My Heart Will Go On

I have found work increasingly difficult to focus on lately. Although I am allowed to listen to music, and although my MP3 player has at least 15 gigs worth on it, I find myself growing weary of the tunes that I've got.

I've tried to compensate by downloading new music, and it has helped, to a degree. The problem is that most albums are shorter than an hour so I require several in order to keep a rotation that holds my interest. This is a lot of work to do every day, and there's no guarantee that I'll actually like all the new stuff I get. I was about to give up hope, when suddenly I remembered something...

Back when I was 15 and 16 I used to work during the summer at a computer firm that took about an hour to drive to in the morning. I remember that one of the other guys, Rob, had roughly the same commute and HATED it. He said the only thing that saved his sanity was the discovery of books on tape. Thinking about this, I remembered that Project Gutenburg had a lot of audio books online as well as original texts, so I headed over there to see what I could find. The first thing that jumped out at me was Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The office has a fantastic internet connection which takes less than a minute to download a 40mb chunk of audio. And since all the works are in the public domain and read by volunteers, it's completely legal -- this is a black and white area, it's not even remotely grey (ironically, much like the setting of Heart of Darkness, ho ho ho). I reckon I'll be able to finish the book by the end of the day.

The book is read by the lovely Kristen Luoma and hosted on LibriVox. Although she occasionally fumbles over her words or mispronounces some of the British phrases, she does a pretty good job overall! Heading on over to LibriVox I found they have a ton more titles that, for some reason, aren't listen on Gutenburg! Certainly enough to fill the rest of my time here at the office. I've always wanted to read some more 'classics' but have just never made the effort to get around to it (recall my comment about self-discipline yesterday). Now I can do the next best thing and listen to 'em!

Since LibriVox is entirely a volunteer project, I'm totally gonna do some readings for it! I've got a nice deep voice and I like acting, so I don't think it will be too difficult! Apparently you start out doing chapters here and there and then 'graduate' to entire books. I'll be sure to let you folks know when I've completed a few recordings!