::A Geek in Korea::

I have about twenty to thirty minutes every day spent with Yoshi walking him around the apartment complex and the nearby park. I normally spend this listening to podcasts from various sources organized through podcastready. I’m up to about twenty podcasts now, some daily, some weekly, all of them very interesting and entertaining.

While I tried out Librivox for free classical work, I found the recording quality highly variable at times. It was fantastic for finding old classical works, but sometimes it was difficult to listen to the people recording them. I wanted a more professional sounding set of books.

I stumbled upon Podiobooks around the same time, and while I found a few novels that sounded promising, I never made the dive and started listening to them. Sometime two weeks ago, I had finished all my podcasts for the day and wanted something to bring with me to work. I decided to download one of the books, Earthcore. It had been the most downloaded book at the time, and it was also the highest rated.

While there were good free classic audiobooks at Librivox, there were new novels from new writers at Podiobooks. I just had to find a few books I liked. Since they were free, what was it going to hurt to give a few books a try?

Immediately upon listening to the first installment of Earthcore, I knew I had made a good decision. The quality of the production was leaps and bounds better than most of Librivox. The story was interesting too. I was hooked.

I listened to Earthcore for the past two weeks, only finishing it last night as I came home from work. Upon completion, I found Heaven, another book I’m totally digging. This book is part of a series, and the third book isn’t even finished being recorded yet.

It’s not like I’m going to run out of material waiting for the Heaven series to be completed though. Every day I don’t listen to my daily news podcasts, my backlog grows. I’ve got a week or more of podcasts I need to catch up on. I’ll need to go exceedingly far out of my way walking my dog to ever get caught up on all of this new, free, professionally produced material on my mp3 player. This is exactly the sort of thing that keeps my mp3 player in my ears whenever I step outside on my own. I’ve always got something interesting to listen to instead of endlessly tracking down new music. This stuff comes to me instead. I’m totally gaga for this, as stimulating English language listening material outside of television or bar talk is at a minimum here. I just hope I don’t drown.