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In my formative years, I had a good friend called Jon Skeet, now he was nothing short of a genius and a top bloke, I think it’s fair to say we learnt a lot from each other about life, the universe, girls and everything!

After leaving Hereford to go to Uni we slowly lost touch and the last time I saw him properly was at his wedding. (He’s now somewhere in Reading with his lovely wife and child, working and being a lay preacher I think)

ooops tangent-tastic… anyway… One discussion we had really sticks in my mind, you see he was an awesome programmer and on his 8086 he wrote a piece of software that was basically artificially intelligent, it learnt how to recognize letters you drew freehand with a mouse. This is when he was about 15/16!

We talked about what we’d do when we “grew up” (don’t think I’ve ever grown up but hey, thats for another day…) and how we wanted to be seen by others. Then he said one sentence which keeps coming back to me,

“I want to be respected by the few in the know, not the masses that don’t”

that statement is so true, it’s the balancing act I face every week on air.

You see what brought this back to me today is that my radio show used to be a tuesday night 10-12pm with free range to play what I wanted. I tried to strike a balance betweeen both groups above, which sometimes got me criticizm from those “in the know” but generally I think was a good show, pushing the musical boundaries of the station without being too scary.

The station re-launched on monday, with my show moving to a thursday night 8-10pm and for the first time, I have some guidelines on exactly what to play, it has to be “more friendly”, include some “classics” (although my idea of classics, I’m sure isn’t exactly the same!) and at max 50% friendlier new stuff.

it’s going to take me a few weeks to get the balance right and whilst my initial reaction was one of unease at the new show, you know what… I think it is the right thing to do, stuff the few in the know, if I can play a few more new tunes to the masses that they might not otherwise of heard through my show then I know I’ve done a good job.

my final springer thought for the day is: Never forget that most things in life are subjective, not right or wrong.