Life Long Learning

I'm recovering from three days at the CMSExpo, a conference for users, developers and vendors of Open Source Content Management Systems. Basically they are frameworks for creating web sites that use dynamic content driven by a database. The products have names like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, Alfresco and Plone. Not exactly household names, well maybe WordPress because of it's popularity as a blogging tool. I use recovering because even though they say the mind is a sponge, mine was well saturated by the end of the day. The point of this is life long learning. You are never too old to learn new skills. In fact, I believe that learning keeps you young.

I have gone through periods of "No More Information" where I shut down, wear blinders and focus on day to day activities but what I've found is that I'm happier and more productive when I expose my mind to new concepts. In the last six months, I've attended seven user group meetings, three Tweetups, three conferences and one Facebook Developers Garage, clicked on hundreds of links from Twitter, blogs and Facebook, and Googled something everyday.

In closing, the mind is a terrible thing to waste, so go out and fill it. And don't worry, it won't explode.