Jeremy Clarkson has us Americans (me) pegged. I love American highways, with their wide lanes and straightness. There is no finer feeling than driving down a straight road at 65 mph with the right music coming from the radio. It’s not even a matter of having a fast car or a convertible, I drive a Taurus. The only thing it has going for it is the view, with the cab forward design, it has a large windshield.
I bring this up, because I spent a lot of time on the road today. In addition to driving to work, this morning I drove up to a job fair hosted by Dice in Plano. I decided to take the long way, 20 to 635 to 75, because on Thursday I have an interview with Raytheon in Garland, and I wanted to see how long it’d take. And I really did enjoy the drive. Granted it wasn’t in the morning, so no real traffic to deal with, but it was fun. And my iPod was batting a thousand. Sometimes I swear that my iPod’s shuffle has a telepathic link to me, every song was money. The music is an important part, if I had to listen to local radio, it would’ve been unbearable.
Local radio is just horrible. There is no real commercial station that I like, and my favorite station, 88.7 KTCU, isn’t available throughout the metroplex. Once you get past the airport, reception is spotty. But luckily there is satellite radio. My desktop has been out of commission lately, thus no music when I’m home. So I’ve been listening to a lot of XM Radio via AOL Radio. It’s really fantastic. I’ve been listening to the Britpop station, and it’s great. I’ve noticed they like to play “Fake Plastic Trees” by Radiohead a lot, but I’m fine with that. If I didn’t have all this music and an iPod, I would seriously consider satellite radio. All you need is a traffic station and you’d be set.
The only problem with satellite radio is the two competing companies in the US, Sirius and XM. It’s not like cable and satellite tv, where the delivery medium is different, but the content is the same. They each have their own custom radio stations. So you have to take a risk when buying the hardware, cause you’ll be locked in to that provider and their playlists. But I like what XM Radio is doing with AOL, letting you listen to their stations for free. I have no idea what Sirius is playing, so if I was seriously considering satellite radio, I’d go with XM.
BTW, if you’re on Windows, you can listen to XM Radio with the latest Winamp.
4 Comments
try tuning into npr, its always interesting. Too bad Glen Mitchell passed away, he was about to get syndicated on xm radio too.
hmm… the first link on google for glen mitchell is for a gay photographer. I speak of the radio show host: http://www.kera.org/radio/InMemory/GlennMitchell/ I always imagined him to be a young guy from the sound of his voice. During a pledge drive this year he made a joke about how he offered to accept a bag of pennies from anyone willing to drive out and hand it to him and that no one had ever taken him up on the offer. I made a note of it.
NPR is fine, but what if I need to ROCK!
You tune into “The World” program, duh! http://theworld.org/globalhits/index.shtml In particular I think you’d enjoy Marcelo D2.