Drumroll please…the best tool for working on your teak decks is now….
The Amazon Kindle 2!
How does this little wonder help you refinish your teak, one might ask?
Well, technically it doesn’t. What it DOES do is read to you, which goes a LONG way towards alleviating some of the more mind numbing aspects of prepping the teak.
My apologies in advance for this almost completely non-sailing related techno-gush, but after spending six hours today listening to the book I am otherwise reading when my hands and eyes aren’t busy was a much better way to pass the time.
The Kindle 2 is the second generation of Amazon’s e-book reader. In and of itself it is a pretty cool piece of gear – the Kindle allows almost instant access to hundreds of thousands of books – old stuff, best sellers, etc. via free wireless communication. Its as easy to read as a paper book, and is much smaller in size than a C.S. Forrester trade paperback and holds around 1,500 books. I can shop for new books anywhere I can get a Whispernet (which is really Sprint) signal.
But the Kindle 2 has one other important feature – it will read almost anything you have in it out loud. So in addition to being a BOOK, it will read to you like an audio book. I say like an audio book, because it is still a computer synthesized voice so it is like listening to the Voice of NOAA weather reading to you. It does lack the emotive impact of a true audio book being read by a human. But for switching back and forth between reading a book and listening to it while you work it works just fine once you get used to how it pronounces (er, mangles) all the protagonists names.
So instead of listening to commercial radio (where half the music and all of the commercials I don’t like) or talk radio (most of which makes my head want to explode in short order) or non stop CD mixes (which still get repetitive after a few hours) I can now continue “reading” the latest novel I am wrapped up in.
Is it Nirvana (or “Nerdvana” as Scott Adams so acurately put it)? Well almost, except you are still barking your knuckles on things, stabbing yourself in the hands with teak picks and chisels, and crawling around on your hands and knees under the shrink wrap. But at least your mind is engaged in your book.
…….
To tie this all back to boating for a minute – one thing we strongly considered when I browbeat my wife into we decided on His & Hers Kindles for anniversary presents is that when on a boat it will reduce clutter AND ensure we never run out of books so long as you are in range of the wireless Whispernet and/or the internet periodically. Since we can share books between the Kindles we can buy a books once and there is no need for more paperbacks stuffed into various corners in the boat. So there actually IS a boating angle to this, though it somewhat saddens me to think that we might not spend as much time browsing book stores at our destinations.
