Photo by La Tête KrançienToday I’m not really into MAKING podcasts, but I recently subscribed to some new podcasts and I want to finish my queue today. So today will be a day filled with podcast consuming bliss. After that I want to make some bumpers for my own podcast, I’m not really satisfied with the music, but it’s hard to find fitting podsafe music. Also, the sound quality of my voice over isn’t great because I was using the internal microphone of the MacBook. I will be using the new Zoom H2 to improve sound quality. It won’t be much work, so I can enjoy my day filled with my new podcasts.
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Recently I saw on FriendFeed how people shared music they really liked or how they discovered new music using a new service: ‘Last.fm‘. I was completely intrigued, so I decided to create an account and now I’m completely addicted to it right now! 
With the account you can listen to music without interruptions, with good quality, like listening (internet) radio. All music is being streamed to your PC directly from their servers. But that’s not everything: the service sees your taste of your music and suggests similar new music to you. If your friends have an account too, you can suggest music to each other and expand your musical horizon. Every week the site clusters you with some neighbours and enables you to listen to their music. I think the concept is brilliant and I can recommend it to everyone. It’s free and fun! Go over to last.fm to find out more.
For some reason or the other I’m just very interested in mental health, mental balance. I blame it to my education: I am a college student, studying cognitive neuropsychology. Maybe it is my education, but I think I would be interested in mental health anyway. Because it’s important. I think being mentally stable, finding your balance is of vital important also for you physical health. It’s the core of our existence, without a stable mind, you’ll have a very difficult life and you can even die.
Part of finding this mental balance is having good coping mechanisms when life gets tough. You need to train yourself to be like a spring: when it’s pressed upon it will go down, but as soon as you release pressure, it goes up again and expands. Unfortunately we are not born with this, it needs to be learned. Everybody has coping mechanisms, but not all mechanisms function equally well. Most of us will deal with setbacks in the same way their parents do, which can be very good, but also very bad.
Some coping mechanisms work well in some time of your life, but are dysfunctional in later stages of life. Changing things is very hard, because you cannot pull yourself out of the swamp using your bootstraps. That’s why I am so glad I see great examples of staying positive when life gets tough around me. I can learn from these great people.
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You don’t have to be a psychologist to know there are clear differences between a pessimist and an optimist. But did you know those differences go deeper than you think? In psychology, pessimism is associated with different psychological conditions like depression, low self-esteem, low self-efficacy and even higher accident-proneness. It’s very difficult to change a pessimist into an optimist, because this attitude is deeply engraved in someone’s personality.
In another field in psychology, cognitive psychology, a lot has been discovered about the ways people learn and how they process information. When you want to learn something new, you need to practice. One way of doing that is rehearsing the information you need to learn over and over again. The more often you repeat the information, the better the brain will retain it. This principle doesn’t only apply to academic skills like learning to speak a foreign language or acquiring technical skills, but also to behaviour.
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I’ve linked to feeds from SQPN before, but those were only feeds I am subscribed to. When looking at the site at a brief glance, it’s easy to conclude that they only offer religious podcasts meant for Catholics, which is not the case. I am not Catholic at all, usually I fast forward Catholic subjects, because I really don’t feel like listening to it. Which is the neat thing about podcasts: just forward the boring stuff.
Even though I am not a Catholic and also not interested in becoming one, travel podcasts like The Catholic Insider and shows like The Daily Breakfast are fun to listen to, precisely because they are not geared to a Catholic audience. The host of these shows makes more podcasts about movies (films) and makes an in-depth analysis of similar stories from our cultural heritage (which is partly Christian). Which elements did the makers use and why? Which myths and legends did they use? They answer these questions and make you look to popular films with new appreciation. I will give some direct links to their podcasts over here I think are worth listening to for us non-Catholics:
Via SQPN I heard about The Ringcast (which is another Tolkien-inspired podcast, based on the MMORG). It’s certainly worthwile listening to!
I’m open for more podcasts in this genre. I am particularly interested in a good podcast about Battlestar Galactica, the re-imagined series, that’s currently being aired (well, after the hiatus I mean). So if you know something, I’d preciate to hear about it!! Leave a comment down below or drop me an email. At the bottom left of this page you’ll find ways to contact me.
Photo by realityBesides listening to audio on my trusty old iPod shuffle, I’m also subscribed to video-podcast feeds. My current PC setup doesn’t like playing video in the latest version of iTunes, which becomes clunkier after every new release. I’m playing with the idea to install a dedicated feed aggregator with podcast support and have the videos being played by Windows Media Player or Real Player. Most podcasters, however use Apple proprietary formats like .mov for their videos. Usually I end up watching the video on Youtube or Google Video because my player doesn’t support the format.
Watching video podcasts is more fun for me and it takes less time. The average video podcast (or vidcast) takes about six to eight minutes to watch, whereas a podcast easily takes thirty minutes. I have been looking in the iTunes podcast directory to find videos about getting healthy and doing fitness, because I have to lose about 16.5 kilos to reach my ideal weight of 83.6 kg / 184.3 lbs. (I would have a BMI of 25 with my height of 183 centimetres or 6 feet with that weight, it still sounds very heavy, but okay).
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Podcasting is a relatively new phenomenon. Everybody can be the host of their own radio show now, using their own computer with internet connection. It’s as easy as recording an mp3, host it somewhere online, make a feed using feedburner and promote it in the different podcast directories available. In the beginning it was audio only, but nowadays video podcasting, vodcasting is getting popular as well. Video platforms like YouTube enable people to host videos for free and ‘embed’ their content at their own web logs. People can download content to their portable music players and enjoy it during a commute.
You may have heard me complaining about the fact there’s never something interesting to watch on TV or to listen to on the radio, so the whole invention of podcasting has been great for me. I just download stuff I’m interested in and just discard the conventional television and radio stuff. I’m subscribed to a whole bunch of science related feeds, like New Scientist and also to some newscasts. If there’s really a TV show I want to watch, I can do it on demand using the public network’s on demand online video service.
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