Well luckily I have a nice new car because since last week I'm doing a project on the far side of Brussels and as a result have to spend 3 to 4 hours per day in traffic jams. More than ever I can't understand how traffic wasn't an issue during the last Belgian elections.

Anyway, I got a built-in media player in my car and to make life tolerable I'm now collecting podcasts and audio books to put on a USB stick and listen to while stuck in traffic so that 20% of my life isn't completely wasted. I find it very hard to follow an audio book as my thoughts always drift off, hopefully practice will improve that but I doubt it. By finding the right audio books I still hope to get to a point where I actually enjoy sitting in my car and listening to them.

I've listened to "I, Robot" by Isaac Asimov while I had my training program in Brussels, and I've tried to start on "The Idiot" by Dostoyevski, but I'm gonna focus on non-fiction for the moment because it doesn't matter so much if I miss a minute there. Right now I'm 'reading' Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" which is quite entertaining, and I have Sun Tzu's "The art of war" and Karen Armstrong's history of islam lined up. I also like to listen to the Battlestar Galactica podcasts but I'll save those for when I rewatch some episodes.

My car's media player has the incredible limitation that it can't fast forward or rewind through mp3's (but then it's a Microsoft product so what did I expect) which is a problem for long audio tracks. Luckily I found mp3DirectCut which very easily lets me cut up mp3's in chunks of 5 minutes or any other size.