Radio Show Prep in the 80's and 90's

 

While cleaning out an old briefcase (remember those?) I came across these pages of my KUDL-FM (Kansas City) show prep from 1994. I’m not sure whether to just throw this out or submit it to a broadcasting museum.

In the mid to late 80’s I would research my show prep by heading to the local public library to use their computerized card catalog to show synopsis of various entertainment magazine articles which featured artists my station played. I would then have to write the information down, take to my father-in-law’s house since he had a Compaq IBM PC compatible “luggable” with Lotus 1-2-3 where I could add to my show prep spreadsheet stored on a 5.25” floppy and print on tractor fed paper with a dot matrix printer, the result you see above.

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In the early 90’s I had a PC clone with a 2400 baud dial up modem. This allowed me to access the library’s BBS to perform the same searches, but with the advantage of being able to cut and paste the text into my spreadsheet. Even better, the radio station at which I was working had CompuServe. I would get to the station a bit early to sign in and search for more articles on the artists and songs we were playing and add to the spreadsheet.

 

The first studio with a computer with internet access that I remember was in 2000, and that was always plagued with a virus of some sort. 

 

The things we take for granted, right?

 

Do I Really Need My Car?

Reading Elly Blue's book Bikenomics got me to thinking, how much am I spending per month to own my car?

I bought a new car two years ago, right before the pandemic shut things down. Since that time, I've driven a little over 4,800 miles, or 194 miles per month on average (I work from home and if the weather's nice and the trip is shorter than a couple miles, I'll ride my bike).

I've now done the math and with car payments, insurance, and the 13 times I've had to buy gasoline, my average monthly cost to own this car is $477.33.

If I break it down to what it costs me per mile, the total is $2.46 of which $0.12 is gasoline.

If I use the IRS standard business use mileage rates for 2022, which is 58.5 cents per mile, and subtract that $112.91 from my monthly total of $477.33, it is costing me $364.42 a month to have my car spend most of the time sitting in the garage.

If I use Uber's rate calculator, a trip to and back from one of my grandsons' soccer games would cost me $50 without tip. $16 round-trip to go to church. So, with other trips factored in for times when I need to go somewhere, and my wife's vehicle isn't available, I could maybe save $100 or so a month by using a ride service.

All of this is an oversimplification, of course. I like my car; I don't like using a ride service. I like being able to drop everything and do something for my wife, kids, or grandkids without having to book and wait for a ride. At some point the car payments will go away and for what I'd pay Uber to take me to a soccer game, I could pay the insurance. I'll have a low milage car with a really high resale value. 

I've talked myself into keeping the car.

A Life Changing Internet Search

I was listening to an episode of Jordan Raynor's The Call to Mastery podcast where he was talking with his Editor, Becky Nesbitt. Jordan made a comment that if you ask people about life changing moments, they typically either point to a person or a book. That prompted me to do several Google searches for "This (x) changed my life" and books are clearly the winner. Here are my results:

Competitive, or Just a Jerk?

My wife and I were watching a quiz show the other night where the presenter stated as fact that hermaphroditic banana slugs sometimes bite off their partner's penis after copulation in order to prevent the amputee from being able to be the one to mate as a male. I wish I could have been there to ask how they got that information; did they conduct interviews with the biters? Were some sort of slug police reports filed? Isn’t it possible that some banana slugs are just super jerks?