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Franklin on the Practicing Musician Podcast with Jake Douglass

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  When I retired from performing in 2022, I wasn't sure how music was going to show up in my life. For a couple of months, I didn't pick up the guitar - the longest stretch without playing since I got my first guitar. Even during the years I struggled with tendinitis, I would still pick it up and play until the pain stopped me. In the months since I stopped performing, I've regained my love and appreciation just for the time I get to pick up my guitar and play. That is the essence of this interview. My long-time friend Margo set up this interview with Jake Douglass. His mission is exciting. It's driven by the desire to turn people on to the joy of playing music for music's sake. We cover every aspect of the role of music in my life, from my first piano lessons to my last gig and beyond. It was fun and at moments, touching, to remember specific moments when a random encounter started a new trajectory of my journey. Please listen, and if you enjoy what you hear, give ...
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Quickly Make a Checklist with Canva AI - New Trick

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I've been experimenting with several of the latest AI platforms. Canva's most recent AI updates have introduced some fun possibilities.  I make a lot of checklists, worksheets, workbooks, and interactive PDFs that can be tedious and time-consuming to design and make. I've been learning how to use Canva's AI to generate the basic PDFs for me and then I take them to Adobe Acrobat Pro to make them fillable and saveable. I'm hoping Canva will be able to add fillable PDFs to it's output options soon. In the latest New Tricks video, I share how I made a quick social media survey form in less than 15 minutes. Watch it here:
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Leaving the Meta/X-Verse

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▼▼▼ Watch the video below ▼▼▼ It Started With the Question, "Is This Really How I Want to Spend My Time?" I joined Facebook and Twitter in 2009, at the height of a personal health crisis. They were both much different experiences then. I was friends with people I wanted to connect with and hear from, and when we posted, our friends did see it. It was fun to get reacquainted with people all the way back to elementary school. And it was an important place to connect while I was facing a lot of uncertainty in my life. Overall, it felt like a pretty positive and uplifting place to be - until election time. The first couple of elections we went through on social media revealed some pretty horrible things about pretty much all of us. In order to stay in that environment, I had to start filtering what I was seeing. Longtime friends were unfollowed, unfriended, and blocked because I felt directly attacked by their vitriol. I started to realize that if they knew how I really felt, I w...
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