Charlie Brennan is a media personality in St. Louis and he's been on the air for 20 years. His show is The Charlie Brennan show on KMOX from 9:00am to 11:00am CT. His show is a mixture of news, interviews, entertainment and opinions.  

He's the best media personality in the St. Louis area hands down. Why?

I put this under entertainment, as it will be fun to track the responses from the organizations. 

Since it's election time I thought it would be interesting to see how you actually get yard signs. We have one in our yard now for Rick Stream. He's hoping to be re-elected to the state representatives. Hhis sign required no action on our part. Evidently, we signed up for a sign the last time he ran, so he sent us a postcard letting us know they would be by to put one up. They did it this weekend. 

Which ... is what got me thinking about how to get more election yard signs. I think it's going to be interesting to see how well the various campaigns respond to my requests. 

The Dave Glover Show on KFTK in St. Louis is the number one rated afternoon show. It's an amazing feat, because most of the top ratings in the city go to KMOX. I've been a regular listener to the Dave Glover show for a few years, but recently the ratings have started to slip.

I don't know the exact change in ratings , but if it's enough for Dave Glover to mention on the air it's serious. When you look for local rating online you're not going to find it broken out by time period. The best I could do was find cumulative ratings for the station.

If the ratings drop is true there are a few reasons. These reasons are my personal observations, but I am the target demographic for the Dave Glover show:

My thoughts on copy protection range from "it's not needed" to "waste of my time." I don't understand why electronic content providers feel the need to add copy protection to their products. There hasn't been a copy protection process developed that hasn't been cracked, hacked or broken. 

I can remember back in the old Commodore 64 days there were to copy protection processes that stood out:

1) Bad sectors on disks. This one was a classic. Vendors would purposely damage the floppy disk that held their software. Their program would do a check to see if the disk was damaged before it let you run it. Guess what? Hackers either stripped out the check or told people where to nick their disks.

I love posts like this. It gives me a chance to talk about a couple of things I love:

1) Saving money.

2) Vacation.

We've always made a big deal of taking family vacations. In the last ten years I think we've only missed one year. That week of time together, crossing the US, makes for great bonding.

With the increases in gas prices, though, the summer vacation is taking a back seat in quiet time. The new thing is called a Staycation. A staycation is a vacation where you stay home during your normal summer vacation time. 

This post is mostly for me. I listen to various radio stations during the day, so I wanted one place to capture everything. 

KMOX is St. Louis' largest radio station. At night you can hear them across the country.

971.Talk is a small St. Louis radio station, but they have the number one afternoon show ... Dave Glover.  

I'm one of the minority of TV viewers that actually expect a network to commit to a series for more than one year. For the life of me I can't understand why the network doesn't accept 10 million viewers for a show when they know what will replace it will pull in less.

Anyway, Jericho was a great TV show about a city dealing with life after a nuclear attack on the United States. It was Lostesque in that they used flashbacks from time to time, and they kept questions popping up always. It was different than Lost in that they always answered questions.

Jericho had decent ratings, but CBS decided to cancel it instead of renewing it. Of course, they did the whole mid-season hiatus and changed day and times.

We finally got a Wii a few months back and it's been quit an experience. As I've related before, my best gaming days are behind me. I do enjoy playing games on the PC, but I haven't owned a console since the Sega Genesis. This is the main reason I wanted to buy a Wii. It looked easy and fun. 

The wife surprised the family with a Wii back in March. We got the basic Wii system and we bought an extra wiimote and a nunchuk.

It took all of ten minutes to setup, which is amazing considering the non-standard wireless network we run at home. Everything worked out of the box and we were off playing.

HP is running an internet scavenger hunt where you can win $1000. The scavenger hunt includes 30 photos that assemble into a collage. It's pretty easy to play and for those who are imaginative, it should be a good challenge. 

Someone went ti Europe and used their hp camera to take pictures. The model used was the HP M527 digital camera, which looks like it takes great pictures. In fact, this post has an example of the results of the photo, which is a piece of the puzzle. 

I've been a DirecTV customer for over five years. Prior to joining DIrecTV, I was a cable subscriber and I wasn't too happy. The local cable company was the only choice, so they treated their customers poorly. All that changed with DirecTV. 

Their service is top notch, and any technical issues that have come up were addressed. Outages are almost unheard of. Sure, we experience rain or snow static maybe four times a year, but it is almost always a short term thing.

DirecTV's programming is huge in breadth. We subscribe to all the channels you can get and there is never a time we can go without finding something.