I think I’m prepared for that. I had the same experience with Five Guys. Don’t get me wrong, I think their burgers are good, and certainly better than most fast food, but I don’t find them to be amazing. I will also say that I think Five Guys’ fries suck and are vastly overrated. I know a lot of people like them, so…

C’mon In ‘n Out, just come to Michigan already. I’ve been wanting to try In ‘n Out ever since I first heard of them when I saw The Big Lebowski for the first time in the late 90's. I finally made my first trek to California on a business trip about 5 years ago, and thought I’d finally get to try it. I did not have a…

I don’t know if Kahlua counts, but I recently opened a bottle of it (to pour out) that had been open and unrefrigerated for at least a decade, and it still smelled like Kahlua. 

Something consumable that they like. I like this for hard to shop for people as a giver, and also like receiving gifts like this. They don’t take up space in your house, or create an excessive amount of unnecessary waste.

It’s probably hard to know who does and doesn’t use it live, but it’s pretty prevalent these days. I’m pretty old school in my musical preferences, and I prefer a human performance, warts and all. To that point, I was at a Rolling Stones concert in Detroit a couple weeks ago. One person I can guarantee does not use…

A lot of people use autotune in live settings now. I agree that autotune is unfortunate, I prefer performers to be human. 

Thanks, I may check those out. I’m of course not going to go back out and remove all of the lights I installed for this year though! 

Regarding push brooms, they are also great at cleaning off cars as long as the bristles aren’t too stiff and likely to scratch the paint. I’ve broken more than one snow brush right in half when trying to clear a significant amount of snow from cars. Push brooms make it so much easier.

I grew up with Scotch Pines and because of this I always thought all real Christmas trees gave you multiple puncture wounds whilst decorating. When my wife and I bought our house and started buying real trees I was shocked at how soft the needles were on many varieties. We’ve been buying Fraser firs for 12 years, and…

Yeah, the action on a cheap guitar usually sucks out of the box, having that adjusted could make a huge difference. You didn’t mention if it’s acoustic or electric, but that’s doubly true for an acoustic.

I guess that’s the argument the author is making though, that you really don’t need chord diagrams since every major chord is just a bar across the 1st-5th strings when playing in open G tuning. You just need to know that open is G, 2nd fret is A, etc, etc.

I’ve been playing on and off for ~25 years, and barre chords took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to get down. For me they just sort of finally clicked one day.

I agree with you that it’s terrible advice, but finding music to play wouldn’t really be an issue. If you’re printing out a sheet with nothing but chords and lyrics it doesn’t matter what tuning you are in, a C major chord is going to be a C major chord either way.

I am a fan of old school incandescent lights, but I have to say that in my case it’s certainly more than $0.10/year. My electric bill is significantly higher in December than any other winter month. I run about 1,000 mini incandescent lights outside for 6 hours per day in December. Inside of the house we run 400ish on…

We’ve tried to make the switch, but have yet to be satisfied with the quality of light from LEDs. I know they are better for the environment and have all sorts of other advantages. We just don’t like the light that comes from LED bulbs. Any LED holiday bulbs I’ve seen still look harsh and sterile, and lack the warm,…

One thing I didn’t know until recently is that until fairly modern times is that different keys did sound different from each other beyond simply being higher or lower. Instruments, including keyboards, used to be tuned using a different system than we use today, and the intervals between notes were not completely…

We didn’t have internet in my house the first few years I played guitar, so I relied on tab books, magazines, and learning from friends.

I only wish stuff like that had existed when I stared playing in the 90's. 

Or you could go to justinguitar.com, follow his handful of his beginner courses, and learn enough basic chords to strum along to many songs. The amount of free resources available on the internet today should make learning the basics relatively easy.

It is the pinnacle if you like a certain type of music though. I love rock music and have tried to stay current, but the majority of stuff that has come out since the 90's has been uninteresting to me. You could say the same for people who like other genres like jazz. While there is still good stuff being made, most…