Words On Wednesday

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...

Liquor laws in the United States are really weird, and I’ve learned recently how the differences between states can highlight that weirdness. Working in North Carolina now, and visiting liquor stores in that state, I’m beginning to see yet more alcohol law madness. I was born and raised in South Carolina, and the vast majority of my distilled spirit purchase have been in that state. Aside from a single bottle I purchased in Tennessee , everything else came from the sandlapper state that I call home. South Carolina liquor laws are definitely strange, but I’ve at least been exposed to them enough that I’m mostly familiar with them. I’ll occasionally forget what day of the week it is and try to buy liquor on Sunday, but I always know you have to pick your poison before 7pm. Now that I work in North Carolina, I’ve started going by a liquor store near my office some. This has introduced me to a few of the nuances between state laws. The earliest difference that I encountered was the forced ...

I love all things coffee. When I saw PBR hard coffee at a nearby ABC store, I had to give it a shot, even with the unusually high price point. I’m no stranger to coffee-alcohol fusions. I’ve had my fair share of coffee-based mixed drinks, as well as traditional beer styles with coffee included. The only one I’ve mentioned here was the Thunderstruck Coffee Porter from Highland , but there have been plenty more before and after. I’m always on the lookout for the next spin on coffee and booze. For what it’s worth, I haven’t found one yet that I didn’t like. A few weeks back, I was cheating on my usual ABC store with another one that has a slightly larger selection. While we were perusing the aisles, my wife pointed out this curious hard coffee from Pabst Blue Ribbon. Initially, I dismissed it. PBR is supposed to be cheap, not good. And with a 4 pack of cans at roughly $10, that was way out of the normal range that I’d spend on PBR. Even for stuff I really like, that’s a hard sell. How...

It’s been a long time since my last Book Report segment, and I’ve read a lot of books since then, but this series seemed most relevant. Oh, right, and this is a series, not a single book. Anyone who has read Sanderson can tell you that he does fantasy right. His worlds are large and complex, but he doesn’t drone on about them in the style of Tolkien. His characters are deep and dynamic, but none is singled out as the real main character. In short, his writing is just plain amazing, pretty much every bit of it. One note about the books in “The Stormlight Archive” series, though: they’re huge. Over a thousand pages per hardback book, and 45 hours for the shortest audiobook. These things are not for the faint of heart. They are large time investments, but they are worth it by an enormous margin. Book one, “The Way of Kings,” is a little slow to start. It jumps around to different character perspectives, and at the beginning, these characters have no clear link to one another. However, as ...

I’m not typically a huge fan of cider, but I’ll try just about anything once, and I’m a sucker for limited availability stuff, and I do love supporting small, local businesses. Hence, I had to get some of the hard cider that Sky Top orchard produces. Let me just point out that Sky Top is awesome. It’s been a fall tradition in my family for the past few years. They have tons of varieties of apples available, and they have awesome apple cider and apple cider donuts. In case you missed it, here it is again: apple cider donuts. One more time. Apple. Cider. Donuts. Anyway, moving on. We noticed last year that they have a hard apple cider, in addition to their jugs of just normal cider. I’m weird in that I love a good quality non-alcoholic apple cider, but hard cider just isn’t my thing. I can’t place why. My wife, however, loves cider. Hence, we’ll get new ciders for her to try on occasion, and I’ll finish them off if she doesn’t like them. Otherwise, I steer clear. But again, Sky Top orcha...