Words On Wednesday

Hard Mountain Dew is a thing, and while it isn’t available in South Carolina, I finally got my hands on some. As best I can tell, Hard Mountain Dew originally became available in some states in February 2022 (The Boston Beer Company, 2022). When I learned about it, I was immediately interested in trying it. I love some Mountain Dew, and I frequently mix it with varying distilled spirits. Hard Mountain Dew in a can would save me the effort of mixing it with anything. Since South Carolina wasn’t one of the original launch states, I would have to go somewhere else to buy it. No big deal, we cross state lines at least once every few weeks. I would just have to keep an eye out any time we traveled. That, or hope that they hurry up and bring it to SC (Spoiler: they still haven’t). Several months later, I had basically forgotten about looking for Hard Mountain Dew. We weren’t traveling much, and I still had the option to mix white rum in my regular Mountain Dew, so it wasn’t a pressing concer...

I wrote about Plex on December 16, 2020 and again on December 15, 2021 . Therefore, the third Wednesday in December is Plex day from now on. I stubbed out a post for 2022, but I was at a weird point in my life then and never got around to writing it. Fortunately, I just finished school and now I have a little bit of free time again. Hence, Plex Day 2023. At the end of 2020, I was just getting started with Plex. I suffered through the issues with getting my music collection organized into a folder structure that plays well with Plex Media Server. At that time, it wasn’t that I was passionate about Plex as a platform, I was just looking for something to replace Google Play Music (Pour one out for the homies). By December 2021, I was a little more sold on Plex. In fact, I had purchased the lifetime Plex Pass in August 2021, I was just really ahead on writing posts and that post didn’t publish until December. In either case, I was making a gamble. If I bought a lifetime Plex Pass and ende...

I feel like autobiographies can be hit or miss and depend on a lot of factors; how interesting the person is or was, how well they wrote, and whether they narrated the audiobook themselves all play a huge role in how much I enjoy the book. Alex Trebek knocked it out of the park. I grew up watching Jeopardy! off and on. I was never one of those viewers that had it on every evening, but if I was channel surfing and noticed it, that was definitely one of the shows that I would gravitate to. Jeopardy! was nice because it didn’t have the lowest-common-denominator crowd work that a lot of game shows thrived on. The simple and straightforward delivery of interesting questions from Trebek, with contestants that generally seemed to know their stuff really appealed to my logos fixation. When Trebek was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and later died as a result of the disease, I was disappointed. In general, I don’t really get attached to celebrities or mourn their deaths. I didn’t know these pe...

  Information Technology and the Capstone My experience with the capstone class and Information Technology program as a whole has been enlightening and reflects observable personal and professional growth. When I began working toward this degree in 2017, I was far less confident in my ability to engineer software solutions and I lacked the experience to properly market myself. After pausing my education temporarily and enduring a job layoff with several subsequent career changes, I found a position that I like with an ambitious company and resumed classes to completion. Although it took me six years to finish a program that was intended to take two years, the experiences along the way have helped me grow and develop, and encouraged me to take on challenges that I would never have considered before. I have gained enormous confidence in my skill as an IT professional, and I now know how to market myself with my storied background and natural talent. The Information Technology pro...