Another AV review (brief)

Just a quick shout out to note I really enjoyed another title in the Portable Professor series from Barnes & Noble, specifically Deborah Tannen's He Said, She Said, which is a lecture series based on her previous books and academic research on the different linguistic speaking styles of men and women and how they communicate (or fail to communicate) with each other. It was very eye opening to me and I had lots of "aha" moments all throughout, remembering past incidents with my ex-wife and ongoing dynamics with my mom. Sometimes Dr. Tannen's research leaves you feeling a little despondent, like there's no way around the impasse, but I do think she's right that at the very least it's better to understand what's going on than to not understand it. It makes a Meta-critique of the language act(s) possible, though it's not always possible in the heat of the moment. It's also much easier to catch other's faux pas ("oh, that was really insensitive") than it is to catch your own, but I guess you learn with time, and even learn to think of better things to say that are more productive responses than the "typical" response one would make, as influenced by one's gender.

Tannen was recommended to me by a library colleague at a neighboring institution, who had read her books and found them very helpful and revealing, and this is a guy whose advice I trust when it comes to reading material. That advice was solid gold in this case. I downloaded the contents of the entire lecture series from its component CDs onto my old iPod Nano (1G) and listened to it the whole drive down to Sugar Land, Texas from the DFW Metro area, roughly a 6 hour drive, depending on traffic. My only complaint about that is that when the tracks were downloaded into iTunes, the naming conventions of the different chapters were inconsistent, and so I had to be vigilant to make sure I was listening to the lectures in their proper order. At least the lectures were internally consistent with each other, so no problem at that level, but because of the naming conventions used, Lecture 10 would line up in sequence before Lecture 7, for example. I would wait until I had open road ahead of me to hop around the tracks to get the next lecture set lined up properly and started. If I could, I would try to time this with my rest stop breaks, with the car fully stopped. If I was in the middle of heavy traffic, I'd just pause my iPod and either go silent or punch out the adapter from my tape deck and listen to the radio softly instead.

This would be a handy method for "reading" library books-on-CD as well. Library audio content that is already in MP3 format typically does NOT work with the iPod but will work with any other MP3 player. I resisted going to iPod for some time until I realized I could download podcasts of foreign language news content, especially German material, with better audio quality (and later video) that short-wave radio broadcasts on Deutsche Welle just couldn't match; their own Podcasts over the web were that much superior, and since I was listening asynchronously, I could listen at my own leisure, when and where I wanted to, and I still do. My bigger iPod (8G) is what I use for this now, since the video content (RTL news, Tagessschau, and other nightly news broadcast video from Germany) takes up a lot of memory, much more so than mere audio content.

I liked having the whole lecture series compacted onto my iPod Nano, because it was a lot easier to scroll through the iPod menu than it would've been to constantly be swapping out physical CDs into and out of my CD adapter/player, which plugs into my tape-deck. I use the exact same pseudo-cassette adapter thingy for both devices and it works just fine in each. I also have some spare computer speakers that I have set up on my nightstand so I can plug in either iPod and simply listen to the content aloud while I'm getting dressed, doing chores, surfing the web or whatever (it's easier than sticking in ear buds when engaged in physical activity). This is a much cheaper work-around than getting an expensive docking port w/ speakers for one's iPod, or more sophisticated adapters that broadcast your iPod to the car's radio on an open channel (which is what you'd have to do if you had only a CD player and no tape deck). I like my low tech work arounds, personally.

Well, time to sign off for me. I managed to stretch this post longer than I thought I could. I'll sign on again, as I feel like it or have something to respond to or get off my chest, and as always I'll pledge to try to keep it Library related, or at least Higher Ed related. If I don't keep my blog(s) semi-topical, they get too unfocused and end up going nowhere. This blog was built on the ruins of earlier abandoned blogs and even earlier abandoned static websites, now lost to the mists of ancient cyberia.