I was impressed to learn that the Roku’s Pandora channel had been redesigned, allowing one to link it to an existing Pandora account. Now I can get all of my Pandora channels on the Roku, making the Pandora channel much more useful to me. A few nights ago when Travis and I were alone, I cranked up my Intoxica surf-rock channel and we rocked out to that while I was cooking dinner.

Having enjoyed the tuneage from my Roku, yesterday I fired up my Intoxica channel on my laptop. You know what? It didn’t last longer than an hour. I became bored with the music and turned it off.

I think this is one of the flaws with Pandora: you can build a channel so exactly that the music begins to sound the same. It doesn’t take long for me to start wishing for a little more variety. With Pandora, one can box oneself into a corner.

There are some new music services out there now like Spotify, which might fit the bill, but I’m not in the mood right now to have to learn another service all over again (and there’s no free Linux client as of yet). For now I’ll stick with Mondomix and it’s world music stream.