Useless Conversation

[Sky]

Man, that is just the New York City effect:  Shittons of Italians find NYC too crowded to open a pizza joint so move upstate. 

Yes and no. Around here we're old blood Italians, half the city used to be Italian. So it's locals mostly, but the one guy from NYC is indeed an Italian immigrant (and awesome). A large pepperoni is maybe $14 and barely fits in a box. I'd rather pay that for dinner and lunch for 2 than have whatever that buys at a chain.

Marco's here sucks, too. I'm a pizza snob, comes with having so many options as a kid. We used to laugh about how the phone book had a dozen pages of pizza places in the yellow pages. But it was awesome in hindsight. Also, wings have always been a thing here, back to the 70s at least.

Actually, I wish we had more traditional restaurants. We've got a couple decent ones, but one is on the decline (did away with seasonal menus and starting the spiral of raising prices and shrinking portions) and teh other is unreliable (foodie-ish but no set open hours or even days, so we gave up on them). The rest is ancient stuff resting on their laurels, sushi (we don't) and our single chain Appleby's (the most lucrative place in town, which is sadness).

[apocrypha]

I live in a tiny offshoot of a small town in northern England. There isn't a single pizza delivery place close enough to us to deliver. There's a takeaway place called "Pizza Costa" in the valley below us that's one of those places that does pizza, kebabs, burgers, curries, etc. It looks like this:

It's even nastier than it looks. When we want a lazy pizza we get a frozen one from Tescos and jazz it up with olives, anchovies, chilli, etc. ourselves. After 30 years of living in the delivery zones of all the pizza places I thought I'd miss it, but tbh I rarely do. It's actually just reduced the number of times when we go "fuck it, cba to cook" to almost zero.

[Ironwood]

I go to the local wop

 

[Selby]

Couple years after the band broke up, I realized drinking is boring, people who drink are obnoxous and bars are the most boring places on the planet. Went cold turkey for a year, put a can of beer in the fridge to tempt me. Now I can enjoy a couple beers but I hate getting drunk and haven't been in almost 20 years. It's really weird being around really drunk people now, like 'wow, people still do that? Grow up.'

This was my realization back in college\high school.  I hate being around other drinkers whether sober or drinking.  Bars are terrible places that are either sad and depressing or too full of cute beautiful people that I'm not a part of.  The local dive in my old neighborhood was always fun for stopping in for a soda after work with a coworker, I used to get several guys hitting on me who just wouldn't take no for an answer.  And the mid 50's lady who my coworkers were making fun of me for not pursuing.  Combine that with my drink being $9-11 and I had zero incentive to go back for alcohol despite it being within walking distance.

The rest is ancient stuff resting on their laurels, sushi (we don't) and our single chain Appleby's (the most lucrative place in town, which is sadness).

My town is the same way, there's 2 or 3 decent places but they're either closed after 3PM or only do hamburgers.  No "real" restaurants, and Applebee's is THE place to be on a Friday night (or any other night really).  I asked the wife why that was, as coming from California that just didn't happen.  She says it's the only place in town to get food AND drink at the same time while being relatively cheap, so most towns having a casual bar like that will do steady business.

[Yegolev]

I like Mellow Mushroom entirely because of the dough.

Several years ago, in the break room talking to an Italian-American coworker:
me: "Hey, how's your day going?"
him: "What did you call me?"

[MisterNoisy]

We've got a place that does a really decent 24" NY style pizza here in a wood-fired oven.  Since finding out that they deliver, I don't bother with any of the chains except occasionally Hungry Howie's.

[01101010]

I like Mellow Mushroom entirely because of the dough.

Several years ago, in the break room talking to an Italian-American coworker:
me: "Hey, how's your day going?"
him: "What did you call me?"

Holy shit that takes me back... Mellow Mushroom in Athens, GA when I was dating a girl at UGA in graduate school. They had some good pies. Sadly, I haven't lived in places with a MM. They did build one in Florence, SC a month before I left. :(

[HaemishM]

I forgot Mellow Mushroom, probably because when we go there, I usually order a calzone instead of a pizza. It's good though.

[Yegolev]

I'm dumping my tray in the small hole on my way out of the cafeteria when Jennifer Delgado springs from fucking nowhere to say "Wow, how so they expect us to get our stuf in such a small hole?!"  I could go on but instead I'll just

[Merusk]

"I have a lot of practice and am quite willing to give you a lesson sometime."

[Paelos]

The best pizza in Atlanta is Antico, but it's too far away and a pain in the ass to wait on.

The best local place near me is Fellinis.

[Yegolev]

Hmm, I never went to Antico.  I always stopped at Rocky Mtn. Pizza because it was closer and is really a bar that serves pizza.  Too bad I work in... uh, Smyrna?  I don't know burb names very well.

[Paelos]

Never went to Rocky Mountain but want to try it.

[Sky]

Will you fucking kids knock it off and grow up?

I have to stand up in a professional meeting and suggest we investigate a prospect for mobile integration...but it's called fucking BOOPSIE.

What the fuck, kids?

Boopsie.

[Rasix]

The name of every utility has changed under the umbrella of cloud-to-butt enhanced storage/computing and the lo-so-mo app extravaganza.  But yes, that's a particularly egregious one (and I thought MongoDB was bad).

[Chimpy]

Will you fucking kids knock it off and grow up?

I have to stand up in a professional meeting and suggest we investigate a prospect for mobile integration...but it's called fucking BOOPSIE.

What the fuck, kids?

Boopsie.

Hahah yeah. We used that mobile app at the library when I worked there and I said to my boss "the app is called Boopsie???"

[Yegolev]

We have run out of names.  Also no one likes names such as "RS/6000" and "V7000" anymore.

Strangely, Terraform is a good name.  I'm well tired of the food puns surrounding Chef.  Then I say things like "I need to Cheficate out some servers" and people get all weird.

[Sky]

Got my Spanish class reimbursed by work, wrote the boss a note saying 'muchas gracias, jefe' and she corrected me saying it should be jefa (it can be either, but she's technically correct).

So now I call her jefa.

She did NOT think that through.

Also was told that cisco certification might be remibursable and renewing Security+ definitely would be. (mine lapsed because I'm cheap and it hasn't meant anything professionally). So, that's cool. Apparently people aren't using the continuing ed fund!

[Chimpy]

We have run out of names.  Also no one likes names such as "RS/6000" and "V7000" anymore.

We run out of names because companies like VMware keep changing the names of their products every quarter.

[Sky]

Let's start a tech company and just develop products named after dirty stuff. Share all your files with Cleveland Steamer!

[NowhereMan]

I like this idea. "Need to connect to a computer outside the network? Have your considered using SSH Reacharound?"

[ezrast]

Coordinate teams all over the planet with BlueBall. Centralize your employees' account data with FingerBang.

[apocrypha]

Introducing the new, Scottish, secure yet user-friendly operating system, CuntOS.

[Merusk]

Dear Cisco,

When we buy your expensive teleconferencing system with the "googly eye" motion trackers, it'd be nice if you told us we need to buy 3 HDMI cables. Your reps are saying, "Everything comes in the box." It does not, so I had to trudge around NYC at lunch to buy some.

Also, in NYC until Wednesday afternoon. If anyone's around and wants to have a beer tomorrow hit me up. I'm staying at the Hampton on W24th.

[Paelos]

This El Nino weather is really confusing the family dog. He's wondering why the hell it's springtime in December. He likes colder water usually to go swimming.

[Sky]

Dear Google and Xerox,

Thanks to Google for being pro-active on upgrading to SHA-2. Less thanks to Xerox for not supporting it in your copiers so our scan to email feature is now broken until enough FERs pile up that you might actually get off your ass and release a firmware update for the 7120.

Dammit.

[Yegolev]

"Everything (we sell) comes in the box."

[Merusk]

Exactly.

Most amusing was the line of the instructions that says a network cable isn't included. When I had two sitting in front of me that were straight out of the box.

[Khaldun]

Well, that was a fun night. "nVidia kernel mode driver has stopped responding and has recovered", with continuous checkerboarding and other artifact errors on screen even when I'm just in a browser. On my new-ish but just out of warranty desktop. Turns out I'm not the only one to have run into this delightful little hobgoblin of a problem, and rather unusually, after eight years of reports of it, there's no real agreement about why/when (because it's a timing error of some kind, it can have tons of causes) and about what to do about it (there's literally about thirty suggested solutions that I've counted already). I've kind of come to the end of my own competency because the next range of solutions are serious testing for hardware failure, complicated fiddling with BIOS, substantial registry edits.

I fucking hate computers sometimes.

[Sky]

I fucking hate computers sometimes.

Most of the time.

[Yegolev]

I hate some computers most of the time, and most computers some of the time.

[Selby]

I fought a similar timing problem for 3 years and ended up fixing it by dropping the RAM frequency. Nothing out there suggested it, it was one of those "aww screw it" moments of fighting it. In some hardware cases it's best to just start replacing parts than live with kernel failures & core dumps sporadically for years...

As a result I haven't built or replaced a computer since 2003.

[Sky]

I hate some computers most of the time, and most computers some of the time.

Technology would be so amazing if it worked as advertised and was reliable.

As it is, I'm happy it pays the bills but I'd be just as happy in a cabin in the woods miles away from electricity.

[MrHat]

Man, I crushed this pour over at home. So tasty even for store bought beans.

[Morat20]

This year has been a pile of shit, and the rain of shit continues.

On the bright side, after tallying up my year so far, there are few fronts where it isn't shit. It's shit money wise, health wise (my wife has another surgery upcoming), job wise (mine and my wife's. All gainfully employed, but it's just been....really fucking stressful). We've lost one family member recently, and another is in ICU (hopefully that's fixable) and my dad's got...something wrong, but also probably fixable. And of course my wife's issues, which should be finally fixed before the end of the year. And then there's crap with my kid, my brother's fucking cancer.....Jesus.

I think El Nino fucks with more than the weather.

I will say, in the endless parade of shit, that there have been bright sides. My brother is done with his treatment, and is just healing up prior to a PET scan to ensure there are no more active cells. He's active and healthy and awake in a way he hasn't been for over a year. My kiddo, for all the crap, is doing decently in college, holding down a job....and my wife and I have been married 13 years now, and we're....really happy, actually, despite all the shit.

But goddamn, am I ready for a change.