Wayne W Walls

 I have been blogging on this site for over a year. I have over 50 posts published. These are not humongous achievements, but they are more than nothing. They are something. And I had hoped to have had some noticeable progress by now. But this blog still receives fairly little traffic. On good days I get around 20 visitors, but I still have days where less than ten people come to the site. I can keep publishing content , of course, and that should help me to achieve my traffic/readership goals. But there is a strategy which I have read about often that I haven't yet implemented. Consistency. Frequency of publishing. Lots of successful bloggers talk about how important it is to success to be consistent in your publishing. They say that you want to shoot for a couple of articles published each week, minimum. It would even be better to publish a post every day. They say that one reason why frequent publishing will help you grow your blog traffic is simply that you will accumulate pos...

 Income inequality is becoming a major problem in our society. The difference in income between those who make the most and those who make the least is hard to believe. The differences are so great that they cannot be due to a difference in work ethic or productivity. It is simply not possible to be thousands of times more productive than the average person. I could see being ten times or even 50 times more productive, but there must be a limit to what it is reasonable to believe someone has rightly earned through their own hard work. It seems that often, people who are making huge amounts of money are in leadership positions of large companies or are owners of successful businesses. They aren't necessarily the people who are doing the work that customers pay for, but they are almost always the people who make the decisions about how revenues and profits are distributed. In what has become the typical form of a company, there is an owner or a group of owners that receive all of the...

 Businesses often complain about a lack of workers with the right skills. They want people who can do very specific stuff, and it seems those people are not in abundance. People go to college with one of the main goals being increased employability. People feel it would be hard to get a good job, so they go to college to make it easier. They believe that attending college will teach them the valuable skills that employers are saying they are looking for. But, as so many college graduates are finding out, a college degree is not even enough. Four years of hard work and lots of student debt aren't even enough to always get an entry-level job. We have an obvious mismatch. Employers want more skilled candidates , ostensibly because they have good jobs to offer them. People generally, but especially college graduates, not only want good jobs, but have proven that they are willing to go to great personal lengths to become job-ready. They are willing to do what it takes to prepare for the...

 There's nothing that feels quite as good as a brand new, fresh, and still speedy laptop. Boot up time is very short. Whatever you click on or try to open jumps into view nearly instantaneously. There is very little lag time between your movements and the computer's reaction. But for whatever reason, it seems like laptops slow down over time. That is strange. What would have changed? Why would it slow down? But this does seem to happen to every laptop I've ever owned. Just as soon as you've gotten used to a speedy laptop and forgotten all about your frustrations with your old slow laptop, the new laptop begins to slow. Gradual at first, but it becomes extreme eventually. Boot up takes minutes, then tens of minutes. You click on a computer program and it takes several minutes to open. You try to click on something and the whole computer freezes up. Sometimes it even gets so bad that it crashes. Uggghhhhh!!! It is so annoying! I have researched online to find out what cau...

 I have been hearing about Substack for a while now and I've decided to share my thoughts on it. Substack is a company which helps readers connect directly with writers . Substack facilitates the distribution of newsletters . Substack is a directory of available newsletters.  Most, if not all, of those newsletters are written by a single author. They aren't the publication of some massive media conglomeration with dozens of writers on their payroll. They are the thoughts and reportings of one person. By choosing to subscribe to a particular newsletter, you are connecting directly to one person and their writings. That can be more beneficial and desirable in some ways than simply looking for information from large media company websites. The newsletters are listed in a directory that you can either browse by category or which you can search by keyword. You find several available newsletter options, each with a brief description of what they contain. Then, the main way to engag...

 My wife has a friend that is a world-class gift giver. She always seems to pick out the perfect thing for each person. For my wife's birthday in 2020, her friend got her something called a brewery passport. My wife and I love to go to breweries, so that was a perfect gift! A brewery passport is a book of breweries that are each located in a particular area. The Hop Passport is organized by state. We got the Minnesota version , but they have one for lots of states. In the front of the passport is a map of Minnesota with a number on the map wherever there is a participating brewery. Those numbers match up to brewery names in a list that shows all of the breweries in the passport. There are around 100 breweries listed in the Hop Passport. After that passport front matter, the rest of the book dedicates a whole page to each brewery, and the breweries are organized by alphabetical order. Each brewery page has the name of the brewery, a picture of their logo, a short description of the...

 I don't like speaking in clichés. I don't like saying something only to realize immediately afterwards that it was something I heard someone else say at some earlier point. I want to be original. I don't think I want to be so original that I would be considered a hipster, but I want to be free of the constraints of the ideas and phrasings of other people. I've found myself expressing an opinion which I thought was original, then I remember exactly where I heard it and who shared it first. It makes me feel like I'm just a copycat. It makes sense that people would mostly speak in ways they've heard other people speak before. That is how people learn language. They listen to other people and begin to pick up on and borrow the ways other people speak. It is only natural that those phrasings and ideas would meld into your own way of speaking. It is convenient to use common idioms and turns of phrase because they can be shorthand for larger thoughts and they are easi...