Inspirations

By all intensive purposes, this was a normal day.

I went back to work after being out for a few days. I drove for the carpool and we caught up on a few items of minutiae. I went into my office, filled the plastic jug with water, closed the door and started going through the 400 emails that accumulated over the last couple of days.

Nothing new.

Then Angela emailed. She wants to go get a certificate in human performance improvement and her work will pay for most of it. Then she told me about a women in technology group that I need to join. I told her about the spiders that were in the hallways at work. Yuck. She then asked if I wanted to join the group and become part of a committee. I got a little excited about her plans, even though I told her that I've got a few things I'm working on right now (job, marriage, de-junking, the big idea that I want to have yet haven't) . We then got into an email conversation (all while I'm completing my real work emails of course) about what is the necessary background to be a good CLO (Chief Learning Officer). With some of these leadership jobs, I think that sometimes the "maybe she's born with it" phrase comes to mind. We have way too many people in leadership roles that should never have that responsibility.

But, I digress. I go on doing my work, putting out fires, making sure we have product going live, attended a meeting about tagging and metadata, talked to some people about "issues" that were going on, and made sure we had a now inappropriate telephone number removed from one of our online courses that just happens to be taken by over 100,000 people in the department of defense. Yikes!

Then I talked to Ann who was all excited about all of the real estate, entrepreneur, running a business stuff that I've always wanted to do. She brought up all of these books that I've read in the past (The Secret, Think and Grow Rich, Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Richest Man in Babylon, The Greatest Salesman in the World, etc.) and I started getting all excited about the possibilities I have in this life.

Drove home with the carpool and shared a little of my conversations with the car pool. Came home, exercised, cooked dinner and opened hotmail.

iTunes sent me a link to the iTunes U. Nice! The classy advertising lured me in and even though I already know that you can download information for free, this time I really paid attention and now really know all of the fabulous stuff you can download for FREE from iTunes U. The world really is flat! Instead of just accessing MIT Open Source or Open University on the web, you can now download it to your iPhone or iTunes. Has this been around a while? Yes. Have I used it? Only a couple of times and more for testing purposes for work. Right now I'm downloading 26 sessions on Innovations Design from Open University to listen to while I go on a walk. All kinds of topics and subjects are available. There is no excuse now for someone not to be educated or to feel like they can't have access to the best. If MIT, Harvard, Yale and others are offering their courses for FREE to all of us...no excuses. Sure, you'll have to pay the big bucks to get credit for them from those schools, but a lot of us aren't looking for college credit. We are looking for continuous learning opportunities that fit into our busy lives.

Anyway, long story even longer...

I'm feeling very inspired today after good conversations, life changing innovations and the ability for all of us to continually learn and improve.

iPOD weekend

Well, this was an interesting weekend of multi-tasking. While performing all of the house cleaning tasks and house painting this weekend, I was able to upload all of my music CDs into iTunes and synced to my iPOD. It took more hours than I care to share, but since I was able to get so many other things done I'm sure the time wasn't wasted. Painting is frustrating to me and so it was nice to see my progress on the computer rewarded. I've used about 12 GB so far and plan to upload a lot more pictures and videos over the next few months. It is at least another means of "backing up" all of my electronic files.

Also, for those of you that are interested...

BYU provided a link and an access code to download some free tunes until April 30, 2008. It's a marketing stint to get people to buy the actual albums, but you can get about 20 or so songs performed by various artists associated with the college. Here's the info:

Webpage - http://magazine.byu.edu/music
Access Code - 1B8Y7U5

iTunes and 80s music

So, I received a very nice iPod as a Christmas gift and have very slowly been adding music to it over the past few weeks. After throwing away several audio tapes from the 80s recently, I decided to buy a few of the greatest hits on iTunes. Luckily, I found an electronic album that claimed to have 80 of the best hits from the 80s. Very cool! I bought it.

Now, I did scroll the list before purchasing and thought I was getting some great hits. However, I neglected to ensure the artists were legit. Let's just say that most of the songs were not sung by 80s stars I had grown up with in the actual 1980s. Imagine the shock of listening to "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" and finding out Jessica Simpson was the singer! What on earth? As it turns out, Jessica, and most of the other singers, get a big "no value added" by creating the re-makes.

After an internal debate, I've decided to keep the music as a temporary solution until I can research each song individually and purchase the correct version. After all, how else will I be able to remember, and re-create in my mind, all the memories of dances, useless crushes, road trips, and sad moments?

Hmmm, maybe some of those originals shouldn't be found. It may be time to move on...