Useless Conversation

[Ironwood]

Lane discipline is what Clark Kent gives to his girlfriend.

Should have worked previous Bonehunter remark in here somewhere.

I don't know what a bonehunter is.

[Paelos]

I'm guessing it's some comic book thing.

[Chimpy]

Wasn't it one of the Malazan books?

[Paelos]

I thought that was a Bridgeburner? Maybe it was later.

[Yegolev]

[Rasix]

Nerds.

[Johny Cee]

A client who is an apple grower just brought in a bushel of Honeycrisp apples.   

[Yegolev]

My clients only seem to bring in bushels of bullshit.

[Lantyssa]

Start farming mushrooms?

[Sky]

I don't know what a bonehunter is.

It's Erikson's version of Glen Cook's Black Company. Well, technically the Bridgeburners were. So it's kind of a Black Company 2.0.

A client who is an apple grower just brought in a bushel of Honeycrisp apples.   

You live close enough to tell me who that client is. I'm dying over here. Was it Ontario Orchards? They said they were low, back in November when I called.

I'm considering buying a fridge just for the basement, to store honeycrisps. Our local growers sell out in weeks, one sells out in days. I have a good relationship with the guy who owns the bigger orchard, I'm considering buying enough bushels to stuff the apple fridge (and then half of the kitchen fridge).

[Yegolev]

Have you considered planting the seeds from one of the apples?

[Johny Cee]

Have you considered planting the seeds from one of the apples?

You can't grow Honeycrisps that way.... you get a hybrid of Honeycrisp and whatever pollenated it.  I think you have to do splicings/transplants or whatever it's called to get a honeycrisp producing tree.

[Paelos]

Oh god it's back to fucking apples again!

I hate you Johnny Cee! 

[Chimpy]

Oh god it's back to fucking apples again!

I hate you Johnny Cee! 

I rarely agree with the dancing monkey, but this is one of those times.

I will be back in a few days when the 3 pages of apple discussion rehashes are over :p

[Johny Cee]

Oh god it's back to fucking apples again!

I hate you Johnny Cee! 

Hey!  I derailed the Glen Cook/Black Company joke with the Apple talk.

[Merusk]

Winter apples just depress me.  I bought a 5# bag of red delicious and a single honeycrisp from Meijer a few days ago.  None were as crisp or sweet as those from fall.  I was grossly disappointed.

Going to the circus tonight.  I'll try and capture pictures of terrified kids and clowns for everyone's schadenfreude.

[Minvaren]

This thread reminds me that I need to get a real wine press...

[Ironwood]

Comic Relief.  Still not funny.

It's getting to the stage where the videos of dying 3rd worlders are actually more worthy of a chuckle.  Fuck me, stop flogging this horse.

[Sky]

Have you considered planting the seeds from one of the apples?

The widdle guy in the foreground is a honeycrisp tree. I plan on putting in one or two more as well as an Empire or two for cross-pollination. Redundancy thanks to fucking deer, because that tree pictured is hurting right now, it got frosted once and denuded by deer two or three times last year.

To expand on planting apple trees: best done from a nursery tree because they graft onto different root stock. Apple trees are pretty amazing things.

[Bunk]

I shall describe my Tuesday to you, so that you can all feel better about your lives.

Car is feeling a bit sluggish on the highway heading home. Half way up the bridge, it starts rapidly losing power. By the top of the bridge I'm putting along at 40 clicks with my hazzards on. I coast down the bridge, loop around to the next hill, and it promptly gives up. $100 tow later; back to the shop that worked on it last month.

Turns out that when my ignition module went last month, the missfires were pumping raw gas through the catalytic converter. The CC heated up, and melted from the inside out. So essentially, I was driving with a pototo in my tailpipe. So, I walk the mile home from the dealer in the rain, and figure I'll just forget about it for the rest of the day.

I sit down to some Minecraft - and promptly get a BSOD. System reboots fine, moment I log in to Windows - BSOD. So I tear it apart, yanking memory, drives, etc. Nothing helps. Some online checking of the errors on my antique laptop suggest a corrupted HAL.

I throw in my Vista *shudder* disk - and it sits there. Won't start an install for anything... Grr. So I grab an old XP disk, start reinstalling that. Halfway through - "can't copy file" errors.  

In the end, I reinstall XP on my old drive that had 4GBs free. Figure I'll go get a new drive and a copy of Win7 next week. In the meantime, Minecraft plays fine on XP.  


Oh, and the car - dealer wanted $850 for a factory CC. Said no, gave them $70 for the diagnostic, and rolled it down the street to Midas, who cut the CC out and replaced it with a chunk of pipe for $90. Yes, I am poluting the planet now.

[Samwise]

Have you considered planting the seeds from one of the apples?

According to that Michael Pollan book I read, you can't replicate an apple by planting its seeds.  Most apple trees grown from seed produce unappetizing fruit, so when you stumble across the one in a thousand that produces something edible, you clone it by grafting, and that's where all commercially grown apples come from.

[RhyssaFireheart]

Have you considered planting the seeds from one of the apples?

According to that Michael Pollan book I read, you can't replicate an apple by planting its seeds.  Most apple trees grown from seed produce unappetizing fruit, so when you stumble across the one in a thousand that produces something edible, you clone it by grafting, and that's where all commercially grown apples come from.

But, but.. Johnny Appleseed!  He walked all over the frontier and planted apple seeds for people to enjoy!

Why do you want to ruin my childhood?!?

[Ironwood]

Sam does that.

[Samwise]

But, but.. Johnny Appleseed!  He walked all over the frontier and planted apple seeds for people to enjoy!

Well, he did, and they did, but not by eating them.  Crabapples work great for making hard cider and applejack.   

[voodoolily]

It's true, apples don't "come true" from seed. All nursery stock are grafts onto sturdy rootstock. There're some orchards here in Oregon that are reviving the genes of heirloom strains of apples though, so there're usually some really cool, old varieties in stores here that you all can't get everywhere else.

[Chimpy]

At&t's online account managment has the following password restrictions:

Your user ID must contain at least 1 number and 1 letter. The only other characters allowed are hyphens (-) or underscores (_).

Using an 8 character password that fits into their criteria (did not use - or _ as they are shitty special chars) I only got a weak password.

Hell I tried a ridiculous random combination of upper/lower case and 2 numbers mixed in randomly and still got "weak".

Hell, I even tried a password I have used elsewhere that always comes up strong and it was called "weak".

All of this so I can just see what my usage is since I just read they are instituting data caps on DSL april 1.

EDIT: what the fuck, those are USERID restrictions as well as password. AT&T's people are dumbfucks.

[JWIV]

I'm sure at some point I'll fly into a huge fucking rage over my phone not working or something, but for right now, I'm pretty happy with the new Ooma box I just finished setting up.    I did a fair amount of testing with it before porting my home # over and it seemed solid enough.  The especially nice thing is that I can forward my Google Voice # to it so that I can use a home handset instead of my cell phone all the damn time and not have to give out my home number to random people.

[Sand]

I didnt realize people still had "home" numbers.

[JWIV]

I didnt realize people still had "home" numbers.

Given how atrocious wireless reception can be in my basement office, yes, some of us still have home numbers.   

[Der Helm]

Oh god it's back to fucking apples again!

I hate you Johnny Cee! 

Hey!  I derailed the Glen Cook/Black Company joke with the Apple talk.

Someone explain the Black Company joke to me, please, for the love of god, PLEASE ? 

[RhyssaFireheart]

Re: Black Company joke - I think if you look at most of the pages in the book thread there is some mention of the Black Company books there, as in "you should really read these!"  I could be wrong though.

-----

BTW, what is up with people not liking red mulch?  Customer at the husband's bank does landscaping stuff, so we asked for a quote to do spring yard clean up, redo/freshen up the edges of our landscape beds, remove all the debris, and lay down new mulch.  The yard work/clean-up and redoing the edges of the beds (including reconfiguring them to be more aesthetic and not straight lines along the edges of the house) would only have cost about $650.  That's not too shabby.  But then the guy quoted us $1050 for 12 cubic yards of premium hardwood mulch because he basically didn't like the red stuff and thought the more natural brown mulch would look nicer.  *sigh*  Are we really that weird to like red mulch around our pale grey house? 

If we can negotiate on the mulch part and get him to give us red, then we'll go for it since I cut the landscape beds myself last year (finally!!) and they could stand to be touched up properly.  And hauling around by hand that much mulch in bags is tiresome.  I'll be glad to pay someone else to do it for this year.

[ghost]

Have you considered planting the seeds from one of the apples?

The widdle guy in the foreground is a honeycrisp tree. I plan on putting in one or two more as well as an Empire or two for cross-pollination. Redundancy thanks to fucking deer, because that tree pictured is hurting right now, it got frosted once and denuded by deer two or three times last year.

To expand on planting apple trees: best done from a nursery tree because they graft onto different root stock. Apple trees are pretty amazing things.

Is that your back yard?  It's beautiful.  Down here in Texas we only have these fucking bushes the locals like to call trees. 

[lamaros]

Beautiful to be sure.

[Merusk]

BTW, what is up with people not liking red mulch?  Customer at the husband's bank does landscaping stuff, so we asked for a quote to do spring yard clean up, redo/freshen up the edges of our landscape beds, remove all the debris, and lay down new mulch.  The yard work/clean-up and redoing the edges of the beds (including reconfiguring them to be more aesthetic and not straight lines along the edges of the house) would only have cost about $650.  That's not too shabby.  But then the guy quoted us $1050 for 12 cubic yards of premium hardwood mulch because he basically didn't like the red stuff and thought the more natural brown mulch would look nicer.  *sigh*  Are we really that weird to like red mulch around our pale grey house?  

If we can negotiate on the mulch part and get him to give us red, then we'll go for it since I cut the landscape beds myself last year (finally!!) and they could stand to be touched up properly.  And hauling around by hand that much mulch in bags is tiresome.  I'll be glad to pay someone else to do it for this year.

My retort is usually Americans in general lack any sense of design or individuality.  It's why something ridiculous like 80% of new houses are beige with some form of red brick.  Probably with black shutters and shingles.   To even suggest some other color gets lots of hemming and hawing about resale or not wanting to stand out.  I bet their carpets are all beige too.

The red mulch will look sharp, as my house is a darker grey and we do the same color.  The only problem I've had with it is the plants don't stand out as well as they do with a black bed.

[Sky]

I only own the first 20' or so of trees, though. Couple really nice ones and some I'm trying to grow out. If I had a couple grand, I'd plant half the yard, I like trees. Anyway, the rest belong to a guy who likes to play with an excavator, so I pray every year he doesn't get bored. He gutted half the forest for his shitty mcmansion (everyone here has 50s-era capes, mine's an original 1930 misfit). The street perpendicular to mine (I'm on a dead end) used to have that patch of forest in their backyard, too. Now they have his shitty mcmansion in their backyard, with his shitty wife on her shitty cell phone in her shitty escalade and the screaming kids and yappy dogs. (actually he's a nice guy, but the family is the typical asshole american family)

Anyway. My theory is 'if you don't own it, don't count on it being there'. I'm trying desperately to buy it right now. Managing it would net me enough wood for fuel for maybe ten years (without cutting into the prime timber, just cleaning it up and taking non-optimals), plus it's awesome to sit playing guitar in my backyard.

I've been using pine bark mulch. It's red-brown and awesome.