ShawneeDispatch.com

Like they say, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good.

The papers have been full, of late, of stories of people who have been dealt a lemon and decided to make lemonade. We’ve all seen them, surely: people who, after losing their jobs, strike out to open a business of their own.

Talk about jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. My heart goes out to them. Quite a few people are going to learn first-hand what it means to be an entrepreneur. It is well, I think, to remember the definition of that word: one who undertakes a risk for the sake of the profit. Everybody might want to be their own boss, but only a few of us have the salt to risk it all.

Here’s another new one, thanks to CNN: Legacy Locker, a new service that will give your heirs access to all the trappings of your digital life after you shuffle off to the big Web site in the sky.

You might have several different e-mail accounts, plus an online bank account, maybe a PayPal account, and Web-hosting accounts, domain names, memberships to social-networking sites – all the minutiae of a digital existence.

I’ve thought of this myself, and I can see where there might be some utility in finding a service that could turn all of this information — together with the passwords and other protocols — over to my heirs when that day comes.

At the same time, I’m a little hesitant to provide all this stuff to some third party. Not that any hacker would find very rich pickings among my meager digital assets, but still it seems risky. At least, as long as I have the information stored in my head, it’s secure — at least so long as I retain at least that much grip on my faculties.

I suppose I could write it all down on a piece of paper and keep that somewhere, but somehow that seems a lot like bundling money in butcher paper and storing it in the freezer, like some people used to do.

While we’re on the subject of ill winds, here’s something to counter the gloom and doom coming out of Topeka with respect to school funding.

Despite concern over growing unemployment and well documented difficulties that the newly unemployed have in finding new jobs, private education is actually something of a growth area.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, private education actually showed job growth in January, adding 33,000 new jobs. The bureau reported 75,000 job openings in educational services in January 2009, up from 65,000 in the same month a year earlier.

The key here is rising enrollment. Public elementary school enrollment is expected to increase by 10 percent between 2007 and 2016. Surely, we have seen some of this happening in the last several years in the De Soto school district.

Another factor is the growth in both private and public preschool programs, which both our local districts have added in recent years.

Increasing joblessness adds fuel to the fire as people seek retraining for new occupations.

Admittedly, the prospects for hiring more preschool teachers is not all that cheering for someone who wants to a job in another area, but at least it shows a picture that is not unreservedly bleak.

If that’s not enough, at least it’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.