In the past weeks, I missed a scheduled newsletter post and I switched from paper calendar and to-do-list tracking back to electronic. So much for building two different habits during the pandemic.
Rather than add a category for technology and have to fill it each EDwardian Times post, I'll just talk about Trello here. Been tracking all kinds of customer interactions there, as well as special projects. And I've used it extensively for personal scheduling during the work week.
Audio - Read and listened to Elsewhere by Dean Koontz. Just about the audio here. The narrators: Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Imani Parks, Josh Bloomberg, Brian Holden, Kevin T. Collins, Soneela Nankani, Alexander Cendese, Amanda Leigh Cobb. My problem: The way readers typically adjust their voices for speech by different characters, I heard what I would say were four distinct voices. I wouldn't have guessed there were so many people talking part. The main reader was fine, but the reader doing the young girl's voice was terrible. You might like the story of jumping from one parallel universe to another. So try it for that. But if you like hearing one person straight through, skip this. I skipped a third of the chapters because of that one reading style I found unappealing.
Books (personal) - You can get a sense of what Elsewhere is about from the video above. Koontz has published over 105 novels and a number of novellas and collections of short stories, and has sold over 450 million copies of his work Yet this was the first Koontz book I picked up. I'll probably check out a few more.
But I chose Koontz because I wanted to try to find another writer to fall back on for the times when nothing is of any particular interest. Stephen King used to be that guy, and just for comparison's sake, here are his numbers - 350 million copies sold, 61 novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, and 5 non-fiction books, more than 200 short stories, and 19 screenplays.
Books (work) - Nothing of note to talk about in here. We have a Kindle Unlimited plan, and I've been checking out a few freebies. Now and then you get a very good one, but some of the business books don't offer very much and they are very sloppily put together. Can't tell you how many I started in the last couple of weeks that have had multiple typos, or wrong words, in the first five pages (and sometimes three, four, or five). Note to authors, although I'm fairly poor at it myself, please proofread. Those mistakes are serious downers.
Music - When you're walking up to 3.5 miles a day, five or six days a week, you get a lot of listening time in, and I'm trying to stretch do somewhat different things. I stumbled upon Imperfect Circle, by Hootie and Blowfish, released in 2019, after Darius Rucker became a reborn star with his country albums. The shopper/listener reviews are spot on, and I realize these people are mostly fans, but 81% of 600+ commenters gave the album five stars. I had a lot of the same thoughts express in the reviews:
- Rucker manages to sound different with the band than on his own, particularly when singing country
- It's pretty darn good music, whether country or not
- Pleasantly surprised at the sound and the quality
- Happy I took the time to listen to another Hootie album (I wasn't a big fan in the past. I've only become a recent Rucker fan because of his recent solo work.)
Video - Nothing particularly caught my attention over these past few weeks. But what I did notice was how the late night TV people have evolved and gotten better at socially distanced and responsible episodes. They are more comfortable, they have consistent looks, the production quality has picked back up (Fallon's kids aren't doing the graphics anymore) and there are more clicks and special effects back in play. This pandemic life is helping all of us learn, grow, and try different things, and that's been very positive.
