One of the great benefits of spending all of my time in the basement is that I have no commute. The one thing I enjoyed about my commute to the eastside was the time I could spend listening to podcasts. I invested in the proprietary OEM Volvo iPod adapter pretty much just for this purpose. Well, I listen to music once in a while too, but it really is about 90% podcast in my car.
Even with the lack of a work commute, I still spend a remarkable amount of time in the car, usually ferrying children and teens to activities ranging from the Seattle University campus to West Seattle, Queen Anne, and of course all over the north end. So I still listen to a lot of podcasts. Here is my regular rotation:
This is my favorite. It is an electronics podcast featuring Aussie Dave Jones of the EEVBlog, Australia's only full time professional YouTube video blogger, and Chris Gammel, a fresh-faced idealistic EE young 'un. I'll be honest, with my lack of formal electrical engineering education and experience, at least 25% of what they talk about goes completely over my head, but I still love it! They have an infectious enthusiasm that I love even when I don't know what the heck they are talking about. Dave is a wit, very knowledgable, highly opinionated, and pulls no punches. I love his "wank word of the week" and hope he brings back his reviews of "shonky products of the week."
Russ Roberts is the Terry Gross of economics. He has some great shows on the subject of the financial meltdown, and any episode with Mike Mounger as a guest is worth listening to. He also did a great interview with a sales executive from Frito Lay where they dove into the details of how Lays potato chips are made.
This is the best and longest running podcast for .NET development topics.
This is the second best podcast for .NET development
A stylistic homage to This American Life, but focused on the non-technical aspects of a career in software.
I cherry pick from this one when there is a topic of interest.
I used to listen to Weekday on KUOW and Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Weekday kind of went down the tubes in recent years -- now I really only listen when my neighbor Roger Faris (Ana Faris' uncle!) is on to talk about home repair. I still love Fresh Air but something went screwy in how they publish their podcast feed that made it more difficult to figure out what was what, so I dropped it out of laziness. I refuse to use iTunes to subscribe to podcasts, so sometimes they show up with bad meta data.