Birdland

Playing video games actually made me a better golfer

The following is a post I wrote back on another blog.

I am totally serious when I say that. It’s been just over two years since I first picked up a golf club. When I first started out, I knew absolutely zero about golf. When I swung the club I made contact with the ball about half of the time and rarely was it good contact as my ball would hook or slice to their respective sides. It was definitely very frustrating as I decided I didn’t want to spend the money a proper golf teacher would have cost. I considered the thought that maybe golf wasn’t for me and that my Blood Elf could sure use some new gear.

Around that time, one of my roommates had purchased a Wii and Tiger Woods golf. First off, I am not saying that video games are a good substitute for a golf instructor. For me however, I grew up playing video games. Tiger Woods PGA captured my attention enough that I was able to learn some things about golf and actually make me want to get out on the course even more.

Because I didn’t make very good contact swinging on the range, I was able to overcome that disadvantage in game. Since my lack of a good golf swing was a source of frustration, I was able to neutralize that source as well and actually learn more about the big picture of how the game is played.

I was able to pick up on some basic characteristics of each club in my bag virtually and learn about some best practices of moving up the hole. I learned about some of the different types of iron shots like the pitch, flop, and punch and when to use them. What the game did was bring me up to speed on the lingo and give me a brief overview through a medium that I was very well acquainted with.

While on the course learning something, I often think, “Ah, I remember that from the Tiger Woods game.”

Don’t be mistaken by the title, I’m not claiming to be some great golfer, but my attention was captured long enough for golf to become a passion of mine and something that I now want to try conventional methods to improve.

What unconventional way did you learn stuff about golf?

The next new thing?

I’ve been writing content for the web off and on for a couple of years now. The main reason I say off and on is that many times over the years I’ve simply shut down due to either a busy schedule or just lack of ideas (blogger’s block).

Enter Plinky. I created an account a while back, played around with it for a while and sort of put it on the shelf. A little explanation first, the writers at Plinky send out user-contributed “prompts” about once a week. They are usually in the form of “Name three songs you will take on a road trip.” You can just create the list and be done with it, or the service will usually ask a follow up question like, “What do you like about each song?” or something like that. Before you know it, you’ve just created a blog post.

The reason I set the service aside for a while was there weren’t many prompts to answer. Now that it’s been a while, I’ve signed in and have so many new prompts to answer.

The nice thing about this service is that a lot of the prompts are user-contributed. So the more user’s sign up, the number of prompts available will multiply.

So the question, does Plinky have the potential to become twitter-esque?

The obligatory music category

A long time ago I put out a blog post about the Pandora music service. Years later, it is still here and I still use it just about every day.

I figured I’d kick off the music portion of this blog by first saying that I have a few bands that I like and a bunch that I can recognize a song that I like. Enter Pandora, I like it because I can simply enter the stuff I like and set up a Quick Mix and discover new stuff.

So I give you the ingredients of my Quick Mix (in Pandora’s display order, not particularly my chosen order):

• Pearl Jam Radio
• Radiohead Radio
• The Strokes Radio
• Red Hot Chili Peppers Radio
• Weezer Radio
• The Killers Radio
• Nirvana Radio

That list has pretty much remained unchanged for quite a while. Sometimes I’ll through something totally different for some interesting results. I’ve often thrown in some Classical (Stravnisky), Country (George Strait), and some Fugees for a little jazz-rap feel.

New books for a new house

I recently moved to a new house and decided that with a new place I needed some new reading material. Also, I realized that there is a used bookstore down the street called Bookman’s. So I loaded up a couple of extra copies of books that I’ve been holding on to and made a visit.

My first stop was the Star Wars section. It’s been years since I’ve read anything from the Star Wars universe so I was a bit curious. I ended up selecting “Outbound Flight” by Timothy Zahn. I’ve always been a fan of Zahn’s Thrawn series so I am excited to read this book.

I’ve been wanting to read “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” for a long time. I started looking around and completely forgot the name of the author. Since I didn’t have my trusty internets I did the next best thing and texted a friend for a quick response (Douglas Adams, by the way). In the end I was able to score the entire trilogy.

I can’t wait to get to all of the new material.

Second Attempt

I used to have a tumblr account, then decided that I wanted to focus on blogging on my actual site about web design topics. Months later, I have a couple of posts, but nothing spectacular. I really miss just putting up random thoughts that come to my head.

So, here is my second attempt… enjoy!