What's everyone up to right now?

[fredd bear]

Where are you?

Luck devil. Smoked salmon is prohibitively expensive here, so it's a rare treat.

Also love fresh sockeye, which is unavailable here. Have had it three times, all on a visit to Canada. The Canadian male relatives I met could all cook ONE dish really well; one was fresh barbeque salmon. Oh wow. Aussie males have twice the confidence and half the ability. Most can burn a steak or chops.

ME? I'm actually ya gourmet cook.. Or more correctly, I was. Been living alone for a long time, mostly can't be arsed cooking anything which can't be thrown in my wok or one dish ,straight into the oven fo ra couple of hours. These days, seem to eat a lot of Aldi frozen dinners.

[Angrboda]

Listening to music and drinking coffee. Just set up my new microwave, which I've been putting off. Long story short, I bought a cute, red microwave, but it made an obnoxious noise while cooking, so I returned it. I was hesitant to open this one, as the seller, Target, isn't as generous in their returns as Walmart, and doesn't have to accept something if it's been opened. So I dawdled. That and it took a week for the warranty company to get the information they needed to acknowledge the warranty. I wasn't going to open it without a valid warranty in place.

So, I'm just chilling. Nothing scheduled for a few hours. I bought a water bottle, but found out it leaked when I left it in my gym bag overnight. So I bought a bunch of possible alternatives at Walmart, and I've got them all sitting upside down on paper towel, to test them and see if they leak or not. I'll pick from the good ones and return the rest. Monday is going to be droll. I've got a lot of returns to make. After I get done, I'll have to evaluate my budget to see how badly I did so far this month. Much of the past three months, I've been stocking up my kitchen and pantry with food and cookware. The big indulgence this month was a set of wire shelves for the kitchen to expand my storage and working space. I didn't technically need it, but it was my birthday this month, so I'm going to excuse that expense. The other overages on the other hand.... Every month I keep saying that I won't do this next month, but I always do. I think I've got everything that I'll need for a long while. Freezer is full. Pantry is full. I now have a complete set of cookware, save for a dutch oven or jumbo cooker. I think I should be able to coast a while. But then, maybe that isn't the problem.

Target, in their never ending bid to annoy me, sent me another reminder that my shelves and casters that go with them are ready for pickup. The email said that I needed to pick them up "by" Monday, when I thought I had through Monday to do so. So I check on the order, and in doing so, I find out that they're on sale starting today. So I've placed a new order for them at the sale price. This saves me $10. I had originally ordered them because they had advertised them as being on sale in one of their flyers, when in actuality they were not. I was going to wait a couple weeks before putting them up anyway, to see if the expense was tolerable given my spending this month. Well this seals the deal.

[Fireball]

Where are you?

Luck devil. Smoked salmon is prohibitively expensive here, so it's a rare treat.

Also love fresh sockeye, which is unavailable here. Have had it three times, all on a visit to Canada. The Canadian male relatives I met could all cook ONE dish really well; one was fresh barbeque salmon. Oh wow. Aussie males have twice the confidence and half the ability. Most can burn a steak or chops.

ME? I'm actually ya gourmet cook.. Or  more correctly, I was. Been  living alone for a long time, mostly can't be arsed cooking anything which can't be thrown in my wok or one dish ,straight into the oven fo ra couple of hours.  These days, seem to eat  a lot of Aldi frozen dinners.

I'm in California. And yes, smoked salmon is stupid expensive. It's $10 per pound for the raw fish and he smoked it, eliminating that expense. He's a lot better at smoking meats than I will ever be. I'll eat it, but don't want the work.

[Rev. Rye]

Just had a malware scare. Googled Robbie Robertson (the guitarist from The Band), and, while clicking on his official site, I got redirected to one of those "Congratulations! Finish this quiz and receive your prize!" things. Just ran Malwarebytes and Defender. They found nothing. Let's just hope it's a fluke.

[Rev. Rye]

Update on the situation: I've spent the last few hours surfing the web, and, just to see if it would happen again, I used google as much as possible, even if I knew the exact address I wanted to use. Hell, I even went back to Robbie Robertson's official website (which started the situation in the first place) three times. Nothing. I suppose I should also mention that I cleared my cache (over a gig) after the scare, which may have helped with that.

[fredd bear]

Update on the situation: I've spent the last few hours surfing the web, and, just to see if it would happen again, I used google as much as possible, even if I knew the exact address I wanted to use. Hell, I even went back to Robbie Robertson's official website (which started the situation in the first place) three times. Nothing. I suppose I should also mention that I cleared my cache (over a gig) after the scare, which may have helped with that.

I currently have little inconvenience; my ISP has just sent mea message saying they are experiencing outages--hasn't hit me yet, but should very shortly.

[brewer]

Bought and delivered $200 in requested flood supplies from SAM's, then took a family to shop at GoodWill. Things are pretty f-ing sad here.

[Rev. Rye]

Laptop battery appears to be on its last legs. Its battery seems to last a lot less time than usual and didn’t warn me in advance.

That said, I did finally watch the season/series finale of Arrested Development. It dropped a lot of twists in the end, but the biggest one has to be:

---

Michael actually does the best Chicken impression in the entire Bluth family. Also, Buster did kill Lucille 2. And the series ends with a Herb Alpert version of “Cabaret.”

---

[fredd bear]

Laptop battery appears to be on its last legs. Its battery seems to last a lot less time than usual and didn’t warn me in advance.

That said, I did finally watch the season/series finale of Arrested Development. It dropped a lot of twists in the end, but the biggest one has to be:

---

Michael actually does the best Chicken impression in the entire Bluth family. Also, Buster did kill Lucille 2. And the series ends with a Herb Alpert version of “Cabaret.”

---

 I recently bought a Lenovo Laptop---have had a Lenovo tablet for about 4 years, and it's still fine; I paid $299.00, new.

How long has your battery lasted?  Can laptop batteries usually be replaced? Do you know broad price range?

[Rev. Rye]

Laptop battery appears to be on its last legs. Its battery seems to last a lot less time than usual and didn’t warn me in advance.

That said, I did finally watch the season/series finale of Arrested Development. It dropped a lot of twists in the end, but the biggest one has to be:

---

Michael actually does the best Chicken impression in the entire Bluth family. Also, Buster did kill Lucille 2. And the series ends with a Herb Alpert version of “Cabaret.”

---

 I recently bought a Lenovo Laptop---have had a Lenovo tablet for about 4 years, and it's still fine; I paid $299.00, new.

How long has your battery lasted?  Can laptop batteries usually be replaced? Do you know broad price range?

Battery has lasted since I got it on my 27th birthday, 2 years, 3 months, and 4 days ago. Yes, they can usually be replaced, and, indeed, this is the first laptop I've had where you couldn't just slide the battery in and out and have to disassemble the bottom panel. That said, they seem to be interchangeable (at least for any given model). The one Dad ordered to replace my ailing battery was $43, if I heard him correctly.

Also, on a non-tech-related note, I just finished watching the 1936 film Fury. It's a very fascinating film, Fritz Lang's first movie after he fled Europe to avoid the Nazis and went to Hollywood. It's a film about lynching, based on a true story I described elsewhere, and I can only assume that it was daring to make a movie about lynching at the time, especially basing a movie on a real-life lynching that happened three years before its release, and it could have very well been even more daring if MGM didn't insist Lang tone down his original scenario: originally Spencer Tracy's character was meant to be black [there are some minor black characters in the finished film, and though their dialect could be a bit questionable, I suspect this may have been a coup on Lang's part, especially given how squeamish the major studios were about representation at the time (see the case of the 1945 version of Brewster's Millions that got banned in Memphis for treating a black supporting actor too well)], he was supposed to actually be guilty of the crime he was being lynched for [A nod to Lang's previous masterpiece M, where a guilty child-killer ends up the most sympathetic character and barely avoids getting lynched by a crowd of criminals], and when he finally revealed he was alive all along, he was originally meant to be give a fiery indictment of mob violence but became a simple confession that he fucked up.

Lang thought the decision to make Spencer Tracy's character innocent undermined the film's moral credibility; he said that statements about the immorality about the death penalty only worked if you said even guilty people didn't deserve to be executed. Well, at least the moral ambiguity inherent in the premise (a man who survived a lynching faking his death to put the people who tried to kill him on trial) was at least interesting. And, for all its flaws, it's still a film that resonates to this day, and, honestly, if you've heard me talk about the Social Media Hive Minds here, you can probably guess why I think that.