Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@Vinny Well, they're pretty gross, so I'd say it's definitely a contender, but not THE worst. That would be a "fun" product of which I can't show a picture here, otherwise I'd be banned. But I can describe it (I think):
it's a round frame, with a plastic sculpture in the middle, in the shape of a human's behind. It's "opening" is a tissue dispenser, and according to the people who sell it, it's a fun toilet/bathroom accessory.

I think it's safe to say that I can rest my case...

@ReaderRagfihs Almost sounds like a Discord version of a Creepy Pasta...

@ThanosReXXX: Neat! Good ol' amore played a part, I see. Your country is one of several in Europe that I'd like to visit.

I think I understand the pull of going back to your roots as well; many of my ancestors (What we can trace, anyway) immigrated to here from Germany in the 1800s. The closest relative of mine who was actually born there was my dad's maternal grandmother (or my great-grandma, in simpler terms). Her family sailed over when she was barely pushing a year old. Grandma still jokes that her mom "learned to walk on the water". XD I'd definitely like to visit Germany at some point and see the sights...as well as test how much German I've lost/retained since high school lol.

Sorry for going off on a tangent there. I find geneaology interesting; it goes hand in hand with my fascination of history.

Aaaaand now I'm craving actual hamburgers. XD

Been Amsterdam twice, it’s an amazing place and I’d happily go back again.

@Blitzenexx Well, I'll be... guess that's something we have in common, then: my ancestors are German immigrants as well. If I remember correctly, my grandpa's grandpa was a full-blood German, and they immigrated to the States long ago. I still got the German last name to prove it...

And no apologies necessary. I think that those kinds of topics are interesting as well. Especially if most of your family doesn't exactly consist of talkative people, safe for a few exceptions like yours truly, so any and all information I got from my parents and grandparents, I more or less had to forcefully squeeze out of them...

@BenGrimm It is, isn't it? For all the years I've lived here, some things can still amaze or pleasantly surprise me. Lucky for you, you're not that far away. All it takes for you to get here, is a couple of hours.

Can't say the same for my fellow Americans...

@ThanosReXXX

Takes about an hour on the plane from England, and couple minutes on train from airport.

So many funko pops revved up today due to the London Toy Fair. A lot for Dragon Ball Z, Scooby-Doo, Overwatch (D.Va finally gets to be normal size!), however, SpongeBob got MOAR pops! HOWEVER x2, there's been hints that Maroon 5 will be singing Sweet Victory at the Bubble Bowl, and I think THIS SpongeBob pop is adding MOAR to the fryer that it's going to happen!

@BenGrimm Yeah, it's about 10 to 12 minutes. It's two stops.

Ahh, did some cleaning on my ipod shuffle. Hadn't changed the playlist in a long time, so iTunes required me to delete everything in it first. Because that makes sense.

Copied the old songs and did some curating to rescue the songs not from itunes (and the itunes songs that are no longer available for download [which sucks how they can just remove them, btw]).

That took a while but I really like my shuffle, so it's great to have some new songs in there.

@ReaderRagfihs Well, it’s not all bad:

@SheldonRandoms Can’t wait for the Maroon 5 x Jackson 5 x Spongebob crossover episode.

So... I was bored and decided to try that Tiny Arcade hack.

It failed miserably. And now my Ms Pac-Man thinks she's Pac-Man.

I don't mind it. But I might change it back to Ms. Pac-Man at some point.

This is definitely me when someone replaces my DNA with Fruit by the Foot

I get to work later cuz I had to take my mother to the DMV. Find out that a rule definition in the billing system has gone sideways, causing charges to be written off instead of transferred. Then find out that executives need an updated crystal report for some data measurement because the old one is timing out.

It's gonna be a busy day, almost wished I had my Monday back.

This is precisely one of the reasons why I'm still not completely on board with digital store fronts. I use Spotify and YouTube for a lot of my music nowadays, but I'll still pick up the occasional CD if there are enough songs on it that I enjoy.

Ugh, Crystal Reports. I've admittedly done very little with the software, but I know it wasn't easy to create some compatibility with our own software for those who want to use custom reports from it.

At least you got yesterday off....

@ThanosReXXX: Some parts of my family have extensive family trees and know quite a bit about who came from where...at least from when they came to the US onward. That same grandma's paternal side can actually trace their family a little way back to before they sailed over; there are actually some distant relatives that still live in Germany on that side who, last I knew, still owned the family bell foundry. That half of my dad's side is pretty well documented, but I know little about my dad's paternal side.

As for mom's side....Her paternal side also goes back to Germany, but there's a lot of lost information there. I know the ancestors that came over briefly settled in Ohio before heading farther west. The maternal side has German roots as well, but there are also a ton of loose ends. I was able to find that a distant relative came from the island of Rügen in Germany...possibly when it belonged to Prussia, but I can't confirm that.

I really do wish traveling wasn't so expensive. I've seen some online wonder why some US citizens don't get out of the US more often. Travel is unfortunately costly enough here in terms of money and/or time depending on where you live (plus public transportation outside of cities usually isn't great), plus there's already plenty to see in a country that takes up a large geographical area.

Granted, some of that is also because some people like taking everything plus the kitchen sink when they travel; yours truly isn't that way, but I'm not comfortable with just a backpack for trips that last longer than 2-3 days either.

@Blitzenexx Well, I did have to work some Sunday. So I didn't get to relax too much. Just enough to keep me wanting more.

@JackEatsSparrows: Bummer. It's rare that
I work on weekends unless there's a work project that I really need the finish; typically I'll do that on Saturdays should the need arise. There have also been a couple of those "zero-day bug fixes", but those stopped years ago once we had more of a support group for testing and implemented a better release schedule. They catch stuff 99.9% of the time.

The other 0.1%....Well, that's why we decided to move to a more restricted release format recently. Now we have stable releases that can be deployed while further releases have the snot tested out of them more.

We're a fairly small overall team on a fairly new product, so we're still learning.

@Vinny What the hell did I just watch?

@JackEatsSparrows I can in all honesty say, that you've made one of the most puzzling comments I've seen in quite a while. I mean: DMV? Crystal reports? But wanting the Monday back when it was actually a blue one, must mean the situation must have been pretty damn aggravating for you, so I'm just going to take your word for it...

@Blitzenexx Well, you know even more than I do about my family, so you may not have all the pieces of the puzzle yet, but you're well on your way. All I know is that the German part of my family comes from a German place called Heidelberg, and that from there, they spread out to various countries in Europe, and to the United States.

As for your traveling woes: I can understand that, and I've always heard and read from many US citizens, that they often just visit another state, at the other side of the country, because the environment is so far removed from them, that it already seems as if they're in another country.

Some have never even seen the sea, even to this day, which seems like the weirdest thing to me. Then again:
I was born in a place close to the sea, and now live in a country that's pretty much intertwined with the sea, and the beach is only a half hour's drive away from my house.

@ThanosReXXX: That's one way to look at it: a puzzle. One that may never fully be put together, but one that I like learning about and adding a piece to on occasion. I've started wondering at times if I shouldn't have went into a field related to geneaology or archaeology, but then again I sometimes wonder the same about aspects of geology and the veterinary field as well.

The closest body of water to me of any significant size is one of the Great Lakes, but I have seen both oceans. I can personally attest that the waters of the Atlantic off the coast of Florida are definitely warmer than those off of the California coast in the summer

...I can also attest that foolish 12-year-olds will also swim in the Pacific Ocean despite sustaining a bad sunburn the day before at Sea World. XD "Salt in the wound" definitely has some meaning to it.

@BeetonTheRobot: I have no experience with sending consoles in for repair. From what I've read online, they normally don't send a replacement unit unless the one sent is very hosed. What's it doing that caused you some concern?

I still kick myself for not grabbing the HHD New 3DS model when it was still available. If I had known the other limited releases would disappear faster than you can blink....I'm still particularly bitter about those $99 black and white Mario systems.

Despite its weight and larger-than-I'm-comfortable-with upper screen, overall I'm quite happy with my SNES N3DS XL.

Never "wash" your electronics. Just, never. No water. Ever.