One decision I’ve been very glad I’ve made was signing up for a last.fm account a little over a year ago. If you aren’t familiar with the site it serves two main purposes: keep track of every song you listen to, recommend new music based your past listening record. By now, last.fm has a huge amount of information about my music listening habits (more than 13,000 plays) and with all that data available it’s only a mater of time before a programer has some fun with it. One of my favorite finds has been LastGraph, which generates some pretty nifty graph of my listening habits. For example, the graph at the top of this post shows every song I listened to in 2008, while at right you can see some details of my listening activity in late July when I was listening to a lot of bluegrass and a little Death Cab. If you’re interested, you can even download the full, year-long graph (1.6 MB). Looking at a full year in retrospect is always interesting & I love spotting the little shifts and trends in my life. For example, NPR dropps off of my chart in July when we moved to Philippi & I didn’t listen to the Story of the Day podcast on my walk to work, or the steady streams of Coldplay & Radiohead. Sometimes when I consider the fact that I track nearly every tune I listen to, every book I read, and every trip I take it seems obsessive, but I’m always grateful in retrospect.