adrian is rad

So I’m entering my fourth year of being on college radio, first on WMBR and then KZSU, having started in December 2002, with notable gaps (Fall 2003 and Summer 2004). It’s something I think about stopping sometimes, but even when it’s a difficult time slot (Thursdays 6-9am, alarm goes off at 4:30am), I enjoy it. I missed it both times I was off the air so I worked to get back on the air.

I’ve done some fun things and crazy show themes in the past three years:

• Cohosted some crazy late night shows with Devin (of Night Rally) (and Farhad and Austin). I’d often do my indie show called Tonight I Will Retire followed by an old-timey/ field recording show called Maple’s Lament, which would stretch past 4am. Devin would say hilarious stuff (me: the phone number here is 253-xxxx, him: oh man, that’s a great number) and we’d generally be total idiots.
• Playing the entirety of In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel at about 3am.
• An hour of “crushingly beautiful music” (starting with the one am radio).
• an ill-thought-out attempt at “chamber pop two-fers” (from Matt Pond PA to Sufjan Stevens).
• an hour of indie rock songs featuring banjo (through Preston School of Industry, I think).
• almost three hours of oldies when I was so sick I’d asked for, but couldn’t secure a sub DJ.
• my patented 1/1/1 format show. (1 hour indie, 1 hour old-timey, 1 hour motown).
• a show I called “canuck goes totally whack on irish (and some cape breton) music in preparation for st. paddy’s day so break open a guinness or maybe a murphy’s and listen while relaxing with your friends”.

I just applied for a show (or two, actually) for the fall programming schedule. I’ll still be doing my indie format show, but I might be adding a 1 hour slot of a different format. I’ll say more about that later.

I don’t usually rant here, but some people are really dumb.

I run an email list for a friend that’s on Peace Corps so that she can email her updates to just one address rather than 120. People somewhat regularly email this list address rather than her directly, thinking it’s her address. Great. Way to go, pal.

But someone did something pretty spactacularly stupid this morning: he tried to send a 12 MB photo as an attachment to the list. Mistake 1 was noted above. Mistake 2 is don’t try to email enormous files!, especially to lists or people you don’t know.

After this, I sorted my email by size and noticed that multiple people, who I didn’t know, cold (uninvited) sent me things related to my position at the radio station, with attachments over 1.5MB. I realize that that’s nothing these days, in the age of gigabytes and terabytes, but that still bogs down servers and makes things slow. Most email is <15KB, so something at least 100 times larger than that is not good. I take a bit of a offense to this. It’s sort of like someone putting a broken wheel chair on my doorstep; sure, I might want it, but I certainly didn’t ask for it, and most likely, I just have to worry about putting it in the trash.

Okay. Enough ranting. I don’t think it’s becoming.