Words On Wednesday

I always enjoy a good beer, but sometimes a particular beer becomes more than just a beverage. Name: Brown Eyed Squirrel Source: RJ Rockers Style: American-Style Brown Ale ABV: 5.6% IBU: 18 Price: $9.47 per 6 pack at Ingles (0.132 per oz, ~1.58 per can) The first time I ever had Brown Eyed Squirrel was at a friend’s bachelor party. We were sitting at the bar in Spare Time, waiting for our escape room session. I asked the bartender for “the maltiest thing you have.” Probably 75% of the time, this question gets met with a blank stare, and then I just ask for a Sam Adams or something they’ll recognize. The remaining quarter, I’ll get something I almost universally enjoy. Fortunately, this bartender knew her stuff. She told me that they don’t have a lot of malty options, but that she would probably recommend Brown Eyed Squirrel. If somebody is informed enough to answer that question, their recommendation is probably a safe bet for me. I gave it a shot, and sure enough it was really good. T...

You guys remember strategy guides? Man, those were the days weren’t they? Back in the day, strategy guides were the only mechanism available for getting help in video games. That, or asking our friends, and most gamers in the 80s and 90s were super antisocial, so we didn’t have a lot of friends to begin with. We bought the book, or borrowed one from somebody who had it. A History in Reverse Today, there are numerous sources for gaming tips and guides. Youtube and Reddit are peppered with content about every game out there. Many of your larger intellectual properties have a dedicated wiki or fandom, with individual pages about nearly everything. There are platforms geared toward hosting that sort of information, and no shortage of volunteers looking to create the content. In the recent past, maybe a decade ago, GameFAQs was the be-all and end-all of video game information. They had general guides for playing through games, specific guides for particular sections and tasks, and even a fe...

Shifting jobs again has made me reconsider exactly what I put on my work computer, and whether I truly need a personal computer. Spoiler: yes, I do. Confession: I have used employer-issued devices for personal purposes a lot through my professional career. At one job, I would use my work computer to edit GoPro videos between assignments because it was more powerful than my personal computer at the time. Several times, I’ve used my work computer to make Amazon purchases, or order pizza to pick up on the way home. I figured it wasn’t a big deal. I was still getting my work done, this just made it easier to do some non-work things when I had a free moment. When I worked at RedSail, especially during the last few months, I was doing most of my work from my personal laptop and accessing my work computer via remote desktop for anything that had to be done on the network. After I was terminated there, I still had my personal device, so there wasn’t really any significant shift in my computing...

Floating point math is something I always took for granted in software development, but I’ve recently been exposed to some of its nuances and how to better calculate values in some cases. Crash course, floating point is effectively just math with decimal places. Different languages use different terminology for the specific data types (“float” and “double” for double precision are common), but they’re all pretty much the same in concept. In decimal (base 10), it’s really not a big deal. Positive exponents go left or more significant from the decimal point, while negative exponents go right or less significant. You multiply or divide by 10, you go up or down in significance. This is all pretty elementary for most of us. The problem is that computers don’t operate in decimal, they use binary (base 2), zeroes and ones. So numbers with digits after the decimal point, fractions of a whole number, aren’t easily represented in binary. Instead, floating point data types use a combination of pr...

As I mentioned last month, North Carolina has some super weird liquor laws and pricing policies. However, the monthly scheduling means that I have incentive to try something new each month. Specifically, true to the form of the economic alcoholic, I can pick up one of the cheapest sale items and see how bad it is. So finding the monthly sale items in North Carolina liquor stores is pretty easy. You go to this site , select the current month in the “Month” drop down list, and select Microsoft Excel in the “File Type” drop down list. Then hit “Create Report.” You could also select PDF, but spreadsheets are the superior file type. Fight me. This is where it gets a little funky. For whatever reason, the spreadsheet is in this really weird format, where the headers are vertically merged and there are two empty columns between each populated column. I have no idea why the formatting is so wonky, Google Sheets won’t sort the price columns in the original state. You have to do a little data ma...

The recent death of Google Play Music forced me to adopt a new music streaming platform. I decided on Plex. That migration has not been easy. Disclaimer: A word to the wise, fix your music folder before you ever bother with the Plex side of things. There are several tools and utilities I have discussed below, but everything is going to work much better if you get the music file structure right first. Everything should be divided into artist, and further divided into album. A free utility called foobar2000 can do that for you, if you take some time to tinker with it. AFTER the file structure of your music is right, THEN download and install the Plex server. If you need to set up a static IP and port forwarding, you can configure that all later. Be wary of my mistake, though, you want the music file structure to be pristine before you try to import it into Plex. Now, onto the ordeal I faced. I’ve been a power user of Google Play Music since almost the beginning. At least as far back as J...