I need suggestions – a change of media perhaps, but certainly of content.
I’ve been reading too many non-fiction books lately, and while I enjoy them and learn from them, and I need an adventure of some kind, now that I’m not living one, as much, anymore. I’m reminded of landmark books, for me, like “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”, things like that. If you have ny suggestions, please let me know.
On the digital media front, I’m looking to mix it up a bit. Since we arrived in SF, I’ve been back on the podcast beat. I listen to them all the time, and follow several religiously – every week I download them and squeeze them in whenever I can: in the car, on the boat, wherever. It’s been an enjoyable and extremely useful practice – ‘checking up’ in a way on everything tech and mobile, from Google to Apple to Amazon to FB and everything in between – their patent struggles, good or shockingly bad market numbers, launches, platform upgrades, companies purchased and on and on. A great way to augment the ‘catch-up’ challenge for this wayward sailor looking to jump back into the tech matrix.
It strikes me as funny though – my first love affair with podcasts was back when I wan in a corporate job, dreaming about sailing with nearly every spare moment. So, in addition to reading an astonishing number of sailing books, I’d augment all of that with whatever digital media I could. There were some good DVDs, but nothing was available in streaming or TV at that point – so I turned to and soaked up the podcasts – few and far between – that were out there. At the time, the most interesting one to follow was “Furled Sails” – by a nice couple in Florida who nearly every week provided very interesting recorded interviews with famous boaters, sailors, designers and so on. Sadly, they seem to be off the air now. Another one I enjoyed was by a guy named Martin on a cruising catamaran (with wife and cat), called Dos Gatos.
But you can see the irony of it, can’t you? Now, I’m living on a fantastic cruising boat, using what bandwidth I can find, to download and listen to podcasts about everything tech. I’m heavily into the twit.tv network and related podcasts (This week in Tech, This week in Google, The Tech Guy, etc) by Leo Laporte and his gang of interesting characters, tech journalists and friends. I get a kick out of listening to them every week and become nearly impatient with the arrival of the next episode. I’m also into the 5×5 network now, with “Critical Path”, “The Pipeline” and others.
But this last week has been dominated, across the board, by everyone’s comments, observations, and nearly endless discussion about Steve Jobs and the recent biography published not even 10 days ago by Isaacson. It’s nearly the only thing all these podcasters can talk about at the moment. After about the fifth one, I actually had to turn it off. Nothing against Jobs or Apple – I’ve been an unabashed Apple fanboy since my first Mac back in high school. But there is so much more going on in tech and mobile that I found myself frustrated by the fact that very little to none of the content of 10 podcasts this week was actually dedicated to ‘the rest’ of the news, beyond the SJ Biography. Yeah, I’ll read it someday, but now I’m certainly not in a hurry. A bit of SJ overload perhaps, for me.
So, what do YOU guys listen to? I’d like to hear suggestions, trade ‘figuras’ with anyone else who does the podcast dance and likes it.
S/Y Walk On 