I've been traveling a lot more than usual lately.  I think I spent a total of 4 days in the office during August between customer site visits and a vacation.  Tomorrow, I'll be getting up at 4am to drive to Blacksburg, VA for a career fair at VA Tech on Tuesday and Wednesay.  I really like going there and getting to talk to students about their interests and projects & helping spread the word about our office in North Carolina (yes, most people still don't know we have an office here!). 

I'm particularly looking forward to 2 additional geeky aspects of this trip:  1) pushing the mpg on my 2006 Civic Hybrid as far as I can and 2) catching up on a big pile of podcasts.

I've had my hybrid for about 4 months now, and according to the car, I'm averaging about 44.7 mpg.  It's getting a fresh dose of oil today, and I'll be upping the tire pressure and topping off the tank tonight before I head out in the morning.  My record so far for miles on a single tank is 552 on my trip to Charlotte, NC and back.  That included some city driving around Charlotte, so I'm thinking that I might get pretty close to the elusive 600 mile tank on this trip.  On the Charlotte trip, I averaged 51.3 mpg for the whole trip (including those city miles), so again, I'm going to be trying to top that tomorrow.

On the podcast front, I've found some pretty cool 'casts I thought I'd share.  Of course, everyone loves .NET Rocks - Carl and Richard just keep the .NET goods coming week after week!  I've also subscribed to Manager Tools and am looking forward to catching up on back episodes covering all sorts of management tips and tricks.  Recent topics include business meal etiquette, delivering performance reviews, and mentoring.  On the language front, I found a few good podcasts for learning Chinese: Chinese Learn Online, LearnChinesePod.com (looks like the best, but they haven't had a new episode in over a month), and ChinesePod.com.  For fun, ESPN's "The Poker Edge" has given me some ideas for how to improve my Texas Hold'em game.  Finally, if you're looking for some interesting music, check out Spellbound - the world's only podcast dedicated to theremin music.

My hotel apparently doesn't have broadband, so if you post a comment on Tues or Wed and I don't approve it immediately, don't take it personally - I'll get caught up on Thursday when I'm back.