My mother, the wonderful poet Cynthia Blomquist Gustavson, created another podcast yesterday — one that really takes me back to my childhood.

She wrote an incredible children’s epic poem called “The Ballad of the Rag Man” — it’s extraordinary, and you should listen. I’m neck deep in making my mother a new website, and she digs about 15 books out of the closet every day that she hasn’t published! She’s a great writer, truly.

Check out her podcast here:
cynthiagustavson.com/podcast

Or listen in here:

The Ballad of the Rag Man

And check out her website at cynthiagustavson.com for a bunch of free stuff, and for the radio I built into her site with some special music.

I’m offering free music, because I’m totally giddy from the release of the brand new googlepages.com sites! Go design yourself a webpage for no cost, no trouble… Here’s the webpage, where I uploaded about 30MB or more of music in about 3 minutes, and it is now available for you to download and check out…

Hopefully, you’ll become both a convert to googlepages and a convert to my music!!

Free mp3s available on my new website:

http://free.music.free.googlepages.com
Please check them out — they’ll only be available for a limited time! These are full length mp3s of my music only available because I’m exhausted, and have gone insane because of the new release of literally gajillions of gigabyte megabyte gigantibytes of webspace — for free — no advertising, no nothing!

Makes me feel foolish for paying for it!!

Anyway — check it out for yourself:

How to sign up for Google Pages at googlepages.com:

1) Either sign in to your gmail, or sign up for a gmail account (if you don’t have one, I’d be happy to give you one).

2) Go to www.googlepages.com

3) Follow the extremely easy instructions, and then use the template changes in the upper right corner of your screen to easily change web layouts. Easier than any web-building software on the market!! Idiot proof!!

4) And then click publish, and you can have yourself a site with pictures, many pages (mine just has one) and mp3s — for free! And if you get sick of your first one, create an odd little one like my: http://free.music.free.googlepages.com

5) I really like this, but at the same time, something feels strange about it — it’s like Santa Claus — when I was a kid I didn’t understand why I got something for nothing:)

Yet another entry, deep into the morning, the night after (I just couldn’t sleep I was so intrigued) I found out about googlepages.com — The world hasn’t found out yet!!

Google has now ended the battle of webspace. Webspace is now as valuable only as what exists on its bytes.

Kent’s New Google Webpage is on Googlepages.com at: http://kgustavson.googlepages.com/home

Here’s my amusing attempt at a webpage, that amateurs will be happy to hear, took only about 10 minutes to create. A little different than the hours and hours that have gone into my design of my most recent pages, designed for my PhD advisor and my mother: www.peterwinklermusic.com, www.dorotheacook.com, www.silkenrags.com, and www.cynthiagustavson.com

It almost makes me feel dirty to think that I spent all those hours, when there is such a simple alternative out there now! It doesn’t look all that bad, and if the capability to tweak with the style sheet comes around, or more templates, this is the new ‘blog’ of the next half-generation! Everyone and their third-cousin will have a website!! I don’t know if that’s good, or if it’s bad. And I don’t know what to do when I think that every gmail account that I have now has a potential 100MB of space attached to it.

Google has now ended the battle of webspace. Webspace is now as valuable only as what exists on its bytes.

Wow!

Check out www.googlepages.com immediately! Today they released an incredible new program that will revolutionize the web the same way that blogs did a few years ago!

They are offering 100MB of free web space to every g-mail account holder to build their own web site! How do they do that?! This is the equivalent to the government going around and giving jobs to the poor. This is a big thing! The email was one thing — but this is 100MB to host your own webpage, with your own name on it, without a million characters after it, for completely free!

The thing is, I feel a little uncomfortable — because I, like many of my cyberspace colleagues, rent my own space in the great white and wide world of internets (as George Bush would put it)… This is crazy!!! Because I have many gmail accounts, to give away, and of my own, it means that I have several gigabytes of space just kicking around on the internet, begging me to use them!! This is INSANE!! (Almost as insane as the alpine downhill in the olympics — hence the following reference to both crazy amazing google, and crazy amazing alpine skiing)…

Yet again, Google.com stands up for the little people!!

They don’t allow custom style sheets, but there are few of us that are concerned with that anyway! They do, however, allow for remote storage of files.

Here’s what I figured out already! You can upload 100MB of information to your webpage, and have your webpage stay unpublished. AND… Despite your www.googlepages.comwebpage not being published, you can remotely access the files that you have stored on www.googlepages.com!

Very cool resource…

There are a few negative points to having a www.googlepages.com. If you use the account for your website that is attached to the email address that you use all the time, you might get a lot of spam, because your web address will be public.

But, google has the best spam filters in the business, so it will probably be okay!

This IS the alternative to having an expensive, hard to upkeep website, and a step up from a blog… Very cool for amateurs. And, at the same time, this is also an incredible resource for professionals and hacks alike — providing remote memory for picture and mp3 storage, for use in blogs, podcasts and more!!

Enjoy! Visit www.googlepages.comfor more information!

I really am a fan of what google.com does for free, without advertising, and without hitches.

And, if you still need a gmail address, they’re easy to get, but I’d be happy to provide you with an invitation — I have tons!

Chuck Currie wrote an entry in his blog about the priorities of the United States.

Yes, we have centered the Axis of Evil on Iran.

Yes, we are considering entering Iran, bombing them, hoping to stop their nuclear program.

And yes, our conservative American Christian regime is teaming with Iran against the gays.

I guess it all depends on your definition of evil!

Here’s a clip from Chuck’s blog:

At the same time the United States is having an internal debate about whether or not to bomb Iran (or take some type of military action) to stop their nuclear program the US is siding with Iran in a debate at the United Nations to “deny UN consultative status to organizations working to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people,” according to Human Rights Watch:

“In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, a coalition of 40 organizations, led by the Human Rights Campaign, Human Rights Watch, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, called for an explanation of the vote which aligned the United States with governments that have long repressed the rights of sexual minorities.”

Check out Chuck’s Blog Here

My mother, the therapist, healer and poet, wrote her Valentine’s post today, complete with Podcast!

Of course, the proud son is even more excited because he set up her podcast for her, and taught her how to do crazy things like uploading mp3s to ftp!

Check out poet Cynthia Blomquist Gustavson’s Valentine’s Day Podcast!

What You Need to Know

Visit cynthiagustavson.com/podcast for her podcast! You can also syndicate it there!