I like to keep an eye on some blogs. The RSS feed arrangement allows me to 'subscribe' to a blog. What that does is allow the latest post to show up someplace I can look and see if that message is of interest to me. I generally subscribe a blog I want to track in my Google Reader and go through it every now and then to see what I have missed. But some of the more steadily interesting ones are posted in snippets on my main blog page where it is even more likely I will look them over. Just yesterday, Peter Duesterbeck, an interesting man who is retraining himself into a new career as a teacher posted a report on his latest student teacher experiences. His most recent post popped up on my blog page and I immediately checked out what was going on with him.
Karen Maezen Miller has written some of the very best words I have ever read and that's saying a lot. I've been reading nearly all my life. So I follow her lead pretty closely. So, this morning when my feeds showed me she had a new post, I read it. Typically Zen, quiet and stripped down, the file has a link at the bottom she advises readers to use to listen to a podcast (sound file, computer version of a CD). Since Miller is valuable and a little different from your average bear, I was primed to pay strict attention. I saw right away that the file plays for 30 minutes, a very long time for me to stand and listen before breakfast and all. It takes a long time for a nerd ex-academic to get through 30 minutes of a wonderfully rich sound file. In fact, it took me more than twice the recorded time to stop and check each new person introduced in the story. I simply must check to see what the internet through Google and printed books through Amazon have to say about this expert or that. All this with an iffy internet signal that requires re-signing on at random times.
It is a good Zen exercise in self-observation to listen to the whole thing from Miller's site or this link from its originators, NPR's Radio Lab. It definitely seems worthwhile and you needn't check all the references. It is a much broader subject than you might think.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
