badmigraine 0 Posted October 31, 2003 Share Posted October 31, 2003 Let's say you are employed in a Japanese-speaking office and you have a computer at your desk. Now, how are you going to make it through the day? Cruising up and down the Internet gets noticed pretty fast, either by the boss's eyes, or through IT Dept. stats showing how many times you clicked and on what URLs. Scary! Is there no personal freedom left in the world?! Don't you wish you could just curl up with a coffee and a good book... Maybe one of those great novels that you always thought you might read, but never got around to? Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Count of Monte Cristo? The Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom books? Alan Quatermain? Anatole France, James Branch Cabell, Voltaire, Pasternak? How about some personal historical accounts, like Richard Henry Dana's "Ten Years Before the Mast"? This Boston legal clerk chucked his desk job and sailed with quasi-pirates to the Sandwich Islands, before your grandad was even born! Or maybe some non-fiction? Plato, the Koran, Darwin, Levi-Strauss? Maybe you enjoy Ernest Dowson and the Decadent Poets, the early Yeats, William Morris...or how about those Petrach sonnets, or some fascinating samples of thousand-year-old English poetry--"Westron wind, when wilt thou blow?" Here's what you do. Go to the Project Gutenberg site , browse or search among the thousands and thousands of works, download the text file, then open it up in Word on your computer. In a few seconds, you can format the document with columns or dummy headings and make it appear that you are working on a long memo. It works every time! Nobody will really notice anything when they walk past. If some needle-nose bothers to come up and look closer at your screen, you can click up another document, or minimize the lot and say "confidential memo" until they leave you in peace. Well, happy reading. I'm not even at work, but I am reading Dumas' "Twenty Years After" on my old IBM laptop in bed these days. The thing gets nice and warm, so I don't even need the electric blanket. Link to post Share on other sites
Ocean11 0 Posted October 31, 2003 Share Posted October 31, 2003 Excellent! Just what I've been looking for (not very hard admittedly since I moved close to a library ) I can suck down some of these works onto my Pocket PC and have it read them to me! Link to post Share on other sites
oblivion 5 Posted October 31, 2003 Share Posted October 31, 2003 Cool, you're so kind . Link to post Share on other sites
gurningbob 0 Posted November 1, 2003 Share Posted November 1, 2003 Oh no, more things to take my time on. Link to post Share on other sites
slimeypete 0 Posted November 4, 2003 Share Posted November 4, 2003 What kind of Pocket PC would you recommend? Thinking of getting something like that Link to post Share on other sites
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