[Update: This contest is now closed, and the winner is melvynadam. Thank you for participating, we'll have more give-aways starting soon!]

Don’t have time to read? Then it’s time for Simply Audiobooks! North America’s largest audio book retailer with over 22,000 titles for sale, rent or download.

Simply Audiobooks is a service which allows you to rent up to four audio book CDs at a time, as many times in a month as you would like. They have over 22,000 titles, so your odds of finding something you’ll enjoy should be pretty good. They also offer a “prepaid rental option, enabling subscribers to pay up front for a full year’s worth of audio listening.  Plans are cancelable at any time, with refunds prorated at the discounted rate.

Last month I posted about the Simply Audiobooks service, and now they have offered to sponsor a fab giveaway. The prize is what they are calling the “Cure Your Commute” package, and it includes ten audiobooks (a $200 value).

This contest is open to readers in North America (US & Canada). You can win by simply posting a comment naming the last good book you read – extra consideration will be given to those entries which explain why you enjoyed it so much.

One winner will be chosen, and the contest will close Sunday, June 1 at midnight.

This contest is now closed, and the winners have been notified and posted here. Thank you for participating!

Before our month of give-aways was so rudely interrupted by the server crash of 2008 (from now on to be known as “BC”), we were nearing the end of the giving cycle, but I still had 10 days worth of goodies left to go.

I have decided to save those items for the next massive give-away (most likely to be done in time for Christmas). So instead, we are going to pull out the stops to end this contest with a bang!

We have two Windows Mobile 6 Professional (Pocket PC) unlocked PDA phones to give away: an O2 Atom Life which was generously donated by TTT and an HTC Touch Dual that I was given at Mobius 2007 by HTC and Microsoft; both phones are Euro 3G. We also have eight (8) Amazon gift certificates, each worth $25, which were donated anonymously.

The two phones have been gently used, but each come with their original boxes and goodies. The gift certificates are brand new.

Basically, there will be ten winners, and here is how you could be one of them…

Everybody gets three opportunities to enter, which means up to triple the chances of winning.

Entries will be accepted as follows:

1. Your first entry should just be a simple post, perhaps why you would like to win a particular item, or what you would like to do with it if you won – nothing too difficult, okay?

2. Your second entry must be a short paragraph about your favorite gadget, and why it is your favorite gadget. Be creative – as you have probably figured out by now, amusing the Team helps us pick winners.

3. Your third entry, should you decide to do one, must be a link to a picture of you with a gadget posted to your Flickr account and tagged with “geardiarycontest“. These pictures might be taken somewhere interesting, can be humorous, fun, serious – whatever you want; just please keep it clean.

To inspire you, here are a few Gear Diary Team photos…

Wayne, with his iPhone first thing in the morning

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Before our month of give-aways was so rudely interrupted by the server crash of 2008 (from now on to be known as "BC"), we were nearing the end of the giving cycle, but I still had 10 days worth of goodies left to go.

I have decided to save those items for the next massive give-away (most likely to be done in time for Christmas). So instead, we are going to pull out the stops to end this contest with a bang!

Behold:

I have here, two Windows Mobile 6 Professional (Pocket PC) unlocked PDA phones. The one on the left is an O2 Atom Life, which was generously donated by TTT. On the right, is the HTC Touch Dual that I was given at Mobius 2007 by HTC and Microsoft. On the bottom are eight (8) Amazon gift certificates, each worth $25, which were donated anonymously.

The two phones have been gently used, but each come with their original boxes and goodies. The gift certificates are brand new.

  
Basically, there will be ten winners. We will start the contest on Monday morning, and all details about how to win them will be posted then.

I can tell you now, that as we always do – this contest will be open to everyone all over the world and shipped at my expense. Registration on Gear Diary will be necessary to enter (so you might as well do it now and get it out of the way), and you will want to make sure that judie (at) geardiary . com is in your non-spam list.

More Monday…

Most of the photography bags I have reviewed in the past have been very functional, but they also…hmm, how can I say this? They looked like casual bags which were camouflaging the fact that they could safely hold many thousands of dollars in equipment — which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I didn’t feel that any of them exactly stated “I’m a professional photographer, so yeah…take me seriously”.

Of course, that might also be because I am not one, and I don’t play one on TV.

However, the bag I am going to look at today does look like something I would envision a professional carrying. Go ahead and laugh, we all have certain stereotypes that we get in our minds when we think of different professions; to me this bag looks like the real deal, and after going over it with a fine-toothed comb, I am even more convinced. I would fully expect to see a news reporter / photographer carrying a bag such as this when on assignment; once we have finished going over it together, you can tell me if you agree.

photo courtesy of Naneu Pro

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When Gear Diary was created on September 30 last year, I didn’t think about keeping track of how many visitors came until Vincent mentioned that I was missing out on one of the joys of site ownership…statistics. Upon his advice, on December 21 I installed a little counter at the bottom of each page and promptly forgot about it…until the numbers started racking up. For the last month, the Gear Diary team has been watching to see when our first official million visits would occur; today was that day.

I almost let it go by, but Wayne just reminded me.

For the record, we are also at 1,452,443 page views, we currently have 1,600 posts, 7,553 comments, and Akismet has captured 61,306 spam comments. Yikes!

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2006 went by all too quickly. It was a year full of making new friends, renewing past relationships, unbelievable offers, epiphanies, exciting transitions, new partnerships, and with the exception of one major let-down – it was a supremely wonderful year.

There’s no telling what will happen in 2007, but here are a few things you can look forward to…

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