Audiobookery

I love the Green Apple Bookstore in San Francisco. My wife and I sometimes go out on a date sans kiddos and one of our favorite things to do is eat at a nice little restaurant in the Inner Richmond then go browse the Green Apple. The problem is I keep buying books but not reading them.

The solution, I have found, is to not read them at all. But listen to them.

Years ago I tried out Audible (www.audible.com) and downloaded two free books ("On Writing" by Stephen King and "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini) then dropped my subscription. But I recently re-subscribed and have promptly listened to 3 books ("The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho; "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy; and "The Golden Compass" by Phillip Pullman) and working on my fourth. The subscription allows me to download 2 books a month.

The aural experience vs. the visual in consuming a book - Listening to an audiobook is great in that you get a performance from the narrator, an actor or the author, and, like radio, you can do other things while you listen. When reading a book, you can't do anything else but read the book.

Reading a book is visual and you miss out on the 'design' of the sentence. Sometimes an author will deliberately use short sentences like Hemingway or McCarthy. Does that come across in the audiobook? Is it important?

Microsoft + Yahoo!

The rationale for this deal has been a conglomeration of both companies' audience which would mean more eyeballs for more ads for more dollars. Nothing has been said about how the branding would work, or how the products would work amongst one another, or what the user experience would be like. Because it would probably be a nightmare. Yahoo and Microsoft have enough problems getting their own products to make cohesive sense I can't imagine what it would be like to combine them.

There was some mention over company culture clash. Silicon Valley companies HATE Microsoft. It's not just a culture clash, it's an all out hatred/oil and water situation.

I hate to say it because I loved working there but for Yahoo, this was a long time in coming. You could see the decline begin 5 years ago, and it's caught up to them. So to turn 5 years of lethargic momentum around in 6 months - don't think so.

And the kicker is, even if the merger worked they'd still be chasing Google, they'd still be very far behind. Google is wicked shrewd and continues to run with the ball.

In the short term, wall street might like the accumulation of eyeballs and reward the stock price(s) but in the long run there's going to be severe confusion.

Why I voted for Obama...

In one word: Electability.

I think Hillary would be a great president. I think Obama would be a great president. She definitely has more experience. But she would also bring out the Hillary-haters.

If Romney were the Rebulican nominee then Obama or even Hillary would be a shoe-in. But b/c it's likely to be McCain, it makes the race that much tighter.

While I still think it's the Democrats' general election to lose, I want someone with the best chance of winning and that's Obama.

Don't see much difference in policy and philosophy really, just electability.

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Goodbye, Y! Mail. Hello, GMail...

The title really says it all. But the long of it is...

I liked Yahoo! Mail. It was fairly fast and straightforward and suited my lite email needs perfectly. Plus I started out with a Y! Mail account, so there was a lot of history and inertia.

When the new beta launched recently I tried it out and immediately disliked it. Not because of any UI issues - Outlook interface is perfectly fine. But I nixed it due to performance. It was sloooow. Whatever happened to Yahoo!'s committment to performance?

Which brings me to Gmail. I'm not in love with the way it does threading/conversations, it's no big whoop either way to me, but it is fast. Really fast.

Over the past few months I've slowly started to use my Gmail account more (fredland@gmail.com) but lately I've been having issues logging into my Y! Mail account, so I've made the complete switch this week.

So long Y! Mail. (But My Yahoo! is still my homepage.)

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