It is obvious to me that there is absolutely no drug testing going on at Sirius, for talent or management, maybe for the technical staff, because they seem to be the only ones that are doing anything right at sirius. 

I have been pummeled all freaking day with COMMERCIALS on commercial free Sirius, about the freaking superbowl coverage, 13 channels in 10 languages. 10 languages you have to be kidding me. So I wandered over to the sirius web site to find out what 10 languages were talking about here, so here is the breakdown.

• 4 Channels in English, 1 of those in the Queens english.
• 1 Channel in Spanish, understandable considering the number of spanish speaking NFL fans.
• 1 Channel in Russian, huh, how many Russian speaking sirus subscribers are there
• 1 Channel in French, same question??
• 1 Channel in Japanese, same question??
• 1 Channel in German, same question??
• 1 Channel in Italian, same question??
• 1 Channel in Mandarin Chinese, same question??
• 1 Channel in Hungarian say what, there are only 1.5 million hungarians in the US or one half of one percent of the US population
• And 1 Channel in Flemish W.T.F.

First things first, no offense to the flemish people.
I did the numbers here, and here is break down, and yes I did some creative math, because flemish is not a number the U.S. Census tracks, so I used Belgium, and since Flanders (Flemish people come from Flanders) occupies the Northern half of  Belgium, and the CIA factbook says so, I make the assumption that 58% of the belgium people speak flemish. According to the 2000 census there were 384,531 people of Belgian ancestry living in the U.S. and 58% of that is 223,028 people of Flemish ancestry. So we now figure in that roughly 6.7% of the U.S. population or 20Mil, are currently Sirius subscribers, gives us a total of 14,943 people in this country that are of Flemish ancestry and potentially Sirius subscribers, and I am guessing that the number of them that actually speak or understand Flemish is a lot lower then that, then how many of them are football fans, and will actually be listening to the game. My guess is somewhere around 5, 6 tops…

Looking at the numbers has brought another question, why Flemish, when there are twice as many Finnish people, and three times as many Czech, and there are more polish then Russian, French or Flemish…

It comes down to the issue, that a company in Sirius’ financial shape should not be spending any money, no matter how little it costs, and annoying subscribers in San Francisco or Seattle by preempting their traffic and weather to cover the Superbowl in Flemish, because I’m guessing that there are more people listening to traffic and weather in San Francisco and Seattle, then there will be Flemish people listening to the Superbowl

First things first….

I am a Sirius subscriber, a Sirius stock holder, a Sirius XM merger supporter, and a sucker!

I have fair amount of Sirius stock. that I paid about $2.50 to $3.00 a share, and at if I were to sell it all now, I think I could pay for  couple months subscriptions and may have enough left over for a triple vente mocha, but I might have to settle for a grande. They handled the merger so freaking badly, they should have taken the music programming from the XM side of the house, and fired all the DJ’s and just stuck with the automation that XM had. I am tired all the freaking cross promotion going on, isn’t that essentially a commercial? As far as talk and entertainment goes, they should have kept the Sirius side and dumped all the crap on XM, “The Best of XM” now thats a joke in itself, maybe if they paid me the $4.04 per month I’d allow them to put that crap on my radio, as long as I didn’t have to listen to it. It would be real interesting to see the head to figures of best of XM against the best of Sirius. And why in the F*** don’t I have MLB on Sirius.

Then I see this the other day”Rumor: Price increases to come for Sirius XM ” which essentially says that additional radios are going to go up $2 a month, and online listening will now be $2.99, now since I currently have 5 radios and also listen online, I think know I’ll be cutting back in that quantity to one radio and one online account. That will essentially be a loss of $25.00 per month times 1, and I am sure I am not the only one.

This is NOT what Mel Karmazin at all those hearings, in fact he said exactly the opposite, more choices and lower prices.

WHen it comes to the  stock price, how much longer until we hear the imortal words

It has been a hectic week, so I am a little late on posting this…

As much as I enjoy(ed) starplayr2, I am enjoying the iPhone version so much more.

Going to start off with what’s wrong with it, at least what’s wrong that can be changed. This is a fairly short list, and most of my issues appear to be under consideration from what has been posted in the forums…

1. Volume control is in a bad place, between the channel up down buttons, I have accidentally changed the channel more then a few times, and since the forum post to request the change is one of the developers, I guess this one will be addressed…
2. Shake to shuffle, needs an on off switch, or what I saw suggested in the forum an “Off, Shuffle Favorite Channels, Shuffle All”. Had it change channels on me a couple times when setting my iPhone down. I am not really feeling the shake to shuffle here, since it takes several seconds to stream the new station, it kind of takes the spontaneity out of it, like the instant action like on something like UrbanSpoon or itunes.
3. Background play, I know that it cant play in the background out of the application, but it would be nice if it would continue to play while I am looking through the station list and such.
4. Play last channel on launch, sort of related to #3 above, my now second favorite iPhone audio app Pandora does it, and when I launch an audio app I want to hear audio.

And thats about all I see wrong with it, and it is still a beta…

The setup was about as simple as you can get, select your service, enter your username and password, and hit Done, thats it. Then all you need to do is pick your channel in 1 of 4 ways, Scroll through All Channels, Genres, Presets, or Search, and after a few second of buffer building you’ll start hearing your audio selection.

I have been trying my best to put uSirius Starplayr through its paces in various scenarios. I Have had it running on all 3 modes Edge, 3G and WiFi all are fully functional, and even using edge in the middle of a large hospital(will explain that in another post) with real bad signal (barely 2 bars edge) I had maybe 2 or 3 dropouts over a 3 plus hour session, and even the battery consumption was not that big of an issue. Tried it on the road in varying levels of coverage, and had one issue of  the application crashing, restarted the app, and it picked right back up.

Since I have yet to  be impressed with any of the “Portable” hand held satellite receivers  from either XM or Sirius, this is a great alternative to those devices, and means one less thing to carry and charge. Then you also need to take into account that the Stiletto software does not support OS X, and lets not forget those stylish Antenna Headphones.

Stylish Headphone Antenna

The only downside that really cant be addressed by anyone other then at&t,  is the same with any of the iPhones network based applications, no service, no data, no workee. Since I live in rural Southeast Virginia, and spend a fair amount of my free time out in even more rural Virginia, it is a fairly rare occasion that I am not in any coverage and unable to use data services, so that has not really become a factor. Since I am usually horribly lost at that point and only paying attention to my GPS not and not anything else…

All in all this is a great, really great application and lives on the front/main page of my iPhone. 

Here are the obligatory screen shots.

I wrote an entry the other day about StarLite/StarLiteXM, that may have been a bit hasty and a bit unfair. I have had a short discussion with the author of StarPlayr, StarLiteXM etc, and I realize that I did not contact him about this like I thought I had. He has given me some suggestions to resolve my problems with the app, I will give those suggestions a try and report back here.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to download Starplayr2, even though it was an alpha version it was rock solid, some minor issues that were addressed quickly by the author Goodtime.

It was my schedule over the past week that kept me out of the loop this past week, and apparently a lot of activity on the starplayr front. I was running 2.0.2 while I was on a business trip to Philadelphia, and due to crappy connectivity at the hotel, I was using a wireless broadband which was also kind of sketchy, so I had some experience with low bandwidth situations, that I normally don’t experience.

There was some funkyness, that may have been addressed in the 6 subsequent updates to Starplayr2 that I missed through the week. The most annoying one was upon the wireless broadband reestablishing a dropped connection, Starplayr would restart the stream from a point several minutes to the connection being lost. The wrap-around thing with the buffer that I wrote about earlier is still there, but I understand that processing a live stream, is a bit of a challenge, and the fast forward seek 3 minutes is a great way to get back to the live part of the stream, and that only seems to happen if you double click on of the fast forward buttons. Maybe a beginning of buffer end of buffer thing, like command click the 3 Min forward/reverse button, just s suggestion…

Liking the smaller screen footprint, not liking the 20 presets I use 8, and I don’t know many people that use more then that actually most use less, a setting in preferences might be a good idea, to reclaim even more screen real estate. I am running 4 Macs currently, all with different screen sizes, from an black MacBook to a 30″ cinema display, and on all of them I covet my screen real estate.

Ok a suggestion, the windows zoom could be zoomier…
All of the buttons below the volume/pause bar should go away when using the small window

What it looks like now…

To something like this

Maybe even…

Dang, I am whining an awful lot about what is essentially a totally awesome FREE program, that completely blows away any of the alternatives, including the windows player. I have a windows machine on my desk at work, that I use very rarely under duress with a gun to my head. I was going to put it to good use as a Sirius Player, but it was a nightmare dealing with it, so it sits there usually doing something stupid.

I have not had a chance to mess with the StarCast features much in 2.x yet, but I am in town most of the week, I think, so I’ll try replacing the scripts that I have running StarPlayr 1 this week, and see how it goes.

Now I’m feeling all guilty, and stuff, don’t hate me GoodTime, I really do love StarPlayr. I guess I should kick down another $20…