A carnival of technology

I have something very important to say to everyone here. Occasionally I will casually mention the Georgia Tech radio station, WREK, usually to make fun of it. I will admit that I am a WREK listener, but never do I intend for this to be an endorsement or recommendation. I listen to WREK because I’m dead on the inside; rather than being content to listen to normal music, I crave eternal novelty and have trapped myself, forever, within a cage of fresh and unique challenges to my ears and my sanity. It’s similar to the time theories of Terrence McKenna, everyone’s favorite hippie scientist: as novelty is injected into the time wave, great things can come about, huge advances to civilization remembered throughout history, but if a time has too much novelty, its manifestations become destructive. I have no other way to seek novelty than to destroy myself.

Now that I’ve hopefully deterred any more of you from becoming WREK listeners on my account, WREK has been a bit of a disappointment in the afternoons. Their morning classical show is sufficiently thinky and occasionally avant-garde enough to keep me entertained during the drive to work, but the afternoons, lacking a regularly scheduled show, are terribly inconsistent. On two days of the week the afternoon is filled with talk, either the student-run show about nothing in particular or the Atlanta Independent Media Center’s Currents of Resistance (I was fooled into listening to some of this yesterday, since they said they had someone from New Order. It turned out that they weren’t talking about the band.), and Friday is blues day, usually a pleasant diversion, but the other two days are “Rock, Rhythm & Roll”, which is often their way of saying “we let winamp pick the songs”. RRR sometimes has something exciting, but more often it’s just fairly bland. Sometimes they even have music that I’ve heard of, which is usually disappointing. The last couple of times they played some songs from bands that I’m actually somewhat familiar with, like Run DMC, King Crimson and the Sex Pistols. The tracks still fit their mission of playing music you won’t hear on the radio, either by being from before the band was popular, an obscure B-side, or an old recording of a live show, but just the fact that I’d heard of the band makes me feel like I was being cheated. Where are the new ideas? Where are the unknown voices? I want WREK to be an attack on my mind as well as my ears! Where is the challenging programming? Maybe it’s time for someone to start the radio station that plays the music WREK won’t play.

After a couple of days of oversleeping, and several more of waking up to a backup alarm without any memory of the first, I’ve decided that it’s finally time to retire a trusty companion of mine, that obnoxious battery-powered alarm clock. For those of you who have had the misfortune to live or travel with me in the past four or five years, it was that horrible beeping noise that preceded the swearing in the mornings. I liked it a lot: it was durable, able to survive falls even from those rickety lofted beds at Tech; the batteries meant that it is immune to all those times we threw the breaker in the dorms by running 47 computers, three fridges and a microwave on the same circuit; and, best of all, it had a little switch on one side to control the volume, perennially turned to horribly, horribly loud. I’m not one to take a morning without a fight, and this little clock gave me that fight. Whether it was after a healthy 8-hour sleep or a half-hour nap before returning to a a 36-hour run of last-minute CS homework, that thing would always wake my ass up and demand that I get out of bed. Any failures to get up were always mine, whether I was too tired when setting it to understand the difference between AM and PM or remember enough set theory to figure out that 9 comes after 8, or if I was simply too lazy to take the extra step to roll out of bed. Well, either I’ve adapted to the point that I can consistently turn the alarm off in my sleep, or it’s broken.

In the past I’ve always used a buzzer for an alarm, but this time I decided to try something new. I got a radio alarm clock, and I set it to WREK. All the Atlanta residents just cringed upon reading that, but it’s really different from what you’re thinking. Granted, no human could possibly adapt to WREK’s “challenging” programming, which would make a rather effective alarm, but their morning show is classical music, instead of sledgehammers vs. marimbas. The past couple of days have been met with a rather peaceful awakening. Some violins and piano and whatever fade into my consciousness, I think to myself, “Huh, that’s kind of nice,” and then I go about my morning. Maybe waking up doesn’t have to be so jarring.

My main fear now is that WREK will replace their Classics show with the Morning Gothic Airhorn Extravaganza, or something similar. I’ve stopped fighting the morning, but I don’t know if WREK will start fighting me.

I’ve been accused of being too cynical in these things, so I’m going to try to write a happier gopher log entry. Let me know how it works out.

Yesterday, I entered into the fun and exciting world of appliance ownership. I got a washer and a dryer from hhgregg, so on Sunday, when they’re delivered, I can do laundry. My supply of clean clothes is distressingly low, so the addition of more noisy, power-guzzling devices to the apartment is something that I eagerly await. I think that I’ll buy a toaster for my next purchase. Or maybe a blender, so that I can crush ice on a whim. I don’t usually have many ice-crushing whims, but I would want to be prepared.

I’m going to try to start waking up earlier in the mornings. My routine thus far has been to wake up at the last possible minute and go through the process of showering, dressing, and getting into the car in a single, stumbling motion. I’d like to have some more time in the mornings to enjoy some coffee, maybe read a book, and contemplate life for a while before returning to the fast-paced, demanding world of employment. This morning I woke up at 10 minutes before 8, instead of 20 minutes after it, and it was quite enjoyable. I had some coffee and learned a little about the history of the semicolon. Mornings aren’t really all that bad; I think it’s just the jarring experience of being removed from slumber that makes me despise them.

Another nice thing about waking up early is that the radio options are slightly better. Mike is in Massachusetts, so I’m left to fend for myself as far as transportation, and I certainly couldn’t bear to drive to work in a silent car. Morning radio options kind of suck, so I usually end up at least trying to listen to WREK. Before 9am, WREK plays a reasonably pleasant classical music show, which further helps with the goal of relaxing a bit so that I’m not totally stressed-out before starting the day. However, at 9 they switch to the jazz show. I don’t actively hate jazz, but I don’t seek it out, either. WREK, of course, in their quest to cleanse the spectrum of dull music, tends to find and play the unlistenable extremes of any genre, and when presented with pieces like “20 Minutes of Saxophone Noodling in G,” I find myself again forced to find another station or endure the silence. I suppose it serves as a good indicator that I’m late for work.

Well, it looks like I’ll be listening to WREK a lot more now. Maybe I’ll eventually learn to enjoy Bengali death metal and half-hour whirring noises.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Atlanta radio landscape, it pretty much sucks. There’s the obnoxious rock stations, the dentist office stations, NPR, a handful of country stations, a handful of rap stations, two college radio stations, and really not much that’s consistently listenable. An exception was WMAX, the 80’s station. However, if you just follwed that link you may notice a lack of references to Night Ranger and Pat Benatar. I noticed the change in the station’s format on Friday or so, but since the incessant yammering seemed to be entirely about sports, I just blamed the Superbowl. The game came and went, and on Monday the station still failed to sing. This time I happened to catch a station break, which, instead of letting me know that I was listing to “the 80’s! (and more!),” told me that I was listening to something more along the lines of all talk all the time. Their website seems to confirm this change, and I seem to be again without a decent radio station.

I just don’t understand why they would kill what would seem to be a steady source of listeners, even if it doesn’t carry the mass-appeal of a Top 40 station. It, to me, is more entertaining than a classic rock station, just due to the nature of the decade. Artists began to break the bonds of rock music, experiment with new instruments and new styles, and created the New Wave of pop music, at once carrying mass-appeal and new artistic vision. It’s nice to be able to listen to such a dynamic assortment of sounds and ideas without wading through the mold-fit muck of new rock stations or suffering the pain of the unlistenable fringe provided by WREK. I contacted the local Clearchannel office (404-607-1336), and the only information that they would provide me is that the old station “went under.” I don’t understand how a talk-only station is supposed to be more profitable. Perhaps I simply don’t know an adequate sample of radio listeners, but the only fans I know of talk radio in Atlanta listen to that libertarian jackass on the AM station. I can only hope that the new real-talk whatever the hell goes under soon as well. I don’t need a radio to talk to me; I want it to sing.

I think I must be going crazy. Tonight I heard WREK playing gansta rap while WRAS was playing a whirring noise. Has someone been messing with my radio buttons?

If anyone still needs ideas for what to get me for my birthday, you should buy me a Tristania CD. “But gopher, you are not a goth! You often wear brightly colored garments, and, considering you are a CS major, you are of below average paleness! And how do you explain those happy hardcore albums that you hide in the bottom of your car’s glove compartment, you tasteless freak?” Whatever. I was reminded how much I enjoy this most spiffy of Norwegian goth metal bands while driving home last night. I tried listening to WREK, Tech’s student radio station, and they happened to be playing some goth metal. It was rather painful. The woman doing the Latin chanting thing sounded neither regal, nor pained, or any of those other adjectives that make the female vocals in goth metal so nifty and spooky, but instead she just sounded bored. And the growling parts seemed just inappropriate and strained. The band seemed to be trying to follow a formula that they didn’t quite understand. So I just changed the channel to GSU’s radio station (those two and NPR are the only three radio buttons that are really set to anything useful in my car), which was mixing up some spiffy house (it’s terribly hard to jack one’s body while driving, though). WRAS’s music tends to be a bit less diverse and esoteric than that of WREK, but for these reasons it’s also easier to just tune in and listen rather than having to plan ahead.

In other news, Kroger lady says I have soft hands (Citrus Drop was 67¢ for 2L. This stuff is going to kill me someday). I’m not at all sure what to think of this.