Doug’s World

Another podcast consumer

I’ve started listening to podcasts. While working. While exercising. While driving. While eating. While talking to my wife. While sleeping. Constantly.

So far so good. The player I purchased is the 1GB Coby MPC-885, shown here. It’s about 2 inches long, runs on a AAA battery, and includes a few barebones features including an AM/FM tuner, a built-in mic for recording audio notes. I picked this one because it has the two features that were important to me: a simple built-in USB connection (easy to transfer podcasts, and also usable as a spare thumb drive when needed), and low price ($30). I have no plans to ever move to an iPod or a Zune or anything else that I’d give a second thought to if I left it in a bar or dropped it in a toilet. My cell phone is enough responsibility, thank you very much.

I’m loving this thing, because it has solved a growing problem in my life: too many books to read, not enough time. I have a bunch of technical topics on it, including computer science seminars, promotional info about various products, interviews with software developers, and similar things. So I can absorb what I need from those while I’m doing other things with my hands and eyes, and I’m saving reading time for books that I really want to read (as opposed to books I feel I need to read but aren’t, well, fun to read).

I’ve looked around for good sources of free podcasts, and there’s one great collection I’ve found: UC Berkeley’s webcasts/podcasts of course lectures. They’re free, and they cover a wide variety of topics from philosophy and history to mathematics and computer science. The computer science lectures cover some very modern topics — for example, I’ve just finished a few hours on functional programming, lambda expressions, and map/reduce. (*)

Anyway, if anybody has suggestions on similar archives of technical podcasts, let me know. I’d even pay for them if they’re good, but I’m not interested in “interviews with visionaries” and similar fluff: I’d like to actually learn some things, and I get plenty of opportunities to be impressed by “visionaries” in my day job. So college lectures are good, or interviews with hands-on developers who talk about paint more than art, if you know what I mean.

Oh, if you’re in the market for good headphones, I really like the Sennheiser PX100s I picked up with this player. They’re much higher quality than the ear plugs that comes with most players, but smaller and more convenient than the big over-the-ear models. I spent nearly twice as much on the headphones as I did on the player, which feels about right to me … hey, you listen to these things, right?

(*) A slight tanget regarding the map/reduce course at UC Berkeley …

That seminar is something new that they’re offering because Google funded it, to help the university deliver more “real-world” development topics. I think that’s a great strategy by Google: they do a ton of map/reduce programming, and it requires a specialized set of skills that most developers don’t have, so now they have a nearby university starting to crank out map/reduce experts. They’ve identified their specific recruiting problem as a “broader problem facing higher education in general,” and then they’ve generously offered to help solve the problem.

Nicely done. I hope we (Microsoft) are funding similarly “real-world” topics at the University of Washington.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2007 at 5:36 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.