A Creative Commons License Is The Ultimate Music Promotion Tool: Avant Music News cites a common thread heard 'round the world -- "I sold a few copies - but eventually came to a realization I would rather have my music reach more ears as the money I was making was worth far less than the joy of being able to share it with others. Soon after that, I released my latest album along with a few of my older works under a creative commons license.

My goal with art shifted to purely enjoying the process, and I didn’t even worry about promoting it, I just uploaded it. And believe it or not, that’s when the real magic started to happen."

"The galaxy's awaiting
the planet Earth's awakening."

Someday let me tell you how I became certifiably Canada's most listened to modern symphonic composer.

a place to stash your information the Latitudinal Information Scrap Trapper that Indexes Things - is a small, simple note-keeping tool for solving a big, complex task -- helping you manage the tons of little information bits you need to keep track of each day. list.it does this by focusing on speed and simplicity. We have gotten rid of everything except a way to get things in and out quickly, so that you can get things out of your head and somewhere you can access easily any time.

Karger said his group isn't bothered in the least that millions of people still use Post-it notes, but thinks they might be tempted to dial back on the yellow squares if computer programs were designed better. A good program, he said, would have none of the fields and forms common to the genre, and would instead allow someone to easily type or paste in anything they wanted. This design criteria has been elevated by his study group into something of a mantra: "No interfaces."

List.It runs under Linux, Mac and Windows using the Firefox 3.x browser; its free for the download and also gives you the opportunity to participate in the ethnography evaluation of the software by submitting your notes as use tracking data.

Maj. General Smedley Butler, awarded the Medal of Honor twice. His classic statement against war came in the pamphlet, War is a Racket, published in 1935, the telling of the tale of who profits from war, who pays the cost, and how to end the racket.
War is a Racket , by Maj. General Smedley Butler

Girls With Guitars -- the next great manga genre for the modern world ...

Some may ask, "Why do the girl guitar players need a website?" I'm happy to tell you why. I'm lucky to have a long and fairly illustrious career as a female guitar player. I've been a professional guitar player/concert performer/session player/recording artist for over 30 years (Yikes! How's that possible?). After all this time people still come up to me and ask, "Why don't more women play the guitar?" I'm still surprised by the question even though I've heard it hundreds of times and I've finally figured out a way to give people an answer. The answer is on the pages of Girls With Guitars.

Girls With Guitars - A place for female guitar players to meet, greet and share information.

Citizen Orange: Who is it? "... just another undocumented resident living in his adoptive country, giving back to his people and being an example of what it means to be 'American.'

He was sent by his parents to a foreign land so he could have a better life. He never knew he was an 'alien' until his adoptive parents told him in his teen years, but even then he always knew he was different.

He embraced his heritage and adopted his homes ideals and values.

Yet for all the good he does, there are those who still curse him and wish he would go back to his home, a place he's never known and doesn't exist anymore. Sound familiar?"

Fun indeed: I get two tweets in a row from the NFB.ca, the first says mysteriously

thenfb: Will be fun to see how different news outlets react to the site.

followed a few minutes later with

thenfb: Wow. Okay NFB.ca is pretty much headline news across the country

so ... what's all the fuss and buzz about?

Only about 700 pretty amazing films, online, for free, that's all.

Mind bites presents 83 beautifully illustrated reasons why I fled from Psychology.

characteristic pseudoscience cynicism so thick, you could cut it with a knife -- I'm sure to be the object of someone's RDD for that remark.

"This and that from the research into the mind and brain.

"If you have an interesting study, please flickr message me the finding and reference and I'll make it into a mindbite when I have a mo."

Learning SHOULD Be Fun: Tom Stafford writes "In lots of teaching situations we focus on the right and wrong answers to things, which is a venerable paradigm for learning, but not the only one. There is a less structured, curiosity-driven, paradigm which focusses not on what is absolutely right or wrong, but instead on what is surprising. A problem with rights and wrongs is that, for some people, the pressure of being correct gets in the way of experiencing what actually is.

You can try this for yourself, either in any teaching you do, or any learning. Often we will get blocked at a particular stage in our learning. A normal response is to try harder, and to focus more on what we're doing right, and what we're doing wrong. Sometimes this helps, but sometimes it just digs us further into our rut. The way out of the rut is to re-focus on experiencing again."

See also Tom's essay on the always-additive nature of learning at School of Everything: "Once you have learnt something you see the world differently. Not only can you appreciate or do something that you couldn't appreciate or do before, but the way you saw the world before is now lost to you. This works for the small things as well as the big picture. If you learn the meaning of a new word, you won't be able to ignore it like you did previously. If you learn how to make a cup of out of clay you won't ever be able to see cups like you used to before."

Casa Valdez Studios: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Opening Address to the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival - "Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.

And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith.

In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these."