If even one commercial music station were better than warm spit, I might have been in the position to hear the Eels and Vertical Horizon, two of my new favorite bands, when they started out in the '90s.

But because radio stations all play the same 10 songs or are as
stuck in the past as my music collection used to be, I never listen to
them. For a long time, that meant if a pal didn't turn me on to new
music, my collection stood still.

But now I have Audioscrobbler.com, and I am loving it.

A few years ago, several large corporations thought they sniffed
profits through Internet ordering and home delivery of groceries, but
most of them failed fairly quickly. That might have been because
consumers didn't consider the convenience worth the cost, although
Peapod, a corporate affiliate of Stop &Shop, still survives despite
a minimum delivery order of $50 and a minimum delivery charge of $4.95.

The 15-gigabyte iPod introduced April 28 with a couple of cousins,
one bigger and one smaller, is impressive. It can hold and play back
thousands of songs, can perform somewhat like my Palm Pilot, is
formattable for either PCs or Macs, and is impossibly sleek and light.

I would probably want to run out and get myself one, if not for one
thing: I have a 10-gigabyte model from the line's first generation, and
it's better. After 10 days testing an Apple Corp. loaner, I can only
vouch for the first half of that American ideal, "new and improved."

With graduation season comes a new wave of art-school graduates,
their Masters of Fine Arts degrees conferred by Massachusetts College
of Art, Boston University, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
What do you learn in such programs, and when you are done, what comes
next?

JASON CHASE
Boston University

Age: 25

Born: Colorado Springs

Resides: Somerville

To millions of New York City commuters, 1010 AM means WINS radio,
where they say, "You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world."

But the slogan for 1010 AM on a tree-lined block in Brookline, if
they had one, would be more like, "You give us until the traffic signal
at Beacon Street changes, we'll tell you about this condominium for
sale."

The last time I bought a TV, it was the late '80s, and one of its
most appealing features was that it played audio in stereo. I was young
and didn't realize that the TV would soon lead to a new VCR, and then
to a new stereo receiver with enough inputs to coordinate everything.

You probably know a family that has established a network at home to connect all its computers. Each person in the house probably uses the network to share broadband internet access, the printer maybe, or a few files.

What's far less likely is that you have friends who are
using their networks to share entertainment: music, photographs, shows
recorded from television, games, movies, and more.

LAS VEGAS - The plastic and silicon mountains of gear at the
Consumer Electronics Show last week seemed impossibly high and wide at
times, but they yielded more than a few products and services worth
talking about.

If DVD screening while careering down the highway sounds cool to
you, then check out the rear-view mirror: Satellite TV is coming up
fast. A Rhode Island company, KVH Industries, put its version on the
road in September, and competitors aren't far behind.

For years, Aimee Mann's sweet voice and her dark and brilliant lyrics have obscured the opportunities for strong electric guitar play in her music. On Tuesday night at Avalon, those opportunities fully flowered under the fingers of sideman Julian Coryell.

From a thrilling, reverberating, show-ending solo on "Long Shot" that was not deterred by his breaking a string to the subtle slide atmosphere he created for "Voices Carry," the 'Til Tuesday tune that Mann selected for her second encore, Coryell was the story of the evening.