Bill’s blog

I’ve been a very happy XM radio subscriber for over 4 years now. Recently, the two sole providers of Satellite Radio in the US merged. So now its Sirius/XM. But really it’s Sirius with XM’s name attached to the end.

All my XM radio staples are gone, replaced with the watered-down Sirius equivalents. My “Lucy” is now “Lithium”, “Fred” is now “First Wave”, “Fungus” is history. The 80’s and 90’s channels remain but now they have DJ’s, which I cannot stand. I already have the time, artist and song title on my radio display. There is absolutely nothing else a DJ can say that I would be interested in hearing. At least they are still commercial-free.

Its been long known that XM’s playlists were much wider than Sirius’s. I loved that I could listen to a channel like Lucy (80s new wave through 90s alternative with the occasional early 2000’s song thrown in) and still hear stuff that I either haven’t heard in years or have never heard before! Now you got Sirius with their “Lithium” channel with just plays your 90s alt-rock staples, and “First Wave” which plays the 80’s new wave music. It replaced “Fred” which was a similar genre but would play a lot of more obscure stuff like Soft Cell, Modern English, Flock of Seagulls and Missing Persons songs OTHER than the one or two hits they’re each known for.

I think I should just invest in an ipod already. RIP XM.

Arr! Here be my annual posting of the pirate keyboard.

Jane and I went to Asheville, NC today. We had no set-in-stone plan for what to do once we got there other than to go exploring.

We started off by visiting Black Mountain, a nearby town with a lot of shops. There was a German restaurant that she wanted to go to but apparently of all the weeks to pick to remodel they chose this one. Oh well. But I did buy a great tshirt. Here’s Jane outside the store.

After that we headed into Asheville. It really seems like a cool little town. Sort of if you took a few of Atlanta’s more eclectic neighborhoods and turned them into one big neighborhood… and then doubled its size, made it look like a downtown area, and took out almost all of the panhandlers. I was pretty impressed.

We visited a lot of shops there and then went out for some BBQ before heading home. I took the scenic route home, through the mountains of western North Carolina instead of the boring highway route we took to get there. I got this picture right at sunset.

I’d been using Google Chrome for the last week or so. Very speedy browser, that is for sure! But some things still not working the way I’d like.

It doesn’t seem to want to display .jpg files. I think that’s why I can’t click on the rating buttons at yelp.com. Also, my collage from last night’s posting doesn’t display.

I’ll wait for the next version and give it another whirl. Back to Firefox 3.

The latest 12-week poker season has ended, and I finished #9 out of 1763 players with points in this past season of the Atlanta Full House Holdem league! I’m extremely pleased with that, especially considering most of the people who finished higher got a lot extra points from various promotions (800 points to the final table, etc). All mine were earned in normal shows.

The top 100 players get to play in a tournament where the first place prize is a seat in the 2009 World Series of Poker Main Event. The tournament is on the 21st…. cross your fingers!

Several years ago when I first moved to Georgia, I was really into this website called Where’s George? Participants on the site would mark dollar bills with the site address hoping people who got the bills at some point in the future would come onto the site and register where they found them.

In the year or so I was a WG lunatic, I marked and entered around 5000 bills, mostly $1s. To this day, 7 1/2 years after I entered my first one into the site, the bills have surfaced in 46 states, as well as DC, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. The only states I never managed to get hits in were Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Alaska.

But I’ve also gotten “george hits” in Japan, Germany and Ireland. Today, I got one in Poland.

I’ll only get a hit email every couple months anymore, rather than multiple times a day like in 2002, but its always exciting when I see one in my email.