Wes’s Life

Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. For the longest time, I thought that was a crock of crap. I would stay up to the wee hours of the night, doing who knows what. The next morning/afternoon I’d awake and be fairly unpro­duc­tive.

Well, I don’t have too many options these days. I have work at 8am three days a week and class at 9:30 the other two days. I wake up by at least 9am every day includ­ing the week­ends. Now the classes force me to wake up, but when I work is up to me. I could go in later if I felt like it, but I read some­thing that made me change my mind. It was some­thing to the effect that after 11:30pm noth­ing really hap­pens any­ways, so you aren’t miss­ing any­thing.

I feel that this change has made me more pro­duc­tive includ­ing in class and at work. My advice to you night owls is to try it out for a week or two and see how it goes, if it doesn’t work for you, its easy enough to go back.

So it’s Blog Action Day today, and I believe I am sup­posed to talk a bit about the envi­ron­ment. So it makes per­fect sense for me to talk about a small bit of envi­ron­ment I walk past on Tues­day and Thurs­day: the duck­pond.

It’s just a lake between a park­ing lot and the rest of campus, yet it is a lot more than that to me. I started park­ing in that par­tic­u­lar park­ing lot out of neces­sity, as the other park­ing lots were reg­u­larly full when I had class. It’s about a ten minute walk from my car to the class­room. Yet, I keep park­ing there even with a less stu­dents park­ing closer. But why?

Well, I love walk­ing by the duck pond. I get to see the ducks, the geese and the squir­rels. I love the trees canopy­ing over­head and the shade they supply. I love the irreg­u­lar­i­ties in the asphalt cre­ated by the roots of trees much older then the asphalt. And then there’s the bridge; a wooden number, dis­ar­rayed by the same predica­ment as the asphalt. It’s not very big, but its so pic­turesque.

I guess my only issue with this area is com­plete lack of con­cern show to it from the rest of campus. There’s usu­ally trash float­ing around and a dirty film on the water. They demon­strate a com­plete lack of con­cern for the wildlife in the pond, which includes fish among the fowl. I wish every­one had the same appre­ci­a­tion of this small body of water as I do. Maybe then, it would be as good as I believe it is.

There are a few people who know me well and know that I used to read a lot of feeds. I was sub­scribed to over 100 feeds – not ter­ri­bly uncom­mon. But I found myself star­ing at a few feeds and ques­tion­ing their worth. Won­der­ing if the insights they pro­vide actu­ally helped me at all. So, I began to keep a mental list (granted I would some­how make this more con­crete) of the feeds that I just skipped over. It mostly turned out to be Life­hacker and a few others.

So I purged my list of feeds that gen­er­ate lots of posts with little value and replaced them with unique insights by authors I want to hear from; like Dan Ceder­holm and Jeff Croft. After doing that, I am read­ing no fewer feeds (about 96 now); how­ever, I read less news per day (around 60 arti­cles) and half of them are from pho­to­blogs.

I rec­om­mend that if you are read­ing 100+ arti­cles a day, take a look at what you are just skim­ming over. You may not even need that feed.

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.

There are some people who I keep close to me that seem to use me as their own per­sonal search engine. This didn’t just occur when I came to Vir­ginia Tech, it’s been hap­pen­ing since high school. People will pop up and ask me about some­thing that could take five sec­onds to find on Google. At some point I tried to reason out why some­one would do this and it’s fairly simple: it’s seem­ingly faster and easier to find better results.

Yet, I (and anyone else you may depend upon) won’t always be there. True, there are some fairly obvi­ous excep­tions to that rule, but even those select few (family and sig­nif­i­cant others) can be busy for the brief moment you need the answer. So I think that you should spend the time to learn how to find the infor­ma­tion you need. I once had a pro­fes­sor tell me that Google was infe­rior to the bou­tique search engines he seemed to prefer that had “better list­ings”, yet I had to argue that it’s not that Google is infe­rior because of its list­ings, its because people don’t gen­er­ally know their way around it. So the next time you are think­ing about asking your friend for help on some­thing that might take five sec­onds of effort on Google, don’t waste his time.