Podcast Joy!

[bjarvis]

Every morning, I copy various MP3 podcasts from iTunes on my iMac to a flash USB drive; while working on various projects at the office, I plug in the USB drive and my earphones and listen to the podcasts.

My preferred podcasts are nearly all news broadcasts or university lectures. In particular, I like:

• Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's "World at Six," "Quirks & Quarks," "Sounds like Canada," "This Week in Toronto" and "This Week in Ontario";
  
• les nouvelles de Radio Canada (French language news from Montreal);
  
• BBC's DocArchive;
  
• TED, but because it is video I have to watch this at home;
  
• occasional programs of NPR's "Fresh Air" and "Diane Rehm Show";
  
• NPR's "Marketplace";
  
• Slate's daily offerings and weekly gabfest; and,
  
• the Australia Broadcast Corporation's weekly "Occam's Razor," although it's also the most annoying. This program is typically 15 minutes long and while the speakers are interesting, it's very clear (to me, anyway) that everything interesting they had to say takes only five minutes: so much mental meandering is typically strewn through the storyline that I'm close to unsubscribing. Still, every couple of months, there's something worth listening to so I keep on.

Until recently, there was something about "Marketplace" which caused my office's version of Windows Media Player to die so I could only listen at home during my spare time. A recent corporate-mandated upgrade seems to have fixed that problem so I'm a slightly happier camper than I was at this time yesterday.