these last couple of weeks i’ve been preparing myself for the start of ds106. the technical piece of that has so far included getting this domain up and running, upgrading from wordpress 2.9.2 to 3.0.4, starting the 250-words-a-day challenge to get more comfortable with writing and reflecting, and finding some new plugins to replace ones that have let me down recently. this includes replacing twitter tools (which stopped working for me on languagelabunleashed several months ago and which has not worked reliably since) with twitterfeed. i’m a little nervous about this, as i’ve used rss-to-twitter applications previously, and after a while the auto-generated links started including ads and other undesirables. so if you notice this happening in my twitter feed, please do me a favor and let me know.

source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eexlebots/513709851/

i’ve also been mentally preparing myself for ds106, and especially for the idea that not everything i post is going to be brilliant, excellent, or even good. i’m a perfectionist in a lot of ways, and what makes me hesitate more than anything else is the thought that whatever i’m doing isn’t my 100% best effort. which is correct: not everything i do is always going to be awesome. in fact i’m pretty sure that a lot of what i’ll post over the next month will be total crap. but failure is a necessary part of pushing boundaries, especially if they’re your own … if you’re not falling on your face from time to time, you’re not pushing hard enough.

that’s easier said than done, though, so if any other ds106-ers have any mindhacks to suggest, they’d be much appreciated.