Waiting for the Technology

This afternoon, as I was coming back from my physical therapy session (incidentally, it is apparently a bad idea to tell a therapist that you would like some exercises to address things you can't do yet; they seem to take it as a challenge, and you will be very sore afterwards, and for quite a while, too), I was thinking about how I'm interested in a couple of areas such as artificial intelligence, electronic health records, and the like, but I rarely get the time to read up on them. Part of that lack of time is due to my StumbleUpon fixation, which has prevented me from using the excellent services of FeedDemon, the newsgroup aggregator, but part is because I really don't have the time to hunt this stuff down, let alone to listen to or read it.

Well, I thought, that sounds like a podcast question. So, when I got home, I did a search for 'podcast directory', and sure enough there are several services that say that they will point you to podcasts of interest. Turns out that the pickings for, say, CPOE (computerized physician order entry) are pretty slim (the first was from the Society for Critical Care Medicine, and while they sound like an intelligent group, they're clearly not targeting me in their podcasts, most of which have to do with, what a surprise, Critical Care, and only incidentally things like electronic tools for practice management).

But then I found the Yahoo Podcasts portal, and that looked pretty good. So I downloaded one podcast (still have to figure out how to get it into the iPod, and yes, I know you don't need an iPod to listen to it). Elated, I selected another -- and it started to play. No, dammit, I said, I pressed Download, not Listen. So I did it again, and then to another. Same result.

Technology's not quite ripe, I think.