Words On Wednesday

You know what’s hilarious? Seeing a bunch of kids barely out of high school cowering in fear at “brown liquor” after they’ve been shotgunning cheap beer like champs for hours. Really puts things in perspective. But Evan Williams is good for a lot more than just that. Name: Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey Source: Evan Williams Style: Bourbon ABV: 43% Price: $19.99 Volume: 1.75L Price per oz: $0.34 I’m a fan of bourbon. I won’t say that it’s my favorite spirit with any certainty, but it’s often the liquor that I reach for to sip on straight. I’ll mix vodka or rum with almost anything, especially for buzz maintenance, but I’m not just pouring up shots or highball glasses of vodka. Bourbon, though? I’ll hit a glass with 2 or 3 fingers and just sip, because it’s gosh dang delicious. Previously, Jim Beam was my bourbon of choice . It’s cheap, it’s accessible, and it’s pretty good. My local liquor store still has a deal on 2 fifths for $20, and really, it’s hard to get cheaper for anything ...

One of my favorite pastimes with my family is watching old VHS home videos. I want to generate that same experience for my kids, but today's media doesn't really seem to have the same sensation. These videos of my childhood all have a sort of specific feel to them. Long form movies, these typically took up the entirety of a VHS tape, about 80 minutes or so if I recall. Scenes might run for several minutes of us just doing household things. Maybe it was a birthday party, or it could be the one time my cousin tried to make a documentary about trees. In any case, it was a live action glimpse into that period of time. I still need to digitize those videos. We have tons of them somewhere or another, and I know that tape media will most definitely degrade over time. If I can convert those to mp4 now and properly store them, they’ll be preserved for years into the future. I might just burn them to DVD and watch that instead of the original VHS. Who has a VCR nowadays anyway? Fast forw...

You read that title right. This is a book report about a children’s book. My wife and I like to read to our children as much as we can. We want to foster a love of reading, increase their vocabulary, and all those other good things that come from reading a good book. Because of that, I’ve read a lot of children’s books. Some of them are pretty decent, others I hate to see the cover of, but rarely do they stand out as something that even I can enjoy. One exception is “Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse” by Kevin Henkes. The general premise of the story is that titular character Lilly got a new purse, and she brings it to school to show everyone. She is so excited that she has a hard time paying attention, and her teacher is forced to take the purse for the remainder of the day. She is very upset at first, and says some unkind things to her teacher, but she later apologizes after some consideration. It’s a situation that most of us can relate to. We get some new toy or gadget that we are infat...

I’ve often heard the adage that “storage is cheap,” when referring to computer drive sizes. And honestly, it is. Plus, it continues to get cheaper year after year. I got a 5TB external hard drive from Costco a few years back for about $120 if memory serves. This past summer, a similar drive from the same company at 8TB in size was available at the same price. This trend isn’t just for hard disc drives, either. I’ve seen some popular solid state drives at roughly $100 for a 1TB external. The same goes for SD cards as well. The storage capacities continue to rise, while prices stay mostly similar or drop. Not to mention data transfer speeds that tend to go up as technology improves. Realistically, if you wait a few months or years, any drive that you might want is going to be cheaper, larger, faster, or some combination of the three. In almost every case, a superior drive will be available later on. The problem then, is how soon you need the drive, or how much you need it now. This isn’t...