GetAbstract – Business Book Summaries

Recently, someone who also suffers from a two hour commute turned me on to book summaries.

Considering how much potentially productive time I lose during the day, I’m always looking for a way to condense business and self development reading material.

While a few companies service this market, I choose GetAbstract because they keep their summaries small (5 to 6 pages) and the selection of titles is huge. They currently carry over 5000 text summaries and a smaller selection of audio summaries.

With my wife and me starting our own businesses, I figured the 6 month subscription was a good investment. (179.00 CAD) If nothing else, the summaries serve as a concise reference for books I am undecided about buying or I already own.

Summary downloads are available in PDF, other various e-book formats and as MP3’s.

In my opinion, the best part of the service is the Iphone App. It gives instant access to their entire audio and print library. The audio files are small enough that I can afford to use my expensive 3G bandwidth during my drive.

But note, the app costs a steep $2.99. Considering the cost of the subscription it probably should have been free.

In short, many of us are programmed to take in the bulk of our information through short articles on the web because of the lack of both time and attention span.

It makes sense that the information hungry public will turn to condensed material to keep up with changing trends and ideas. Making services like GetAbstract an attractive alternative to sitting down and reading a full book.

GetAbstract

Ethan in holland

A picture of Ethan at Gwens wedding

Ethan

Teething

I always believed that the painful experience of teething was restricted to the first year of childhood, but my son’s teething episode in the last two days has proven my theory wrong.

Initially, we believed that he had come home infected with just one of the million of viruses that wander the hollowed halls of his daycare.  But the fever, cries for water in Portuguese, and massive amount of drool rolling from his lower lip pointed towards teething.

The last few days have been rough.Unfortunately my wife has born the brunt of the situation, Ethan loves me but when he is sick it is all about mom. Considering he was in massive pain over his emerging molars, the pain was only that much worst and the need for mom that much more.

As I write this, mom headed out to work and Ethan has just screamed himself into unconsciousness. His screaming for mom petered out at the edge of the sofa and he just passed out into a loud snore.

I fear to wake him up because I don’t want him to freak out on me and he seems peaceful and pain free. Yet, I also fear to let him sleep and ruin his internal clock an have him up all night in pain.

Update:

I got the best of both worlds. He got up in a good mod, smiled at me, and didn’t once ask for Momma. To keep him happy I’m going to load up the Wiggles video on my Iphone and snuggle up with him in front of the comforting light of my Apple product.

Burn the Negative is back on the Internet …

You can now see all the installments from the original run of Burn the Negative on my Flickr page.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/burnthenegative/

Here is one of my favorites from the run.