Tuesday's Info Source: Get Organized!

Like many people, myself included, you might find it hard to organize your class schedule, activities, work, study time, etc. CollegeRuled has created a tool to help you get it together. Using your student email, you can create an account where you can organize and customize your class schedule, create class specific message boards, you can even link your schedule from your Facebook profile. CollegeRuled allows you to create to-do lists and notes and connect with your classmates!

To find other online organizers and ways to share your schedule, Mashable.com has compiled an extensive list of tools and software to keep you on track. Now you have no excuse for "forgetting" to to to class or that lunch date with Grandma.

Music Monday: Last.fm

Spend a lot of time on Facebook or MySpace? Love listening to music while online?

Last.fm is for you! Identified as one of the most popular online music communities.

Last.fm offers a lot of features that include personalized radio stations, tagging, scrobbling (streaming & iPod capability), wikiing, and listings of musical events. Their latest addition are widgets and they can be embedded into your blog, personal webpage, Facebook or MySpace page.

Users can create profiles where you share your listening history, post events on an online calendar, keep an online journal, add friends, and add groups (people with similar musical tastes).

Friday's Films - Date night advice

This one's some advice for the guys.
Your girl wants to see a movie, or your planning a first date. But honestly have you seen the cost of a movie, plus popcorn and a soda?
So here's a suggestion, consider a classic movie from our dvd collection. We have everything from Jane Austen to Star Wars. (I wouldn't recommend Star Wars or Indiana Jones for a first date movie, but you never know she may be into that.)
So here's what you do:

• Clean your apartment
• Invite her over
• Make some popcorn
• And let her pick from 2-3 movies that you checked out for free from the library

Giving her the choice takes the pressure off you. You can cuddle on the couch and she'll be touched that you went to the trouble.

Some of my favorite recommends are:
Giant - epic story about a Texas ranch family, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson
Gigi - musical about a girl growing up in Paris who longs for a man who can't see her
Great Expectations - yes, the book made into a movie with great costumes and very good acting
Jane Eyre - classic about love, betrayal and forgiveness.
My Fair Lady - Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins, music and great costumes
Oklahoma - Hugh Jackman as Curly (need I say more)
The Producers - Gene Wilder and Dick Shawn in the original movie version about two producers who set out to create a flop and fail

Thursday's Tech: Create Mini-Web Sites

The Little Web Site:

Leafletter is the "revolutionary" way for anyone to create a portable, interactive "little web site" ("Leaflet") using nothing but a web browser.

You can easily distribute Leaflets to social networks, blogs, and other web sites.

Use Leaflets for everything from portfolios to marketing materials. It's simple and free.

Work Tip Wednesday: America's Best- And Worst-Paying Jobs

The medical profession continues to dominate the top end of our list of the 25 best- and worst-paying jobs in America. Anesthesiologists have flipped places with surgeons to take the top spot, but the next eight places are firmly in the healing hands of various sorts of specialist practitioners.

Chief executives, at No. 10, and airline pilots, at No. 14, are the only two non-medical occupations in the top 15. Even lawyers don't make it. They're No. 16.

At the other end of the scale are jobs in restaurants, hotels and leisure businesses. The lowest paid of all? People who cook, prepare and serve in fast-food joints, followed by dishwashers, busboys and the folk who show you to your seat in coffee-shops and the like.

For More Information: Forbes.com

In Pictures: America's 25 Best-Paying Jobs

In Pictures: America's 25 Worst-Paying Jobs

Tuesday's Information News: Infoporn: Despite the Web, Americans Remain Woefully Ill-Informed

More than a decade after the Internet went mainstream, the world's richest information source hasn't necessarily made its users any more informed. A new study from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that Americans, on average, are less able to correctly answer questions about current events than they were in 1989. Citizens who call the Internet their primary news source know slightly less than fans of TV and radio news. Hmmm... maybe a little less Perez Hilton and a little more Jim Lehrer.

For More News: Wired Magazine Issue 15.07

Music Monday: MUSIC DISCOVERY TOOLS

New ways to find the kind of music You care about:

MusicMesh - browse through artists based on their similarities; find tracklists and reviews for albums.
Blogmusik - browse through top lists and listen to popular artists for free.
Musicovery - discover new music with this cool take on Internet radio.

Momaday New State Poet Laureate

Gov. Brad Henry recently appointed Lawton native N. Scott Momaday as state poet laureate, and the author now has a home in Oklahoma City.

The author won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his novel, House Made of Dawn, and he has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of Arizona. He was born in Lawton, lived on the Kiowa Indian Reservation before he moved to Arizona, and later obtained a Ph.D.

He is perhaps best known for his work, The Way to Rainy Mountain. In the introduction to the book, Momaday describes an Oklahoma landscape.

He writes, “A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Wichita Range. For my people, the Kiowas, it is an old landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain. The hardest weather in the world is there. Winter brings blizzards, hot tornadic winds arise in the spring, and in summer the prairie is an anvil's edge. The grass turns brittle and brown, and it cracks beneath your feet.”

Yet the landscape created by these harsh conditions is surprisingly creative and productive.

“All things in the plain are isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.”

Thursday's Tech Link: How to Keep Track of All Your Passwords

Drowning in passwords for email, online banking, MySpace, work, forums, and more? When you first got online, you probably had just one password to remember: the one for your email. Now you've been online for a couple years and it's getting out of hand: passwords for online banking, a web forum or two, your blog, your company's intranet, MySpace... enough! At this point you have two options: Use the same password or two for everything--and the security experts will tell you that's no option at all--or get a password management app. Get your passwords and personal info under control with this free password-management app.

KeyPass Password Safe: Quick 'n' dirty 'n' free

For More results visit: Tucows Solutions

Work Tip Wednesday: Finding Work Is A Job In Itself

So you've left the search for your summer internship until the last minute. Stop stressing and get busy.

Yes, the most competitive internships at name-brand companies are likely filled. But there are plenty of opportunities still available at medium-sized and smaller organizations. On the plus side, those less formal internships might let you do more substantial work. The downside: They're not as likely to pay.

Maybe you're stalling because drafting a resume seems daunting; perhaps it's because you're not sure what field you want to go into. Don't let those things deter you. Potential employers understand you're in the middle of college and don't have much related experience. Put down what you do have. And that includes everything from a part-time job at a retail store in the mall to the waitressing job you had in high school

For more Information: Forbes.com

The Roswell Report

According to a National Geographic special entitled "Extraterrestrial" in 2005, 60% of Americans believe that life exists on other planets. 69% of men and 51% of women believe that life exists on other planets. 63% of college graduates believe that life exists on other planets. If you want to dig a little deeper into the subject, read The Roswell Report (D 301.2: R 73) in the Government Documents section of the Al Harris Library. It is the official version of everything which happened (or didn't happen?) at a purposed alien crash site in the New Mexico Desert in the 1940s. Was there a cover-up? You decide.

Tuesday's Info Source: NASA's Earth Observatory

Images of recent wildfires and fires set intentionally and unintentionally by humans as observed by NASA satellites. For example, includes photos of the Angora fire in South Lake Tahoe, California, (June 2007) and the Bugaboo and Big Turnaround Complex fires in southern Georgia and northern Florida (April and May 2007). From the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

To visit the site: NASA's Earth Observatory

Music Monday: Radio Blog Club

Radio.blog is the first stand-alone player that lets you stream sound on your website. Bookmark your favorite tracks and build-up your playlist. Then listen to your juke.blog player.

Friday Film Review: Drama/Mex

From the New York Times Film Review : Sex, Shouting and Temptation Once Upon Today in Acapulco

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: July 11, 2007

At first casual glance, you can understand why the young Mexican actors Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna attached their names to “Drama/Mex” as executive producers. With its tricky narrative structure, casual nudity, sweaty sex and intimations of politics, this feature seems to bear a passing resemblance to “Y Tu Mamá También,” the wonderful 2001 Alfonso Cuarón film in which Mr. Bernal and Mr. Luna starred. In the years since, the two have helped form a production company, adding to the exciting surge in Mexican cinema, which is all to the good, except when the result is as undercooked and derivative as “Drama/Mex.

Thursday's Tech: Hacking NASCAR: The Ultimate High-Speed Photography Kit

Rick Graves can stop time. OK, not really, but he can freeze 43 NASCAR racers clocking almost 200 mph. How? The pro shooter modified his Hasselblad into what he calls a DistaCam — adding a high-velocity motor, locking the shutter open, and inserting a metal plate with a laser-cut slit. Whenever Graves triggers the motor, film zips past the slit at up to 1,400 rpm, capturing stills of the speeding cars. "Failure is a necessity," he says, "and a lot of times, success is luck."

4 Steps to Shooting Stills at 200 mph:

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/digitalcameras/magazine/15-07/st_nascar

Wednesday Games: Next-Gen Multiplayer Worlds Are Built to Snare Nongamers

From the simple MUDs of a decade ago to the addictive EverQuest, massively multiplayer online gaming has long held sway over serious gamers. But it was the runaway success of World of Warcraft, released in 2004, that pushed MMOs into the mainstream, attracting not thousands but millions of players to its servers. Now gaming companies are jostling to position their virtual worlds as the next big play space online.

South Korea-based NCsoft is helming one of the most promising of these next-gen MMOs: the sci-fi themed Tabula Rasa, due out this fall. Game designer Richard Garriott says the game is all about accommodating the schedule of a more casual player, starting gently and including features that make the game easier to get into.

For more Information: http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/news/2007/06/nextgen_mmos

Tuesday News:Escaped Wrecking Ball at Allegheny College Goes to Town

A wrecking crew that was demolishing part of the library at Allegheny College dropped the ball on Monday — literally. The 1,500-pound ball, which had snapped its cable, commenced a pinball-like journey downhill from the campus, which unfortunately led along North Main Street in Meadville, Pa., according to a report in today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The ball caromed off nine cars, kept in play by the curb, and came to a rest in the trunk of a car being driven by an Allegheny student, Alex Habay.

The student, a junior, was slightly hurt, and the police said he had been saved from severe injuries by the more than half dozen soccer balls he was carrying in his trunk. Mr. Habay is a forward on Allegheny’s soccer team

Thursday Tech: What is Eventful

What is Eventful?Founded in 2004, Eventful is the leading events website which enables its community of users to discover, promote, share and create events. Eventful’s community of users select from nearly 4 million events taking place in local markets throughout the world, from concerts and sports to singles events and political rallies.

People use Eventful to track and share events with their friends and community in many ways:

• import iTunes and last.fm performer lists and keep track of which favorites are coming to town
• easily export events via feeds, calendar widgets, third-party calendar services, email alerts and much more
• keep track of what’s happening at favorite venues and see where favorite performers are appearing
• weekly email event guides are completely customized based on a user’s interests, with recommended events in their city
• add events to your personal watch list and see what events your friends and groups are watching (and going to)
• add events to Eventful for free and promote events to the entire community

Tuesday News

Wrapped in the Star-Spangled Toga Well, O.K., not really. But the idea might not be so farfetched. Recently, it has seemed that ancient Rome is everywhere — and especially comparisons of modern America to the ancient empire. Moreover, it is one of the few things on which all segments of the political spectrum — left and right, Christian fundamentalists and Islamic radicals, Ivy League professors and renegade bloggers — seem to agree.

Music Monday

Used to be you showed the world your killer taste in music with a Clash T-shirt and a Ramones pin. Then came blasting your iPod playlist at parties and boasting that some obscure artist was your "friend." But now that MySpace is overrun with posers, you'll have to go elsewhere to impress audiophiles with your musical savvy. Just don't tell them who sent you. Mog.com Launch March 2007 Described as a musical "nudist colony," Mog — in beta since July 2006 — scans your music library, then matches your taste to similar "moggers." A recently launched TV arm provides high-quality video streaming. A subscription service is in the works. It's a hit with The famous (Ben Gibbard) and nonfamous High Fidelity-esque purists.