Archive for January, 2006
Open Source Education- Learn From Free Podcasts
How long’s your commute? What do you do when you’re doing laundry? Do you really LIKE the music they play in your local grocery store?
You could be using that time to LEARN.
What follows will be a list of places to find FREE educational materials that you can download and listen to at your convenience.
First off, you don’t need an iPod to listen to podcasts. You can download the MP3 files to any computer and play them easily with the installed player of choice (Windows Media Player or Quicktime or whatnot). If you DO have an iPod, you can Google podcatcher software and look for what works best for your machine (or if you’re lame like me, you can manually download new podcasts, copy them into your iTunes, and then force them down the throat of your iPod).
The List:(which is by no means conclusive. Add more in comments)
Learn Out Loud- These guys are the daddy of all places to find new and interesting educational podcast material. Also check out their list of free audio and video.
Stanford on iTunes - This one gets posted to del.icio.us all the time. It’s pretty good. There’s a huge listing of courses to check out.
LibriVox - This is a great project, where they are creating audio books from books that are now in the public domain. Lots of interesting reads here, and would make good fodder for long road trips like vacations.
Webcast Berkeley- HUGE ton of files here to check out.
University Channel- This site has podcasts all over the place, about various topics.
Feel free to add more great resources in the comments section.
Fix the Repeat Clutter Offenders
I am on a mission against repeat offenders. (of the clutter kind.)
Clutter messes with one’s productivity. It distracts. You might look at it and think, “I really SHOULD be doing something about THAT” instead of working on whatever really matters most. You might not be able to find things. Whatever the case, clutter has to go. It mucks with time you could be spending on YOU.
Here are some examples from my house and what I intend to do about it:
The Mess: When you enter our house, there’s a mess right by the door. It’s SUPPOSED to be where we all take off our shoes and coats and whatever else we wear out. There’s actually two little bookcases for boots (which is much better than what WAS there) and some hooks for coats. But it’s still not working.
The Fix: I’m going to design something more like BINS with lids, and the rule will be: I don’t care what it looks like INSIDE the bin, but I want your stuff in there, and the bin closed. (Note: when I say design, I might actually get lazy and trek down to Ikea and buy something instead.)
The Mess: In the living room, we have a nice functional coffee table. It has nice space underneath it to store stuff, but at the end of the day, it’s a shin-level thing you’re supposed to put beverages on when people are visiting, and it gets CLUTTERED. Not very functional, and also a magnet for clutter.
The Fix: I’ll replace the coffee table with a big tall table, the kind people can really sidle up to and USE. I’ll make it something like a butcher block top (or whatever will give me lots of AREA), and then with the bins again. I’ll install four sliding bins underneath. One for the three of us who can use bins and one for dining materials. Then, the kitchen table goes away and we’ll use this one as the FOCAL point of the whole house.
The Mess: Our laundry scenario is a little messy right now. The hamper we had was stylish but stupid. The new one was functional but buttugly.
The Fix: This calls for a tall bin on wheels, that’s easy to bring down to the laundry room, and that can be closed shut and made lessy clutterrific.
Overall: There’s one more point overall. Reduce. Get rid of things you’re not using and haven’t used for over a year. The likelihood that you’ll use them again is low. Sell them on eBay. Donate them. Whatever. But they’re not helping anyone.
Free eBook at Seth Godin’s Blog
Seth Godin is giving away a free ebook entitled, “Flipping the Funnel” over at his blog. I’ve read all of his books, free or otherwise, and there’s always something interesting you’ll want to work with right away. Check it out: link.
Off Topic: Best Website Name Ever
Here’s the coolest website name ever: songstowearpantsto.com
Check it out.
Career Feeling Stale? Take a Library Vacation
Nick over at AsktheHeadhunter.com has a great two-part article discussing one way to think about and revitalize your career. He calls it a Library Vacation.
Keep Your View Open
Yesterday, I heard of a new role in the real estate world. Basically, if you’ve got your house on the market for a while and no one’s buying, you can rent out a person who comes in and gives the place the once-over from a marketing point of view. The woman I heard was RUTHLESS: “What’s with this psychedelic lamp?” That kind of thing. It’s what she said next that stuck.
People are still viewing the place they’re selling like it’s their home. It’s not. It’s a product. And it’s a product that needs as much marketing as a new car.
Can you see how that changes what you might do to present your space for other people’s eyes? Now, take the basic core thought and expand it further:
Look at YOURSELF as a product to be marketed.
Would a new company looking for talent and experience hire you with the mindset and attitude you have now? Would they look at your skills and find them lacking? What about your professional life needs to be developed more, to make a more well-rounded product?
It’s a worthwhile exercise to consider.
Quick programming note: two of the three giveaway books are gone. Write me to get EMERGENETICS, a great study on various personality types and a way to view yourself differently.
Get Your Music at GarageBand
Do you want to find some GREAT music you’ve never heard before? Go to Garage Band and find all kinds of unsigned bands and performers. The music is amazing! It’s not like a pile of junk or your cousin’s old junk band. It rocks! Check it out!
Free Download: BubbleMap Productivity Focusing Tool
Bubble Mapping is a way to focus your efforts on what needs to be done to accomplish a shorter term goal. Here’s a free pdf file you can download and print to try the concept out.
Here’s what I did with mine:
I wrote down a major goal in the green-blue box: create content. I then broke that down into what I thought I’d end up doing during any given work day to accomplish that, including the last line for firefighting/emails/surfing.
I’d love to know what you think of the idea.
Download the file here. (You click the file, then it’ll pop open another page. The DOWNLOAD button is at the bottom left of the page.)
Business Book Giveaway
FREE new Business Books!
I have the following three titles (one of each) that I’d like to send to you absolutely free. Why? Because I want to share. I want to give you something that might be of use to you.
First come, first serve. Simply email me: offer @ chrisbrogan . com , and I’ll send you your choice (you should probably pick which ones you want in order of 1,2,3). You’ll have to give me a mailing name and address obviously.
Here are the books:
(Clicking the invisible white boxes BELOW the pictures will give you details from Amazon.com . If there are two images for each book, I blame the same.)
The Internet is Cool
Okay, this is kind of an “aw shucks” post about how neat the internet can be. Here’s what I just did over the last half hour:
*I checked out my friends and colleagues’ blog posts.
*I listened to some old cassettes transferred to mp3 of video game sounds.
*I found the complete text of Neuromancer by Gibson in PDF.
*I edited a file in Writely, a free online feature-rich document editor.
*I wrote a few blog posts, added a few pictures to Flickr.
*I found this MASSIVE list of freeware.
*I found a cool MASSIVE list of free, online, games for preschoolers.
*I downloaded Ubuntu 5.10 so I can load it on a target laptop sometime this week.
Offline, I drank a beer and ate arroz con queso.
Pretty neat, eh?
