I'm glad we've returned to music. I was feeling guilty for introducing the Family Ties theme that threatened to turn this into a retro-TV blog.

I've been listening quite happily to CBC Radio 2 during my commutes both in the morning and at night. There is more music than talk, and no commercials. It is the commericals that drive me crazy - my evening commute generally takes me across the 6 o'clock mark when radio 2 switches to a jazz show, and it usually loses my interest within a couple of songs. At that point I start flipping around the few Ottawa commercial radio stations that could conceivably play a song that I like. I end up hearing a few fragments of good songs, but I can't bear to listen to the endless commercials in between them, so I change channels restlessly. I also change when I hear a song that I don't like, or a song that I've heard too often, or a song that I'm just not in the mood for. I think that satellite radio would be perfect for me, if I weren't far too cheap to pay for it.

Another approach - which I may take - would be to get one of those gadgets that will pipe my ipod through my car stereo. Then I could load up my ipod with the newest batch of songs that I've downloaded (mine will take about 1,000 at a time), and listen to those while I'm commuting.

Speaking of downloading music, have any of you heard of or tried the Paste VIP club? For $6 each month you get an album by an up-and-coming band, a sampler of songs from various artists, 4 songs "live from the Paste studio" recorded by some of these same artists, an occasional DVD sampler (4 per year), an occasional bonus disk (about 4 per year as well) and access to their digital magazine. You can see a track list from their latest sampler to get an idea of the kind of music Paste focuses on.


Mike