Lovely Parting Gift

My bosses at 680 News bestowed some terrific things on me as I exited on Friday.  A massive bouquet of flowers and a generous gift certificate for Fredas were among them.  But I’m having the most fun with the new internet radio. 

This gizmo isn’t to be confused with satellite radio. It looks a bit like a complicated radio but it’s so easy to use, well, I set it up after a brief glance at the manual.  You turn it on, anywhere in your house, and it wirelessly taps into your Internet connection.  There’s nothing to configure or patch or program.  It hunts down the connection in a few seconds and gives you every station that’s broadcasting on the Internet.

Like everything else on the web, there’s quality and there’s crap.  You can choose from any station with a web stream to a net-only mix broadcasting out of some guy’s basement in Boston.  (He’s awful, by the way.) I made my gizmo scan for 70’s music and it found hundreds of stations.  Want to listen to something from Canada?  512 Canadian stations came up.  It will find any country, any type of music – and it does so in seconds.  If a song comes on that makes me want to hurl, anything by Johnny Mathis for example, I click a button for it to search again and choose another station.  I’m totally hooked!

This model is made by Sanyo.  Marketwatch says it retails for around $219.99.