Recycling Electronics

Cleaning up recently I had a lot of old electronic stuff to throw away - broken CD drive and power supply, batteries, a couple of speakers that no longer work, etc. Before tossing it all to garbage, I took a look if there is something more useful that can be done - perhaps some of those parts and the metal in them can be salvaged and reused. That got me to this list of locations (.doc) all around the country (via this site) where electronic waste can be disposed of safely, which I did. So take a look next time, there's probably a collection facility just nearby.

Corporate Spam

When receiving corporate email, it often includes a signature with the senders position, contact info, and possibly a company logo or some other small branding element, which I think is appropriate. Recently however I received a work related email which had in it, embedded around the mail content, four corporate ad images on the side, a large banner on top and the following signature at the bottom. 

I could not imagine how hijacking any outbound company email and "enriching" it with company ads in such a manner could contribute to the company's image, not to talk about the signature ad for the external service doing this, which mostly reminds me of the crappy "sent by hotmail" sigs.

However, after a second glance the bottom "do not enrich" link gave me hope that I might still unsubscribe. Clicking on it, I was asked for confirmation and then presented with the following message:

So now, someone should decide in person if I am deemed worthy enough to not receive those ads in my inbound emails from that company... And knowing the company, this request of mine was probably forwarded to whatever in-person version of /dev/null they have.

Listen...

This post is about something I "discovered" for myself some seven years ago, and have been doing ever since - listening to audiobooks. This manner of storytelling existed long before the invention of print - whether sharing some experience near a camp fire, or a father passing knowledge to son. And although print allowed us a much more efficient and durable way to transfer knowledge, listening to a story is a profoundly different, and better experience. 

When told by a narrator, the plot becomes much more personal, and the characters become alive compared to just reading the "dry text" of the story. And yet, unlike movies, which seem to provide you with even richer experience, audiobooks do not take away your freedom to imagine and create your own world from the words to the writer. Because after seeing the movies Lord Of The Rings or Harry Potter for example, those images will be fixed in my mind when I reread the books, which looses some of the richness of possibilities in the world created by the author. Furthermore, listening to a narration requires you to slow down and pay attention, whereas my ability to read fast may sometimes cause me to skim through sections, and thus loose some of the detail and feel of the story.

Besides being a great way to read a book, audiobooks are very practical - they can be listened to almost anywhere and are an excellent way to use any "dead time" you might have. I've finished some four or five audiobooks just this month, and that's without much dedicated "reading" time - I've been listening in my car while commuting to work, when going to a store to buy groceries or when running on a treadmill in the gym.  I actually went running instead of swimming some time lately just because I had to get to the end of the plot... And listening to audiobooks in the car has a very interesting side effect - I am not impatient or annoyed when being stuck in traffic, because this is no longer "wasted time". There were even several times when I parked at home and then just kept sitting in the car for a couple more minutes, just to finish listening to some interesting part of the story.

For shorter periods of time, when you might not want to listen to just a small part of a long story, I would recommend listening to podcasts. There are thousands of great programs that can be subscribed to and downloaded, for every possible taste, and those are usually shorter recordings. A friend of mine recently recommended me a wonderful Israeli podcast called Making History - those are about 30 mins programs about a variety of subjects, often connected to science but not only. This is a great program to listen to in the morning, on the way to work - subscribe to it here.

I hoped I convinced to you try it out if you haven't yet, and if you want - I have a hard drive full of things to listen to...