Update 03/30/2010: I need to take back some of my praise and enthusiasm about the new station now. WTH is up with Friday night "rockabilly?"
Good music airs in OKC. I only wish I'd known about this for the last month since they were reborn in late November as The Spy, KINB 105.3FM. Better late than never. The station is a sort of resurrection of some of the KSPI (including Ferris) I remember from Stillwater, except more condensed goodness. And with his legitimate interest in music, it's a good recipe. Go figure - a radio station focused on music!? As opposed to, say, "personality" pony shows with mind numbing blends of hip-hop and semi-country chart-choking filler. I don't really mean to bash those other styles of music, but turning the dial was just exhausting... like squeezing water from a rock.
So the obvious on-the-road choice, lacking radio options, has been custom mixes on CD, or carrying around my library on my iPhone. It's a reasonable option, but sometimes it's just exhausting to maintain a fresh playlist. I've spent thousands of hours listening to and searching for music online just like anyone else. But some days you just want to sit back, relax, press a button, and let someone else take the wheel. That's what internet radio has been for me lately (ala Last.fm, etc). Now it's nice to have that auto-pilot button in my car - preset #5. The signal on the road is still a bit weak south of the metro since they're located in Kingfisher, but internet streaming is a nice option indoors.
The Gazette has a nice story on The Spy's re-emergence.
It was sometime around 1984 at the age of 14 when dad bought my first computer, an Apple II+ with 48KB RAM, two 5-1/4" floppy disk drives, and a monochrome monitor. I had taken a course in Apple BASIC programming the year before and couldn't wait to have a computer all to myself. I was hooked. Over the next few years I wrote hundreds of programs, and even audited the 6502 assembly language course at my dad's college when I was about 15 or 16. BASIC and Assembly were my real programming roots. The combination of high and low level programming allowed for a deeper understanding of how the computer worked, and opened the doors for so much more learning.
The Apple II+ 12" Monochrome Display, 1MHz 6502 CPU, 48KB RAM, Dual Floppy Drives
Windows 7 x64 Ultimate is up and running smoothly now on my main desktop system. As an MSDN subscriber, I get early release copies of the latest operating systems and development tools from Microsoft. I usually give new operating systems a few months or more to work out any kinks, but everything I'd heard about Windows 7 made me feel more than comfortable to jump right in. Luckily it's running great and I don't have any special hardware or driver issues.
