Thursday, December 21, 2006

Skeleton Woman in North Carolina

Had a nice experience today. I take care, as a volunteer, of the WCNI internet streaming.

WCNI is our college-sponsored FM radio station. My email address is on the streaming web page, so folks can contact me directly if there are problems. I received this in the early afternoon: "Hello I am writing to inform you that I can't get your station. It says it isn't found....Hope you get it fixed soon was hoping to hear the great Global Village with the Skeleton Woman."

For some reason, not being too familiar with the WCNI programming, I thought the listener was referring to a little known punk band. There were clients receiving the stream fine, so I figured the problem was the client's computer. After several emails back and forth (almost had a chat room going), we got it fixed, and she was a happy listener.

I then got interested in who the heck "Global Village with the Skeleton Woman" was. Was this a musical mashup of the revamped Village People with a skinny female lead? I went to the WCNI schedule, and saw how wrong I was!

Global Village is the name of the show: "All the music of the world-plus bagpipes!", and Skeleton Woman is the DJ. The show is on Thursdays from 3 to 6 pm. I must say the music was great, most with a Holiday Season spin, but with a "world" of variety. So, I have to thank the listener for turning me on to Skeleton Woman's show.

I then noticed that there were four of five clients with the same IP listening to WCNI. When we get more than one from the same IP it generally means they are behind the same VLAN, which could be physically spread out over a large area. I looked up the IP on GeoBytes. Turns out the main location for this IP is Shelby, North Carolina.

So, it looks like Skeleton Woman has a faithful following in North Carolina. Hurray for the Internet, which has made this possible. For a little while, I felt close to the now happy unknown listener that emailed me, as we enjoyed the same music. And no, the Internet was not invented by Al Gore, in spite of what he has said.