Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Assassination Vacation is the latest book by author, columnist, and public radio personality Sarah Vowel. It is about the three U.S. presidents who were assassinated within 40 years of each other, Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Sarah takes us on her “pilgrimages” to various sites relating to not only these unfortunate presidents, but also to their killers and co-conspirators. Along the way, we get to learn a great deal about the circumstances in which they were shot, as well as the often interesting events after those shots rang out.

Sarah Vowel has written several books, and this latest one repeats some of the same themes of American history that her previous book, A Partly Cloudy Patriot, started. Vowel is a self-proclaimed “history geek” and also presidential-assassination-obsessed. A lot of what she wrote about in the past was about personal experiences, and that is what she talked about on the radio as well. In this book, too, there is a lot of this. It’s not just an historical text, but also partially an autobiographical journey with Vowel to various places of historical significance where she interacts with the tour guides and other tourists, and also the friends that she drags grudgingly to almost every one.

I listened to an unabridged audio version of it via Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods). If you’ve ever heard Vowel speak, you know she has a very distinct voice. You may have even heard her without knowing - she played Violet (the daughter) in the animated movie The Incredibles. It’s high and nasaly, which you would never think would be something you’d want to listen to for 7 hours, and yet at least some of us find this voice strangely hypnotic. I’ve heard her speak a couple of times in DC, once as part of a live This American Life, and a second time as just herself. The second time, she was late. She doesn’t drive, and so was taking the train up from her home in New York City. The train lost power. The woman handling the show was talking to her on her cell phone while she was rushing from the train station in a cab and actually put the phone up to the microphone. Sarah managed to keep us laughing and still did a great job once she got there in person. It’s a testament to her appeal that 99% of the audience stayed over an hour after she was supposed to be there for her to arrive. The book is available in print as well, of course.

Vowel’s dry humor runs throughout Assasination Vacation, catching on oh so many ironic twists of history, so many outlandish actions or quotes that they seem downright hilarious sometimes. She also repeatedly pokes fun at herself for her peculiar geekiness about historical minutiae, her morbid fascinations, and her various allergies and phobias. The book contains not only her own voice, but also that of a number of others - actors, writers, comedians - who ad a little spice to the mix. They recite quotes from the principal characters - presidents and assassins alike. Included are Steven King, John Stewart, Conan O’Brian, and Brad Bird (whom I think was my favorite as Garfield assassin Charles Guiteau).

While I enjoyed listening to the book, and believe I picked up some knowledge from it, I’m afraid that as with most books about history, I will soon forget many details (if I haven’t already). Even with the fairly narrow subject matter, there are still lots of facts involved with each assassination, not to mention a bunch of background information about the lives of each president and their various family members, friends, colleagues, and of course their assassins and co-conspirators. Also included is information on the wars, scandals, and other events that took place before or during the time of a given president. Of course Vowel makes a lot of this stuff more memorable by adding her own humor and passion for the subject, which makes it more memorable, but I still think many of the details will slip away despite this. Then again, this isn’t a history text, but more a kind of biographical/autobiographical journey through a few singular parts of history, as well as a journey in the present day to some of the odd memorials and museums for both the presidents and the assassins - ranging from the high reaches of the Adirondack mountains to Fort Jefferson on the Dry Tortugas, a small tropical island 70 miles west of Key West, where the Gulf of Mexico meets the Caribbean.

That being said, while I certainly enjoyed Assassination Vacation, I personally preferred A Partly Cloudy Patriot. Either book is a great listen from my viewpoint, and this latest one kind of follows from the last. I also think that this book might grow on you and slowly infect you with at least a little of that same geeky obsession for these assassinations that Vowel has herself. Then again, while I’m a geek, I’m not much of a history geek, and so I’m not sure I’ll have the dedication (or time) to devote to something as relatively arcane as 19th Century U.S. presidential assassinations!

This latest book from George Carlin consists of many, many short riffs about language, skits involving lots of profanity and potty humor, and commentary about various things that for the most part just piss Carlin off. I listened to an unabridged audio version of it via Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods). The audio book is over 7 hours long and is read by Carlin himself. The book is available in print as well, of course. I’ve found that Carlin is great in short doses, and so I found myself only listening to 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there, etc. Maybe the longest listen was an hour. I find some of what Carlin has to say very insightful, and some of it is also very funny, but not all of it, of course. A lot of what he has to say is also meant to be fairly offensive. You can tell that Carlin is trying to push buttons mostly with a lot of his shtick. For example, there’s a lot of what could be deemed as sexist jokes, but there are also parts of the book where Carlin talks about how women are superior to men in most ways and are also crapped on throughout the world for the sole reason that they aren’t as physically strong.

I would say a majority of the book is about language and specifically about euphemisms, which Carlin finds repugnant, because they “water down” the language and make a lot of things “meaningless” by couching them in kinder sounding words or phrases that don’t impart truth or real meaning. There’s a lot of truth to this, but Carlin does belabor the point, and after a while I was starting to say, “Ok, I get the point already!”

He also has a lot of these little “skits” where he will make up a conversation among a couple of people. Some of these are funny, some aren’t. A lot are graphic, gross, “dirty” or in various ways the opposite of “political correctness.” As I said, he definitely is out to try to offend just about anyone.

There’s also some insightful stuff about politics, the irony of various political issues, how politicians are constantly trying to deceive us, and a lot of times doing so by use of language.

Of course there’s a lot about various things, not all language-related, that simply piss Carlin off. Some of these are just silly and obviously not to be taken seriously, some are things that most of us would probably find annoying, or at least will once Carlin enlightens us as to why they are so dumb.

I’ve mainly seen Carlin in some older stand-up routines, a couple of movies, and one other book, Napalm and Silly Puddy, so I don’t know if I’m familiar enough with his stuff to comment on how this book compares to earlier work. It was an interesting listen, one with some laugh-out-lound moments, no doubt, but also some interesting thoughts, and a lot of expounding on random stuff that made it a bit repetitive. I wonder if for books like this, a very strategic audio abridgement might actually make it a much more solid listen?

David Sedaris is a humorous writer and speaker who got his start on the radio. He really gained recognition with his reciting of his writing on the public radio show This American Life. He subsequently has come out with a number of books and also writes articles for The New Yorker.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is Sedaris’s penultimate book (his latest being Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules). I listened to an unabridged audio version of it via Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods). Sedaris’s books, in my opinion, are best listened to rather than read. He has a unique, high-pitched voice with a slight hint of an accent from a childhood spent in North Carolina. As with his brand of humor, I’m sure his voice is something of an acquired taste, as most “unusual” things are. But in addition to the voice itself, the comic timing, intonation, impersonations, etc., all are helped greatly by this author who is used to performing for audiences be they radio or live theater audiences. Of course, you can still buy the book in print if that’s more your cup of tea.
Most of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is about Sedaris’s odd family. Stories about them are accounted both from his childhood and adulthood. Sedaris is gay, and often makes fun of his clichéd feminine proclivities growing up. Even so, this oddness seems to pale in comparison to the personalities of some of his (heterosexual) brothers and sisters. Possibly it’s because we are all used to these clichés by now from TV and movies, but even so, the Sedaris clan all seem to be exceedingly odd. One can scratch ones head and wonder a bit about this, but then most families have their oddities, and sometimes that accounts for most of the family! Of course Sedaris makes even the most bizarre and repugnant characteristics cutely funny ones.

A few of the stories Sedaris relates are about his current life with his partner in France, and while I loved his stories in “Me Talk Pretty Some Day” about his trying to learn the French language, and just trying to make sense of French culture, in this book, I preferred the family stories to these. The main exception to this was his relating how he uncovered the Dutch version of Santa Clause and how bizarre he seemed compared to the U.S.
version. This particular story, as well as one or two others, was taken from recordings in front of a live audience, as opposed to the rest of the book, which is your normal, studio-produced audio book.
In the end, if you love Sidaris, you’ll probably love this book, and if you hate him, you’ll hate this book. If you’re unfamiliar with him, here is a selection of audio featuring him on Nation Public Radio.

This was the first book I’ve read of Pat Conroy’s, author of numerous books made into movies, such as Prince of Tides, the Great Santini, and Beach Music. Unlike those books, which were either mostly fictional with big chunks of Conroy’s persona thrown in to thinly veiled autobiographical works, My Losing Season is straight autobiography.

It was largely an entertaining read. It covers Conroy’s history as a basketball athlete from
the first time he handles a ball (at 10 or so) to his last game as a player for his college, The Citadel. While it’s primarily about basketball, including lots of play-by-play reporting using sports lingo which isn’t always explained but still understandable, there’s
also a lot of about Conroy’s life that has nothing to do with basketball per se - his incredibly cruel father, his discovery of literature and finding his own voice as a writer, his ordeals as a Plebe at The Citadel, and much more. I like the way Conroy mixes in some poetic flourishes into hid descriptions book - kind of like dabs of florescent color on an otherwise straightforward, albeit very interesting picture.

I listened to this book via my subscription to the online audio book service, Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods). The book is available in print as well, of course. The narration is skillfully handled by Chuck Montgomery, who is also an actor and composer in addition to narrating many audio books.

I only have two minor quibbles with My Losing Season. The first is that about halfway through the book, I realized that Conroy loves superlatives. Everything is “the best” or “the most” of his life. Most of this has to do with a particular game standing out in some way or another, or a particular performance by himself or another player. Someone I mentioned to, said something to the effect of, “well of course he loves superlatives, honey, he’s Southern!” This was said by a Southerner, of course.

The second qualm is that the ending takes a little while to come. Conroy doesn’t just end on his last game at the Citadel, but goes on to talk about players and coaches in subsequent years. The book was written in 2002 and his last game was in 1967, so there’s a lot of ground to cover. He talks about the history of his relationship to The Citadel, about his changed relationship with this father over the years, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I was certainly interested in finding out about all of these things, but there’s gotta be over an hour, maybe two of this “afterword” stuff. I suppose when you’re reading a book, you can see clearly something marked “afterword” and you understand that it’s seperate from the book itself. But listening to it, either it wasn’t marked as such, or I missed it.

These two complaints are pretty minor and I’d definitely recommend it to most people. I know almost nothing about basketball and never watch it, but it does give you a great deal of appreciation for the game and even a desire to learn more about it - although the book is more about how the game was played in college in the 1960’s rather than how it’s played today, either in college or in the pros.

I listened to this book via my subscription to the online audio book service, Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods). The book is available in print as well, of course.

For those who enjoy non-fiction, Mountains Beyond Mountains is a fascinating look at a Doctor who’s devoted his life to curing disease in one of the poorest countries on the planet - Haiti. Dr. Paul Farmer and his organization, Partners In Health, have been involved for 15 years or more not only in Haiti but in treating multi-drug-resistant TB in Peru and Russia, as well.

The author, Tracy Kidder, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Soul of A New Machine, covers Farmers life growing up, going to college, and his initial experiences in Haiti. He also covers the perspective of some of the other principles of Partners in Health, including the director, Ophelia Dahl, and others. The different personalities of these people as compared with Farmer (who it seems is a unique individual), makes for some interesting interpersonal reporting, so it isn’t just a story about a saintly doctor who came to a poor country and made everyone well.
I didn’t really know much about this book when I started listening to it, since it was one of my wife’s selections. I just started listening and thought if it was interesting, I would continue. I did. The narrator, Paul Michael, does an excellent job as usual - he narrated The Da Vinci Code, and as with that one he has lots of fun with the various accents from different nationalities in the book.

I’ve never been one to watch the commercials for charities showing all the malnourished kids. I find them incredibly depressing, and the underlying issue to be one of such huge proportions that it’s all but insurmountable. While this book was similarly depressing in some ways, it was also very hopeful. It detailed many of the improvements going on in world health, concentrating on those pushed ahead by Farmer’s group. I found myself routing them on like a sports team, even though I haven’t been a real sports fan since I was a kid and following the New York Yankees in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

As for Farmer, his life sometimes does seem at times to be that of a saint. On the one hand you admire everything he does, but on the other hand you sometimes wonder if he’s actually human. While he’s someone you would might want to emulate, his selflessness, courage, and dedication are so superlative as to be almost unatainable, at least by most of us.
It’s probably a great listen for when you might be feeling a bit sorry for yourself, and realize that there are so many people who are living in such wretched conditions that you should be grateful to live in a country where all your creature comforts are taken care of - even if you happen to be within the poorest 10% of us. On the other hand, it also could induce a lot of guilt for not wanting to devote your life, or at least a fair chunk of your time and money, towards helping those who are so less fortunate for the simple reason that they were born in a horribly poor and mismanaged country…

I know the entries haven’t exactly been spilling out lately. Chock that up to parenthood I guess, which tends to take up most of the free time at home I used to devote to blogging, and the time that is left over is just an opportunity to catch up on sleep!

However, I have been up to some other things besides parenting, specifically as it relates to what I am listening to these days vis-à-vis digital audio. First a quick bit of history:

I got involved with audio books and what might be called a forerunner of podcasting (at least in terms of subscribing to feeds of magazine, newspaper and radio shows) about 6.5 years ago when I subscribed to Audible.com. I’ve listened to a lot of books and other programming, but after I got involved with my now wife back in late 2001, the listening slowed somewhat.

Then in late 2004, I started listening to what was then the very new phenomenon of podcasts. Because there were so many, they completely pushed out my audio book listening. Sure, I could have alternated. But as kind of a news junky, it’s hard to start reading history books when there’s lots of current event non-fiction or news articles, etc. I also have this tendency to want to complete lists of listening, and the method that seems easiest is to do the shortest things first, thus getting through a large number of list items right away. Unfortunately with podcasts, they just keep piling up! You can subscribe to just a couple, but I was subscribed to 20-30, and even though these were on average a small fraction of the length of an unabridged audio book (and also that I was speeding these up by 50% or so), I was still barely keeping my head above water. All this time my audio books sat dormant, and continued to pile up. I was also spending a considerable amount of time just doing the processing that would speed these podcasts up, organize them in the proper folders, downloading them and transferring them to my iPod, etc.

Back last December I finally axed my Audible account because I simply wasn’t listening to books at that point, and didn’t want yet another growing pile of content that I was ignoring. Several months later, though, I took advantage of an offer to become a member again for $10/year with a free audio book offer. There was a book that had just come out, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dillema, that had just come out and was available unabridged at Audible. I thought I’d spend $10 on it, or half the price I would have had to normally, and gain back some of the priveleges of membership - such as the ability to take advantage of sales, to gift audio books, etc.

In August, I burned out on my podcast habit, and felt like the only thing to bring back a bit of calm was to quit cold turkey and go back to my kindler and gentler days of mainly just listening to audio books. It’s odd, since I now have over 100 audio books that I haven’t read, most of them unabridged, that I wouldn’t feel the same compulsion to finish them as soon as possible. But I guess the difference is that these are not podcasts of news events that I feel compelled to be familiar with or else be “out of touch.” Many are novels, but there are plenty of non-fiction titles as well.

I think the seed for this move was generated when I bought my Treo 700P back in May. I was surprised to see that it had come with a $100 off coupon for some types of Audible memberships. I was resisting the temptation because at the time I was still totally committed, nay addicted, to podcasts, and so feared digging myself an even deeper hole! I wanted to have some chance of actually finishing what was on my plate! But by the time I had burned out on podcasts, I think I had given up on the thought I’d ever be able to keep up.

The $100 off an Audible.com makes each book “credit” cost about $5.42 (most books are 1 credit), at least if purchasing Audible’s Annual Platinum plan. This price is great when you compare it with what you would normally pay at a bookstore or online, save for maybe a used version of some book on eBay. Then when I was actually trying to sign up when I looked a little more closely at the offer. There’s some fine print at the bottom which says “Offer valid for new Audible customers only.” Doh! The only way around this is to actually create a new account with Audible and apply the coupon to that new account. Yes you can do this. Theoretically you can have as many accounts with Audible that you want. I don’t think Audible cares, as I know many who have multiple accounts. The one problem with this scenario is that if you want to have all your audio books on your iPod (or other compatible player), you can’t. Well, unless you have only one, or at most two accounts. You can’t activate more than two accounts on a given player. I suppose you could buy two or more iPods and then rack up accounts in order to take advantage of these discounts, but the added price of the player would kind of defeat the purpose. In any case, my problem was that my wife had an account as well, which had a number of books I hadn’t read and really wanted to. So I managed to dedicate most of my free time towards reading some of those books, and a few others I ended up skipping after I determined that I wasn’t enjoying them enough after the first hour or two to devote another 10+ hours.

So I signed up for the new account that gave me 24 credits. What do I do with those credits? So far, the only ones I’ve used were for a podcast! Well, that’s what Audible calls them anyway. They are basically the same type of subscriptions that Audible gives you the choice of downloading in the old more manual way or via a feed address. Unfortunately, as I’ve found, when you set it up in iTunes as a podcast via the feed they give you, it downloads a file that cannot be sped up as all other Audible content can be on the iPod. Yes, I still speed things up! Although I do this via the iPod’s built in ability that will only speed a file up by 20% or so, not the 50% I was doing in a much more belabored process with my podcasts earlier. I signed up for a subscription to The New Yorker magazine. Then I discovered a couple of free audible shows, one of which only comes out every month or two called Ear to the Ground, the other which comes out twice a week, called This is Audible. Both of these contain excerpts of audio books, interviews with authors, publishers, and others who talk about the books. Then just a week or two ago I discovered that my new account came with a complimentary subscription to the New York Times! So now I have around 27 hours of subscription/podcast content via my Audible account! I can’t escape the podcasts!

In an effort to try to organize things better, I went through my very long wish list on my old account to look for stuff that I could get rid of. I hadn’t done this in a while and I had lots of old stuff, and as it turned out a good amount of abridged stuff which Audible never did offer an unabridged version of. I made the rule that I wasn’t going to have anything abridged on the list, nor books that were more than 100 or so years old, since that would put them in the public domain and I could possibly get versions for free via Libravox or the Guttenberg Project. I used to add books to my wish list because they seemed interesting, and that’s fine, but after 2 or 3 or more years if they had no reviews and a rating of 3.5 or less, I didn’t have the confidence that these were books worth listening to. I was able to get my list down from a whopping 308 to a much more manageable 60 or so. Of course, I’ve also been adding new ones to this list due to hearing some of the books on This is Audible or Ear to the Gound which really interested me. But I’ve also paired things a bit by actually buying a few titles via special sales that Audible has had in the last month or so - they seem to be having sales pretty regularly now, maybe gearing up for even bigger ones towards the holidays in an effort to make some big sales numbers by the end of the year?
The point of this is that I’ve been listening to a lot of stuff, and have even managed to post a bunch of short reviews on an Audible Yahoo Group, but I thought I’d start posting them here as well, since I’m not posting much else these days! So watch for a bunch of these reviews as I have time to find them, spruce them up slightly and post them here.

As a slow reader, I took to Audio Books when I first heard of Audible.com five or six years ago. Audible.com provides audio books over the internet as digital files that you can play on your computer, iPod, or many other audio devices. The pricing was so much less than it was at the book store. The ability to download and play something from a very large selection of audio books on demand was irresistible. A huge chunk of Audible.com’s selection was and is unabridged, whereas up until fairly recently it was difficult to find any unabridged audio books at a book store, and when you could find them, they were outrageously priced – probably several times the price of the equivalent hardcover.

Just the other day, the New York Times published an article by Amy Harmon about audio books and I was actually quoted in it! The article asks the question whether listening to audio books is the same thing as reading, or whether it’s inferior. My big reason, as stated in the article, for listening to audio books is that I’m a slow reader. Basically I read stuff aloud in my head at about the same pace as someone would read in an audio book. I’ve tried speed reading courses but they never seemed to work. Aside from this, of course, you can listen to a book without needing total concentration as with a written book. So I can listen at the gym, in the car, etc. Some people consider this inferior because you aren’t using your mind as much to invent voices in your head. You can linger on sentences or words without having to keep going if you want. But in general, I think it’s all very individual. Some people get a lot more out of reading a book than listening to an audio book, whereas for others they are similar, and still others audio seems to have an added value. What do you think?

The New York Times requires a subscription to read the article, but Luke Sonnier has reprinted it on his blog along with some commentary about why he thinks reading is superior. There’s also some discussion going on in his comments that indicates some of the contentiousness of this issue. Neil Gaiman, a professional writer no less, makes some good points in favor of audio books and why those who assert the superiority of the written word are snobs.

Back to Audible.com. This week the IT Conversations Podcast’s show Web Talk interviewed Audible.com’s Founder and CEO, Don Katz. While not the most scintillating orator, Don Katz does let us in on a lot of interesting info, particularly on where Audible may be going in the near future. In particular he talks specifically about how they are planning on offering over-the-air downloadable content. So, for compatible devices, specifically smartphones like the Treo 650 which can both download data from the internet and play Audible files, soon you will be able to download this content directly from anywhere. Up until now, one has had to be chained to a computer that syncs such data onto your device, but with the increasing speeds of cellular data networks, smartphones rely less and less synching to an individual’s computer for transferring information.

The other subject that Katz talks about is podcasting. Actually a good part of the interview centers on it. Katz is asked whether it threatens their business and predictably says it doesn’t, but it seems like even more traditional forms of media he has been smart to take it seriously enough to get Audible somehow involved in the whole podcasting phenomenon. There hasn’t been anything announced, but it sounds like there may be plans to court some podcasters for inclusion as programming that Audible sells. This will, of course, be very different from the current, completely free (or voluntary contribution) model. Will podcasters take advantage of such a system and make only part of the podcasts freely downloadable? Or none? Will they only provide their last podcast for download and let Audible sell their archives? Some of course will. But many will, I think, be resistant to forcing people to sell something that they have labeled with the Creative Commons license. Who knows, Audible could even offer podcasters a salary and let them, as Katz said “quit their day job,” as long as they could sell their content (and likely have it not freely available otherwise). I will admit that since I got into podcasting, I’ve had so much to listen to that I haven’t listened to many books over the last 6 months! I’m not about to unsubscribe to Audible, but I do think that there’s so much great content available freely via podcasts that for many, it will be hard to convince them to pay a monthly fee for more, even if it is stuff that is not available via free podcast.

While I love Audible in many ways, I thought I would get off my chest a couple of things that have nagged me about them for a while, and I know I’m not alone. The first is related to Audible’s web interface. There are often problems where if you search for an author or title, it doesn’t come up with the books you know they have. But this is an occasional annoyance. My major issue is with their wish list and search functionality which I think are extremely clunky! Audible has tons of books in their library and so it’s very easy to build up a wish list that is hundreds of books. In order to keep this up to date and prune it so that it doesn’t get completely out of control, Audible should make it easy to remove, and sort the list in different ways. Instead, you have to look at your list in 20-book increments for one, and secondly, while you can sort on various fields, you cannot sort in revers order. In order to see the books I’ve added to my wish list most recently, I have to click on sort by date added and then page forward a dozen or more times. Audible’s site is often sluggish making this a time consuming process. I’m a web developer by profession and so I know these changes to the interface are not huge ones. I realize that Audible has many other places to put its resources, such as in actually recording the books and customer support, but it seems like the way most people browse and buy books could be improved quite a bit. Katz did say there were improvements coming in these areas, so I await them with great hope, but really it’s been a long time coming!

While Audible has tons of material, my one wish would be that they would carry more “special interest” material, such as computer books, reference books, instructional manuals, etc. Audible occasionally has something close to this in the way of kinds of “self-help” material, but it is almost always in abridged formats. I think this is the last big market for Audible. If they could somehow convince publishers to produce unabridged audio versions of books that aren’t just categorized as fiction or non-fiction (historical, political, etc), then I think they could attract even more readership.

Finally, I wish that Audible would give more choices in the formats they offer for various devices. Audible has four formats they offer their programs in; level 1 being the poorest quality and level 4 being the best. Of course level 4 takes up much more spaces than level 1. Audible offers level 4 for iPods, but not for my Treo 650. Perhaps this is some technical issue with the Treo not having enough processing power or battery power to play the file, but my guess is that it is more likely a decision Audible made based on the file size. Since the Treo has only a very small amount of internal memory, it would be infeasible to expect people to store their books anywhere but on an external memory card. While a couple of years ago probably 128MB or 256MB would be the largest most people would invest in, one can now get a 1GB card for $70 give or take and if price is now object than you can even get a 2GB card. Even 1GB still will store just about any unabridged book in its entirety, and up to several depending on length, all at level 4. While I like the thought of having all my books on my iPod, it sure would be nice to listen to everything on one device. But not having that extra fidelity does make the decision to ditch my iPod for most occasions not a very likely one.

Aside from these relatively minor annoyances, Audible and Audio books have changed my life in the last five years. I’ve read upwards of 60 or 70 books, whereas the previous 5 years I probably read 6 or 7! In my mind, the fact that I didn’t read these on paper makes no difference. I can still recall the good ones in detail and many greatly influenced my thinking.

Back to Content ConsumptionI’ve been struggling recently with keeping up with audio content. In general I prefer audio to text because, as I mentioned, I’m a slow reader and I can listen when I otherwise wouldn’t be able to read – such as exercising, driving, cooking, doing housework, etc. I can also speed up much of what I listen to via a feature on my Ipod. I can divide my listening into two main categories – talk and music. Within Music, I can listen to my collection of CD’s I’ve burned to MP3, or I can listen to a much larger collection of tracks from my Launchcast internet radio account. Within talk, I listen to podcasts, to audio books, and to traditional radio shows, primarily NPR. The biggest technical problem is that there are too many different formats which may or may not work on a single device or program. My burned music is in MP3, Launchcast streams Windows Media, and my Audio books are in a proprietary format that Audible.com uses. While podcasts are usually initially in MP3’s, I convert them to AAC in order to take advantage of the ability to have them play at faster speeds on my iPod.

All these different formats cause headaches, but are not insurmountable, at least on a computer. iTunes will play most of these, although it won’t do the Launchcast radio and I can’t install it at work. If I want portability, I can play MP3’s and Audio Books on my Treo 650, but no AAC files nor streaming Windows Media or Realmedia which would allow me to listen to Launchcast and NPR segments of my choosing – which I’ll elaborate a bit on below.

When it comes to NPR, or any radio show for that matter, there are ways of making it more portable than you initially would think, but it is not elegant or easy. I can listen to NPR shows on my Treo, but they are just streams from live broadcasts, not specific selections that I make from the archives. So what? Well, for one, why even bother with a Treo and just use a radio? Exactly my point! A radio is for live broadcasts, but the whole power behind digital devices like the Treo, the TiVo, the iPod, etc., is that they enable you to have a much greater say in the matter of when and how you watch or listen to something.

I did find a program for my PC that allows me to “timeshift” radio like a TiVo does TV and used it for a while to record numerous NPR shows which I then synced with my iPod. This software, called Replay Radio, does really seem to be useful, but it just wasn’t fleshed out enough for me. Maybe part of this had to do with the fact that I was telling it to record 9 hours of content a day! Ok, so maybe I was overdoing it a bit. But still, all this writing files to the hard drive and then optionally converting them to AAC was making my computer sluggish as well as taking up lots of storage space. Sure I could have archived some of this to CD or DVD, but that means yet more time spent managing files! Speaking of which, just managing the process could take a while. It’s not nearly as easy as recording and managing shows on TiVo. While there are a few hundred channels on TV, there are thousands upon thousands of potential radio stations, so actually compiling an accurate programming list of even a fraction of these is a monumental task! Still, if you need to timeshift radio programming, this is definitely a way to do it, just realize that depending on how much you record, the process of keeping everything straight (not to mention actually listening to the stuff!), may take up a considerable amout of time.

Not long ago, I discovered that at least some of the shows I was listening to from NPR have RSS feeds. The feeds present each report within a show like Morning Edition as a separate entry in the feed, so that you don’t have to listen to the entire program to find what you are interested in. You simply pick the ones in your newsreader that are of interest, and link to a page on NPR’s site which has a button to listen to a streaming version of just that segment. I can’t do this when I’m away from a computer as my Treo cannot download these streams or play these streams, but at least it cuts way down on the amount of time that I would have had to spend listening because… I can filter! Ideally I would like to see a way to listen to these on my Treo and/or the iPod, but this would either entail NPR producing streaming MP3’s in addition to the other formats, or to provide actual files to download ala podcasting (they do this already for On The Media, Future Tense, and Morning Stories, but that’s it), neither of which I think they will be doing any time soon. But hey, you never know!

Speaking of podcasting, there isn’t much of an issue here. I can transfer podcasts at home onto my iPod (or theoretically by Treo) and listen to them anywhere. If I haven’t been able to do this for a while, I can still listen to them by just downloading and playing them on any computer connected to the internet, or even theoretically doing this with my Treo, although personally I haven’t tried yet because the GPRS download speeds I can currently via T-Mobile are too slow.

The other main issue that I was grappling with recently was how to make all this audio accessible to me at home without a) having to be right next to the computer, or b) having constantly be walking around with headphones on. I’d seen these streaming media servers at some computer stores that intrigued me. These allow you to transmit audio files on your computer, or even internet radio to this device that you hook to the audio input jacks of your stereo. The communication between the device and your computer is via Wifi. Voila, you have an instant serious listening station to play your music and/or spoken word audio no matter where your computer is in the house related to your stereo.

So I went out and bought the SMC EZ-Stream Wireless Audio Adapter (SMCWAA-B). I was unable to determine prior to buying it whether it would play Launchcast radio, but I thought I’d give it a shot. The description on the box says that it’s compatible with Rhapsody, but I don’t use that. So, I bought it, brought it home and started struggling first with simply connecting it to my wifi network. I use WEP security to encrypt my network, and the user interface on the device was not very straightforward, so all this took a while to get working. The software that comes with the unit makes you install Musicmatch Jukebox in order to play MP3’s or WMA’s. Despite doing this, the unit couldn’t find some sample tracks I added to the Musicmatch library. Luckily, I found that one can download third-party server software, most notably TwonkyVision, which can greatly expland the initial capabilities of the software your device comes with. Initially TwonkyVision didn’t work either, so I had the idea to turn off my TiVo Home Networking Option, and all of a sudden success! Perhaps this was my problem with the original software not working as well. More importantly, though, TwonkyVision gave me access to my preferred audio software on my PC: iTunes. It was able to use my iTunes library to create basically a mirror of the same hierarchical menus that are on my iPod to navigate through tracks based on album, artist, genre, etc.. The only problem was that it would still only play MP3’s and WMA’s. No AAC’s, and no Audible files. Researching this further I found that the only media server that can currently play AAC’s is Airport Express with AirTunes. This would have been the perfect solution for me, except that of course this doesn’t play Launchcast radio! Argh!

And there’s the rub. It seems like no streaming media server out there is perfect in that it will let you stream any type of file or internet stream to your stereo. Certainly I don’t understand the intricate technical details in back of these technologies, but to me it seemed a fairly obvious product would be one that simply took the analog output of your computer’s sound card, converted it to digital bits, transmitted over a wifi connection to a device that could decode this into analog again to be output to the stereo. The media servers that exist allow for actual browsing through your music collection with a remote control and a visual textual display. This of course requires the device understand file types, directory structures, etc. What about simply a type of audio “modem,” if you will, that converts an analog stream into digital and then back into analog? It wouldn’t have the interactive ability to control things through the stereo – you would have to do that controlling on the PC side - but as far as I’m concerned, that’s icing.

I posited this question to the TwonkyVision forums over media-server.com as they seemed to have a lot of knowledgeable users and the main relevant suggestion I got was for a product that’s pretty different, but one that I decided to try out anyway.

The Radio Shack 2.4GHz Audio/Video Signal Sender/Receiver is something that looks like it was designed to share the signal coming from a dvd player, CD player, VCR, satellite receiver, etc., among stereos and/or TV’s in different rooms in a house. Its 2.4 GHz range seems to indicate some Wifi compatibility, but really it has nothing to do with Wifi, which is completely digital. Instead it is just an FM modulation transmitter/receiver that works on the same frequency as Wifi signals. You can only do so much research on the web, although it really depends on the device and who sells it. Radio Shack does not offer a way to review products on their site. The cost of it was low enough ($100) that I could just go buy it myself and if it didn’t meet my requirements, I could return it. So that’s what I did. Here are my impressions so far:

The device is actually two devices, a sender part and a receiver part. Both of these not only have to be plugged into a power outlet, but also have to be plugged into your computer and/or stereo. So what is in one way a “wireless” solution becomes one which also adds a lot more wires! The instructions are pretty sparse, as you can see (Radio Shack no longer has the manual available online), but there’s really not a whole lot to these things. You can operate them on four different “channels” and they not only have RCA stereo audio jacks, but also an RCA and coax video jack. I suppose with the video I could transmit stuff from my PC monitor if I had a video out on it. Alas, it is a non-multimedia laptop, so no such video out is available.

I was initially concerned that there would be interference between these and the Wifi I have in my house, but that seems to not be an issue. Whether this has to do with the different channels, I don’t know, but I just used the default channels for the device and there’s no interference like when I used to have a portable phone that worked on the 2.4 GHz frequency that would always toss all the computers off the network whenever we used it!

While there was no interference from Wifi, there was a lot of interference from other radio frequency sources. For example any time my cell phone rang, there was tons of crackling and other distortion, although of course the degree depended on how close the phone was to the transmitter or receiver. When the microwave was on there was some as well. As far as sound quality is concerned, it’s not bad, but with FM-Modulation, you are only getting FM-quality sound. This probably will not matter when it comes to spoken word, but for music, you can definitely tell the difference. The dynamic range is truncated so that you aren’t hearing the sounds that are on the extreme ends of bass and treble. Probably mostly bass because when I play music through these it sounds a bit tinny. I have to really play with equalization, but I know that even when I set loudness on and add additional bass and/or treble, that I’m simply stretching the information, not adding back in sound that’s been chopped off due to the smaller dynamic range. And I’m not an audiophile by any means. I can only imagine how horrible FM sounds to all those with more sensitive ears than mine!

Still, having a set of these sender/receivers is still the main option that fits at this point. I suppose if I got over my love of Launchcast, I could move on to the Airport Express, but as I’ve explained in the past, there is something inherently great about Launchcast that I so far have not found on any other internet radio platform – the ability for it to learn exactly what you like based on your own ratings and those of people who rate music similar to you – a kind of big social network based on music ratings that allows you to keep hearing new music that fits your taste even though you may have never known such music existed!

Another usage that the Radio Shack units allow for that I would not be able to get with a media server is something like Atmosphere, a background sound generator which I’ve talked about before which I really like. Of course I could record Atmosphere to an MP3 file and just play that over and over, but that would do away with some of the inherent randomness that Atmosphere has built into it.

As you can see, there are lots of options out there for those who want to listen to music and spoken word audio, and for many people one of those options will provide everything they want or need. Being somewhat picky about this stuff, of course, hurts the chances of this happening. We’re obviously still in the infancy of digital music when it comes to distribution mechanisms, portability, and compatibility. It may not seem like that with the iPod being around for close to five years and Internet Radio close to ten, but eventually there will need to be some consolidation in terms of formats and technologies or else many of us will have to continue to trudge along with multiple devices, multiple programs, tweaks and workarounds in order to enable us to play everything we want in every way we want, and any place we want.

Update: I’ve recently learned that Launchcast IS partnering with an equipment manufacturer to stream their content to stereos wirelessly. Philips Stremium brand devices apparently will do this. They are, however, very pricey compared to other media servers and I’m not quite sure why. The other problem is that currently Launchcast support is only for its genre stations and not for a user’s custom station. This really defeats the whole purpose. Apparently there are plans to get the custom station support working but I could not get any kind of timeline out of Launchcast folks. Without this support, I can’t see considering such a device, and even with this support I’m hard-pressed to spend such a huge premium just to get somewhat better quality over my current solutions. Of course these devices let you stream video as well, so if you have lots of digital video that you download off the net or create with your camcorder, this will allow you to transmit this stuff to your TV, but then you can do this with devices that cost a fraction of the price…

The Apprentice: My Life In The Kitchen is an autobiography of a French chef turned American culinary authority is a great read. Pepin grew up in war-torn

France and from practically puberty on was in the kitchen cooking for his mother’s restaurant. Thus began a life devoted to food and the culinary arts. We read about how Pepin goes through the grueling apprenticeship process in Parisian restaurants and somehow makes it through despite self doubts and a tendency for clowning that was sometimes very risky in the face of a strict hierarchical system

But as charming as the stories around his childhood and apprenticeship are, things get even more interesting once Pepin is drafted. Due to some great luck, he ends up as the chef for DeGaul. After working for the president for a number of years, he comes back to

Paris but eventually gets bored and comes to

America, and that is where things really start to get interesting. Pepin gets to be friends with some very notary people of the time, a time when gourmets and gourmands were still a very rare bird in this the

US. Such people as Jim Beard, Craig Claiborne, Julia Child, and many others were personal friends and colleagues of Peppin’s and we get to hear inside stories about all of them.

Peppin’s career, once in the

US, explored many different paths. He managed a popular restaurant that brought French bistro food to the New York City masses, worked in the management of Howard Johnson’s when it was all about serving mass-produced but high-quality meals, he gave personal and group lessons, he worked in television, wrote books, administered cooking programs at Boston University, and much more. The story is not just about a very successful chef expanding his career, but of a French cook trained in the French style and then being flung into the freewheeling U.S. and learning to not only survive but to thrive. To take the freedom and lack of formality and new foods and regional cuisines and running with them.

Although the French are often maligned by xenophobes here as being stuck up, snobby, and rude, Peppin seems the opposite of these. He applauds Claiborne’s culinary egalitarianism, he bemoans the lack of a decent number of African American chefs at cooking schools or kitchens, he admires all the different cuisines the

U.S. has to offer, rather than pooh-poohing anything that is not haute cuisine. He recognizes the cooking of women in

France as better in many ways than the very male-dominated system of chefs that populate the finer Michelin-starred restaurants. Peppin’s sense of humor and optimism shine throughout, even in the face of seemingly tragic events that might have ended his career if not his life. One also gets to hear his love of food and cooking throughout – so many events are talked about and always the food is described in such detail and excitement.

If you like to cook, love good food, or just a good story, The Apprentice – My Life in the Kitchen is a great read. I actually listened to the unabridged audio book version of this book, which is unabridged and read by Michel Chevalier, who does an excellent job.

Well, I’ve gotten a little behind writing my reviews of (audio) books, so Why We Buy was actually something I finished a few weeks ago! Hopefully my memory will not fail me too badly, and indeed it was a memorable enough book. Why We Buy was written by Paco Underhill, the CEO of a research company dedicated to examining how people shop and then recommending ways of improving a store to help make that experience easier and thus improve sales.

The book in some ways is almost a study in both sociology and psychology - not only of the customer but of the store owner, managers, and clerks. All areas of retail are covered, from supermarkets to clothing stores, to online stores. Underhill’s firm observes shoppers in all these environments and they take detailed notes about what people pick up, put back, put in their cart, etc. Their conclusions and recommendations, according to Underhill, have unfailingly had one result – they improve sales. Many of these recommendations seem like total common sense, but I wonder how obvious they would be to many of us if we were told to go out and make such recommendations.

The main theme running through the book is that stores all too often get it wrong and do not make the shopping experience an easy one for a large segment of its customers due to wanting to portray a certain image – whether that image is the designer of the store or signage, or the image that marketing wants to portray, etc. For example, in a woman’s clothing stores, often the smallest sizes are placed within the easiest reach. So teenagers and 20-somethings are favored, whereas an older and/or heavier woman has to stoop down to the floor, reach way above her head, or even worse go looking for a sales clerk to help them find a larger size.

As mentioned, I actually listened to this book as opposed to reading it. The version I listened to was an unabridged one from Audible.com, narrated (very nicely I in my opinion) by Rick Adamson. Unfortunately it appears that Audible.com is the only place that it is available in audio.