89.9 & My Top 5 Todos

I’m running out of podcasts to listen to on my commute. With two hours of driving every day, I’m managing to burn through more audio than I ever have. Currently, my favorites are StackOverflow, Software Engineering Radio, and Hanselminutes. I’ve been catching TWiT Live, but haven’t clicked the three buttons it would take to subscribe in iTunes.

Given the nearly two months since I started at McAfee, I’ve now officially caught up on everything. Late last week, I tuned to the radio to find something entertaining. There’s a #fail. In the morning, I couldn’t escape the morning shows. In the afternoon, everything sounded the same. In frustration, I ended up turning off the radio and just sitting in silence.

Silence isn’t golden

After two sessions of silence, I realized that I wasn’t just sitting with my thoughts, but rather noticing every sound in and out of my car. My fan makes a really annoying clicking when the dial is set below the 3rd setting. Combustion engines are loud and rumbly—why don’t we have plug-in commuter cars yet? You really shouldn’t buy cars with a light-colored interior; they can’t hide dirt and just look dingy all the time.

Embrace the Classical

Yesterday evening, I remembered that I had skipped one station in my search for listenable radio: 89.9 All Classical. For three trips now, I’ve been listening to the sounds of Strauss, Bach, and other composers I will never remember. Suddenly, I wasn’t listening to my car, or the outside world, or my tangential thoughts, I was thinking about my life, dreams, and goals. (Do note, I wasn’t paying that much attention to the music, sorry Strauss!)

I even came up with a list of things I want to do in the very near future:

  1. Build a Social, Browser-based Game
  2. Host my own 1U box at a Colo
  3. Beat Super Mario Galaxy (I have 35 stars)
  4. Write software to make a tangible object move
  5. Finish development of a Web App that’ll fulfill a dream
  6. Bonus: Hold my newborn baby

Now that I have the content for my drive, I need to figure out how to make the trip shorter so I can get some more work done!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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