Friday, January 16, 2009

The Annoying XM Dj and "That Song You Love"

I have a theory about those annoying XM Djs and XM devices that allow you to record that favorite song you like.
Those really popular, good songs, always seems to have a voice over in front of them, so if you record it you've got the annoying voiceover in the front (or the end) of the song... I think this is done on purpose, but that's a different theory.
The theory is that the voice over distracts you long enough for you to recognize the song and initiate a recording. Otherwise, without the voice over, you just go in to enjoying the song, enjoying the escapism, relishing in the feeling it evokes — totally not thinking about mudane trivialities like pressing the record button on the XM device.
At that point, why do I even care that it's coming from an XM device — I'm just listening to good music.
Consider the following scenario:
Hey, it's that song I really like (singing)
♪ ... Oh if I were a boy ... ♪ (song ends)
♪ ... Womanizer, womanizer ... ♪
Damn you Britney you don't deservce to follow Beyoncé!
Crap! Why didn't I record that!?
Remember, that's just a dramatization, and the scenario is necessarily reality... but it happens all too often.
If you manage to record the song with the Dj in the front you have to suffer through the Dj's blather everytime you want to enjoy the recorded song. The annoyance is particularly bad on songs with a long non-vocal intro. Dj's classically use this as a license to talk over the song.

Pioneer GEX-XMP3 Portable XM Satellite Radio Receiver w/ Home Kit

Speed Bumps / Humps

Interesting argument on speed bumps:

They don't really work and they're annoying, I just speed to the next one and slow down

In this case I was arguing for the addition of more speed bumps. We just bought a house not to long ago and didn't properly evaluate the irritation factor of our proximity to a main entrance of a large housing division.

I figure there's several points related to speeding in our neighborhood:

  • The neighborhood was designed before they started designing housing divisions like mazes to add a kind of "natural traffic calming" — without the funky hardware like traffic circles and speed humps.

    From what I've seen these kind of divisions have no houses facing arterial streets (arterial on the scale of a housing development). All houses are facing a "capillary" street, the undesirable locations are the ones whose backyards face the arterial streets or whose backyards face the large city streets that bound the division.

  • Because there are relatively few places to get out of the division people are frustrated and impatient when they are on the verge of exiting — thus the speeding to get out

  • People are just jerks and don't care that it's a residential street!

There are other factors like the fact that there's a several speed bumps on the road in question, just none between my house (and about 14 other house) and the exit of the division -- which doesn't quite make sense. People seem to see the exit, notice that there's no speed bumps, and haul tail to the exit.

Regarding the above argument... if speed bumps don't work, I guess I don't really care, at least they're being annoyed by the speed bumps while they're speeding between them. This way there's mutual irritation between me the driver.