At that time, the goal was just to say we can do it. Now, the goal is to look at how the tool can applied as a useful resource for CICS students, alumni, faculty and industry fellows (and to some extend, our industry in general and the communities in which we serve).

As a believer in the medium, I want to be the first to pilot the new series of CICS: The Podcast. To accomplish this, I have selected what I believe to be a useful resource to the current candidates, especially the GA cadre. This edition of CICS: The Podcast is a compilation of two interviews conducted in the Spring of 2005 on Muncie-based Backyard Broadcasting radio stations WERK and MAX. As part of those stations' community affairs programming, 2005 Alumni Eric Mitchel, Levi Perigo and I were interviewed to discuss the yearly Cisco Certified Annual Retreat (CCAR) and how the event and other efforts by the Center have made an impact on East Central Indiana.

I also included a Public Service Announcement we made last year and made available to all Indiana radio stations to promote CCAR. I found the interviews and the PSA to be useful exercises for me as a candidate last year and helped to keep in perspective the need for all of us in the CICS Mafia to practice good stewardship of our talents by participating in our communities. I hope that the current candidates find as much value in listening to this resource in podcast form as I had in recording them last year.

So, here's how it works... The actual individual postcast entry is a MP3 file. It's available here: CCAR 2005 Radio Campaign. However, the MP3 file itself does not subscribe you to the podcast. To do that, copy the following URL into iPodder, iTunes or any other podcast utility: http://www.cicsworld.org/podcast/index.xml Once subscribed, when new shows are posted, they'll be pushed to you (you won't have to visit this blog to search for new shows).

This excerpt is the Q and A session from Dr. Gillette's presentation.

As usual for CICS the Podcast, you need not have an iPod or a RSS audiocast tool (such as iPodder) to listen. Just click the link to start. However, if you do have a program such as iPodder, you can subscribe to this site to get the most recent edition of CICS the Podcast delivered transparently when it is produced.

The above link will begin playback of an excerpt from Dr. Gillette's presentation last Friday given simultaneously via the Polycom PVX Videoconferencing solution. Dr. Gillette has dubbed our use of this Polycom innovation as "everybody's videoconferencing", as the PVX is a software solution that will interface with several mid-range computers over a high throughput connection. In our case, Dr. Gillette used a mid-range laptop and Oxford's Internet connection to connect to our dedicated Polycom stand-alone hardware unit in the CICS Solution Center at 384 kbps.

Please note that the audio quality is the result of the available microphone (a fairly low-end "stick mic" that is available to laptop users on Dr. Gillette's end, thus a low pickup of anyone seated far from the mic as Dr. Gillette was [to an extent] and that many of the guests on the Oxford end were as well [to a much greater extent]) and packet loss over our trans-Atlantic connection that was being routed across at least a couple of different firewalls.

This presentation, 1 of 2, is from some of Dr. Gillette's introductory comments to his presentation. Look shortly for part 2 of 2 which includes the question and answer session with commentary from the US and the UK.

As usual for CICS the Podcast, you need not have an iPod or a RSS audiocast tool (such as iPodder) to listen. Just click the link to start. However, if you do have a program such as iPodder, you can subscribe to this site to get the most recent edition of CICS the Podcast delivered transparently when it is produced.