go a good job and can match the prices of our competitors, I think we should make it out of the recession fine. In fact, we're still hiring and moving into a larger office shortly.

That's just scary.... really. :S