I have to say that I am totally satisfied with my XM Radio experience and do not want to go back to Sirius. On Sirius the radio had 18 presets and I was hard pressed to fill them all, especially after they combined the 40s channel with American Standards and dropped Jerry Doyle's show from their lineup. (For what? So we could have a "Cosmo" channel and an Elvis channel? Urgh.) The only thing I miss is Discovery Radio, but then on the way home from work all Discovery every played was A Wedding Story. How boring could you get? There are 30 presets on the XM Radio and, although I suspect I will listen to just a few of them regularly, there are enough of interest to me to fill all thirty. Tiny fly in the ointment: Sunny, the "Beautiful Music" station that so reminded me of the old WLKW in Providence many years ago, is going to start having commercials next month. Barf. Oh, well, what can you expect from a Clear Channel station?

(My main presets right now are the Atlanta traffic channel, Radio Classics, "Frank's Place" [the standards channel], Watercolors [cool jazz], Sunny, the 40s channel, all three comedy channels [been listening to some very funny Canadian and British comedians!], and Cinemagic, the movie music channel.)

The radio is also smaller and mounts on one of my air vents, no longer taking up a ton of room on the dashboard.

In the meantime, I called up Dish Network yesterday for one thing—I cancelled HBO; we never watch it anymore and who cares about The Sopranos?—and made arrangements to get the new antenna so we could get the other Atlanta PBS station, WPBA. I happened to ask about getting an HD receiver and how much it would cost. I was told since we've been with them for seven years—good grief, I didn't realize it's been that long—that they would waive the setup and installation and whatever have you fees and we could "lease" the receiver for "free" if we promised to stay on for the next 18 months. Since we don't plan for that to change, I said "sure!" and also decided to get the high-def channels. In that set we will get an HBO channel, a Showtime channel, some other movie channel, Discovery HD, and a few other channels (including a couple of dopey sports channels, but I guess that's the usual bad with the good). Our bill won't change all that much and we can cancel the HD if we don't get a lot out of it.

The whole shebang gets installed next Friday.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:53:00 AM

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