The ecosystem of Pop Tarts continues to evolve to keep with the times. This instant breakfast is now healthier for you featuring fiber enriched toaster pastries!
And while you’re getting your daily intake of whole grain, you might be able to win $10 in iTunes.
Sadly, I’ll be eating 48 Pop Tarts without winning any iTunes music. 🙁
Ugh, what a mess on the airwaves this morning. Last week, I heard about the shakeup on Hot 93.9 and Island 98.5 amongst others. For this Monday morning drive, I listened to both stations to understand the wisdom behind these decisions. My first thought:
Cacophony
What a mess at both stations! Out of reverence, I started with Rory and Gregg of the displaced Wake Up Crew on 98.5. I validated my personal selection of music and Island reggae ain’t it. No offense, but just not my style, and I don’t know if it’s the Wake Up Crew style as well. First off, where was Rory? I didn’t hear the Wake Up Crew leader during my entire drive. As you know, Rory is the stage setter who masterfully synergizes the show and its personalities.
Listening to the 98.5-version of the Wake Up Crew was a downer. No energy exuded from the show. Maybe it’s the mellow music and laid back lifestyle the station is geared towards. The background music was dull, and I know it’s still early, but the interaction of Gregg and Crystal Akana just isn’t there (yet?). I also felt that Gregg was “dumbing it down.” I don’t know if this was on purpose, but Hammer’s an akamai guy who seemed to be catering his delivery this morning.
Over on 93.9, I didn’t hear from Maleko or Natasha for some time. I know people complain about not enough music on the airwaves, but I think this was too much. For too long of a stretch, I only heard songs and mainly commercials or station promos. To make things worse, the handling of all of this was a mess. Very abrupt and harsh transitions without any sense of flow. Song plays then cuts off at the end, a commercial, followed by a 93.9 promo, then a commercial then another song – the transition between them very disjointed.
Around 8:00, there was a teaser with Hammer making a vocal appearance on 93.9. Was he returning home? Nope, just doing a promotion for his Mother’s Day show at Dave and Busters. He sounded so natural on 93.9, amicably bickering with Natasha…
What I really miss from the Wake Up Crew in the morning is their perspective, experience, and antics. I want to hear their views of topics and events, not just the straight up news. I’m not a boxing fan but really want to hear their rendition of the Pacquiao fight. It’s their spin of the news intertwined with their own experiences that make the Wake Up Crew great.
Rory and Gregg might be able to find their magic on 98.5, but I regret I’ll be missing it.
Completely missed this shakeup on the Hawaii radio waves this week. Of most significance to me is the move of Rory Wild and Gregg Hammer from Hot 93.9 to Island 98.5. Taking the duos place on the morning show is Maleko who teams with holdover Natasha. Not sure what happened to Kreyz Oshiro.
The Wake Up Crew has been a staple on my morning commutes for years. While I’m glad the pair is still together since they synergize so well, I doubt I’ll ever listen to them again since I’m not an island/reggae music listener. I don’t even have 98.5 programmed into my radio. Heck, I didn’t even know this station existed.
It was a good run Wake Up Crew.
I haven’t been really looking at web stats for Pulpconnection for some time. Visits haven’t been the same since the move to WordPress. Couple the move with less and inconsistent blog posting, and the stats ain’t going to look pretty.
For the month of April 2009, here is the top content:
Top traffic sources:
Wow, I don’t know if I like the message looking at the top content – a few Twilight things, a few LOST items, controversial ads from Abercrombie & Fitch, and Club 939?!
Looking at the traffic sources demonstrates the changes of social networking. Facebook, Twitter, and Ginx are now valid sources of traffic, albeit small compared to the search engines.
Gotta keep plugging away and see how things go.
After a few days learning about the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I’m ready to go Quadrant 4 for awhile. You know the place where not important and not urgent stuff resides, like watching television and goofing around the Internet. 😉
Trying out the new Thesis version 1.5 theme for WordPress. Easy upgrade path but looks like some things broke. My customized navigation bar up to no longer shows all my pages and RSS Subscribe, Email, and Twitter links.
The “teaser” function seems pretty cool to changeup the number of full posts and short teasers seen on the home page. Right now I have 6 full posts shown on the home page then other posts are shown as teasers below these. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see the teaser excerpts. I may go back to full posts on the home page, still playing with the new features of Thesis you know.
Some of my fonts also look different. The tagline of “Addicted to Passions and Pulp” seems smaller and the Google ad’s font doesn’t match anymore.
Out of time for now. More experimenting and learning later.
One more thing, to help control the amount of Spam comments, I set comments to automatically close after 30 days. So if you don’t say you’re peace in one month, too bad!
Made a few small changes to Pulpconnection which uses the great Thesis theme. In the rightmost sidebar, I added a section to display recent links saved to my Delicious account. You’ll see the “Delicious” section under the “What I’m Doing…” area displaying my tweets.
I added a Facebook plugin to integrate Facebook with Pulpconnection, but it doesn’t seem to be working. 🙁
To better track comments, I installed the Subscribe to Comments plugin. For each post, you can now get notified via email of any new comments.
Lastly, the Thesis theme was just updated to version 1.5, and I’ll probably upgrade to that soon enough. So you may be seeing even more changes.
On Twitter, each Friday you’re encouraged to nominate fellow Twitterers for others to follow. While I haven’t taken part in Follow Fridays, here’s me saying thanks on my own Mahalo Monday.
Mahalo to Doctor Flores at the Straub Medical Clinic at Windward Mall. A partial water outage forced the closure of sections of the Mall including the Straub Clinic. We didn’t get the phone message of the closure so we showed up with a sick kid for an early morning appointment. Instead of turning us away, Doc Flores who was already at work helped us and any others who happened to come to the Clinic. Thanks Doc Flores! By the way, I’m giving you the street name of “FloDoc.” No ka oi, Class of ’96!
Mahalo to the young Asian brother working in the pharmacy at the Kailua Longs Drugs. We had to get three medications and a nebulizer which supposedly was available at “any” pharmacy. Not so anymore. Nebulizers aren’t so easy to come by. Still, this dude took care of the prescriptions and called other nearby pharmacies to find us a nebulizer.
Mahalo to Windward Mall Sears appliance sales rep Craig. He provided great service and expertise in helping us find a new washing machine. So far so good with our LG washer.
Lastly, mahalo to the City and County crew helping Kaneohe go green with the delivery of the community’s green waste recycling bins. Not only were they working hard, but they gave us some spare parts to repair our trash bin.
And that’s all my mahalos on Mahalo Monday!
Defying all odds, we won a fish at the local elementary school fun fair. My daughter tossed a ping pong ball into a sea of cups, and it landed in the only cup that wins a fish (supposedly the best prize from this game).
So now we have Nemo (who doesn’t look too healthy to begin with).
My Nike Air Moto 6+ running shoes were already wearing down so I picked up the Nike Structure Triax+ 12 in silver and black.
So far, loving these shoes. Usually, I go for the cushioned ride provided by Air Max technology, but the Structure has responsive Nike Zoom instead. I think the Foot Bridge is giving the stability and comfort I need.
All this tech including the Nike+ iPod integration ain’t helping my runs but the runs ain’t hurting me either so it’s all good.
Old Bessie, our longtime washing machine, finally gave out, losing a battle with a waterlogged comforter. So it was off to Sears to find Bessie’s heir. We checked Consumer Reports and went looking for the highest rated Kenmore washer in the reviews (Sears has a sale on appliances this weekend). Other features we want – a front loader that can handle bulky items like pillows and comforters. Sick kids who throw up a lot makes this a necessity!
Due to the bad economy the Sears appliance section is dead with pretty much no customers looking around. So when we showed up, there were quite a few sales people eager to help. Craig started helping us and after talking with him, he showed us washers made by LG. Never had an LG anything before, but he sold it.
Some of the benefits of the LG WM2487HWMA:
What else? Cost was okay though front loaders are also more expensive. Oddly enough, even though Sears has a sale on Kenmore stuff, this LG was discounted 22%. And the white color is cheaper. And there’s free delivery (coming tomorrow, yes Sunday). And HECO is giving out a $50 rebate since this is an energy efficient washer. And this model was rated #7 in the Consumer Reports guide. Â Â So in all, a pretty good deal.
How well does it work? We’ll see tomorrow.
