I’ve recently finally gotten into podcasts. I’ve thought they were a cool idea for a long time, but never really use them. I bought a dvd-rw drive so I could make a dvd slideshow for the last disaster show. I now use the slick (and multiplatform) juice to manage my subscriptions and then use the slightly clunky but still functional xcdroast to burn the podcast mp3s to a cd-rw disc. I bought a portable CD player that will play MP3s years ago, and it works fine for this purpose. No need for expensive iPods! I’m still trying to find interesting podcasts, though I’ve found a few. I’ll post my OPML file eventually.
One podcast that I found that I really like is Morning Stories from Boston’s public radio station WGBH. On this weeks podcast, there is a great profile of a Boston postal worker. Between Defiance, Ohio distro orders (though Ryan does most of that these days) and sending packages for the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project, I spend a lot of time at the post office. The postal workers in Bloomington are great. One carrier is involved with a lot of activism around Bloomington and even recorded this report on Pages to Prisoners for the local community radio station. The others who work the counter are always helpful and pleasant, even to us when we send hundreds of packages, or to the long lines of other customers who act as though they’ve never sent a package before in their life.
Anyway, you can listen to the radio piece here. I want to keep it around for possibly using it in a disaster show.
Another interesting note – my friend Leanne came through Bton recently. She used to be a postal worker who sorted mail that had illegible addresses. I’m not positive about this statistic, but I’m pretty sure that said that she said that when she started working there were 45 mail sorting facilities like the one she worked at around the country. When she quit, there were only 5, mostly due to people sending less mail.