Words On Wednesday

I’ve been looking for a new monthly segment to complement Thirsty Thursday Eve , and I feel like a “book report” or sorts would be the perfect idea for it. Making a monthly obligation to write about a book or short story that I’ve read accomplishes a number of goals. First and foremost, it gives me more incentive to read. I love reading, I just don’t have much free time to do it lately. Committing to at least one piece per month is a fairly low investment, I’d say. Plus, with my recent discovery of how awesome audiobooks are, I can listen to the book while I work. Setting aside 15 hours or so of uninterrupted time during a month for reading is difficult. Listening to 15 hours of audio while I work is something I already do in less than a week with music. I enjoyed writing the originally one-off book report on  John Updike’s “A&P” a while back, but if this is going to become a regular thing, I want to give it a little more structure. Most importantly, I want to have posts t...

Date formats are not something that many people have any sort of opinion on, but it is something that I find very polarizing and I’ll explain why. The two date formats that I probably see most often are MM-DD-(CC)YY and DD-MM-(CC)YY, with the former being more prominent in the United States and the latter seeming to be the preferred format of European countries and elsewhere in the world. Maybe it aligns with use of the Metric system versus Imperial units, I’m not really certain. Either way, I think both options are terrible. First and foremost, they are terribly ambiguous. Without a definite indicator or a value higher than 12, the month and date could be interchangeable. Take today’s date, for example. September 12, 2018 as I will list it formally, could be represented as 09-12-2018 or 12-09-2018. Let’s not even get into the option of excluding the century from the year, as we all know of the headache that caused with Y2K. Without a clear context, those dates could alternatively ...

I do not care for tomatoes. For the past few months, however, I’ve been trying to change that. Nearly everybody I know seems to love tomatoes. Maybe it’s the geographical region of the American southeast or some sort of confirmation bias since I don’t frequently ask people directly if they eat tomatoes, but I know many more people who eat tomatoes than those who do not. And this isn’t a matter of, “I’ll eat it, but I don’t really care one way or the other.” No, most of these people love some tomatoes. And they’ll rave about how much better fresh tomatoes are than store bought, and such. I’ve tried tomatoes several times through my life, and I’ve never really cared for them. It isn’t really the taste. I’ll eat tomatoes cooked into stuff, or I’ll eat salsa provided it’s a more pureed consistency. It’s the texture that I don’t care for. The goopy innards of tomatoes remind me of the sort of semi-rotten thing that you might accidentally squeeze too hard and have it just fall apart in y...

During a recent vacation to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, I learned about the woeful unavailability of distilled spirits, and discovered a new brand of bourbon. At the beginning our trip, I decided that we could pick up some alcohol after we arrived and unloaded all our luggage. I understand that liquor laws vary widely between states, but SC tends to have some of the more strict laws than other nearby states. Hence, I tend to assume that I can typically pick up spirits during the same conditions as what I would be able to back home. When visiting an area that I’m unfamiliar with, I often rely on the expertise of local employees for information. Waitresses, store clerks, and other such workers almost always live nearby, and because of that, they usually know where the best options are for a variety of goods. In my case, I asked a waitress at our new favorite wing restaurant in the area  if she knew of any good liquor stores around. She asked if I’d seen the cross up in the midd...

I almost won a car from a contest recently. Almost. This story begins back on 29 June. It had been 8 weeks since I last donated blood, and I was once again eligible to donate. Because the donation centers are more spacious and typically less crowded than the mobile drives, I usually just go to the center on the day that I become eligible. Sure, I miss out on promotions, but I still get points and the occasional t-shirt. Besides, it’s not about getting rewarded; it’s about saving lives </sarcasm>. I pull up at the donation center and see a  Hot 98.1 van and tent set up in the parking lot. Huh, what do we have here? Curiosity got the better of me, and I step up to the table under the tent and inquire about what’s going on. It turns out they’re entering people to  win a brand new 2018 Honda Civic . That’s neat, but I’d never win it. They were also giving out free swag to anyone who entered, so I figured it was an easy way to get a free coffee mug. Per the detai...

After a few times starting and stopping, I’ve reached level 99 fletching and popped a bond… or three. As I mentioned way back in November , the decision of Jagex to make fletching a f2p skill is part of what made me start playing again. It was an influx of new content, and a skill that I enjoyed playing. Mind you, at the time, I didn’t realize it could be free/profitable to train. I just knew that it was something I could do without paying for membership. Turns out, just because fletching is what brought me back to Runescape, doesn’t mean I would actually do much of it. Between  my last post of my last stretch of playing, and the first post of this current stint, I only got 13,843 xp in the skill. For comparison, a single load of unstrung maple shieldbows gives around 1,600 xp. So I did less than 10 loads worth of my bread and butter training method, and just stopped completely at 2,047,727 fletching xp. I liked fletching, sure, but there were more pressing issues in the w...

You might not expect it to be difficult to automate posting to social media, but good lord, it is an absolute pain. I bring this up because Facebook recently changed their policy on sharing from third party tools. I’m not sure on all of the intricate details, but essentially, automatic sharing can only be done to Facebook Pages, and not personal Profiles. I have traditionally used tools to read the RSS feed of Words On Wednesday and share updates to my various social media profiles, so this means that I would no longer have my posts automatically share from my Facebook Profile. Since the vast majority of my traffic comes from Facebook, I would lose a lot of that without sharing my posts. After learning of this pending change, I began looking into different options. When Words On Wednesday was hosted on WordPress , I could use the baked in social media sharing options offered by WordPress itself. Once I migrated to Blogger, I had to look into alternatives. Blogger supports automatic...

I spoke of how I had discovered StepMania back in November 2017 . I bought a PS2 to USB adapter online, and I had high hopes that it would allow me to play with my dance pad. Admittedly, I’m a little late on the followup, but I did finally try to use the USB adapter  with the game. Shipping from an obscure little company in China obviously takes a while, so I didn’t get in any hurry waiting for my package. It took a few weeks, but the adapter finally came in. I told myself I would try it out, but I sat it aside and didn’t get around to it for a while. And by “a while,” I mean about 5 months. Things came up, I forgot about the adapter, and I just never got back to it. Finally, in March 2018, a friend came up and asked if I had ever gotten to try it out. I obviously had not, but we decided to hook it up. I expected there would be some configuration, so I was prepared for some setup time. With a black belt in Google-fu, there are very few general tech issues that I can’t solve wit...

Coincidentally, I happened to post Thirsty Thursday Eve topics on the last Wednesday of the month for three months in a row. So I inadvertently made it a thing. Hence, the last Wednesday of each month will be a Thirsty Thursday Eve post for as long as I remember to do it. This month’s Thirsty Thursday Eve is less of a review or recommendation, and more of a tale. A story of my decision to purchase a full bottle of liquor on the recommendation of a friend, and the disappointed journey that followed. I discovered that I strongly dislike Southern Comfort, so at least I learned something from the experience. The beginning of this story takes us back to soon after I turned 21. Like many people who reach this milestone age, I was trying numerous different types of alcohol just to figure out what I did and didn’t like. I’ve always been a rule-follower and come from a very conservative family, so my exposure to alcohol was extremely limited before I could legally buy it for myself. I k...

I knew it would happen eventually. My third bond recently ended and I’m getting to the point now here I’m pretty burned out with the paid game. Mind you, I still haven’t paid a cent of real money on the game since my purchased membership ended on 8 September 2013 . But the whole situation of having to prioritize making money within the game to pay for the bonds I’ve purchased with in-game currency… it gets old. I’ve fortunately found some ways to recoup the monetary cost of a bond pretty quickly, but temporary membership of any sort still adds that feeling of obligation to the game. For each bond that I buy, I’ve got 14 days of membership, and I have to max out what I do within that time, else I’ve wasted it. The entirety of my first bond was colored with that “ermahgerd, I’m a member again” magic. Considering my only exposure to p2p in the past almost 5 years was a free membership weekend, having 2 weeks to do whatever I wanted in the game was great. It wasn’t really driven, and hones...