Sunday Night Odds & Sods

24° - clear at 10:50pm

Intending to write all weekend - but radio got in the way.

Inspired by Lee Arnold's great WORJ.COM, yours truly spent the weekend setting up a PC to run automation on with the eventual goal of streaming sometime down the road.

Saturday was spent upgrading an old Dell Pentium III thats been sitting in our storage room for a few years. A PC that my wife and I handed down to our kids years back - and then proved too slow for their use.

Replaced Windows 98SE with XP Home (aka "XP Lite") - and added a 250 gig hard drive for music, loaded the software and was in business. It actually ran great with its mere 128meg of ram and wimpy (by today's standards) 750mhz processor.

This morning I configured the software to stream windows media format - albeit for not more than a listener or two at a time. Plugged in some music and some old WMMQ sweepers.

Sent links to a few friends to check out; and had great "reception reports" from Phoenix, Denver and Pittsburgh. Next step is dubbing tunes and thinking formatics. A real "sign-on" months down the road...

Its all big-time radio geek fun.

Reading: Dave Lange wrote this past week a great piece on keeping your mind open to new ideas - and cites the all-Christmas presentation, now an AC staple - as an example.

Read Dave's piece here.

Jaye Albright. The country consultant shares some great thoughts:

"Plan each community service event, prep each content break, build each promotion, create each stunt, communicate each strategy and just when you feel that it’s your best, before finalizing it use the Seven Magic Words and see how far you can go with whatever you’re doing.

The words?

“Great! .. but what else could we do?” Use them the next time your team brainstorms."

Jaye's piece here. Makes me wonder: how often does your team brainstorm together? Are they formal or informal sessions? Who isn't there that should be to provide another perspective? Just thinking. During my PD days, I should have done more brainstorming sessions more frequently.

Radio stories: Rick Kaempfer sits down with Chicago's John Calhoun about his career. Great stuff. Read here.

Have a good night.