Serendipity

Freebies galore: iTunes & NPR

I was doing my weekly review of the iTunes Store as well as NPR & found a few things worth checking out, and checking back on:

1.  iTunes has several free downloads each week, of all kinds.  I frequently download all the music and then, if I hate it I can delete it easily or decide to move ahead perhaps to buy the person's next song.

2.  iTunes Podcasts:  The greatest thing since sliced bread, other than iTunes U.

All sorts of material, music, spoken and video, humor, poetry, I could go on [including one of my favorites, This American Life].  I wish I commuted so I could listen to more.

3.  iTunes U:  The second slice of bread, so to speak.  History, philosophy, math, language lessons, marketing, Public Radio shows.  Universities have increasingly been putting material on iTunes U [Stanford, U. Penn, Cambridge University, etc.]

4.  Fourth but not least, NPR.  Again, I was meandering around its site.  I decided to check on the Music area and there are two collections/samplers of music available for free:  Folk at Newport and Jazz at Newport.  

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.

  

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 

Images listed at eBay

I sell photographic images at my Gallery site, but am also now listing a few of them at eBay. [This link to eBay takes one to my profile page where the first ten listings are linked;  if there are others, the links will take you there.]  The ones listed are some favorites of myself and others.

In these troubling times. . .

My suggestion is to turn off the TV and avoid watching all the gloom and doom about the economy.  Don't ignore it, but don't dwell on it.   Empower yourself.

I recall after 9/11 that we were innundated/saturated with television coverage of the incident, effects etc. and at some point after months, a psychologist noted that we were wrapped up in 24/7/365 news about it and that was contributing to our feelings of depression and powerlessness.  The same thing is going on now, with people honing in on all the terrible news.  Not that the economy isn't a problem, but the constant barrage of terrible news coupled with our own constant focus on it is probably doing the same thing. We can each focus on where we are and what we can do, and that'll help the economy more than watching bad news on the TV and feeling powerless to do anything about it.