Is this the end of an era?
Greetings to one and all. My name is Aaron and this is my Newsletter. It's another Tuesday in Jive City and there are a few things that must be discussed. Topics discussed today: March Madness, the next step in the technological revolution, another potential TV show to apply for, and the impending end of an era. For those of you that continue to read, welcome. On we go!
It's March Madness time again, people, and that means only one thing - the inevitable busting of my bracket. Traditionally, I have not been a very good picker in bracket pools, generally having a couple of my main teams ousted after one or two games. It's frustrating as heck, but, boy, do I love it? I'm not really a fan of college basketball. Too many teams. Too many players. Too much turnover from year to year, so it's hard to keep track of who's where and which teams are good. Thankfully, extensive knowledge of the field is not entirely a requirement because of Cinderella teams and upsets and the like, so pretty much anybody can win a pick 'em league on a given year. I've got a couple brackets filled out at this point, so we'll see how things go. Undoubtedly, there will be updates to follow.
This past week, I did something that I never thought I'd do: I purchased an iPad. I never thought I'd need an iPad. I've already got a TV, a phone, a laptop, and a Playstation 3, so I didn't really see much of a need for something expensive that would essentially be all of those combined into one. You see, I work at a place that's all about technology. It's a young, incredibly successful company, and, as one of the perks of being an employee of said company, I get a lot of free stuff from time to time. I have accumulated, over the past several months, roughly $200 in free iPad accessories and, with the announcement of the aptly-named "new iPad" last week, the retail price of iPad 2s dropped $100 across the board. I figured it was time, so I ran on down (figuratively) to the local Best Buy and picked one up. As a Windows user, there was (and still is) a bit of a learning curve, so I'm still figuring some stuff out. Probably the hardest part so far has been finding some good apps. I'm sure there are a billion of them, but I just don't know what they are. Suggestions would be appreciated. One of my favorite apps so far is "GarageBand," which I find incredibly entertaining as a former student of music. I could probably mess around with that thing for a while without getting tired of it. I've found a few other fun things to do with the iPad 2 in the last six days and am looking forward to playing around with it a little bit more to see what other possibilities are out there. I feel like I've fully embraced the technological revolution that began back in October when I got my first smartphone. Wow. Look at me go. I'm so cool.
One of the iPad 2 apps I've spent the most time with so far is the wildly popular "Draw Something" game, which is basically like Pictionary for touch screens. The game gives you three options of varying difficulty and the player must select one of the words to draw for their teammate. The opponent then has a chance to watch the drawing come to life then guess what it is that their teammate drew. There is no time limit, so there's no rush to have to guess the word right off the bat, and there are no penalties for guessing incorrectly unless the player has to pass. The game isn't incredibly difficult, so it's really just something to do to pass the time. One of the more difficult words I've had to draw was "Alf," referring, of course, to the gluttonous, brown alien that was a pop culture icon as I grew up. I used to have an Alf lunchbox, dang it! Because I'm a newbie with this game, I only have a couple colors to choose from at this point, so I had to make my "Alf" red instead of brown. It ended up looking more like a snout-nosed parrot with a bad hair day when I was done, so I resorted to spelling out "A-l-f" on the screen after completing my drawing. It took the other player a second, but she got it eventually. Can I just say... Mostly everyone I've played with has been great - with a couple exceptions. The word was "rake" - but it looked like an upside-down pitchfork. Maybe just a fork? A trident? A hill with a single stream of smoke coming out of the top? What the heck is that? I had to pass for the first time ever. I responded in the next round by drawing the word "east" by a bunch of swirls and squiggly lines using three different colors. Childish, I know. I'm kind of sorry. Another round with a different player involved a sketch that looked like... a glass pyramid as seen from above? With random letters written on the tiles? "Alphab..." Nope. The right letters weren't provided. "HELPUS--" didn't work either. Um... One of those ghetto 80s room fans? Seriously. Was it a pyramid? Pass. The word was "Scrabble," apparently. Never seen it played diagonally like that drawing showed. Maybe I just don't get out much.
The game I've had the most fun with so far has got to be the "Family Feud" app. Amy, Cody, Lex (Austin's fiance), my mom, and I sat down over the weekend and played so many rounds that I lost track eventually, but, I'm telling you, we're going to go pro. We want to get on that show. Maybe since those boneheads over at CBS chose not to take me and Austin for "The Amazing Race," our next adventure will be applying to go on "Family Feud"! We've got it all down. We clap along to the music as the game starts, we encourage each other by saying "Good answer! Good answer!" after every answer, even if it's not, in fact, a good one, and when we don't get all the answers on the board, we repeat (in unison) the correct answers as they show up - as if it was such an obvious answer that we should have known it all along. We're ready, Steve Harvey! (That's who runs the show now, right? We're all still a little disappointed that it's not Louie Anderson or Richard Karn anymore.) Amy has done some research into the application process and we would need to submit a 3-5 minute application video, so we're seriously contemplating applying for the show. Maybe. Probably. Potentially.
After the popularity (is "notoriety" a better word?) of last's weeks "He said/She hears" segment, I had a couple people telling me to do a "She says/He hears" segment this week. Sadly, I only had like one or two suggestions of what girls say that guys misinterpret (how would I know these things??), so I didn't have enough material to do an entire segment about it. Too bad. So sad. This brings me to my next point.
I've been writing this blog for four years. Contrary to what some may believe, this is not easy to do. There's quite a bit of pressure on me to not only blog every single Tuesday -- which I have done for 199 of the last 205 Tuesdays or so with the only exceptions being the day that we took Austin to the airport for his mission and a couple vacations where I didn't have internet access -- not only that, but I'm also expected to put out good, quality, humorous material every seven days. As interesting and incredible as my life is, it's tough sometimes, and I sometimes submit blogs that I personally feel are not that good. But I do it anyway and I do it all by myself. Since the dawn of time, I've been begging you people to participate, to interact, to contribute, to help me out a little bit, dang it. I know I'm pretty hilarious, but sometimes I think it's funnier when I take YOUR ideas and put them into writing instead of having to come up with everything on my own.
For a while, **QUESTION TIME!!** was a very popular segment in this Newsletter. As some of you may have noticed, that segment has practically been discontinued because, well, sometimes the Junior Mounties just run out of good Questions, if you know what I mean. Remember the Two-Minute Instant Message? Yeah, neither do I. It's a thing of the past. I've been posting polls on the side of the blog page pretty much since its creation and every week we get maybe a maximum of four or five responses (SPOILER ALERT: I vote every week). Feedback is usually a little bit better for the Year in Review Issues, for which I shove the polls down everyone's throats and pretty much make people vote, but, for instance, right now, there are a total of two votes for each of the two polls on the blog site and - surprise! - two of those four votes are mine. What is increasingly confusing to me is how sometimes there will be five votes for the first poll, five votes for the second poll, and two votes for the last poll. I mean, did you not have three seconds to click on one final response or something? If you don't care, don't vote, by all means. Don't do it. But if you don't care, why are you reading in the first place? And if nobody cares and nobody responds, other than my immediate relatives, a couple faithful cousins, and the handful of Loyal A-Towners that have been with me from the beginning, why do I continue to stress about posting week after week after week? If my family, a couple friends, and I are the only ones who care, why don't I just throw a party every Friday night, invite my Loyal Subscribers over to my parents' house, and tell them dating stories? (By the way, you're all invited.)
It is for these reasons that I am seriously considering going into retirement and discontinuing "Signs of the Times" after next week's monumental 200th Issue, which, coincidentally, is also the fourth birthday of the Newsletter. People ask me from time to time when I'm going to stop blogging. I have never had an official answer to that, but, being the OCD freak that I am, 200 is a nice, round number, isn't it? Obsessive-compulsively speaking, the next time I would conceivably consider stopping would be at 250, which is about a year from now. So maybe I'll just hang up the headband and call it quits after one more installment. Sounds like a decent plan to me. Heck, Encyclopedia Britannica is calling it quits after 244 years, why can't I give it up after four? There's a little thing called a journal that I haven't been terribly diligent in keeping. I would have tons of time to catch up on my personal journal writing where I don't have to worry about annoying anyone or unintentionally hurting somebody's feelings. Plus, I'd be able to do other things on Tuesdays, other than sitting in front of my computer all day. These are things to consider, my friends. Things to consider...
Finally, the Shoutout of the Week goes to my sister, Amy. Amy is my Family Feud buddy and it's also her birthday on Saturday. Nineteen years old. Holy crap. That's crazy. Happy birthday to you, Amos.
One of the iPad 2 apps I've spent the most time with so far is the wildly popular "Draw Something" game, which is basically like Pictionary for touch screens. The game gives you three options of varying difficulty and the player must select one of the words to draw for their teammate. The opponent then has a chance to watch the drawing come to life then guess what it is that their teammate drew. There is no time limit, so there's no rush to have to guess the word right off the bat, and there are no penalties for guessing incorrectly unless the player has to pass. The game isn't incredibly difficult, so it's really just something to do to pass the time. One of the more difficult words I've had to draw was "Alf," referring, of course, to the gluttonous, brown alien that was a pop culture icon as I grew up. I used to have an Alf lunchbox, dang it! Because I'm a newbie with this game, I only have a couple colors to choose from at this point, so I had to make my "Alf" red instead of brown. It ended up looking more like a snout-nosed parrot with a bad hair day when I was done, so I resorted to spelling out "A-l-f" on the screen after completing my drawing. It took the other player a second, but she got it eventually. Can I just say... Mostly everyone I've played with has been great - with a couple exceptions. The word was "rake" - but it looked like an upside-down pitchfork. Maybe just a fork? A trident? A hill with a single stream of smoke coming out of the top? What the heck is that? I had to pass for the first time ever. I responded in the next round by drawing the word "east" by a bunch of swirls and squiggly lines using three different colors. Childish, I know. I'm kind of sorry. Another round with a different player involved a sketch that looked like... a glass pyramid as seen from above? With random letters written on the tiles? "Alphab..." Nope. The right letters weren't provided. "HELPUS--" didn't work either. Um... One of those ghetto 80s room fans? Seriously. Was it a pyramid? Pass. The word was "Scrabble," apparently. Never seen it played diagonally like that drawing showed. Maybe I just don't get out much.
The game I've had the most fun with so far has got to be the "Family Feud" app. Amy, Cody, Lex (Austin's fiance), my mom, and I sat down over the weekend and played so many rounds that I lost track eventually, but, I'm telling you, we're going to go pro. We want to get on that show. Maybe since those boneheads over at CBS chose not to take me and Austin for "The Amazing Race," our next adventure will be applying to go on "Family Feud"! We've got it all down. We clap along to the music as the game starts, we encourage each other by saying "Good answer! Good answer!" after every answer, even if it's not, in fact, a good one, and when we don't get all the answers on the board, we repeat (in unison) the correct answers as they show up - as if it was such an obvious answer that we should have known it all along. We're ready, Steve Harvey! (That's who runs the show now, right? We're all still a little disappointed that it's not Louie Anderson or Richard Karn anymore.) Amy has done some research into the application process and we would need to submit a 3-5 minute application video, so we're seriously contemplating applying for the show. Maybe. Probably. Potentially.
After the popularity (is "notoriety" a better word?) of last's weeks "He said/She hears" segment, I had a couple people telling me to do a "She says/He hears" segment this week. Sadly, I only had like one or two suggestions of what girls say that guys misinterpret (how would I know these things??), so I didn't have enough material to do an entire segment about it. Too bad. So sad. This brings me to my next point.
I've been writing this blog for four years. Contrary to what some may believe, this is not easy to do. There's quite a bit of pressure on me to not only blog every single Tuesday -- which I have done for 199 of the last 205 Tuesdays or so with the only exceptions being the day that we took Austin to the airport for his mission and a couple vacations where I didn't have internet access -- not only that, but I'm also expected to put out good, quality, humorous material every seven days. As interesting and incredible as my life is, it's tough sometimes, and I sometimes submit blogs that I personally feel are not that good. But I do it anyway and I do it all by myself. Since the dawn of time, I've been begging you people to participate, to interact, to contribute, to help me out a little bit, dang it. I know I'm pretty hilarious, but sometimes I think it's funnier when I take YOUR ideas and put them into writing instead of having to come up with everything on my own.
For a while, **QUESTION TIME!!** was a very popular segment in this Newsletter. As some of you may have noticed, that segment has practically been discontinued because, well, sometimes the Junior Mounties just run out of good Questions, if you know what I mean. Remember the Two-Minute Instant Message? Yeah, neither do I. It's a thing of the past. I've been posting polls on the side of the blog page pretty much since its creation and every week we get maybe a maximum of four or five responses (SPOILER ALERT: I vote every week). Feedback is usually a little bit better for the Year in Review Issues, for which I shove the polls down everyone's throats and pretty much make people vote, but, for instance, right now, there are a total of two votes for each of the two polls on the blog site and - surprise! - two of those four votes are mine. What is increasingly confusing to me is how sometimes there will be five votes for the first poll, five votes for the second poll, and two votes for the last poll. I mean, did you not have three seconds to click on one final response or something? If you don't care, don't vote, by all means. Don't do it. But if you don't care, why are you reading in the first place? And if nobody cares and nobody responds, other than my immediate relatives, a couple faithful cousins, and the handful of Loyal A-Towners that have been with me from the beginning, why do I continue to stress about posting week after week after week? If my family, a couple friends, and I are the only ones who care, why don't I just throw a party every Friday night, invite my Loyal Subscribers over to my parents' house, and tell them dating stories? (By the way, you're all invited.)
It is for these reasons that I am seriously considering going into retirement and discontinuing "Signs of the Times" after next week's monumental 200th Issue, which, coincidentally, is also the fourth birthday of the Newsletter. People ask me from time to time when I'm going to stop blogging. I have never had an official answer to that, but, being the OCD freak that I am, 200 is a nice, round number, isn't it? Obsessive-compulsively speaking, the next time I would conceivably consider stopping would be at 250, which is about a year from now. So maybe I'll just hang up the headband and call it quits after one more installment. Sounds like a decent plan to me. Heck, Encyclopedia Britannica is calling it quits after 244 years, why can't I give it up after four? There's a little thing called a journal that I haven't been terribly diligent in keeping. I would have tons of time to catch up on my personal journal writing where I don't have to worry about annoying anyone or unintentionally hurting somebody's feelings. Plus, I'd be able to do other things on Tuesdays, other than sitting in front of my computer all day. These are things to consider, my friends. Things to consider...
Finally, the Shoutout of the Week goes to my sister, Amy. Amy is my Family Feud buddy and it's also her birthday on Saturday. Nineteen years old. Holy crap. That's crazy. Happy birthday to you, Amos.
That's about it for now. I'll post a few polls if you feel like responding to them. You can comment on the blog page, leave comments and "like" my post on Facebook, you can follow me on Twitter, and you can send me an email. Hey - you can even write "Signs of the Times" a nice little birthday note. Wow. So many ways to interact. Mind-blowing, almost. If not, I may graciously bow out after next week's celebratory Issue. No pressure, though. No pressure at all. Life will go on, regardless.
Until next Time,
Move It. Sell It. And Leave the Door Open
Aaron
5 comments:
If you stop blogging then I'll have nothing to look forward to on Tuesdays!
Idea for your next blog: Now that you're an iPad owner are you going to succumb to the dumbing down of our English language and start talking about "apps" instead of the correct term: "applications"?
Richard
I'm always amused by your Tuesday ramblings. If it matters, I always try to do the polls (unless they don't show up on my smart phone) and I have tried to contribute opinions, comments, and material when it is relevant. Count this as a vote to continue on, sir. If there is more that I may do to keep the dream alive, I will try my darndest to help. ;)
You see, many people read your blog, but few actually comment or post.
I think it is quite an achievement that you have written so many editions of "SOTT." Keep it up and promote it.
-S
Consider this, my young Padawan Learner. Tuesdays without SOTT just becomes another Tuesday. Literally tens of people would have to suffer through Tuesday with no salve for the Monday they just experienced. SOTT is a beacon of truth, justice the A-Town way in a world of "Howards" and "Double Face-palm" moments. Would you consider opening SOTT up for guest bloggers to take the pressure off?
without the newsletter, how will I be reminded of how awesome Tuesdays are? I need an awesome pick me up! Please don't stop writing!!!
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