What are you crazy about that's not well known or popular?

There’s so much awesomeness out there in the world – music, film, tv, places. What are you nuts about that you want to share – particularly if nobody knows much about it? I’m thinking this group has enough in common that we can all gain from sharing our hidden gems. I’ll start with first comment.

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Saw Ben Folds – just him and a piano – on Sunday and it’s crazy how this guy’s not a national hero. Yet. This show had two parts – first part were songs he selected. The second part was all random requests via paper airplane. He performed “Don’t Change Your Plans” from the last Ben Folds Five album The Autobiography of Reinhold Messner. They came back together to play the entire album front to back. So many of his songs give me those musical goosebumps and this one gets me every time.

“Don’t Change Your Plans” starts at 7:30 here

There’s also the entire Myspace (yes Myspace) gig from 2006 kicks ass too. He played this song Sunday too. One of my favorites.

Have a great day fellow mutants.

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Ok last one I promise cover of a Kesha song … actual music starts at 1:08

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I’m pretty crazy about logging people off when they aren’t at their computers. I mean, it drives me crazy when I remote into a machine and see there’s like 12 people who’re logged in and the main complaint is that “our computer is slow.”

Well log the fuck off when you’re not using the thing.

I keep telling them. But apparently, it’s not very well known and definitely not popular.

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I don’t even know what you mean. Are they all logged into the same vm or something?

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You can switch users in windows 7. Which means an arbitrary number of people can be logged in simultaneously to the same machine, but leave their user in a “locked” state.

So that you end up with something like this:

That’s six people logged into the same physical computer. They just walked away without doing a proper logout, instead doing fast user switching to allow other people to use it while they’re away.

For each user there, about 800MiB of RAM is reserved. Most of them also had Outlook open, which always uses resources.

By the time they called me, every single action on that computer was getting written to the page file, and getting swapped onto disk.

And they thought there might be something wrong with the machine.

No. The problem lies squarely with the users.

We tried turning off fast user switching for a while, but got so many complaints that the company executives ordered us to turn it back on.

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I’ll keep this in mind. Thx for the PSA!

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Funny enough, a simple way to solve this is with a reboot.

I don’t even give a fuck if people lose their work. We’ve told them plenty of times that if they don’t log off, they WILL eventually lose work, because it forces me to use the computing equivalent of the Jaws of Life.

I’ve had users complain that they’ve lost a whole day’s work because I rebooted the machine.

I tell them to call my boss, who will then tell the user that THEY are wrong, and that I did the right thing.

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I think that the least well know person that I listen to is Damien Youth. For me his music is very connected to a friend that I dated for a while and have lost touch with. I’m really disappointed that I never managed to catch him live while I was in New Orleans. These are my some of my favorites. I have heard that Hermaphrodite Jesus is about a guy that Damien Youth met at what was my favorite coffee shop in late High School/ early college.

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I liked the couple things I heard from Ben Folds. It was just Underground and Rockin the Suburbs, but I was feeling his cynicism toward the music scene. Sonically, very different tunes; lyrically, the same thesis, practically.

Listening to Bastard embed now

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When I moved in with my partner, one day he told me how great Ben Folds was, and I thought he’d gone crazy. “Ben Folds? The ‘she’s a brick’ guy?” Then he played me a bunch of his stuff and it was a revelation. “The Luckiest” became a favorite song instantly, ‘our song’ if you will.

A few years later we were eating in a very fancy restaurant with a harpist providing music and, mid-meal, the classical harp music sounded very familiar. It was a harp arrangement of “The Luckiest”. Both of us tried to make the other one admit they’d pre-arranged this, but it was just a coincidence – the very friendly harpist just turned out to be a big Ben Folds fan.

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I thought he was?

Anyway:

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That song was written for a movie, I believe. But the scene and sadly the song got cut. I gotta find the story. It’s a popular wedding song, and Ben has said that if there’s one song that he’ll be known for in 100 years it’ll be that one.

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He played that on Sunday (it was requested) and he said before he started — if you got kids with you it’d be a good time to step out. He doesn’t sing the second verse (because of the words?), he said … and I’ve noticed that in live recordings … he asked the two girls who requested it (by paper airplane) to do that … but they didn’t quite step up to the plate.

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The culinary resin mastic (Greek: Μαστίχα, transliteration ‘mastika’). It’s a resin tapped solely from Pistacia lentiscus growing on the Chios island of Greece.

Its aroma is unlike any other aromatic spice or herb, yet it partners with a vast number of foods and both savory and sweet dishes. Coffee, chocolate, tomatoes, olive oil, pears, crème brûlée, wine sauces, lamb, basmati rice, roasted asparagus—I haven’t yet found a food that it doesn’t enhance.

Part of its obscurity may be its chemical nature. The stuff is a pain to work with. Since it’s a resin, it’s not water-soluble. It will leave a tenacious, gummy residue on any tool used to grind it. Throw into an aqueous liquid, these ground particles will eventually aggregate together.

The most effective way (I’ve found) to use it is to create a saturated, ethanol-base solution (I use 190-proof, though 150-proof might work, too) and then disperse this solution, drop by drop, into either a fat-rich ingredient (ex: olive oil, cream) or a very thick aqueous ingredient (ex: wine sauce reduction).

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Listening to this right now BTW:

Music by Ben Folds, lyrics by Nick Hornby

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Doc Pomus is my favorite song from this album:

But the entire album is definitely worth a listen

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My wife? I mean, she’s very likable, just a private person…

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Yeah I have that album … He played Doc Pomus … It took some time for that album to grow on me. I’m not sure if the songs were disjointed or what.

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Ceylon Cinnamon. The stuff in the stores, processed food, and most restaurants is Cassia. After you try Ceylon you can’t go back to the old stuff. It’s much more ‘cinnamony’, that’s the best i can do. it’s just so much more flavorful; it makes Cassia taste like bark dust. And, unlike Cassia, Ceylon is not bad for your liver in large amounts, which is good, because about one heaping tablespoon per cup of applesauce is my favorite dessert. It can be a little hard to find depending on where you live, but oddly enough my local Kroger’s has it in bulk (while the excellent health food stores around me either don’t carry it or don’t know about it).

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