Serendipity

Clyde Herring's photos from World War II and in POW camp in Poland

We visited Poland in July and made a special trip to Szubin, the city/town in Poland where the Germans had a prisoner of war camp.  It was Oflag 64, a POW camp for officers only.  My father was with the 34th Division in North Africa and fought in Tunisia and was captured, marched to Poland and interned at this camp through the rest of the war.  

I've created four pages on this topic at my MobileMe account:

    CEH in World War II [Camp Claiborne, LA. training]

    CEH in North Africa and POW camp  [after shipped to N.Africa, going thru battle & then onto camp]

    Life in the POW Camp in Szubin, Poland  [activities created to pass the time]

    and from our trip this year, pictures of Szubin in July 2009, the remaining camp buildings and a memorial to those who were there and others, from 1939 to 1945

    Szubin, Poland in 2009

[links corrected]

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.  

Using Faces in iPhoto

I have blogged on this before here, or on another blog of mine, but was using iPhoto today and thought I'd try to assign a 'Face' to the various family images there.  Since I had a whole set of photos of Ryan already identified as such, I decided to go through them using Faces to Confirm that they are, in fact, of him.  The program then uses the information and some sort of algorithm to identify similar facial features on other faces in the entire library and asks me then to Confirm them as the person or not.

Doing this, of course I had alot of Ryan right away and confirmed those.  But then I kept going and pretty soon up popped:  his sister, Kate, and nephews/nieces [children of his older sister and brothers who are under 10 yrs].  It's a great feature of iPhoto and it also confirms that often there are subtle family commonalities even though everyone in a family might seem distinctly different.

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 

Fact Checking

St. Petersburg Time's PolitiFact.com is following Obama's various promises during the campaign and keeping an eye on them, as well as doing other fact-checking.  Might be of interest.

A Plane in the Air

Nifty video from VST of a paper airplane gracefully flying in New York City.  Enjoy.

10 Minutes for Health

I know we should all be doing 30 minutes a day of strenuous activity, but that's not always possible.  Yet, even 10 minute sessions can be helpful.  Interesting show on yesterday's NPR, Health

[to the right, a fun photo from the QuadCamera application on my iPhone, still life of pears]

A Wordle of the President's Speech last night.

 Wordle.net

Some images are uploaded on Flickr

under VictoriaJZ.  Many just for fun or of occasional events or trips.

Social Networking

I have been exploring the various social networking sites and over time, have been trying to discipline myself to keep up my blogs [one at HL, one at JZ and this one] and social network contacts [Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter mainly].

Candidly, getting my iPhone made a big difference because each of the sites has an iPhone application [my TypePad site runs my blogs and the others have their own applications], so I've used that to upload thoughts & information [trying to avoid non-informative or non-helpful posts].

Another GREAT application to promote discipline in this area is QuicKeys, a Mac application [also available for Windows] which allows you to program various keystrokes or events to occur through the selection of a key, setting of a time or happening of an event.  I set all my blogs/sites to open in Safari at 7:00 am.  I certainly can close them and do nothing, but this serves as a prompt to suggest to me it's time to update.  QuicKeys is a program made by Startly Technologies, a Des Moines-based company, which is an added benefit.

Safety Tips

Using Facebook:  From AllFacebook.com, 10 Privacy Settings You should know.

Using Macs:  The need for more safe computing, even for Mac users.  From UGN Infomanager.  [I do use a virus program and am careful about my setups - such as NOT selecting the preference to open 'safe' files in SystemPrefs]

A shepherd in the Cretan countryside [he and his wife very kindly invited us in for coffee and cookies one afternoon]