Sometimes people do things that really catch your attention. They may do exceptionally well at something, and our response, impressed by such a feat, is to tell them that we’re impressed.

That rocked!

Author Seth Godin, however, says something about this.

You don’t rock all the time. No one does. No one is a rock star, superstar, world-changing artist all the time. In fact, it’s a self-defeating goal. You can’t do it.

His point? Try “rocking” at something for just 5 minutes. A day. Don’t aim to be doing profound things all the time, but instead, baby-step those things you can do an extraordinary job at.

I think the advice also fits in line with something else Godin said earlier this month:

Very few people wake up in the morning and feel like taking big risks or feel like digging deep for something that has eluded them. People don’t usually feel like pushing themselves harder than they’ve pushed before or having conversations that might be uncomfortable.

You might not feel like climbing the big mountains all the time. What’s important is mounting small hills, each one in stride, not conquering everything, just little things that you can do that make a difference.

This mix of both rain, snow, and ice is an interesting one. This video captures the view earlier this morning from my dining room. It’s not a very action-packed video, but if you’re in a warm climate, it hopefully conveys the wintery mood.

One thing I hated about writing a book was knowing that the information I was putting down hot and current very well might not be so hot or current when it got into a reader’s hands. I think the test of time has actually been better to my content that I had first imagined, but then there’s Lifehackers Tripani and Dash who have set about to write their book using a wiki.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave is both a book you can buy, and a wiki you can use online. Furthermore, they want the book to stay current, which (don’t they know?) could be a full time job! But they aren’t necessarily dumb: they’ve invited the “users”/readers of their book to contribute to the wiki.

It’s an experiment of sorts for sure, but I think it looks great and we need examples like this to build off in the educational sphere. Don’t you agree?

Of course, this says nothing of the cool tool that Wave is emerging to be. But that’s for another post down the road.

I came across this article this evening on the speed reader machine I saw two years ago here in Richmond from Xerox PARC. I thought I’d link it up since I have thought about this invention many times since that experience of using the machine.

With the device in an arcade-style enclosure, I was able to read in excess of 600 words per minute.

What I often wonder, in this age of Kindles and Nooks, is why these devices don’t yet make use of the reading technology developed and then marketed by Xerox in their XFR project…

Al Doss, one of the folks that has helped create and maintain VSTE Island (in Second Life), has made this great promotional video for VSTE 2009 in just a week!

If you have a SL avatar, please join us on VSTE Island tonight (Monday, November 23, 2009) as I talk about what I’ll be doing at this year’s conference, and you can ask questions!