Serendipity

Go to the website and play this NOW!!!

Soy Tu Aire    It is a song ["I'm Your Air"] by Labuat, a female vocalist who sings in Spanish [her website is www.labuat.com] - but this is not only a song but an interactive experience.  As summarized on VSL, where I found it:

As the song — “Soy Tu Aire” (“I’m Your Air”) — kicks off, a line of black ink moves across the screen: You can send it up, down, back, and forth, or swirl it into circles. The line grows thicker along the way and splatters into several shapes: butterflies, red lips, birds. The immersive experience will make you feel like a maestro.

Wait for it to download and then move your cursor around and around and you'll get the idea.

Cloud formations in Iowa

I just uploaded some pictures of various clouds [mostly cumulous but some looking suspiciously like tornadoes on the way] to my Flickr site [VictoriaJZ] - some of the cloud formations are, sort of, Iowa mountains...you need to squint a bit though.

iPhoto and Face Recognition

I probably commented on this before, but I went back to iPhoto09 and was working with a library full of scanned images and thought I'd pass this on.

I have been scanning in photos and have concentrated on family 
and friend photos so far.  Then I thought I would use Faces to put 
names to people.  So did so with a few people.  When I went to 
Confirm Name for our daughter, it pulled up a whole bunch of photos 
which, indeed, did include her.  And those which did not included me, 
my husband and/or our son...meaning there's evidently enough identity 
points to find the similarities.

It gets really interesting when you have exhausted Confirm Name and 
it starts picking out faces of others in the family or among friends 
and you can, sort of, see some features which are similar.  All and 
all a good timesaving feature and fun to boot.

Playing for Change

Happened to catch NPR interview with Mark Johnson of Playing for Change.  Joyous music...the CD is now out.

Kate is blogging from Chile this year!

She's teaching in a small [2,000 people] town, Futaleufu, Chile, and blogging about it, though not as often as she should.  She's teaching in schools there through World Teach.....NoLungYet

Alaska, the Western U.S. and Volcanos

There's a reason "volcano monitoring" is in the stimulus package just passed and, contrary to Governor Jindal, is not an example of wasteful government spending, not any more than building levees around New Orleans is.  This is explained by Alaska's two senators in letters to the Governor.

Obviously, we don't have volcanos in Iowa, but each part of this country has its share of natural disasters [tornados, hurricanes, wildfires, floods, etc.] and having monitor and warning equipment seems, to me, to make sense.

We visited Alaska last summer for a few days and it's hard to put into words how magnificent the landscape is and how outsized  it is.  One certainly feels tiny in its presence.

  

A Sign of Iowa in Venice

Fun to see, Vermeer manufacturing machine on a canal in Venice.

iPhone Applications

If you're like me, there are WAY too many applications to download to your iPhone, plus some are expensive [for professional use no doubt] and some really are bad.  So, what to do?  Find in-depth reviews.  So, I read the reviews and discussions at the iTunes Store.  Then I go to other iPhone information sources to find what information I can, or else I just shell out the 99 cents for the experience and fun of trying something [or get it for free!].

If you Google/research 'iPhone websites' you will find plenty.  I like iLounge and iPhoneAtlas, but the best right now [IMHO] is 148Apps.  You can Twitter it and keep an eye on things coming in as they do, fast and furious.  Not that I have had time to even test out the apps. that are on my iPhone, but I will!

There ARE jobs out there, but you have to work at it no doubt.

I'm on LinkedIN and noticed it added a 'Jobs' tab to the page - in the Des Moines Networking Group's page today are 27 jobs.  Most appear to require some background and skills, but at least there are some available.  

I'm on Facebook and Twitter as well, though one does have to be judicious in their use [Doonesbury is having a particularly funny series right now about twittering].  But, they're valuable tools for making quick contacts and for sharing and marketing, so good to know.  In fact, I'm leading a 'tutelage' [my term] in a few weeks for my breakfast club on the topic of social networking.  Should be fun and educational as well.

Stock Market collapse

I'm studiously ignoring it, since I can't do much about it.  But if you go to StockCharts.com and look at the charts, you can see that this too shall pass.  Might be a good time to catch one's breath and turn off the talking heads and not get too stirred up by talking from people who, really, don't know much more than we do:

* what is happening now is precipitous, a sudden decline [which is what is freaking people out]

* the stock market was way down back in the early 90's