Month: May 2007

No More @$!%# in Pandora

Dale

noswearsI’ve talked about Pandora in the past. It is a great site for discovering music and it’s an easy way to play some tunes in the classroom.
One drawback to Pandora was that naughty words popped up in some of the songs. Fortunately, Pandora has a fix to this little problem.
Click “Settings” in the upper right corner to see an option to enable an explicit lyrics filter.
Now I can play my “White Stripes” station without worrying about the words my grandma doesn’t like.

A book about email

Dale

emailbook Recently I heard an interview on Wisconsin Public Radio about email. The guest was David Shipley, coauthor of “SEND: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home.”

Shipley gives tips to help avoid email pitfalls and discusses how to write the perfect message.
I encourage everyone to give it a listen; it was a fun interview.

The authors also have a website where you can read examples of bad emails.

We all have our horror stories, here’s what bugs me the most:

  • No meaningful subject line—Imaging if the newspaper quit using headlines or changed them all to “read this” or “FYI”.
  • Email for the masses—Chain letters, rants, persuasion pieces…why did you send this to me? I barely know you. (This website provides a solution.)
  • Forward of a forward of a forward— I don’t always need to see who sent you the message. And maybe they don’t want you to spread their email address all over the world either.
  • Pretty email—Just because you can make your default font Comic Sans in purple doesn’t mean you should. And there’s nothing wrong with a white background.

Aaaah that felt good. Now post your pet peeves in the comments section below.

Use Rules to prune your Outlook inbox

Dale

With all the messages that get sent around at work, we need to prune our email inboxes every once and a while.

Outlook lets you move (or even delete) messages that meet certain criteria. For example, you can delete all messages that are from spam@temple.com or you can move all messages that contain the word homecoming into a “Homecoming” folder.

rules

Outlook makes this easy with its Rules Wizard. You can find a quick step-by-step tutorial to get started.

You need to fight for Pandora and NPR

Dale

nopandora A few weeks back I wrote about streaming music in your classroom. I left out the fact that Internet radio (like Pandora) is in jeopardy due to a possible royalty hike brought on by the RIAA.

Savenetradio.org explains:

The future of Internet radio is in immediate danger. Royalty rates for webcasters have been drastically increased by a recent ruling and are due to go into effect on July 15 (retroactive to Jan 1, 2006!). If the increased rates remain unchanged, the majority of webcasters will go bankrupt and silent on this date.

Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, explained in a recent interview that this would cost Pandora millions of dollars. It would very likely end their business. It’s not just going to affect Pandora. Thousands of internet radio sites and even NPR will be subject to the increase.

Everyone understands that paying royalties is a fact of life but these prices are unreasonable. They are much higher than satellite radio. Traditional broadcast radio doesn’t pay any royalties to record companies or recording artists!

Visit SaveNetRadio.org to join the fight for the preservation of Internet radio. There is a bill in congress, The Internet Radio Equity Act (H.R. 2060), that would fix this. Call your congressperson to ask them to co-sponsor this bill. Tell your friends to do the same.