I'd love to open Pandora's Boxes

I am feeling like the stupidest person on the planet.

This whole mad endeavor started with me declaring radio morbid and starting out to look for new ways to find new music. I keep finding new cool stuff and there's no end in sight.

I've read a lot recently about how the RIAA's greed is going to kill Pandora, or maybe not if negotiations go well. This will, apparently, destroy the single best place to find new music ever in the history of the galaxy. (I am going to write more about the money trail soon after I figure it out well enough to explain it.)

I thought I better try out Pandora while I still could, so I headed over. I had set up an account there a while ago, but never did anything else. For a miracle, the password was where it was supposed to be, so I logged in and waited for the great new music to start showing up.

Hah. Of course, I had to do something to make the music appear. I'm sure Pandora has wonderful documentation, but it seemed to me that there should be some obvious entry point and voila, I see a giant box that says "type in the name of your favorite artist, song, composer and we'll create a radio station featuring that music and more like it." That would be the jumping in point.

I decided to try Hoobastank. Type it in and "CLICK HERE TO PLAY", check. Explanation box that says we're going to play an example, click here to close this box, very nice. Many fine labels and control buttons, nice.

And then crickets. The play/pause button changed, but nothing else happened. There is no sound, no blinkenlight, no messages. Nothing.

I thrashed around a bit, but I have only succeeded in getting different songs not to play. Am I missing a button? Is Pandora down? Pandora doesn't play nice with Firefox? Is my computer screwed up? I'm at a loss and frustrated.

My report to date on Pandora: It has pretty boxes.

Pandora