While the office move from Golden to Downtown is hardly earth-shattering in its implications (my job remains identical, and for anyone I work with the only change will be my land line number), it’s having all sorts of little “gotchas” for my life. Net net still quite positive, but the whole commuting by rail to a different location thing is a little more complicated than I’d thought.
The one that came to mind this morning, as I was talking about KCFR’s move to FM in early July, was my commuting listening habits. I usually get about 40 minutes of drive-time listening to NPR each workday — and when that fails (Pledge Week! Gah!) I have my audiobooks to keep me amused (currently listening to a nice one on the Glorious Revolution).
Now, just because I’m not commuting in my car each day to the office doesn’t mean I’ll be radio-less. I’ll have the drive to/from the station, driving to Katherine’s school to pick her up, driving to karate class, etc. — but net-net, that’s a big drop in my information factor (and non-fiction “reading”).
Of course, I can also do the iPod thing, or some other portable entertainment device (both for music and for — less pleasantly — downloading audiobooks). There are a few complications there (if I’m going to use something other than Margie’s iPod, I have to deal with registering multiple devices to iTunes). But if I want to listen to the radio, I’ll need to do something else.
Of course, I can also “just” read a book, which was the general plan, or check my Crackberry mail. But it would be nice to have the other options.
To carry on from Avo’s comment elsewhere, podcasts are a definite possibility — though that implies having to actually do some work regarding them.
Hrm. We’ll see.
Registering multiple iPods isn’t really a big deal. You might check out audible.com they have a good relatively inexpensive selection of audio books and have some really good deals if you commit to a package which gives you a book or more a month for a discounted price. Audible has some sort of deal with iTunes so that they are fairly seamlessly integrated. iTunes also has access to most popular podcasts and lets you manage them via subscription so it will automatically download the ones you listen to when they are available. NPR has a great deal of their shows available via podcast. I’d never get to listen to “Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me” if it wasn’t for the wonders of podcasting.
If only Says You! were available as a podcast. If I miss any of it, I have to get up early Sunday morning to catch the streaming audio from a New York station. 🙁