Since June, I put in a USB enabled stereo in my car. Combine that with Juice (an open source podcast downloader) and I have all I need to painlessly change that time to and from work, from wasted time into into something productive. I can simply just download podcasts that I am interested in, copy them to my usb thumbdrive and walk out the door. Of course the only problem I found is that it would be easier if I had more then one thumb drive. That problem is really easy to solve. :)
I find it difficult to find the time to keep up with technology and push myself to learn what is going on in my profession while balancing family and work obligations. So I consider the 6-8 hours a week I spend in the car my continuing education. I have been concentrating on the areas which will have immediate impact with issues I face at work. I do expect to expand this list soon once I get through all of the back episodes. Here are the podcasts I have been listening to:
- Agile Toolkit - hosted by Bob Payne - http://agiletoolkit.libsyn.com/
If you are interested in Agile then you need to listen to this. It is fairly technology agnostic and Bob has really produced some great content including a ton of episodes from the Agile 06 conference. This has really motivated me and has given me some good perspective on Agile, TDD, and Scrum. - ARCast - hosted by Ron Jacobs - http://www.skyscrapr.net/blogs/arcasts/ Ron works for Microsoft and focuses on Architecture. What is really great is the fact that he has been able to travel the globe and meet with a great deal of real world practitioners. Even if you think a pure Architect is a waste of a head count, this blog combines high level architecture with enough technology depth that it is totally worth listening too.
- MSCom - http://blogs.technet.com/mscom/ - A series of audio streams from the Microsoft.com operations team's webcasts. This has been awesome information for me as we are in the business of providing a solid platform for our business solutions and this team really laid out what works and given some great views of web infrastructure.
Give it a shot. I have been trying out some other webcasts, but these are the ones I have found to be full of solid, real world information.