Anyone who has followed my columns knows that I’ve done much whinging and whining about the changes in the CBC Radio 2 format. I liked the old classical station that I came to love when I moved to Canada. If I wanted rock and/or roll (a Reverend Lovejoy reference for you Simpsons fans), I would turn my dial over to CHOM when I lived in Montreal or to some of the obscure New England stations. I don’t know if anyone can still get WBTZ, the alternative music station known as “the Buzz” that broadcasts out of Burlington, but it is next to impossible to pick up in Lennoxville. I always enjoyed their mix of old and new pop/rock music though the commercials made me turn the station off about as many times as I turned the station on.

The thing is, when I get in my car, I don’t feel like futzing with my iPod and all the wires plus I figure it’s not good for the iPod’s battery to leave it in the glove compartment in minus 16 weather, so I’ve been leaving CBC Radio 2 on for the drive to and from work to make my life easier and to pretend that I’m keeping an open mind. I may be middle aged but I’m still curious about new music that’s coming out.

A crazy thing has happened; I’ve started to get used to Radio 2. I’m tentatively admitting that I like it. In the morning, I’ve been listening to Bob Mackowycz who plays a solid mix of old and new music. He definitely has a well loved play list as I’m getting a little tired of hearing We Could Have Had It All by Adele (I’m also getting more than a little tired of singers with only one name, kind of presumptuous, don’t you think? Why should Adele be the quintessential Adele? There are probably some other very special Adele’s in the world…and don’t get me started about Ellen! I had the name first.) Other than that, I must admit it’s kind of nice to turn on my radio in the morning and hear Bob Mackowycz sing the praises of a group like The Clash who I used to love and then hear Rock the Casbah which, politically incorrect as it is, is still a great song and frighteningly timely.

When I come home from work and then hit the exercise or guilt machine, I listen to The Drive with Rich…Terfry. The reason that I put the pause in is that’s exactly how he says his name on the air and all the time. Everybody has his or her eccentricities and that’s his, I suppose. He’s had a running theme to the show for the last few weeks which has been music to exercise to, and for me, that’s been very handy as he’s been playing a lot of upbeat music, like Adele’s You Could Have Had It All, but then, I grew up with AM radio when the number one song was played a lot so that doesn’t put me off too much. Terfry plays everything from Joni Mitchell to Patti Smith to Elvis Costello to a Canadian band called Lazy Susan whose single is called Sweet Thing, (not to be confused with Van Morrison’s song of the same name which is infinitely better), to The Decembrists who have garnered lots of favour, according to my Facebook friends. It’s a great mix of lively music and Terfry is an engaging radio DJ without being annoying.

CBC Radio 2 may not be the class act that it was a few years ago, but in its drive to be all things to all people, there are bound to be some hits and misses. CBC Morning and The Drive are a bit of what Peter Gzowski’s Morningside was, but in a more musical vein. When you play a wide mix of music, you are sure to please some of the people some of the time.

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It’s bad enough for a media addict like me to have a wide variety of TV channels to keep me off the guilt machine (read exercise bike or more appropriately, elliptical trainer), but now my computer offers the possibility of having all or most of the TV and/or radio shows that I’ve missed at my disposal.  Not only that, most of it is free, legal and offered by the actual distributors themselves, so that I don’t have to suffer the eternal guilt and damnation of having downloaded illegal shows.

You may have heard podcasts mentioned on television and radio and wondered what they are.  In these days of iPods, everything is somewhat pod-related but a podcast is actually a digital media file which can be downloaded to your own computer, transferred to a portable device such as an iPod and used whenever you like.

iTunes, as most people now know, is the Apple online store where people can buy music, movies and television shows if they can find their wallets and then locate their credit cards.  The iTunes store also offers free podcasts and there is some very interesting material to be had.

Most of the CBC radio shows have some kind of podcast available on iTunes. You can even set up a subscription to one and iTunes will automatically download the show for you once a week. I just think it’s great for catching shows that I’ve missed.  For example, I’m a Van Morrison fan, and Jian Ghomeshi interviewed him a few months ago.  One of my colleagues at work told me about this so I went to iTunes, searched for the CBC radio show, Q, and before you know it, I had downloaded the show for free.  Even though I didn’t have time to actually listen to the show when I downloaded it, I was able to put it on a few days later when there was nothing on TV.

Another form of catching shows is through streaming.  Many television stations like CBC, CTV and Global allow you to go on their web site and watch shows that you might have missed.  With computer screens getting bigger and sharper, this is not such a bad way of keeping up with your favourite TV show.  The difference between streaming and podcasting is that you don’t get to download and keep the show when it is streamed. The web site broadcasts the show to you and you just watch it, much like watch a TV show without taping it.

There are web sites that stream that are not completely legal and I admit to trying it out; it was an amusing experience. If it wasn’t for surfthechannel.net, I would never have fulfilled my goal of watching every episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine which was being shown on the cable station, Space Channel.  Every time I missed an episode, I was able to watch it through surfthechannel.net.  The only problem, if you can call it a problem, was that I had to watch it with Japanese subtitles.  I honestly believe that it enhanced the experience. 

Sometimes it is frustrating when the Internet is streaming slowly so that you have to wait for the next bit of the show to load up.  The best way to get around this is to walk away, do something else, and come back when the whole show is in your computer’s temporary memory cache.  Now you’re ready to watch the show without any interruption unless your spouse comes over to chastise you for having nothing better to do with your time than watch every episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine.  

Possibly you might want to do what teenagers do: open another tab on your computer with a more serious and weighty web site and flip to it when you hear your spouse’s footsteps.  As soon as your spouse has satisfied himself or herself, you can quietly go back to the show.  I, of course, would never dream of doing such a thing and have never done it.  Now, I’m going to flip to last week’s episode of House.  Happy procrastinating.

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