I love listening to audio books. I've been a customer at Audible for years and have also found some great classic (that is: public domain) works to enjoy at LibriVox, where the books are free and contributed by users. On the forums, I've seen posts by long-haul truckers, students, housewives, and others who listen to the free audio books and want to participate. Some readers are very talented, and so, being creative, bored, and competitive myself, I decided to try my hand—or mouth. That is, to put my mouth where my... mouth is. Whatever.

Off-beat holiday gift ideas

2007.11.28 — Culture | Technology | by BB Rodriguez

The gift-buying season is here and once again you're wondering what to get that hard-to-buy for guy or gal who has everything. If you've done all your shopping at the mall and Amazon, here are some ideas you probably haven't even considered.

Getting your free lunch

2007.11.18 — Culture | Technology | by Derek Jensen

There is a world of free, open-source, community-contributed content out there. At last, you really can get a free lunch. Are you getting yours? Sure, you know all about Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and free, ad-supported news and opinion at thousands of sites, but do you know about these...?

Postcards from the District

2007.10.22 — Culture | Postcards | Travel | by Derek Jensen

Finding myself with still more time on my hands and access to air and hotel points, I decided a few weeks ago to book a trip to Washington, DC for a long weekend. It was too short of notice to get a ticket to the White House tour, but that's how my business trips to DC have been in the past too. I planned to knock around the town for a couple of days and make a more comprehensive trip with White House tour in a few months.

Observations from traffic in India

2007.08.18 — Culture | Travel | by Frank Stobie

Having traveled to India on four separate occasions I’ve developed a love-hate type relation with the place. My first trip, in September—October of 2005 for approximately four weeks was to deliver training to the staff in Bangalore who would be performing billing exception work for a natural gas utility in Ohio. This is a gentle way of saying we were outsourcing work done in the states to Bangalore.

Jensen-Barry Wedding

2007.06.27 — Culture | Postcards | Wedding | by Derek Jensen

Congratulations to Nicole and Kevin on their wedding on Saturday, June 23! This is a selection of the best of the photographs I shot of the wedding and surrounding events. I have made full photo sets available on my Fotki galleries for the rehearsal, ceremony, and reception. The Rehearsal gallery contains 116 photos of the rehearsal on Friday. The Ceremony gallery contains 138 photos of the preparations, posings, ceremony, and license-signing. The Reception gallery contains 59 photos of the wedding reception.

Unifying English

2007.06.18 — Culture | Language | Spelling | by Roland Grant

The old joke about the United States and United Kingdom is that they "are two countries separated by a common language." That was observed by George Bernard Shaw, the playwright and spelling reform advocate. When it comes to spelling, I myself have joked about "stubborn backwardness of our friends on the Small Island." But the truth is that English has a fairly awful spelling system compared to other European languages, regardless of which version (or mixture of them) you cling to. I've carefully considered the differences between US and UK English and the choices made by Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand writers and have produced these recommendations for unifying English writing at last.

Manhattan redux

2007.06.04 — Culture | Postcards | Travel | by Derek Jensen

Back in 2004, I posted some photos I had taken in Manhattan while I was working across the way in Newark. At the time, I decided that 1400 x 1050 was high enough resolution for these, but recently I decided to post the full 5 megapixel resolution images of these (they were taken when I still had my old Olympus snapshot camera).

Making a better keyboard

2007.05.01 — Culture | Language | Computers | by Roland Grant

Way back in 2005, I wrote about my lifelong frustration with computer keyboard layouts. The hateful tilde, reverse apostrophe, filthy backslash, and strange and alien pipe are all horrible remnants of another time when dinosaurs ruled the earth and typed clumsy snail mail to send to each other. I tried a few keyboard remapper tools, but they were either unreliable or cost more than I wanted to pay (approximately nothing). Fortunately, I eventually found that Microsoft provides just such a tool, that it's reliable, and easy to use—for a Microsoft workaround product.

7 British words Americans should adopt

2007.04.12 — Culture | Language | by Roland Grant

America and the Britain are famously said to be two nations divided by a common language. We sometimes use different words to refer to the same things and refer to different things sometimes by the same words (studying to be a chemist is very different in the US and the UK). It is inevitable that some Briticisms must be better than their American counterparts. Here are some of the best.

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