General congratulations in the direction of RaW - who, according to their website, are the best student radio station in the world, ever! Or at least, some bloke from Radio 1 says so, so it must be true.

Actually, I'm inclined to agree -- I listened to a lot of RaW last year over the interwire. In fact, you should check out the clips on trixie karinski's site: the worrying thing is I remember hearing almost all of the clips featured when they went out live! As I have been heard to mention before, Chris Carter is the future of radio broadcasting (although he will need to change his name if he ever wants to avoid all those X-Files references on the web). He deserves the "best presenter" award solely on the basis of his interview with Tim Westwood from last years awards ceremony.

What's most exciting is that they will get a chance to go live on Radio 1 for winning best station. Normally, Radio 1 is rather embarassed about the winners of the best student radio award, and does its best to lose the winning show in its schedules (the last time RaW won best station, their show went out live to the nation -- at 4am on a Tuesday morning). But this time, apparently they will get a slot on Radio 1 on Christmas Day at midnight, which is pretty decent.

For some reason, the only time that Radio 1 is ever worth listening to is over Christmas when their regular presenters are off on holiday, and there is a chance for some vaguely innovative or at least different programming. The best mix set in the world even, the awesome Soulwax 'Hang the DJ' set was broadcast at 8pm on Christmas Day in 2001, only a few weeks after the legendary Mr. Psyche set on the John Peel show. Plus of course there's the festive fifty, and even the chart of the year (when they remember to put one in the schedules -- I think they forgot last year) makes for interesting listening to hear just how undiscerning the singles buying public is.

Talking of Music, I still haven't worked out what the song Save My Life by Pink reminds me of, so please help out if you can. I got the idea that it was some punk song, so I spent a day listening to every punk song that I own, but it wasn't any of them. It could be something that I heard on the radio, which would make this harder (I can listen to every piece of music I own electronically in about a week solid listening if I am serious about it.

I also heard a song that I liked on the radio, which I successfully identified as Milkshake by Kelis (hook lyrics: "My Milkshake brings all the boys to the yard, And they're like "It's better than yours" Damn right, It's better than yours, I can teach you, but I have to charge"). Problem is, I didn't like the single mix so much, so now I have to figure out what the random radio mix I heard was, assuming even that it's commercially available. It's a hard life living in the modern world.

Anyway, I should probably actually work on my SIGMOD submissions. (current status: one I think I'm done with my part of; one has been abandoned/postponed to VLDB, and the other needs a severe amount of working doing to it asap).