When I browsing audio books in the company library, I just discover this hidden treasure hiding on highest level in the bookshelves. The company has a subscription to the executive book summary, that is a book abstract service for busy people. It summarize two to three popular business books per month in a single CD. The library a collection from the last 3 years. From my experience with popular business books, most of them just have one great idea, then repeat the same theme over and over again. The book summary is a good way to quickly separate the chaff from the wheat. Instead of spending many hours reading a book, you can quickly scan its key points in 20 minutes. If you found the ideas in the book useful, you can read the full version to learn more about the details later. The only draw back is human’s memory is a leaky bucket, you may forget what you learn if you just spent 20 minutes listening to the key points. Reading a book may takes more time, but the more time you spent, the more knowledge will stay in your mind after you long forget you had read the book. I just add another goal to my 2009 new year resolution. I am going to listen all those CD on my drive to work.
Reading habit
I have a very bad reading habit. I have the tendency of reading multiple books in parallel. After I started a book, reading it half way, sometimes even just the first few chapters, I may get distracted by a new book. Then I will put down the old book and start the new one. I just count the number of books that are reading in progress, I have 8 books pending to finish. I am not abandoning the unfinished books, I will still read a few chapters from time to time, until I got distracted by another book again. I just finished a book that I started 2 years ago. Here are the books pending in my reading list:
1. Asimov’s Guide to the Bible
2. Dimensions of Moral Theory
3. Free Culture
4. A History of Christian Thought
5. Philosophy of Bullshit
6. A Good Book, In Theory
7. Philosophy of Law
8. Contemporary Political Philosophy.
The oldest book stuck in the queue started almost 7 years ago. My reading pipeline is so full that I really should refrain myself from the temptation of new books. I should focus on the books in hand and just be content with what I reading. Interesting though, I only have this problem with non-fictions. It is easier to concentrate when reading a fiction. It has the element of a story to keep my attention until I flip to the last page or it’s so boring that I give up.
Toastmaster 2009
In 2008, I absented from the Toastmaster most of the year. I have many excuses, like getting marry, travel to India, working on project with ridiculous schedule etc. I went to the Toastmaster year end party before X’mas, mostly for the free pizza. I found that I do miss the enjoyment and satisfaction of delivering a good speech in front of a crowd. Today is the first Toastmaster meeting in 2009. The theme of the day is goal setting. The president of the club try to re-energize the club by having a mini-workshop. During the meeting, he asked the members to think about what they want to archive in club this year.
I am not making any process in my ATM speeches. It’s over a year since I did my last speech. My goal of this year is finishing off my “Humorous Speech” manual and achieve the ATM credential. There are only 4 more speeches to go, my plan is to give one speech every two months. This club has its annual humorous speech contest on Oct. I am going to deliver my last speech as a contest entry. Since I am long time Toastmaster, I feel very natural speaking in front of people. This year, I am going to focus on my pronunciation and the use grammar in my speeches. These two problems are the biggest challenges for most ESL speakers need to overcome.
First ski of the season
I had my first ski of the season today. I have been itching to go skiing in the Christmas holidays, but the weather condition is pretty bad for the past two weeks. The weather forecast for this weekend looked good, it said it would be +5 degree rain. I seize the chance and went to Whistler with my friends. The weather was pretty good in the morning, we have some fresh powder snow over the week. The snow base is not enough, there are still rocks and tree tops on some runs, so we have to stay in groomed runs. It’s not too bad for the first ski, since I haven’t ski for almost a year. The lack of train makes my legs get tired easily and I need to recall the muscle memory. We should take it easy today.
However the weather turns bad after lunch. Its windy and getting cold. It is so cold that we rather ski further down the mountain to take the gondola up instead of taking the lift chair. We only had 3 runs in the afternoon and decided to call it a day. The traffic coming back is very bad. We left on 3:30p and took us 3 hours to arrive Vancouver. It was already snowing in the city. Many cars got stuck in snow and blocked the traffic. The rear-wheel drive cars are very annoying. The driver don’t realize their car can’t go up slopes in snow. Yet they still try their way up and blocking off everyone behind. I finally arrive home at 9p.m. safely. If I know it’s going to snow this afternoon, I would probably stay home instead of go skiing.
Demanding professor
Next semester, my life begins getting back to normal, I am talking another philosophy course. I had class with this professor before, she is really demanding. In her class, she forbid any students using laptop, even for taking notes, because she think anyone with a laptop would be distracted by surfing the web. The course work load was normal, but her lecture expect us to do the reading before coming into class without explaining much background details. I didn’t do very well in that class, but that’s OK, I won’t really care about my grade.
My first class is staring on Monday and the professor already sent out email to the class to assign next week’s reading. I don’t even have time to buy the textbook yet. Luckily the textbook is available online at Google books, so I have to read the two assigned articles on my laptop this week. The work load of this course is not too bad, just two essays on top of the exams. I did introductory political philosophy last year, I thought the intermediate course would be more or less the same. However, I already found I am learning new ideas on the first two essays. The previous course taught about the all the -ism in political philosophy, this course talk about political theories, which is one layer deeper than the -ism.