100 Bloggers

She did not convey an imposing personae, yet her insights were amongst the best of the conference. She teaches folks to work quickly. To work without thinking. To just let it happen. Many times. Then step back and select of what you have done, what you would choose to keep.

"If you didn't know how old you was, how old would you be?"

Friensdship is a relationship that cannot be bound by time, distance, age, culture, or race. It is one of the truly beautiful things in our world. The best way I can describe friendship is to say it is the sibling of love. Friends have a bond that can endure time, distance, racial differences, cultural challenges, and generation gaps.
Friendship has an energy that transcends prejudice. It overcomes hatred, disregards educational biases, and lends a helping hand to others in need. Friendship is sharing triumphs and tragedies, dreams and failures. Friendship rebukes when neccessary and comforts when needed. Friendship rejoices in good times and endures through the bad. Love cannot survive without it and hatred cannot stand in the face of it.
Friendship is the hope of the world, friendship is the fuel of the world. Why not think of an old friend today? Why not make a new friend today?

... A community, which now it seems, must absorb the Nine Champions of RSS 2.0, because they have been banished from the round table that was the RSS Advisory Board. A Board that is no more, created by a man who resigned from it, and who gave up any intellectual ownership of the specification, but still retains ownership of the specification, to wit, making decisions about who is or is not on a board that no longer exists for a technical specification given intellectual property rights by a University that had little or no involvement with the specification, under a license that has little or not applicability to specifications, mainly created for songsters and photogs and other artsy types AND which has little or no legal standing within the rules of the land because there are no rules of the land when great bodies of water separate most of it.

If you can follow that, then you won't need to follow the link to read the whole thing!

Technorati Tags : blog, RSS, Atom

From Hugh at the GapingVoid comes this gem:

So to Big Media, Madison Avenue, journalists, bloggers and citizens everywhere, I say: If you think this is just a game of bubbles, bandwagons, favoritism and knowing the right people, as opposed to having good ideas and plain old hard work- Fine, go ahead and believe it. Nobody cares. Just don't be surprised when you get left behind, same as you did every other time the world changed.

You'll need to click trough to read the full posting and see the cartoon, but you knew that.

And of course you know that when Hugh speaks it is anything but from a gaping void!


Technorati Tags : blog, blogging

"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." - Galileo Galilei

Hmmm...Very interesting quote that reminds me of what I do for a living. I manage an IT help desk. People call me, actually they usually call my team, and ask us questions, easy questions...to us. We're IT experts. Gurus if you will.

But to the person on the other end of the phone, they're asking questions. Difficult questions. And they don't know the answer.

And then we show them the answer. And assure them that it's going to be all right, and that's it's okay they don't know the answer.

And they understand...they understand the truth. That they're not IT experts...and that's okay. In fact, that's more than okay. That's GREAT! We don't ever want them to be IT experts. We want them to be EXPERTS at whatever it is that they do. No more, no less, be an expert at whatever it is you do.

And that's the truth.

Make it a great day,
Phil Gerbyshak
http://makeitgreat.org

Don’t Wait for Permission to Succeed! The Manifesto is the running!

Check this out. My manifesto is up for vote at ChangeThis. Goto ChangeThis and vote for me! You can vote once per day per computer through March 18, so vote often and tell your friends.

Thanks!
Troy

There was a certain point in my teen life where I was no longer found entirely repulsive by boys. Having spent so many of my preteen years being teased and bullied by my classmates, I saw this change as both a new beginning, and proof of my self worth. For the first days and weeks of any new "relationship", I would spend my time in a euphoric stupor. Someone likes me, life is worth living, la la la. But soon the feeling was over, until the next boy came along. Lather, rinse, repeat.

A good example of this happened in Grade 7. Right before lunch on a Friday, this boy in my class hands me a note. I head to the bathroom and unfold the piece of paper, which reads:

I think your cute.
-Victor

Now, at age 12, I'm already a grammar Nazi, and the first thing I notice is the use of the incorrect homonym of "you're". But the second thing I see is that YAY! SOMEBODY LIKES ME!

Thus began a weekend of limitless bliss. I took the note everywhere, showing it to strangers, even. I think to myself, I'm not disgusting, I'm capable of being liked (hey, the bullying had been pretty bad; as far as I knew, I was disgusting). But I was now so happy; I still remember how good I felt.

It hadn't occurred to me on the Friday to write the boy back. On the Sunday I compose something like "I like you back" but with correct spelling, and hand it to him the next morning. He had assumed the delay in response had meant a lack of interest. And in a way, he was right.

A few weeks of note passing ensued. The boy wants to see me after school, or on the weekend, but I refuse. You see, it was enough for me to know that he liked me, and it didn't need to go any farther than that. As you could guess, the relationship didn't last. It seems you're supposed to actually spend time with the person you're dating. Go figure.

As my years and experience progressed, I didn't get much better. Each time, I didn't necessarily want, or need, to see my boyfriends all that much. Once a week was fine, even if they went to my high school. The rest of the time, I preferred to sit at home and fantasize about being with the person. I'd relish the images and feelings of love (or what I thought was love) I'd created in my head, and go to sleep smiling.

But, teenage boys being themselves, they needed a bit more from me. Namely, attention (though probably other stuff too that they never had a chance to ask me for). I was actually quite crushed when I got dumped, but another boy would come along soon enough to help distract me again.

Cut to my early university years, and maybe I'd gotten a little better at relationships. Or maybe too good; I spent all of first year with my boyfriend, to the exclusion of anyone else. It was so good, I was so happy, I had visions of marriage, even. And then it all changed, because I was 18, and what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be was in flux. So the relationship ended less than a year in.

I was in a similar situation a year later. The same happiness, the same utopian dreams of a married future. It lasted five months.

It was around this time that my mother said to me, "Gillian, you're in love with being in love." I think she said this as an offhand remark, not caring if I was paying attention. But it stuck, it really did. I thought about it, and realized that she was exactly right. I was addicted to the ignorant bliss of the start of a new relationship, but didn't want anything to do with the guy once that feeling was gone. All these years, I'd just been getting off on the "somebody likes me". Holy cow.

So I stepped back from dating for a few years, not wanting to unduly hurt people by trailing them along for a few months and then dumping them when they turned out to be less than perfect. In fact, I never really stepped back on the relationship bandwagon as much as I was once on it. Knowing my weakness for the early relationship daydreaming, I tried my best to counter it with cynicism and bitterness, with moderate success. It hasn't always worked; even now a boyfriend will do something human and fall off the pedestal I'd subconsciously put him on. But at least I'm aware of myself when it happens.

What I've learned most of all from this is the folly of putting so much importance on having a boyfriend, or in having someone like me. Have you heard that cliche about needing to be happy in yourself before you can be happy with someone else? I totally buy that. I've realized that there is nothing good in waiting for boys to make me feel good about myself. It makes sense not to; I mean, do others think better of me when I have a boyfriend, versus when I'm single? I hope not. I certainly don't think better of friends when they're in relationships. Though I might think less of them if they're choosing bad relationships over no relationships at all. There's no shame in being single.

My Valentine's Day message for anyone who will listen, then, is that if you're alone, be happy alone. Don't base your self worth on whether somebody loves you, but on whether you love yourself. If this has to be a day about love from others, think of the less fickle types, like the love of family, friends and pets. The feelings they give you may be less euphoric, but they last much, much longer.

I have a very simple theory: the only stupid question is the unasked one. I try to impress this on my students as often as I can. If we don't ask questions, that's when miscommunication happens. Answers to questions inform, clarify. They can't do that, though, if we don't ask the questions.

I ask a lot of questions. I encourage those around me to ask a lot of questions. It should come as no surprise, then, that I was completely intrigued by this article that suggests smart people ask questions. It's true. So many people are afraid to ask questions because somehow this idea that questions somehow make you stupid or antagonistic has pervaded our cultural identity.

We need to shake that and ask more questions. Questions lead to answers, and answers can often lead to an increased awareness that benefits those around the inquirer.

I spend much of my teaching time asking questions. I tend to teach a concept, and then start asking questions until I feel that my student is comfortable with te concept and can work on his or her own. When a student is struggling with an assignment, they know I'll start asking them questions to help them think through what they're working on.

I've actually started wondering if my teaching method borders on the Socractic Method, but honestly, questions work.

Posted to EducationNiche

It is incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busy-ness of life, to work harder and harder climbing the ladder of success only to discover it's leaning against the wrong wall.

It seems nearly a month since having been invited to participate on this amazing collection of thoughts, inspiration, and just plain interesting writing. How to add to it? Troy Worman's great post about not waiting for permission to succeed got me thinking. What about blog productivity? Getting Blogs Done.

In case the reference is lost, my favorite productivity guru, Dave Allen, wrote an excellent book about productivity in general, "Getting Things Done". A blog is a thing, thus "Getting Blogs Done". David Allen's book and thinking has become so popular, it's almost a cult. It's great stuff, all about getting things out of your head into a trusted system so you can spend more time in flow. Getting your thoughts out into blogs will help you experience flow.

Here's some inspiration, some link food for getting your blogs done.

One of my favorite blogs is written by Kathy Sierra, one of the authors and conceivers of the Head First series of computer books. In her blog Creating Passionate Users, she exhorts and encourages a wide variety of folks in a very non-techie fashion to help users "kick ass". The quickie advice she gives for bloggers is to write less about ourselves and write more about what would make a difference in the lives of the readers.

That's what to blog about. How about motivation to get blogging. Blogs are changing the marketplace. Here's some inspiration from Kathy Sierra and Robert Scoble to get on with it!

And finally, a couple paraphrased quotes and a link. Mickey Rooney is quoted in one of David Allen's books that when he has an article to write he sits at his desk and he better well have a good idea. There's a great book out,
Never Eat Alone. Apart from a book full of great pearls of practical wisdom for success in life, he repeats the most important lesson I've ever heard about writing. Do it, and do it often. You'll get better.