So. As I’ve said before, I don’t read anymore. At all. ‘Teh internets’ came in the nineteen hundred and nineties but in ’03 or so I discovered broadband and tabbed browsing with the Opera Browser and my attention span was forever fucked.

Now, I don’t open a new web page with my coffee in the morning, I open a session. Thats right. About 25 tabs in all, which I flit between and use the Cmd+Shift+Click shortcut many, many times to ‘Open New Tab in Background’ so by the time I’m halfway through my coffee, I’ve got about fifty tabs open. So what does this have to do with my reading habits? Lots. Tabbed browsing has reduced my attention span to a few seconds, a minute at best. It’s pathetic really.

As a child and a young adult (hate the term) I would regularly read at least five books a month. I’m not boasting, other kids my age were getting to second base while I was reading Alistair MacLean’s Ice Station Zebra for the third time. <hangs head> Its true..

Nowadays I have a really hard time even getting through a leaflet or those BS little ‘Nutritional Facts’ tables on the back of bags of chips. I don’t need a table to tell me what the nutritional value of a bag of artificially coloured, artificially flavoured chips is! ZERO! That’s the nutritional value!

Anyways I just went off on a tangent there as I am wont to do these days but that just illustrates the point I am trying to make.

So. Quickly. Before someone jangles a set of keys in front of me and I go all “Oooh! Shineee!”

My Attention Span: Fucked.

AudioBooks though: Good.

Somehow the only way I can really ‘read’ now is with an audiobook. It takes a bit of getting used to and it has it’s drawbacks but when your back starts hurting just as you get to chapter two its time to give an audiobook a try.

So. Here’s a list of four great audiobooks (with links) that I’ve just finished ‘reading’, am almost through or have just started. I can’t even read a book at time now. I have to be reading at least two. But I digress…

Read more…

Books Alistair MacLean, An American Addiction: Drugs, and Counterinsurgency in US Intervention in Colombia, David Sedaris, Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook, Guerillas, I Am America And So Can You, Ice Station Zebra, Noam Chomsky, Opera, Scott Adams, When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Since the time I started doing this site (I hate calling it a blog) I have been searching for a decent way to post without using the online WordPress interface. Call me old school but I hate online apps. I always have. Unlike most people I know I have clients for almost everything I do on the internet. I like using a POP client for e-mail (Mail.app) and iChat for Google Talk. 

WordPress isn’t bad. Really. It has always been very stable and the current version (2.7, I think) is a huge improvement over its predecessor in terms of its user interface. It’s speedy too if you have Google Gears (Something that lets websites cache content to your computer to be more desktop app-like) installed. My problem is that Gears doesn’t work in my browser of choice, Opera and more importantly I don’t trust web based editors.

I was thinking about this the other day and have figured out what this habit (or preference) stems from. A lot of people I know who grew up in the same era I did, have the same preference for desktop apps and it stems from a word that brings up really, really bad memories.

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Tech Blogo, Dial-up, Google Gears, indie app, Internet Exploder, Mac, Mail.app, Mantra Online, Opera, Outlook Express, Wordpress