Author: DOuG pRATt

What’s wrong with oldies radio

Oldies stations have left the 50’s behind — demographic is too old — and even the 60’s is being nudged out, now that the 80’s have been added to the playlists. But even when the 60’s was the sweet spot for ad dollars, the stations kept far too few songs in rotation. Here’s but one of many examples. Tommy James’ hit “I Think We’re Alone Now” would get played to death, but we’d never hear his great single “Mirage.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXMEhRmKeyM

The good news is, Pandora and Slacker have, and play, everything. Music Choice on cable TV is good too. And that’s why, unless I’m the car, I don’t listen to oldies radio.

Lawrence O’Donnell calls out O’Reilly

Lawrence O’Donnell has Keith Olbermann’s former 8 PM weekday slot on MSNBC, and tonight he’s ripped apart “Irish bully” Bill O’Reilly. O’Donnell’s style can occasionally be combative, but tonight he’s his more typically controlled and metered self, and he’s done a good job of picking apart O’Reilly and what passes for news at Fox.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Joe Sinnott in Dutch, Ian Anderson in Space

Mark Sinnott has announced that his dad, Marvel Comics legend Joe Sinnott, will have some of his fantastic art on display at the Dutch Ale House in Joe’s hometown of Saugerties, NY. The opening for the two-month showing will be next Sunday, February 20 at 3 pm, and I’m hoping to be there with D.F. Rogers, esq. Denro has done an incredible job of locating issues of comic books for Joe that he worked on decades ago, where Joe had only the story title on file because the publisher didn’t have a specific issue in mind for the assignment.

Mark is the world’s biggest Jethro Tull fan, and at this moment one of Ian Anderson’s flutes is in orbit on the International Space Station, with astronaut Catherine Coleman.

Coming up Acers

Knowing that you can’t stand the suspense of waiting to find out what my new desktop computer will be, I’ve already ordered one. It’s an Acer Veriton M275 E7600, and having soured on Dell, it will be the third Acer computer in the house.

Ugly box, eh? It’s intended to be a business computer, and that’s why it interests me, because it has Windows 7 Professional (64-bit), which is $80 more retail than Windows 7 Home Premium, but $100 more when ordering it as part of a customized Dell configuration. I’m fairly confident the 500 GB hard drive from the Dell Inspiron is still good, and the new computer also has a 500 gig disk, so I’m hoping to use Windows RAID 1 mirroring. I vaguely recall there are hassles when doing this on a C: drive, but I’ll either figure it out or add the second disk as a D: drive.

My external Western Digital USB drive has hardware RAID 1 mirroring. Unfortunately, it appears that WD has discontinued their Mirror Edition drives, but fortunately Amazon still has some, so I grabbed one.