4 posts tagged “computers”

Do you listen to podcasts?  Are there any you'd recommend? 

I am totally grooving on podcasts lately. I posted about them a bit before, but here are some of my favorites. All of them are available on iTunes:

• The Writer's Almanac: Garrison Keillor's five minutes every day on writers and poetry. It's the first thing I listen to every morning on the bus. When I remember to dock my iPod the night before, that is.
• Wait Wait -- Don't Tell Me!: The podcast version of the hour-long NPR news quiz goes up sometime on Sunday, I think. Beware listening in public, or just get used to people wondering what the crazy person is giggling about.
• This American Life: Finally! Available as a podcast! Now, it's only a free podcast for the first week, and then it goes into the archives for 95 cents, so make sure to download it every week. I took it off of the auot-delete-once-listened-to-thingy because it's TAL. I want it to be easy to keep if I want.
• The Acapodcast: I don't know how I wound up finding this. I think I might have gone crazy and searched for "barbershop". All a cappella all the time, and sometimes Chad even plays barbershop and I keel over, ded from hot chords.
  
• A Cappella U: Chad plugged this on the Acapodcast. It's really awesome all-collegiate a cappella. With this as with the Acapodcast, the show notes are really great for tracking down more by the artists.
• 4cast: The barbershop podcast which I haven't listened to quite as much as the other a cappella podcasts, for all I love barbershop, but I would like to say I frightened myself by recognizing the speaking voices of Metropolis during interviews at internationals.
• Science Friday: I don't listen to all of the stories every week, but they're well-labelled so I can pick and choose. Recently I listened to great stories on genetic testing and improving school lunches. Well, I was interested anyway.
• NPR Movies: Round-up of film reviews and interviews every Friday, for those who like to keep on top of that sort of thing.
  
• Senator Barack Obama: Yes, really. Not a regular podcast by any means, but a treat when a new one appears.

I've been downloading a few others, and there are some I have yet to test run. Too many podcasts, too little time! Are there any you think I should be listening to? Drop a comment. I'm particularly interested in one on Seattle politics and issues, but I'm not sure that one exists. A good one, anyway. And is anyone listening to the Boing Boing podcast?

Earlier this week I finally joined the 21st century and started downloading podcasts. It's a good place to be, I tell you what. You all are ahead of me and know that it's like the "good parts" version of radio and the Internet so I don't have to sell you on it. I'm especially pleased because it's so rare the programs do everything I want them to do right off the bat, so it's a treat that iTunes will autoupdate to my iPod, that it will automatically delete podcasts I've listened to, and that I can select certain podcasts to -not- autodelete. And! That it will give me the titles of the available back episodes so I can choose to catch up.

Podcasts that I am particularly enjoying so far include Senator Barack Obama, The Writer's Almanac, and Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. (I was laughing so hard on the bus today over the slip-up "drunk tank clown" that I thought they might kick me off.)

The podcasts I've listed as "do not autodelete", though, are the ones I find most exciting: podcasts for learning Spanish. I hunted a few of those down yesterday, timely, as I had had one of those days at work again where several times knowing even a little bit of Spanish would have helped me provide better service to our participants. There are a few out there, which means I'll get a few different perspectives and teaching styles. The best way to learn, of course, is by speaking & listening, and that I can get at work. So,   we'll see how it goes. I am hopeful, though.

What is your current computer desktop image? Let's see it!

My work computer has had "Doctor Who" wallpaper forever, this Tardis/Rose/Ten shot. It's fun, because I've been asked questions about it, and there's one boy in particular who got me to explain a great deal about the show to him, and the last time he came into my office he asked to see "the Doctor" and then we talked about regeneration some more. Pretty cool. ETA Nevermind! I just changed it. Now it's a Jasper Morello wallpaper. Yay steampunk!

On the MacBook it's a shot of Patrick Fugit, because I became re-obsessed with him a bit after seeing Wristcutters: A Love Story at the film festival. It'll likely change soon, just because.

Born in 1978 I am a child of the 80s. My formative computer use was on an Apple, thanks to the education discounts. I was largely a typewriter girl in high school, but then when I started college I got an ancient Apple something-or-other, a computer so old that it was too old for even an eternally-poor Catholic elementary school to use. It got me through my BA, but when I returned to school for my MLIS a Mac was too expensive for my grad student budget, plus, it wasn't supported in my tech-heavy program.

Now that I have more control over the technology in my life and the Dell laptop that got me through grad school has died, I returned to the Mac fold this spring with the release of the new MacBook. Mine's shiny and white and named Adrienne (for the poet Adrienne Rich). Last night I converted my iPod (Whitman) to Macintosh from Windows. I tried to do it last week, but it refused to work. In a flash of brilliance I restored it under Windows yesterday to correct anything that had gone wonky in all of my computer issues of the past just-under-a-year and then tried restoring it again on the Mac. Voila! iPod goodness! Plus, now I get the joy of loading it again. There's something appealing about the blank slate, after all, and so now instead of 17 gigs of music I feel like I should be listening to if I want to be hip and interesting, I have 3 gigs of music that I really love and a stack of new & awesome CDs to rip.

So. Yay.