Random thing you love right now that doesn't deserve its own thread

NSMike wrote:

Just paid off my car.

\o/

Woo!

clover wrote:
NSMike wrote:

Just paid off my car.

o/

Woo!

Isn't it great knowing the finance company will never get another dime from you for your car?

sr_malo wrote:
clover wrote:
NSMike wrote:

Just paid off my car.

o/

Woo!

Isn't it great knowing the finance company will never get another dime from you for your car?

Actually the loan was through my super awesome credit union, so I don't mind them profiting off of me a bit.

Besides, I paid off a 5-year loan 2 years early.

Relaxing by the light of the tree.

IMAGE(https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/425578_4375781066814_1392388197_n.jpg)

That is a nice tree.

The first day of my holiday break was spent with my girlfriend in an awesome way we didn't plan. We got up and intended to run out for a couple of hours to do a bunch of running around and ended up having a great, productive and calorie filled day. We went to a new store called Emulsify which is run by the sister of one of her co-workers. All they sell is flavoured olive oils and balsamic vinegars. Got some presents for our Moms and some stuff for ourselves that was amazing. Then it was off to another tiny local place called SuzyQ that does nothing but artisan, high-end donuts. Got a box each for our amazing neighbours and a box for ourselves. These things are unreal. Then it was off to Art-Is-In Bakery to get a couple of things but also to have lunch as they serve food as well. The place is a fully functioning industrial scale bakery that they added a dining area to and it's amazing. I had Chili Mac & Cheese which is just as amazing and deadly as it sounds. Then we went to see mudbunny who was holding a present for my girlfriend I brought in from the US and because he rocks, he gave us a jar of his home made crab apple jelly (which is also amazing). Then we did a pile more running around which included finishing all our Christmas shopping and be taking advantage of a bunch of stacked deals to get an upgraded 3DS XL for myself for basically $30. We made our neighbours' days with the donuts after and despite being alone for way longer than we planned, our puppy was both happy and extremely well behaved all evening. To cap it all off, I'm closing out the evening playing Syndicate with a bunch of the StanliTech crew which I've been craving to do for weeks.

That was way longer than I planned but yeah, it was an unexpectedly awesome day both my girlfriend and I desperately needed. If this sets the tone for my holiday break, I'm going to go back to work pretty damn re-energised and happy.

Went on a really fun app-guided walking tour of Chinatown with Alexis - we were supposed to go with another friend as well, but she bailed due to a fever, so it ended up being a really wonderful date for the two of us. We managed to start off by coming across the Chinatown/Little Italy Christmas parade - nothing makes me happier than insane cultural mishmoshes:

Followed that up with some really good dumplings, my first (holy sh*t it was good) egg tart, a great lamb and cumin burger, the best tofu I've ever had in my life, a trip inside a Buddhist temple I've walked past a million times, but never entered, and the best falafel I've ever had in my life.

Just catching up on this thread: congrats, StrangeBlades! Welcome to BC

I watched Downton Abbey season 1 earlier this year, just now getting around to Season 2. Forgot how much I loved these characters.

NSMike wrote:

I watched Downton Abbey season 1 earlier this year, just now getting around to Season 2. Forgot how much I loved these characters.

Have fun with that. I can't wait for Season 3.

I've now watched Minecraft: The Story of Mojang twice, and it's awesome.

It's the day before Christmas and I'm supposed to be able to leave the office after lunch, but I'm still at work. Why is this in the love thread? Because lunch included 3 Corona's (Elysium! woo!) and a damn nice pork chop

PS: Also since I don't really expect to get any application support emails, Imma just gonna work on my tmux.conf instead.

"Oh, come all ye tasteful..."

Relatives who bring over real key lime pie!

avggeek wrote:

It's the day before Christmas and I'm supposed to be able to leave the office after lunch, but I'm still at work. Why is this in the love thread? Because lunch included 3 Corona's (Elysium! woo!) and a damn nice pork chop

PS: Also since I don't really expect to get any application support emails, Imma just gonna work on my tmux.conf instead.

Pork chops are the must underrated of all cuts of meat. I loves me some chops!

Radical Ans wrote:
avggeek wrote:

It's the day before Christmas and I'm supposed to be able to leave the office after lunch, but I'm still at work. Why is this in the love thread? Because lunch included 3 Corona's (Elysium! woo!) and a damn nice pork chop

PS: Also since I don't really expect to get any application support emails, Imma just gonna work on my tmux.conf instead.

Pork chops are the must underrated of all cuts of meat. I loves me some chops!

If you live somewhere where pork chops are an underrated cut of meat I'd consider moving.

Lamb breast. That's an underrated cut. But pork chops? Yeesh.

Maq wrote:
Radical Ans wrote:
avggeek wrote:

It's the day before Christmas and I'm supposed to be able to leave the office after lunch, but I'm still at work. Why is this in the love thread? Because lunch included 3 Corona's (Elysium! woo!) and a damn nice pork chop

PS: Also since I don't really expect to get any application support emails, Imma just gonna work on my tmux.conf instead.

Pork chops are the must underrated of all cuts of meat. I loves me some chops!

If you live somewhere where pork chops are an underrated cut of meat I'd consider moving.

Lamb breast. That's an underrated cut. But pork chops? Yeesh.

Especially with a dash of cinnamon on them, just to make them festive (or "Chinese 5 Spice" on that crunchy outer rind).

Now I want pork, and we have a fine cut of it sitting downstairs cooling after an evening roasting, for Christmas lunch tomorrow. (estimated max is 40 Celsius tomorrow).

Crafty wife, she left it uncarved so she can tell if I've tried to steal any.

Random thing I love? The fact I am contemplating blaming "Santa" for the crime I am am about to perpetrate...

Merry festivities all.

I think that we need before and after pictures.

m0nk3yboy wrote:
Maq wrote:
Radical Ans wrote:
avggeek wrote:

It's the day before Christmas and I'm supposed to be able to leave the office after lunch, but I'm still at work. Why is this in the love thread? Because lunch included 3 Corona's (Elysium! woo!) and a damn nice pork chop

PS: Also since I don't really expect to get any application support emails, Imma just gonna work on my tmux.conf instead.

Pork chops are the must underrated of all cuts of meat. I loves me some chops!

If you live somewhere where pork chops are an underrated cut of meat I'd consider moving.

Lamb breast. That's an underrated cut. But pork chops? Yeesh.

Especially with a dash of cinnamon on them, just to make them festive (or "Chinese 5 Spice" on that crunchy outer rind).

Now I want pork, and we have a fine cut of it sitting downstairs cooling after an evening roasting, for Christmas lunch tomorrow. (estimated max is 40 Celsius tomorrow).

Crafty wife, she left it uncarved so she can tell if I've tried to steal any.

Random thing I love? The fact I am contemplating blaming "Santa" for the crime I am am about to perpetrate...

Merry festivities all. :nicekiss:

Everyone knows the fat man loves him some hog.

Someone posted a link to the Google Tracking Santa stuff a few days ago, but Google going their own way means that my company got back the deal with NORAD to do the techy visualization stuff for their tracking Santa stuff, and we really pulled out all the stops. It's a little choppy with all the traffic (the servers were Microsoft's responsibility, not ours) but still pretty awesome.
http://www.noradsanta.org/
A non-IE browser is best, I recommend Chrome, as we are visualizing using WebGL, which IE does not yet support. Using IE gives you a fairly crummy 2d map only slightly better than Google.

And yes, you read that right, Microsoft is one of the partners of this venture, providing the servers and BING imagery, and the main product being delivered is something that doesn't work in their browser. No, they were not too happy about that.

I went to the home improvement store during lunch today to pick up a few things for the new house, including a fire pit that we had picked out over the weekend. Ran into 2 of my bosses there who told me "but WE'RE getting you a fire pit!" when I told them why I was there. Spoiled the surprise, but mighty nice timing. They even had picked the one that we wanted.

So I actually won a legitimate contest. I won a fancy cigar cutter and a matching lighter.

IMAGE(http://www.lightersdirect.com/thumbnail.php?maxw=723&maxh=723&file=images/pop/paliol.jpg)

IMAGE(http://www.cigarmony.com/images/products/detail/380x475_PalioGunMetalLighter1.jpg)

I hope it is not in poor taste, but I have ended up re-gifting them as groomsman gifts.

AJ and my Friend Jon will be the beneficiaries of these. These are hefty duty items, 50-60 bucks normally, 100 for the gift set.

Gravey wrote:

Just catching up on this thread: congrats, StrangeBlades! Welcome to BC :drink:

Also playing catch up; congrats, SB! Sounds like you got a pretty sweet offer!

If you're ever coming up to North Vancouver, PM me and we'll go ride up the side of a mountain or something and then drink a beer!

Mimble wrote:
Gravey wrote:

Just catching up on this thread: congrats, StrangeBlades! Welcome to BC :drink:

Also playing catch up; congrats, SB! Sounds like you got a pretty sweet offer!

If you're ever coming up to North Vancouver, PM me and we'll go ride up the side of a mountain or something and then drink a beer! :D

When I starting posting here when i'm in BC just remind me.

My entire immediate family and extended family is in Manila to celebrate Christmas! It was an epic Christmas day with piles upon piles of presents going every which way. Some drama to be expected, but nothing more than the same old, same old. At some point, you gotta let the parties sort it out for themselves.

There's talk of going to Palawan post-New Year for a family getaway.

IMAGE(http://tripmart.com.ph/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/palawan_el_nido.jpg)

IMAGE(http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/images/04_06/palawan.jpg)

We got approval on the flat. Come 1st of January I'm a Swedish resident =)

Maq wrote:

We got approval on the flat. Come 1st of January I'm a Swedish resident =)

Congrats! Your tag will be all the more appropriate then.

TigerBill wrote:
Maq wrote:

We got approval on the flat. Come 1st of January I'm a Swedish resident =)

Congrats! Your tag will be all the more appropriate then. :)

Beat me to it, by a loooong shot too.

Grats Maq!

My Lian-Li PC-K58 case. The damn thing weighs a ton, but holy cr*p installing new RAM & an additional HDD was 100x easier on it than doing a similar upgrade with my media server's HTPC case. Not a fair comparison I know, but still.

ps: Memtest+ passed - phew!

Bed Bath & Beyond, at least the Kanata location. My girlfriend and I bought a coffee maker a couple of months ago that started not feeding water properly. She's obsessive about keeping receipts but lost the one for this so we figured we'd be on the phone with Krups support forever to try to get it fixed without one. We called up the store to ask if they could somehow figure out how to reprint it for us and they were like "Just bring it in." No receipt and they just exchanged it over the counter for a brand new one. The whole experience took about 2 minutes and we were so blown away, we were asking "Seriously? Like, you don't need us to do anything or pay some kind of restock or something?" Our confusion definitely made the clerk smile. They had every right to tell us to go away without a receipt and didn't. I can't remember the last time I had service that good. Damn impressed.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

Bed Bath & Beyond, at least the Kanata location. My girlfriend and I bought a coffee maker a couple of months ago that started not feeding water properly. She's obsessive about keeping receipts but lost the one for this so we figured we'd be on the phone with Krups support forever to try to get it fixed without one. We called up the store to ask if they could somehow figure out how to reprint it for us and they were like "Just bring it in." No receipt and they just exchanged it over the counter for a brand new one. The whole experience took about 2 minutes and we were so blown away, we were asking "Seriously? Like, you don't need us to do anything or pay some kind of restock or something?" Our confusion definitely made the clerk smile. They had every right to tell us to go away without a receipt and didn't. I can't remember the last time I had service that good. Damn impressed.

No pint of blood or animal sacrifice required? What kind of amateur Bed Bath and Beyond the Mountains of Madness is this?

*assistant whispers into my ear*

Uh, my mistake.