Volunteers

Volunteers

<rant>

S and I volunteer with our church, youth organizations and others.  As a matter of fact, we organize some of our home setup around that work – we have a home office not to work at home from our jobs but to support our volunteer work this is a large portion of our lives. We’re both very busy but would miss this work if we couldn’t do it.

That makes working with other volunteers difficult some times, we’re both dedicated to the organizations that we work with but I find it frustrating sometimes working with others in our organizations. I hear complaints that communication in a volunteer organization isn’t working but then they aren’t attending the meetings that are being held.

Sigh…

One other observation, much of the communications that we do between volunteers is by email and I have run into people that ‘just don’t have email’ which is ok, but I’ve also run into people that don’t have email and throw that back at you as a challenge. They’re almost proud of it…?  Now, readers that aren’t in Canada should understand that 70%+ of Canadians have access to email either at home or at work and that percentage continues to grow every year.

I wonder if people that are not on email understand – I can send an email to five people at once, rather than making five phone calls over the course of two days, leaving messages, getting call backs etc. With services like GMail with its excellent conversation tracking it’s even easy to track multiple conversations over several days.

Double Sigh…

Ev

</rant>

Podcasting

Podcasting – I’m hooked

I’ve gotten into podcasting – well listening to them anyway. I’m currently working on a client site where I don’t have internet access. Normally when I’m at the office I log onto one of a couple of streaming music sites (yahoo music and Pandora being most common) and listen to the music they send me.

However, at this site I don’t have internet connectivity and I was getting a little twitchy with nothing to listen to so I downloaded ITunes from Apple and went hunting for podcasts. Now, for those of you who might not know…a podcast is a serialized audio, or potentially video, program. These can be done by Hank and Earl in their basement using a $10 microphone or by very serious internet casters like Todd Maffin who works for the CBC. He has a personal podcast called todbits.com that I really enjoy and is done to professional radio broadcast standard.

One of the interesting things is this fantastic variety – people of all skills and interests make podcasts, I would say it’s a little like the shareware or freeware software interest groups – people who are programming just for the fun of it and hope that people enjoy their work. Now, there are a few corporations that are jumping on the podcast bandwagon, CBC is apparently getting ready to move into Podcasting in a bigger way (they already podcast Quirks and Quarks) and several popular TV programs have producer/director podcasts that support the series.

If you’re interested, first download the free ITunes software then use the podcast directory in ITunes to go hunting for what interests you. Also, check out iloveradio.org for a good site, run by Todd Maffin as well, that provides a good selection as well. The ITunes application will download a list of all of the available episodes and the most recent one as well, you can select additional episodes off of the list to be downloaded to your hard drive. One thing to note, I have just a few podcasts and my catalog is up to 600mb – even though I have ITunes set to keep only the three most recent episodes for each podcasts.  

Enjoy!