"Sirius Rocks!"

I drive for a living. Well, I do a lot of driving, I work on large format printers.

Radio in Los Angeles sucks large these days. Yeah, there are a few talk stations I listen to, but most of it is pure crap.

The music stations are so formatted and play the same songs over and over.

Evil Clear Channel rules the airwaves here.

I have hundreds and hundreds of CDs to listen to, but it's hard to rotate them in and out of the car. It's also very hard on the CDs. I've ruined more CDs in the car than I can count.

So... For about a year now, I've been thinking about either getting a mp3 player or a satellite radio for the Kia.

OK, I'll admit... I listen to Howard Stern. Not always, but sometimes a fart is just funny, ya know? This whole ordeal with Howard and the FCC really has gotten me pissed.

The lunatics (religious-right) are running this place now. Scary shit, but that's for another post...

Anyway, I decided on Sirius over XM because of Stern.

I picked up a Sirius Satellite Radio with some Christmas money we got from my mom and dad last weekend. I bought the Starmate Replay.

Now, if you have tried to find a Sirius radio lately, you'll know what I'm talking about... They are almost impossible to find. They were a pretty hot item for Christmahannukwanzakkah this year.

I found the Starmate Replay at (evil) Fry's Electronics. I wanted to get the home kit so Cyn and I could listen at home. You can pop it in your car, or pop in your home cradle... cool...

I couldn't find the home kit anywhere. I tried all of the retailers around here that sell Sirius. Nope, out of stock. Hell, I even went to Radio Shack. The guy looked in their database for me and they are out... Completely out of stock in Southern California!

OK, no problem. For now, I'll just ust the car kit in the apartment and get a 12 volt battery eliminator.

So, I got home, activated the service and plugged it in to the PC.

It sounds pretty good! I had read that both XM and Sirius had kinda cruddy audio. Kinda like listening to a good quality Internet stream. Yeah, there are some digital compression artifacts on the low-bandwidth stations like talk and weather, but the music sounds pretty darned good! It ain't CD quality, but it's pretty good.

So, Monday morning rolls along. I had set the radio up next to my PC and have it hooked to the line-in jack on the PC. I set Total Recorder (I wish they'd port that to Linux!) to record Stern's first show live (3 AM here).

That night, I listened to the recording. All I can say is that Stern should have done this years ago! It wasn't a complete gross-out like a lot of people were expecting, it was very free-flow.

Anyway...

I started to futz around with the new radio. The music channels are awesome! We like this radio so much that I'm going to buy another for the apartment next week.

We listened to the New Age station all day today. Yesterday, we listened to the 60's channel. I've been going back and forth between their three Classic Vinyl stations and some of the world news stations.

Yeah, I'm digging this.