Portland Parents

Oregon lags below the national average in providing health insurance to poor people, especially children, an analysis by The Oregonian has found.

Kids can’t choose their parents. Kids don’t choose to be poor. We have a responsibility to kids to help them stay healthy. So what’s with this? Kids who stay healthy spend less time in the emergency room, more time in schools and generally “do better.” As much as our schools seem to be hurting these days, we need to help kids with the best opportunities we can give them.

Besides, less sick kids means less snot. You don’t like snot, do you?

The Oregonian

I heard on Radio Disney that they’re setting up “radio disney now,” podcasts of your favorite radio disney DJs and music.

With varying degrees of technical skill and charisma, people just like you are assembling their own syndicated radio shows. Did you ever want to host a weekly chat show? Podcasting is your answer. Do you and your friends amuse yourselves by sitting around rating movies? You could be podcasting. To get more information, check out “what is a podcast” at podcastalley.com.

And it’s not just Disney, folks. There are thousands of podcasts out there on every imaginable subject. Most of the files that are produced are in mp3 format– yes, that same format you can copy your CDs to. So here’s what you can do; find a podcast that looks promising and then use iTunes or some other software to burn an audio CD of your ‘casts. Then you can use it in the car and listen to “talk radio” on any subject imaginable.

So; what do I do? I’m a person on a budget, so I’m trying to make it as easy as pie for myself and still free. I created an account on newsgator (free), and added some podcast feeds. The link for that is on the top left side of the menu bar, right next to “web reader”. I generally find my own feeds, so I go to where I have found a podcast I think sounds like it’ll be interesting and find the url for that feed. It looks like “http://www.doctorfloyd.com/blog/rss.xml.” Over on the newsgator site, on the right hand side, I click on the tab that says “url and import.” I paste that into the little box, and submit it. Then “The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd” shows up on the left column. You can do that as many times as you like.

Then I downloaded the “feed demon feed station” from newsgator, and installed it (there are linux and mac things available, but I did this under XP). When you go back to the newsgator site and view the news feed (it’s just like the rss reader you’re probably reading this with), you can add the audio files to “my podcasts.” After doing that, you can configure feedstation to automatically check your newsgator account and download any mp3 files you have flagged in there.

I don’t have an iPod or other mp3 player (told you I was on a budget!) so I download about an hour’s worth of mp3 files and use roxio’s CD Creator (which I got with the computer) to create a “music cd” from the mp3 files. Then I can just toss it in the car cd player and listen!

If you have an iPod (or other player, but that’s where the ‘pod’ in ‘podcasting’ comes from), feedstation will copy your mp3s right to the player. And I believe that if you purchase FeedDemon as well, you can automate the entire process so that when your newest podcast “show” is released, it’ll be automatically downloaded and set up on the iPod.

Quick tip: Make sure to download 2 parters in order The Dr Floyd one I tested was a 2 parter with Benjamin Franklin, and could have been terrible backwards!

To be honest, I’d love to be able to afford to buy their feeddemon program. FeedDemon was created by the same guy who wrote TopStyle, a terrific css style editor. The best. Which also is the same guy who wrote the only “wysiwyg” html editor I’ve been able to stomach: HomeSite (now owned by macromedia). What I’m saying is that this company, BradSoft, has a long history of excellent software that I wish I could support.

Here are some suggestions to get you started (besides the obvious radio disney one above):

1. The Adventures of Dr. Floyd
2. Club Kidcast
3. Story Nory

Professional Development Days

What can you do in five heartbeats to save the planet? Our kids depend on us to pass them something useful– not a dried up husk of a rock like Some People seem to think.

At EarthShare.Org, you can learn how to protect your children and their world from obesity risks, pesticides, chemicals, and even changing weather patterns.

April is National Poetry Month!

Everything is game, from Free-Verse to Haiku, Sonnets to Limericks (although maybe we should have saved those for March 17, eh? To get you in the spirit of the season, I provide you with Robert Service…

The Land God Forgot
The lonely sunsets flare forlorn
Down valleys dreadly desolate;
The lordly mountains soar in scorn
As still as death, as stern as fate.

The lonely sunsets flame and die;
The giant valleys gulp the night;
The monster mountains scrape the sky,
Where eager stars are diamond-bright.

So gaunt against the gibbous moon,
Piercing the silence velvet-piled,
A lone wolf howls his ancient rune –
The fell arch-spirit of the Wild.

O outcast land! O leper land!
Let the lone wolf-cry all express
The hate insensate of thy hand,
Thy heart’s abysmal loneliness.

Is that a little daunting? How about a nice 5-7-5 haiku?

Silent Swollen Stream
Strong Storms, the mountain crying
Oregon in Spring.