Sunday, November 22, 2009

Audio Book Craze



apparently the novel has a movie version

 Apart from photography, I have found another distraction: audio books. This is an offshoot of law school, when I had to listed to audio codals in my iPod during commute, to remind me of lessons for the evening's class. I think I am beginning to prefer listening rather than reading books, especially that it enables me to use productively the time I spend commuting to and from work and other chores, which I use a considerable amount of time for. I am also looking at getting classical music for my iPod: just music with no words, most probably made with violin and piano. My boyfriend listens to gaming pod casts and all sorts of popular music. I guess this illustrates how different our tastes are, even when we have a lot of things in common. =)

I easily found websites with free download audio books, made mostly by volunteers. Someday, maybe I'll upload in my blog or Scribd page a downloadable audio which I recorded myself, tee hee.  Audiobooks.net is a good place to start looking for free audio books. So far I've downloaded three poems and a novel, Lady Chatterlay's Lover by D.H. Lawrence. All have turned out pretty well. I particularly like the reading of The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe's classical poem, which I downloaded from the same website.

I've been trying to download other stuff, Grimm's Fairy Tales (I wanted to hear about the real gruesome tales behind the sugarcoated Disney renditions!), Japanese folk tales, Greek myths and ghost stories. Delicious! The intermittent (grr!) internet connection is slowing my downloads down, but I can wait. I am now at Chapter 3 of the Lawrence novel, a book that made it to the 7 classical novels banned during their time.

This week, I have also learned to fiddle with the settings of my new camera. I took a nice picture of Carlo while we were in a coffee shop. I've adjusted the exposure compensation and the focus setting (set to macro). I'm so proud of this shot! I know I should've moved a little to the right to center his position on the picture, but its a lesson learned. I took a lot of scenery photos also, saved in my Multiply account, but they weren't good enough for uploading into Flickr. Anyway, here's my shot:

this was edited a bit 

We are planning to visit an aquarium exhibit and eat in a seafood restaurant near the bay next Sunday. I can't wait to take pictures! 

I wanted to upload The Raven in MP3 format into this post, but I didn't know how. Oh well. ;-)