Wes’s Life

I’ll be away for the next two weeks in Europe. Expect some new pictures when I get back.

This is mostly an excuse to show you some awesome album art, but also this album is awesome. I’ve only heard a few songs, but I can say that this album will keep a space in my rotation for a while. It’s new and classic all at the same time and brings a nice change of pace to my stagnant library.

I looked back at some of my old posts today, and I mean my first and second posts and saw a much younger self writing those. And most people can understand my feelings when they pick up a notebook from college or high school and wonder about the person who originally wrote those. Often times, that person was immature, less developed and generally not as educated as the person reading it.

Naturally, we all develop and improve slowly – intentionally or not. However, we want to improve in leaps and bounds. We feel that it’s the only noticeable way, that anything else is a waste of time or no real improvement at all. Yet, we rarely improve this way; instead we do much better when we slowly improve ourselves.

Picking something on a weekly basis to improve upon would probably be a good idea. Attempt to use more varied vocabulary or do less damage to the grammar side of your writings. Or, you could forget about wordy goals and more about worldly goals. Smile more, take things as they come, wake up with a smile. I have been doing this, without thinking about it for a while now. Small improvements now, lead to a much better person in the future.

Well, here’s a simple and easy to follow tip: always back your files up. And I don’t mean just your documents, I mean everything. I’ve been playing around with my Windows installation lately, installing Vista and reinstalling Vista and then eventually going back to XP. Each time, back ups have saved me time, energy and most importantly – sanity.

The first time I almost lost all of my photography which would have done me in. Sure, I have a lot saved on Flickr, but not everything and not at full quality. Plus, I would have lost all of my RAWs. On the second installation I lost the latter part of my music library and my all of my school email. I am now a full on supporter of backups. Make sure you do it fairly often – I back up twice a week – and get a good reliable external drive.

I had a comment posted yesterday to my post about One Day Blog Silence, and I won’t do you – the readers – a disservice by letting you see what was written or the person’s website. Yet, I’ll give you the gist of his tirade. He felt that this tragedy should and is overshadowed by the war in Iraq and that the soldiers never receive any form of memorial like convocations, half-masted flags and various memorials.

Where this reader has severely messed up his argument is that our soldiers signed up for a job – where they are compensated – that they have to realize could leave them injured or dead. However, no one applying to go to college ever assumes that they will be put in the same situation and shouldn’t be. The true tragedy is that these people were only trying to better themselves through a solid education.