Adam Kazwell is...somewhat concerned

Good day at the skatepark

Have I shared with everyone my views on how being a successful skater can have a direct correlation to success in the business world? My theory is if I were to start a company, I would almost exclusively hire skaters (diversity be damned!). Actually that's not true, but I think that skaters would make for excellent business people (see Tony Hawk and Bam Margera(sp?). For a few simple reasons:

1. They don't waste their times writting project plans, instead they're all about action
2. To be a successful skater takes courage, confidence, a developed set of skills, a willingness to try new things, creativity, and an ability to overcome fear.
3. Did I mention perserverence?

You give me a person with just half of those things, and I guarantee they could succeed in whatever business venture (or any other challenge) they choose. I'm not saying that I'm a good skater, but that I enjoy the sport for both the physical and mental aspects. Tonight, I really wanted to try a new trick. It was something that I was pretty certain I was capable of, yet it was a little out of reach as compared to stuff I've done before. I prepared myself by getting comfortable doing some similar moves and then it took me about 10 mins to convince myself to actually try the trick. It was uncomfortable to stretch my comfort level. Finally I tried it and wrecked. And wrecked again, and again, and again (repeat 5 more times). Each fall hurt, and I could have and thought about stopping after each attempt, but with each fall also came an increased comfort in trying the trick, and eventually I landed it. I don't know where I wanted to go with this, point is I landed the trick and I'm proud. And that if I could act the same way in the business world I would achieve the same amount of success.

How do you spell competition?

March Madness. Nope, try again. How about S.P.E.L.L.I.N.G. B.E.E. I watched the movie Spellbound today and really enjoyed it. Much better than what I sat through last night.

Anyways, I think the movie did a good job portraying a few things:

(Need to edit the following)
There were all sorts of kids there. Sure, most of them were your typical nerds and bookworms, but there were a few of your average 10-14(?) year olds in it with everyone else. Some kids were comfortable with their brainy-ness, others not so much. But you got a sense that after they went to the spelling bee, they didn't feel so weird about themselves before they came - much like the "No rain" video by Blind Melon. Umm, where was I? Oh yeah - so it was interesting to see how each kid handled the stress, and how they prepared, and how they were viewed by friends and family.

Here's a few more miscellaneous points:
Each kid had a huge amount of dedication to get where they were
Spelling is simple, anyone can do it, these kids just wanted to be better at it.
It's about the process of setting and achieving goals
How smart kids can exist in not-so-smart environments
What do these kids turn into when they grow up? I'd like to write more about this later, we'll see what happens.

How Sweet It Is

"Travis gave me a look and nodded,'' Novak said. Evidently, that's all it takes to turn Steve Novak into superman.

Marquette played a great game against Missouri yesterday, with just about everyone stepping up. Man, to have that feeling of peak performance at the most important time must be such a rush! If only I could have been a D1 college basketball player...

Hmmm, interesting

Notes for tonight:

Went and saw Oscar Shorts at the Magnolia theater. And read some of the Alchemist (note - this book has nothing to do with the DJ for Dilated Peoples. Needless to say, I was disappointed.)

Here's some cool links I found tonight...

Dan Says Makes me miss the Brew City
Exploding Dog Like Grape Nuts, neither Grape, nor Nut.
Fairvue.com Saw this guy at the Bloggies, sweet sign design
The Raging Platypus

About the last site, I think it taught me a few important lessons. One - cool titles always get attention. I thought I knew that already, but clearly AdamKazwell.com isn't turning any heads. It's okay, I've got cooler titles up my sleeve. Two - Even though the content is somewhat weak (my opinion), the site does a great job at creating hype. See the FAQ here. Three, I take the first part of number two back. There is some decent content on the site, including a lot of metadata stuff that I want to learn about, including RSS, XFML, RSD, FOAF, etc...Man, if only I knew what half those acronymns meant (yes, I meant to omit the "of"). Oh yeah, final proof that the site is good at creating hype, look who's adding the Raging Platypus link to their site (see March 14th post).

Alright, enough for now. Gotta go ice the knee (Let's just say that me and the 7ft spine didn't have a great first date)

2 hours down the drain

In the last post, I mentioned a new design for the site...And while the site does look different than it did yesterday, it is not the redesign I was hoping for. You see, when I went to paste in the new design into Blogger, it seems that Blogger didn't like whatever tags Frontpage was using, and so it refused to publish the changes. Which cost me, oh about 2 hours of work. Pretty sweet, huh? Thanks Blogger.

We'll See How Long This Lasts

New Design, for today at least. Man, if I spent as much time on content as design...Look for the links to get updated soon. You should be able to google most of the links if they don't work, sans any of the non exist links in the "Producing" column. Unfortunately, Google is taking forever to index my sites. Someday.

Be Not Afraid (of the coping)

Other titles that were considered for this post
1. Coping with Coping - too cheesy
2. The Coping is your Friend - True, but didn't have nice ring to it.
3. I didn't have a third one.

Anyways, I managed to make some slight progress at the skate park tonight. I can now successfully ride up and down the mini-pipe while locking onto the coping and then a) do a 180 into the pipe b) riding fakie back into the pipe c) doing a 180 first, locking onto the coping, and then dropping back in as normal. I figure this will pave the way for grinding and other more advanced stalls. Interestingly enough, the 180 first didn't seem too hard once I actually tried it. Guess that's how skating goes some times.

Sleepy.

Alright, now we're getting somewhere.

Formatting's a little better (usable for now), and all the links seem to be working. Now just gotta pump this page full of good ole C.O.N.T.E.N.T. (insert your own definition here).

Good night.

Yeah!!

Looks like this page is finally up and running! Jeez, now I just gotta get rid of this crappy template design... (note: In beginning post, each exlamation point in Howdy stood for a failed attempt to get Blogger to auto update the site. Third time's the charm!)

Howdy!!!

Howdy!!!