This is not just a blog issue, but I am going to be away from Facebook almost entirely for a month. In fact, I deleted Facebook from my phone a couple of weeks ago and noticed a substantial improvement to my productivity at work. My free time isn’t spent checking to see who else is slacking off at work, but rather in avoiding the temptation to slack myself. I’ve been visiting some of the 6th grade band classes, making copies of sight-reading music, listening to recordings, studying my scores for contest and planning sectionals in addition to cleaning up the band hall and getting much more organized.

Little things slip through the cracks and it’s easy to overlook so many of them or just put things off till later.

My time at home will be much more useful as well. I’m excited that I am going to get my house cleaned up, continue running, begin working on a push-up program to do some cross-training along with the running, read like crazy, and spend a lot more time reflecting on things rather than having noise and information thrown at me.

Oh yeah, my DVR is going to be saving up some shows and I’ll catch them all later. More noise gone. More focus gained.

Will you do anything online then?
I am going to continue checking my personal Twitter account through my iPhone. I can send updates to my personal Facebook account that way. I also will continue reading some blogs and other stuff online and sharing it on Twitter. Aside from the fact that I won’t update my blog, you probably won’t notice the absence. Oh yeah, I will also pay a few bills (electricity and water) online.

But I will notice it. And I need it. Already, I have a sense of liberation as I realize that I’m actually doing this. The liberation will give way to desperation and regret soon, I’m sure. But the end result will be amazing.

Why would you do something like this anyway?
I am a fairly impulsive person, and I often need extremes to shock me back into reality. Over the last few years, I have allowed more and more online activity to creep in that really just keeps me in front of the computer so much of the time. It drives me crazy.

So over the past few months, I have been implementing things to allow myself to be able to take a few weeks (or more) off with minimal damage being done when I return.

• I use Instapaper to read articles that might be interesting. If I find that it is, I star it. When I star it, it gets sent over to HootSuite, which then occasionally posts those interesting articles to my Twitter account. If it’s not what I thought it was, I delete it. The beauty is that all of this can be done from my iPhone without even logging into Twitter.
• Most of my bills are automated.
• I have shifted most of my document-making from home over to Google Docs, so I can access my personal budget from home or work or anywhere else I might be. Or my iPhone.
• All of my emails end up at one single Gmail address, and I strive to keep my inbox completely clear. If it requires follow-up action or is something I want to read later, I’ll star it. I can’t access Gmail on the school computers, but the webapp for the iPhone is pretty sweet.
• I also removed commenting from my blog, which substantially lowers the amount of time needed to moderate those. I miss the conversations, but do enjoy the reduction in spam.

All this sounds like I’m going to be glued to my iPhone the entire time I’m home, but I assure you this is not the case. I have a lot of running to do, and have quite a few great books that I got last time I was in San Antonio. Maybe I’ll write a few articles to post on the blog when I start logging on…nah, that would defeat the purpose entirely!

And yes, I am continuing working my way through Tom Anselm’s novel You’re Never Too Old For Space Camp. I do enjoy his writing and now I have time to actually read it.

Good-bye, my blogging friends. I shall see you again soon…

Oh yeah, if you get bored this month check out these articles from March in years past.

2007

• 6 Motivation Techniques
• How Not To Waste Spring Break (or Summer Vacation, or Christmas Break, or Saturday, or Tonight!)
• Do You Run The Risk of Becoming Successful?

2008

• TAKS Day
• Not The Best Day Ever Revisited
• Catching Up
• Entering the Twittersphere
• Around The Blogosphere: No Child Left Behind
• An “Online Magazine Rack”
• Whitespace
• The Deep-Seated Problems With Public Education
• You’ve Been Teaching HOW LONG???
• Video: You Think You Pay Attention? What Else Are You Missing Out On?
• Carnival of Education #163: Spring Break 2008 Edition
• Parents, Students, And Teachers…Whose Right Is It Anyway?
• Principals Gone Wild
• The State of the Blog 03/30/08
• Audio: 03/28/08
• Do I Really Want To Teach?
• UIL Sight Reading Success

2009

• 50 Online Reference Sites for Teachers
• The Hunt For The Missing Carnival
• Standardized Reading Testing
• Information Overloaded? 10 Quick Tips To Tame The Tide
• Spring Break Is Here…What to Do, What to Do…
• When Is It Time To Relocate?
• Seven Years Later: 7 Things I Would Do Before My First Year As A Teacher If I Knew Then What I Know Now
• Student Teaching 2009 Update
• Recession 2009 And Its Impact On Teaching
• Last Minute UIL Concert & Sight Reading Preparations: 10 Things I Am Doing To Try To Get Sweepstakes
• Welcome to Education: Now Change Your Plans To Fit OUR Schedule

This is a guest post by Liz Cutten, who helps run FindCollegeCards, a college student blog that helps students learn about everything college.

All college professors are different, but what you’re going to find out is that all of them are human, and many of them are going to be impressed by the same things. I went to college over 6 years, and what I had found out is that most professors will honestly look at the good students in a different way, compared to those that are bad.

Now, I know when you read the title, you’re probably thinking, “I don’t want to be suck up!”, and that’s fine. I’m not writing this to show you how to brown nose, or suck up to your teacher. Instead, this is a way to show self respect to your teacher, and be on their good side, rather than the bad side. Trust me, teachers will grade differently on those who respect them more. They won’t come out and say this, but if you know someone that has taught in the past, or present, they may tell you this when they have drank one too many.

1. Always show up on time
   This is a no-brainer. When your class starts at 8AM, show up at that time. If you show up late, not only are you disrupting the class, you’re ticking everyone off. It’s really not that hard to show up on time. Get on a schedule, and stick with it. With today’s world of technology, you should know about traffic, the weather, and everything else ahead of time that’s going to hold you back.
2. Show up to class
   A professor hates a person that shows up only 50% of the time. The person that always skips is the one that’s going to always ask the dumb questions. Unless you’re sick, don’t skip out. In college, you’re paying for your classes, so there’s no reason on why you should skip out.
3. Turn off all electronics
   Yes, I know we all have iPods, Phones, Laptops, and more. You can bring these to class, but for the love of god, TURN THEM OFF! I don’t know how many times I’ve been in class where I’ve heard the cell phones go off.
4. Be patient
   Your teacher is more than likely willing to help, but what you have to understand is that they can’t help you 24/7. If you have a question at 2:30AM, you can’t just shoot an e-mail, and expect the answer back within a few minutes. Cut your teacher some slack, and don’t harass them. They will more than likely get to your question sooner, or later.
5. Follow directions
   It sounds stupid, but many people can’t even do this. Your teacher is always going to set rules, and have direction for assignments. As long as you follow them, you’re going to be good as gold. You don’t have to be the rebel out there that’s going to break all the rules, because you’re not going to prove anything by doing this.
6. Do your work
   Homework is given out for a reason, and the same goes with your reading assignments. Always make sure that you’re keeping up with the class. If you can’t accomplish this one, you’re going to find that you’re going to slide fast. Trust me, a teacher can always spot someone that doesn’t know what he/she is doing.
7. Be respectful
   Treat your teacher with respect. Raise your hand to answer questions, be polite to your fellow classmates, and ask your questions that don’t relate to anything after class. As long as you show respect toward your professor, he/she will show it back to you.

It never hurts to be respectful to your professor. By impressing them, you’re going to find that you’re going to have an advantage of those that don’t. What does this mean? With some teachers, it may mean nothing, and while with others, it may mean a grade higher, when grading essays, etc.

Oh, you’ve done it too…

Positive changes come and go like the wind most of the time. How do we stick it out and truly persevere? If you know the answer to this question, write a book and make millions. It seems everyone who thinks they might have a clue has already written a book about it. And the world continues setting goals and failing.

The only key I have found has been simply diligence. The Free Dictionary defines diligence thusly:

1. Earnest and persistent application to an undertaking; steady effort; assiduity.
2. Attentive care; heedfulness.

I prefer the simpler “discipline multiplied by time.” I think how to fail gracefully is one of the greatest lessons we can learn and more importantly as teachers, one of the greatest lessons we can transfer to our students.

Along these lines, Keith Green wrote:

He’s brought me here, where things are clear
And trials turn to gold
He shared with me, His victory
He won in days of old

Oh Lord, I don’t deserve
The riches of your word
But You’ve changed my filthy rags
To linen white as snow

The view from here is nothing near
To what it is for You
I tried to see Your plan for me
But I only acted like I knew

Oh Lord forgive the times
I tried to read your mind
Cause you said if I’d be still
Then I would hear your voice

My Lord, my King, my urge to sing
And praise the things above
No words can say the glorious way
You changed me with your love

He’s brought me low, so I could know
The way to reach the heights
To forsake my dreams, my self esteem
And give up all my rights

With each one that I lay down
A jewel’s placed in my crown
Cause His love, the things above
Is all we’ll ever need

He’s brought me here, where things are clear
And trials turn to gold

The thing that got me thinking along these lines was actually that I downloaded a recent TED Talk by Aimee Mullins entitled The opportunity of adversity. In it she says, “unless told otherwise…if left to their own devices, a child will achieve.”

How powerful is that? How often do we take a child’s diagnosis and assume that means they are going to act or think a certain way? How often do we — consciously or unconsciously — reinforce those stereotypes? I’m sure I’m the only one who might possibly remotely come close to doing anything like that…or not! She concludes the talk:

“I think that the only true disability is a crushed spirit. A spirit that’s been crushed doesn’t have hope, it doesn’t see beauty, it no longer has our natural childlike curiosity and our innate ability to imagine. If instead, we can bolster a human spirit to keep hope, to see beauty in themselves and others, to be curious and imaginative, then we are truly using our power well. When a spirit has those qualities, we are able to create new realities and new ways of being.”

Here’s the entire video:

Oh yeah, did I mention she had both of her legs amputated when she was one-year old?

While we’re on the topic of TED Talks about adversity, you’ve got to watch this video of deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie explaining how to listen. Amazing stuff!

Embrace the trial. Learn from the experience. Go for the gold!

You’ve been teaching for quite a while. You’ve pretty much gotten a handle on classroom management, paperwork, classroom rules, and any number of the other day-to-day tasks we encounter. But how many of these teaching vices do you struggle with? I know I’m not guiltless in these areas. In fact, I’ve had run-ins with most of these. Not all of them, of course.

1. Luxuria (extravagance or lust)
   While most people think of lust in a sexual kind of way, in the original context, it essentially meant excessive love of others. Even so, some teachers take this one quite literally and end up losing their jobs over abusive relationships with their students.
2. Gula (gluttony)
   Gluttony is typically viewed in the sense of overeating, but it can be any overindulgence. Do you spend too much time doing one thing? I know that I had to delete Facebook from my iPhone because it can become such a distraction at work. I’m leaning toward deleting Twitter apps also.
3. Avaritia (greed)
   As teachers, we often pride ourselves in the fact that we don’t have high salaries, and so we can quickly get deceived into thinking that we are exempt from the struggles of greed that many people have. Quite the contrary, do you find yourself spending your next paycheck weeks before you even get it? Do you have too much month left at the end of the money each month?
4. Acedia (sloth)
   Do you work hard when you’re at work? I put in 10-hour days most of the time. It’s easy for me to sit down and just zone out. Or go back to the aforementioned Facebook or Twitter apps. I have to fight hard to work the whole time I’m at work. It’s a struggle. Especially when I am much more organized than I was in the early years.
5. Ira (wrath)
   When something doesn’t go my way, I get frustrated. When this year’s students don’t learn something as well as last year’s, and definitely not as well as the ones I had five years ago, it can be oh so aggravating. Oh yeah, did I mention that I find myself working with middle school kids every day? Isn’t that excuse enough to lash out in anger? Or maybe I’m the only one…
6. Invidia (envy)
   “Wow, Mr. So-and-so has much better students than me.”
   “If I had only taken that extra class over the summer, I’d be getting the same $500 stipend she is!”
   “You only say that because your husband is an attorney.”
   “Why won’t the administration ever suspend this kid and get him out of my class?”
   Need I say more?
7. Superbia (pride)
   I used to be a really bad teacher, but now I find myself shocked when other teachers do the same things I used to. I would never do it like that! And yet I did it like that for years. My students never misbehave. A lot of the time I catch other teachers (or myself) bragging on my students, it’s really more of an attempt to fish for compliments.

So how are you doing in fighting these sins? They just might be your downfall if you’re not careful! Below are the Christian virtues that correlate with each of the sins and ways that I have had success in resisting some of the above sins.

1. Chastity
   Band directors and coaches tend to spend more time outside of the school day with students and therefore run the risk of allegations of indiscretion with students. As a result, I make every possible effort to avoid being in a close one-on-one situation with a student. If they stay after school to work on music, I try to have other people around. If everyone else is gone, I am at my desk listening but not real close. If they are the last one picked up, I get in my truck and wait. Even an unfounded allegation of impropriety can sabotage any teacher’s career.
2. Abstinence
   Sometimes ya just gotta say no. Happy birthday, but don’t be offended that I’m not eating a piece of cake today. When was the last time you really unplugged from all of the over-connectedness that we experience in the world? Try it for a day and see what happens. As I said before, I’ve deleted Facebook from my iPhone and will be drastically minimizing the amount of time I spend online in the near future. Pretty much from now till the end of March (when my band goes to UIL Concert & Sight-Reading), I will be under the radar. I need to reclaim my focus and trimming the attention sails (the term stuck with me almost three years after I first read it, so I figure it’s an effective headline).
3. Temperance
   Practice delayed gratification. Plan purchases out long-term. Get on a budget. Don’t go (any further) into debt. Listen to Dave Ramsey. Embrace the words “no” and “later”.
4. Diligence
   Hard work is the key to winning at anything long-term. I started running for the first time in over a decade at the beginning of this year. It’s hard work. Really hard. Each day I have to force myself to get up and go out to run. I don’t win every day, but the battle rages on. At work, I actually teach 4 completely different classes and work with small groups of students in 1-3 other classes each day. Plus after-school sectionals. I have a whole lot of prep work to do. But I must force myself to do it, or else the students will lag behind. And at this point in the year, I can’t blame the band directors from last year. It’s all my fault now!
5. Patience
   This is the area in which I struggle the most. Outbursts of wrath (or course the good ol’ occasional planned fit). If I’m trying to create a safe atmosphere in the classroom, I really should avoid yelling. Even if it’s just me trying to convey my passion for the music or whatever, it’s out of place. Maybe I should just invest in some ice packs or Orajel and get used to biting my tongue…
6. Kindness
   Kindness is the flip-side of envy? Yes! Essentially, whether the other person knows about it or not, envy is rudeness. It’s me saying that they don’t deserve what they got. It’s also intertwined with pride in that by saying they don’t deserve it, I am also saying that I somehow do. If I actually LIKE the person, I will have a hard time discrediting their character. Ouch.
7. Humility
   Humility is tough. Especially as I do become better at teaching. But people pick up on it pretty quickly. Each one of the above virtues is more powerful when seasoned with humility.

Sometimes I wish I could go back to the days when I struggled to come to school and didn’t have time to worry about what else I was doing wrong. Ignorance indeed was bliss…

This has been a fun project. I’ve learned a whole lot about web development, myself, teaching, and the art of blogging through the building and maintaining of this site. It has become more of a burden than I ever imagined, but I do enjoy the opportunity to share my thoughts with tens of thousands of visitors each month. I’ve learned a lot as a result of the blog and the comments that many of you have posted or emailed.

Whereas in months past I would have asked you to leave a comment, I recently realized that comments were beginning to overwhelm me and were draining my time, so I removed comments from my blog. Instead of asking you to leave comments, I’ll kindly ask you to blog, tweet, or Facebook about something that you’ve really enjoyed about SYWTT. Share a link to a particular article you appreciated or to the homepage. Heck, you can Google Buzz about it too if you want.

Back then
Contest preparation when I first started teaching way back in August of 2002 went something like this:

I began by digging through the CDs that I picked up each year at music conventions to find recordings of some of the band music that might be available. Then I picked up my copy of the UIL Prescribed Music List to see what was on the list. At this point, I went back to the recordings and tried to find whichever of the tunes I had on CD so I could listen. If a friend recommended a piece I couldn’t hear, they would send me a tape of another area band playing it or just assure me that it was worth checking out.

Now
I still consult friends about pieces, but there are some phenomenal recording projects that have been done over the last few years with high-caliber university wind ensembles playing middle school level music. Additionally, most of the music publishers are now online or have recordings available on music dealer websites. The UIL PML (and I assume other state contest lists) is available online in an electronic format that can easily and quickly be searched.

These eight websites have recordings of most of the music that I need to listen to for my contest programming:

1. Alfred Music Publishing
   Alfred has one of the most comprehensive libraries for young band. With composers such as Robert W. Smith and Michael Story, the Alfred library is teeming with great recordings. The publishers of the Accent on Achievement band method series, Alfred Music has a slick Flash player on its website where you can listen to their recordings as well as an online store for purchasing MP3s.
2. Hal Leonard Online
   Hal Leonard is the second (alphabetically) of the major music publishers. Hal Leonard is the publisher of the Essential Elements 2000 band method along with the numerous titles in the Essential Elements 2000 Concert Band series. The Hal Leonard site also includes recordings for Curnow Music, Musicworks, Rubank, and Boosey & Hawkes.
3. Manhattan Beach Music
   Manhattan Beach is a small publisher with a handful of great composers. Frank Ticheli, Bob Margolis, and Timothy Broege are some of the more prolific names. One of the coolest features of their website is that there is a page with all of the MP3 recordings on it where you are encouraged to download for personal use.
4. Neil A. Kjos Music Company
   The Kjos company also includes the entire Queenwood catalog. Though many of the pieces are not recorded, there are a fair number that are and any middle school band director would be remiss if they didn’t at least consider a John Edmondson of Anne McGinty composition once in a while.
5. TRN Music
   TRN is a  small music publisher with a handful of great compositions. Many of their publications are available in MP3 format on their website. You can purchase all of their recordings in one neat simple download. You can also browse their Texas UIL list.
6. JW Pepper
   J.W. Pepper is a national sheet music distributor and they have some MP3s on their own site and actually link to the audio file on many of the publishers above. This is where I usually go to listen to music.
7. Penders Music
   Penders is located in Denton, TX and has a huge stock of readily available music. Pretty much every (currently in print) piece I’ve looked for on the Penders Website has a recording available. They even have a cool list of just the Texas UIL PML, many of which have recordings.

Further resources

• Go to the UIL Prescribed Music List to search the UIL database.
• Go to the Young Band Repertoire Project to find detailed analyses of some of these compositions.

Maybe paperwork isn’t your problem. Maybe it’s a half-finished basement, a bathroom renovation gone sour, a fence in the back yard that needs to be adjusted. Or you have bill collectors hounding you. Or you aren’t contributing enough (or anything) to your retirement plan. Or you are in debt out your eyeballs. Or you’re still lugging around that extra 5 pounds that you’ve been meaning to lose (or the 75 pounds that has grown as you’ve been ignoring it for the last decade).

Whatever the case, we all have unfinished business in our lives. These things can cause incredible amounts of stress when we think about them. They can cause even more when we ignore them for a while hoping they’ll go away. But they rarely do.

Here’s the secret
You won’t change a thing in your life until you finally decide that you’re disgusted with living the way you have been living.

Most plans go unfinished simply because they are good ideas, perhaps even great ideas, but they aren’t all-encompassing ideas. By that I mean, we don’t develop the intense focus needed to accomplish them.

This goes back to the concept of planned neglect that I mentioned a few weeks ago. If we really want to change something, we’re going to have to give it solitary focus for an extended period of time. This is the psychology behind Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover plan (watch the videos for more info).

Having said this, there are a couple of things that we can do to help lower the stress in our lives.

1. Find a source of stress and beat it into submission
   Figure out one thing that brings most stress in your life. If it’s a relationship, work on addressing the problems that are going there. If it’s financial, focus all of your effort onto one financial goal at a time. If it’s a project, just decide to make it happen immediately. Spend a month or two developing one habit that will get you moving into the right direction. As you focus on one thing, other problems will become evident and your passion and focus will help you to overcome those in the process. But don’t get sidetracked! Stay on target.
2. Resolve to ignore the problem
   This is the other choice. If it’s not something illegal, immoral, or unhealthy, just accept it. If it’s something you want to eventually get through, then put some steps into place to gradually get over it, but sometimes there is beauty in just flat out accepting your own imperfections and moving on. It may be something you accept now but in a year or two or six you’ll be at a point where addressing the problem is easier and more reasonable.

I have a few unfinished series of articles on this blog that I started but for one reason or another I gave up on. This year, I will go back and finish some of them. If I don’t finish them all, I’ll live. So will you. If I do finish them, great! For now, I’m simply not going to worry about them.

For me, my focus point right now is exercise (specifically, training to run a 5K). Do you have one yet? If not, what are you waiting for? Tweet or blog about it and let people know.

Where it all began
I began this blog as a hobby back in the spring of 2007, shortly after I began to learn more about the potential that blogs held. Life was much simpler back then. For one thing, I taught 6th grade beginning band only. My obligations outside of school were minimal, and the amount of time I spent in front of the computer was similarly low. Life was much simpler back then.

I long for that again.

Where it has taken me
In the fall of 2007, I moved to the middle school where I became responsible for one of two performing bands. This shift meant that in addition to all of my previous responsibilities, I was now going to football games, pep rallies, and parades (in addition to the same high school football games, marching competitions, and other duties). In addition, I now have after school sectionals most days until 5 or later, as well as taking the band to the UIL Concert & Sight-Reading contest in the spring.

The winter of 2007-2008
The blog (and the interaction with readers) was something that really helped me when the other band director at my campus had a stroke in December 0f 2007. He was out for three months, and the encouraging comments I got from readers of SYWTT (in addition to church and frantic phone calls to my mother and friends) were immeasurably helpful in getting me through that experience.

Beginning in the spring of 2008, I noticed a sharp drop in the number of posts I was writing on the blog as well as a sharp increase in the number of comments. This came as a result of natural growth of the site, but I soon realized it was too much to keep up with.

During the summer and fall of 2008, untold hundreds of spammy comments were undoubtedly allowed to be posted on the blog simply because I fell down on the job of moderating them. There were a handful of great ones, and I enjoyed the insight I got from many, so I really didn’t think anything of it.

Google enters the fray
I noticed sometime in November that my Google PageRank had been up as high as 5, but it was now hovering somewhere in the 1-2 range. Traffic was still coming from Google, but not as much as I feared it could be. I worked to take care of that some, but really have been unable to bring it back up above 3 again. As a point of reference, my Twitter profile currently has a PageRank of 6.

Though my blog is not huge by any standards, my full-time job as a middle school band director takes up a lot of my focus, and the increased comment load as well as the increasing demand on my attention as far as moderation goes, began to be too much.

Problems compounded
This past fall, I got an email from my hosting company telling me that they were getting a bunch of spam emails being sent out through my blog’s comment functionality. After a few weeks working with them (including a complete shutdown of the site for a day or two), I finally made some changes, installed some plugins, and got them happy again. But comment spam continued flowing.

DISQUS
I installed the DISQUS comment system in October of last year, but soon began to notice an increased time spent loading the pages on the site. Last week, I posted about this, got a comment and subsequent email from some of the people over there, but really didn’t get much of a solution and the whole thing has been bothering me for a while.

The final straw
Yesterday, I bought the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook from ProBlogger. He had a special running that also included a few podcasts. I was listening to Leo Babauta talking about the reasons he removed comments from Zen Habits and it really struck a nerve with me. It’s been building for a while, but this was really why I decided to do it.

I also listened the Neil Patel talking about why he keeps comments on Quick Sprout. I would love to be able to do that and respond to every single comment that comes in, but I also remember that he is a full-time web worker. I’m not. I have other priorities and the blog is taking up too much of my time.

Plus I’m on a mission to run a 5K this spring. Oh yeah, and hopefully lose 50-100 extra pounds in the process. Can’t be sitting on my butt in front of the computer all day when I should be out training, now can I?

Taking up too much of your time? But you rarely post any more!
While it’s true that I rarely post, I am being forced to delete comment spam and really dig through a lot of other administrative tasks that I don’t want to do. I want to get back to that place where I’m really passionate about doing this stuff again.

That may involve some changes in the near future. That may involve me launching one or two new blogs soon. I will most definitely include me spending less time doing blog administration and more time blogging. I’m sure I have a bunch of unfinished blogging projects that I started out at one time or another and need to finish. 2010 is the year of completion and discipline for me.

Will you ever turn comments back on?
I reserve the right to turn the comments back on any time, and who knows, maybe I will again. If I do, I still have all 2,500+ comments saved in the WordPress database, so if I ever decide to flip the switch, they will all be restored. But I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you…

Today I have been catching up on some of the Twitter links I’ve seen and came across 13 Most Inspirational YouTube Videos of All-Time that Angela Maiers had sent out a few days back. I was really impressed by this video.

I was so impressed that I decided to dig in and see what more I could find from him. I came across an interview he did following the release of I Am Legend (Will Smith Walks Alone in I Am Legend). Below are three excerpts from the interview:

Smith on the discipline of losing twenty pounds for the role
“For me, the important part of that, and what we determined from our research, is that eating becomes something you do because you have to. There is no pleasure, there is no desire to eat, you just know your brain won’t function if you don’t. So losing weight and then the working out being part of the regimen you have to do – but for me I have a much easier time losing weight than putting weight on. Ali was fifty times harder trying to put weight on than to drop. If you run thirty miles a week and do five miles six days a week, your body will look like whatever you want it to look like.”

Will Smith on whether he has a positive attitude towards life
“Yes, absolutely. I feel very, very confident that the keys to life for me are reading and running. The idea that there are millions and billions of people who have lived before us, and they had problems and they solved them and they wrote it in a book somewhere – there is no new problem that we can have that we have to figure out by ourselves. There’s no relationship issue, there is no issue with your parents or your brother or your government, there is no issue we can have that somebody didn’t already write a thousand years ago in a book. So, for me, that concept of reading is bittersweet because you know it’s in a book somewhere but you’ve got to find the right one that is going to give you the proper information. I said reading and running and the running aspect is how can you connect with your weakness. When you get on the treadmill you deprive yourself of oxygen. What kind of person you are will come out very, very quickly. You’re either the type of person who will say you’re going to run three miles or you stop the treadmill at 2.94 and you hit it and you call 2.94 3 miles, or you get off after a mile, or you’re the type of person that runs hard through the finish line and when you get to 3.0 you realize, ‘God, I could really do 5,’ and you go ahead and do two more. And that little person talks to you and says, ‘Man, do you feel our knee? We should stop. I feel we should stop ourselves right now. This is not healthy anymore.’ When you learn to get command over that person on that treadmill, you learn to get command over that person in your life. That’s the same person that tells you, ‘Man, that girl’s got some big breasts. Listen, we don’t have to do nothing, let’s just go the hotel room together.’ That’s the same person. Getting command of that person has been really important.”

On where his confidence originates from
“There is a very central idea in my life. My grandmother just thought I was the greatest. She always had us always playing piano and having us do recitations at church and all of that. She always kept us in the shows at church and there was a look of pride that my grandmother have in her eyes that became the fuel that I need in life. I need my woman and daughter and mother and women in general to look at me with that look that my grandmother had. I was about 15 years old when my first girlfriend cheated on me. It so destroyed my concept of cause and effect, that you can be good and good stuff happens, and when you’re bad, bad stuff happens. I processed why she cheated on me was I wasn’t good enough, and I made a decision in my bed that I would never not be good enough again. That was the last time in my life that I would not be good enough. In that bizarre hurt 15-year-old mind then nobody would hurt me or cheat on me if I’m good enough. I may have gone a little overboard on it but every single day Jada has to have that look. I can’t function if she doesn’t have that look in her eyes. That means with the movies, as a husband, as a father, everything I do in life I educate myself to the place that I can contend with the best on Earth and that’s the only way to keep my woman from leaving me.”

Be inspired, stick with your goals, and don’t end 2010 the same way you started it!

1. A decrease in the number of relevant comments on my blog
2. An increase in the number of spammy comments that get approved
3. An increase in the number of complaints about the difficulty of commenting on my blog
4. A substantial increase in the the time it takes for pages on my site to load

I turned off DISQUS commenting this morning and while I lost a number of comments that have been posted to my site, I also notice that some of the comments posted on DISQUS actually were preserved. I also did some speed testing of my site and was blown away by the results. In fact, I turned DISQUS on again to confirm. All stats are provided by WebSiteOptimization.com.

Site stats with DISQUS installed
Global Statistics

Object Size Totals

External Objects

Download Times*

Site stats without DISQUS installed
Global Statistics

Object Size Totals

External Objects

Download Times*

Clearly a great improvement. The home page loads 11 seconds faster for a 56K reader than it did with DISQUS comments installed. There are only 37 HTTP requests rather than 64. This may not make much sense to most of my regular readers, but it’s dramatic improvement for such a simple change. Even at a super fast T1 connection, 5 seconds may not seem too impressive but when you consider that the site loads in 60% of the time it previously took, it’s a pretty solid improvement.

If anyone from DISQUS is listening, I love the comment system, but don’t like sacrificing user experience for convenience. I’m hoping one day to find the same cool comment functionality that the service provides without the crazy slow load times.