diary of an Endorphin Junkie

I have my van, and my bike, with me at work. It involved a 4am wakeup for the drive out to Fresno and then back, but my world is mostly back together now. I'm $950 poorer, but it probably could have been worse.

Every year when the renewal charge hits my card I wonder if paying for radio is the smartest thing. Well, I just spent a week with normal air radio and yeah, all doubt has been erased.

There are 6 local radio stations that I like music from. And actually, my complaint has nothing to do with what they played. It is entirely how rarely they played.

* It was very common for all 6 stations to be in commercial at the same time.

* I noticed on several occasions that a gap of greater than 15 minutes passed where not a single one of the stations was playing music. (even worse in the morning, this morning it almost reached 40 minutes)

* In particular, 105.3 *never* plays more than 7 songs an hour. That's less than half an hour of music. I'm sorry, that would be close to half an hour if they weren't speeding the songs up nearly 20%. So it's really about 15 minutes of music.

It has to have gotten worse recently, because I can't imagine it was always this bad. I mean, seriously, airwave radio is non-stop commercials with a teasing song tossed in from time to time. It's horrible.

(this also absolute defeats any idea I might have had about HD Radio, which are the same stations...)