So as I’ve said, I love to listen to podcasts on my commute. There’s so many excellent ones out there.

For most of the last three weeks or so, I took a break from my podcasts and listened to two fiction books. The first was Armada by Ernest Cline, same author that wrote Ready Player One. Armada was kinda lame. Not entirely sure why I used an Audible on it. The second was Star Wars: Aftermath, the newest Star Wars book that is sorta the first in what is the “official Star Wars cannon”. I disliked the writing style (though I got used to it), but what I disliked more was the voices and sound effects in the audiobook.

Upon returning to my regular podcast programing (I powered through Star Wars to get it over with), I also added some new ones to my rotation. The first, CodeNewbie, I honestly haven’t listened to any yet. But I added it after listening to episode #183 of the Shop Talk Show with Sharon Yitbarek. It was a great conversation about finding a community of developers as a newbie in the development world. I’m excited to dig through their backlog and learn some stuffs.

The second new podcast is The Web Ahead, part of the 5by5 network. I’ve recently added a few 5by5 shows, but this one in particular apparently just wont a NetAward for best podcast so my interest was piqued. Today on my drive to and from a wedding with my friend Robb, I listened to Jen Simmon’s chat (the host) with Gerry McGovern, a name I’ve heard a ton on the Twitter but hadn’t interacted with any of his work. This chat was about focusing on Customer Top Tasks and it just get me excited to get to working towards some of the stuff he talked about.

I’m going to write a bunch more about this episode because it was fascinating and was particularly timely, especially as I am working on a list of things I want to learn/chat with people about at the up coming HigherEdWeb Nation Conference.

But what porompted a post was just this thought. I love using my time in the car to learn, but I do find it hard to retain some of the information because I’m not able to take notes without causing accidents. So why did I call this “Reconsidering the Train”? Only because I kinda wish I was working downtown and could listen to these awesome chats and gain the ability to take notes.

Anyway, that is all for now! Great time photographing a wedding with Robb today and I’ve been thinking hard about some tough roads forward with the web at Benedictine. Which is really mostly challenging because I need to take all these ideas I have floating around or that I’m ingesting through podcasts in order to prescribe a path forward, essentially using my M.B.A. to translate all this to the business folks at the school.

Peace - KS

Today’s lyric is from the song “Son” on Sleeling At Last’s newest EP installment of the Atlas series. Ryan makes SUCH. INCREDIBLE. MUSIC. I could (and do) listen to this stuff over and over agin.