I Fucking Hate The New Sirius XM Online Radio Player

I often don't shut my computer down.  Instead, I put it on hibernate.  Does everybody do that?  I don't know.  But if there's writing I want to get back to, or if there's something I want to read on the Internet later, that's what I do.  I think I hibernate more than shut down, even though I think it's not good for my laptop.

I also listen to my XM (now Sirius XM) Satellite Radio online.  All you have to do is give your e-mail and password, and they know if you're a subscriber or not.  I always put it on, so when I hibernate the laptop, I pause the radio player, but I don't logout or close or anything.

Well, I did that after having coffee late night Friday.  I come home, watch the rerun of Washington Week, and then do some more work and surfing on the Internet.  But when I hit the button of the station/channel to reactivate the online radio, bring up another window, then come back to the player because it's not playing anything, I was taken aback: The entire page was redesigned!

It used to look like this.  What do you think?  Yes, it seems basic, and there's one predominant color for each genre that might hurt some people's eyes, and there is a lot of words but no pictures.  It wasn't great formally.  But I miss it now.  And it took one or two spins with the new player for me to figure out why.

What it looks like now is a blue-and-white webpage that opens up to about half a full-screen size.  Instead of having huge horizontal bars with which to click on a new channel, there is now what they call a "spectrum" of small and tight vertical bars, each representing a channel.  You hover your mouse over one of these blips and you'll see the logo of the station and the name of the artist and song playing at that moment.  And when you click, information about the channel and a photo of the cover art of the album the current song comes from appears below this "spectrum."

The most bothersome thing about the redesign, and this really, really pisses me off, are these vertical bars for each station.  They are too small to click on.  You don't understand how many times in the past five-to-six days I try to hit a bar and I get the channel next to the one I want.  Also, previewing what's on each channel is limited only to the one your mouse is on.  You could see what's playing on all the other channels on the old design; all you had to do is scroll down.  Does Sirius XM know how frustrating it is to seek another station but being confined to hunt and peck for other options one at a time?  Do they really think I could just click on a random bar and listen to whatever I get?

Does Sirius XM have a Twitter?  Their homepage is so shitty, I don't think they're technologically savvy or willing to have one.  But my God, there has to be other people who thinks the new Sirius XM online radio player sucks big donkey dick.