Friedbeef’s Tech

Picture this, you just bought a spanking new 30 Gig MP3 player, and finished transferring your entire music collection on it, but guess what - it’s still half empty! Instead of letting that extra space go to waste - How about filling it up with free music? Well, here are 5 places you can start:

1. Free Classical Music

On Wikipedia you will find a gigantic list of classical music downloads which are in the public domain, or shared by the commons law. Get songs from all your favourite composers from Bach to Beethoven here.

The drawback though is that the files are in .Ogg format, which may not be the most popular or widely supported file standard. If you cannot play it on your desktop, Wikipedia has some tips to help you along.

2. Music Blogs

What I like about music blogs is that they often talk about the story behind the song or artist in a personable manner rather than just offering up a link to a song. Here are some of of my favourites - all of which contain songs you can download.

• Womenfolk - Women in music (includes big names like Shawn Colvin)
• Funky 16 Corners - Old time Blues
• Aurgasm - World music
• Filles Sourires - French women in music
• Said the Gramophone - Jazz to Indie Rock
• Downtempo - Dance tracks
• Benn Loxo - African music

Related Link: Watch the latest Music Video from your favorite artists.

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When I started blogging less than a year ago, one of my personal rules I set for myself was that this blog had to be self sustaining.

Now, thanks to the few advertisements I place on my site, the costs incurred by domain registration and hosting, were being covered - but only just.

When PayPerPost came along I toyed with the idea of using them as a source of site revenue, but decided their terms and conditions may end up compromising the integrity of my blog. For those unfamiliar with PayPerPost, it is a service that pays bloggers to write about topics determined by the advertiser.

While it may sound good on the surface, there were some key issues bothering me.

1. The fact that I could get paid for posting a story without disclosure would leave some of my real unsponsored reviews in question.
2. Worse still, the tone of the review (positive/negative) would be completely dictated by the advertiser, leaving me to be nothing more than a mouthpiece for them to praise their product, or criticize their competitors.

Having considered this, I then decided not to participate in PayPerPost blogging.

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In our quest to defeat email overload, we’ve covered the first two stages in the email Zen methodology.

Stage 1: Get to Zero Email In Your Inbox

Stage 2: Working from your Followup Folder

Using these fundamental steps effectively, you would have:

1. Whittled your inbox down to zero emails
2. Already answered any emails that needed a quick response
3. Broken down all your other email and projects into mini-tasks, each with it’s own timeline
4. Created a single unified list of everything you need to do, in order, so you can only focus at the key issues at hand

Now in part 3 we will finish off by fine tuning the process with some quick tips.

Stage 3: Fine Tune Your Outlook Workflow

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