The CBC, Canada's public broadcaster has had a long-running experimental-music show, Brave New Waves, which I used to listen to back in University (using a plain old stereo). I would actually listen to the CBC most of the day while doing my thesis, switching back and forth between CBC1 and CBC2 as various shows came on.

A few years ago I tossed my stereo.

It had been my very first "big" purchase, made when I was about 10 years old. Our father had decided he was tired of having us complain about the things he bought us, so had decided to teach us the value of money and stop the complaining in one go. He took the money he was using to generate the cash he was using to look after us and invested it, giving us a yearly income with which it was our responsibility to pay for all school trips, all "treats" for school, all clothing, all school supplies, etceteras.

After the first year I had hundreds of dollars left over, so I went to some huge "warehouse" stereo store I'd heard of on the radio (Krazy Kelly's) and ordered a guady ghetto-blaster-style stereo system.


The stereo was about 90% (fake) chrome, with 50 or 60 switches for tweaking the sound (of which I used maybe 3 on any regular basis). Still, for the first 10 or 15 years it produced good sound, and I had a bit of an attachment to it.

When I moved to my current appartment (with my sister) I decided to scrap it, since the one speaker had long since died and my sister had a perfectly good stereo I'd given her. Haven't had a radio since (she gave her stereo away soon after).

I've tried listening to the CBC Windows Media streams a few times, but the Windows Media Player interface is nothing like as nice as that of Winamp. I would set up the link, then promptly ignore it (even finding it is a pain, as the media library is just one of half a dozen links in that ugly, advertisment-cluttered interface) until the machine was rebuilt (thus losing the link). With the Ogg stream, I can just drop the link into Winamp and have Brave New Waves streaming in a few seconds.

Of course, it would be even nicer if it could be streamed at any time of the day (it airs from midnight to 4am Tuesday through Saturday (i.e. just after Monday through Friday), which suits my schedule fine, but not many others'), but I guess we'll have to wait a few years for that.