Another weekend, another audio book

This week, the audio book is "Built to Last" by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. The book has been published in 1994, but the audio book is recorded recently in 2004. And that makes it even better than the original book becuse the authors have time to reflect upon their theories and observations.

I find it hard to absorb Jim Collins' another book, Good to Great. Perhaps I am just not very good at reading books =p

I think it's worth pointing out that all the audio books are borrowed from company's library. I think it's critical for my first job to be a positive learning environment. A place provides learning opportunities. I think the place I am working for, is going out of its way to excel on this. There are thousands of webcast on all sort of topics on its intranet, ranging from our core business information, technologies, science and social science. And the library has a vast collection and is easy to use.

Anyways, my recent interests is product design. How you make a product that's not just useful but invokes people's positive emotion, called Emotional Design. I sucked up all the books by Don Norman, hoping to gain some insight on the art of design product people not only use but love.

Gonna read some of those over the weekend, so nothing much to share yet.

Audio book is awesome

Update! That's right... Back to update this blog again
Not that anyone would care =p

Today I have just finished a book by Thomas Friedman called "The World is Flat", actually, I listen to the audio book in Windows Media Player at 2.0X speed. The experience is great, I get to finish this wonderful book in about 3 hours, which I otherwise would probably give up in the middle of it due to my short attention span.

I like it so much, that I think I am going to do this once I go back to work. I am going to go through my Amazon Wishlist and search them one by one on the company Library website. If they happen to have the audio book, I am gonna grab it right away! If they only have the book (which, they probably would, the library is huge), I would probably need to think about if I would actually go about reading it.


So the points of this post:
1. The World is Flat is an awesome book! Read or listen to it if you could.
2. Audio books are wonderful for people who can't read fast enough
3. Windows Media Player speed adjust feature RULES. Absolutely the best feature ever.
4. Portable audio players, support Audio book as a core scenario. iPod / iTunes already does that, so wake up and do it!
5. Windows Media Audio format has a voice codec that could compress an hour of audio down to about 10MB, and an audio book usually come in as 6 - 8 CDs.