Sunday, July 16, 2006

Decisions

It's taken me a few days, but I've finally decided I'm going to stick with Blogspot for my blog, and just make my other site for things like my writings, etc. I can be so indecisive at times, so I couldn't make up my mind at first. I like the simplicity of Blogspot, but I do like being able to have the other pages on my site when I want them. What finally settled the decision for me was the issue of spam. I have to delete two or three spam comments off my other blog every day. I get email alerts when someone comments, and I would get alerts each day about a comment being posted on some old entry. I'm getting rather tired of that, and the security step I tried before didn't work so well, as some people weren't able to comment then. At least if I start getting such comments here, I can use their word verification setting to cut back on that. I've been wanting to post some lately, but haven't been able to decide which blog to use! I'll post a notice over there, then only post here after that. My one hangup about not using that one anymore was that I wanted to keep my archive, so I'm going to work on a way to link to them from here. I'm going to be rebuilding our evangelism site soon, and I'm working on other websites for family members, so I've got plenty of computer work to keep me busy already. It feels nice to have something simpler for myself now.

Last night, I practiced my guitar for quite a while, working on my flatpicking. I hadn't practiced much lately, so my fingertips are sore. The metronome I use is on my computer, and sometimes I play along with recodrding I have on the computer, so I play sitting in my computer chair so those things are easily accessible. Well last night, I was working on one of the songs, and had gotten it up to a decent rate of speed along with the metronome. I took it up a bit faster, then I just couldn't get it at that rate of speed. I kept focusing too much on either the playing or the metronome, and that would get me off on the other thing. I had a blog open on my computer, and something caught my attention and I started reading it while playing. After about a paragraph, I noticed I was playing perfectly in sync with the metronome, and having no trouble with the speed at all. I came to realize I try to focus too much on where my fingers are moving instead of just playing. I knew the song well, so there really was no need to think about it that much. I get so caught up with thinking I'm going to make a mistake, I overanalyze everything I'm doing, which then causes me to get off. I set the metronome to go faster, and just played, aware of the metronome, but not concentrating too much on any one thing. That helped me tremendously, and I began to see a great deal of improvement. I got down some of the easier songs, and moved to some with just about all eighth notes. I practiced until my fingers were too tired to keep moving so much, but it was great to be able to see myself making some improvement. :)

4 comments:

John said...

Here's an offical welcome to blogspot!

Lindsay said...

Thank you! I'm finding I like it a lot.

John said...

I use to have a different blog server that I hated and was hard to use before I changed to blogspot and now it is so much easier to blog.

Anonymous said...

Wow Lindsay, that is really cool about your being able to play so much better when you stopped focusing so hard on it...How neat!!! :)