April 2007 Archives

I've spent the last five days in Princeton, Illinois helping clean out my grandmother's apartment. She moved into an assisted living facility and it was time to clean out her old place.

It's a little strange spending five days in a small farming community. Random things:

- There isn't a Starbucks in the entire county. No joke.

- There's a coffee place on the north end of town that doesn't open until 10 AM. (How do they stay in business?) But the drivethrough place downtown sells a great cup of brew. Plus they come out to your car when the guy in front of you is taking forever. And ask the people behind you to back up so you can get out of line and be on your way.

- There's a town not far from here named Marsellies. It's pronounced "mar-sales." There's another town in the area named Ohio. This brings to mind an Abbott and Costello-like "where do you live" routine, which I will mercifully leave as an exercise for the reader.

- My grandfather's tire store is now an art gallery. We went in and checked it out - the floors are still the same squeaky hardwood.

- The bartender/proprietor of one of the local watering holes remembered our grandfather's tire store, down to the squeaky floors and the "don't feed the bird" joke thingy he had on the counter. (8-ounce draft beers were a dollar. One. Dollar.)

- The local "nice steakhouse" is cook-your-own. That is, you go to the cooler and pick out your steak, and then you grill it yourself. (For $2 they will cook it for you. We splurged.)

- When the local salvager/house cleaner-outer guy left us in the lurch on Saturday morning, my mom called the local car dealer where grandma bought her car and had it serviced. They loaned us a pickup truck, no questions asked, no documentation, no nothing - just "here, take the keys." Then the manager sent one of his guys from the shop over to help me haul the bulky stuff down the stairs. Still trying to get my head around that one.

- Beautiful early-1900s era Victorian homes on 1/2 acre lots near the center of town go for around $200k. (The lots are quite deep as they originally held stables. You know - for the horses.)

- Many of the streets are still brick-paved.

- People talk about not wanting to go "all the way to the south end of town." Yeah, I can see how you might not want to drive A WHOLE MILE.

- My mom likes to eat breakfast at the truck stop. (You may insert your own joke here but be careful - it's my mother you're talking about here.)

- Apparently the only vegetable able to penetrate the borders of Bureau County is iceberg lettuce.

- Holy smokes those are some big tractors.

I've had my Samsung Helix XM receiver for a little over three months now. Here's what I think of it now that the first blush of infatuation has worn off:

Good:

The music programming is great. I suspect that Sirius has a very similar lineup and that this is not a distinguishing factor for satellite radio, but it's worth saying. I drove to Las Vegas for a trade show this week and never had to look for another tape, pick a CD, or hunt the dial for a radio station - I just hopped around between my favorite XM music channels. Also, the 80's station plays one American Top 40 show from the 80's each week, which is an amazing blast from the past.

I really like having a portable music player that surprises me with music I had forgotten about. In my book that's a big plus over any mp3 player.

As a baseball fan, I love the fact that I can listen to Any Game Any Time. There's one small drawback to listening to Angels games - they broadcast the home team feed, which means when they played Cleveland last week I got the Indians play-by-play. Not a big deal, but worth noting.

The ability to record a single song is fantastic. If you hear something that you want to record, one button push takes care of it. You can start the recording up to 10 minutes after the song starts and it will get it all. Granted, the song is recorded only as long as the title tag is up - so you don't always get a clean head or tail on the recording. It sounds like you recorded it off the radio - what a big surprise! You can build playlists and search/sort your tracks by artist, channel, recording session - all the usual stuff.

Bad:

The user interface for scheduling recordings is clunky. The device is described as "Tivo for XM" but it's really more like "pre-VCR Plus VHS for XM." To schedule a recording you enter the time and channel - there's no "program guide" type information to select shows from.

Transferring files onto the unit from your computer (it plays mp3/wmv formats) is also very basic. Unless you want to run XM+Napster, you plug the thing in and it shows up as a USB drive. Personally, I don't buy a lot of music online so the XM+Napster was only going to be useful if it had a good UI - and it doesn't.

XM's metadata (artist/title) is fairly inconsistent. The worst offender is the American Top 40 rebroadcasts. Some weeks it will be tagged "Casey Kasem AT40/AT40" all the way through, some weeks it's "Casey Kasem AT40/(actual artist+title)" Needless to say it's pretty hard to find the one track you want to hear when you have three hours of stuff all tagged the same.

Seeking inside long tracks is pretty crummy. The only functions are "skip to the beginning/end" or "skip 5 seconds." This is fine for 3 minute pop songs but really stinks for 45 minute podcasts. It would be nice if it would start skipping bigger chunks the longer you held the button down.

The built-in antenna is pretty good but doesn't quite cut it on my train ride. I've tried sitting on both sides of the car looking for the best signal strength, but it just isn't quite there along some stretches. Normally this isn't a big deal as I can listen to prerecorded stuff or podcasts, but when the Angels are on the east coast I'd like to listen to the games on the way home.

Ugly:

Sorry, nothing ugly.

Go buy one. Now.