A recently hired blonde was tasked was to go out for coffee. Armed with a large thermos, she hurried to a nearby coffee shop.
When she got there, she held up the thermos so that the man behind the counter could see it. “Is this big enough to hold six cups of coffee?” she asked.
Looking at the thermos the man replied, “It should easily hold six cups.”
Handing the thermos over, the blonde said, “Wonderful! I need you to fill it with one black, two decaf, and three with cream and sugar.”
LMDE Upgrades
Let’s back up a moment… Like way far… Before Flush Twice… Even before Windows 95… The internet had only just reached Ohio, and BBS’s (aka Bulletin Board Systems) were still the coolest thing you could do with your home computer on a Saturday night. (Hey, it actually got me laid many times, which is more than I can say for reddit.)
It was the early 90’s and a friend of mine had introduced me to a new operating system. He was so excited about it! “What can you do with it?” I asked while feigning interest. Denny typed a few cryptic commands into what looked like a broken DOS prompt. It spit back equally cryptic nonsense as he explained with great excitement what the system was doing. At the time it didn’t make that much sense, and I wasn’t really all that impressed.
A few years later I would be very impressed during a computer show at Hara Arena when I witnessed an entire operating system installed with a graphical desktop environment in a mere 20 minutes. In both cases, that OS was Linux, and after the latter, I became a Linux user. Fun fact: Flush Twice was originally hosted on a Linux server in my basement.
Of course some of you may recall my foray into the military back in 2005. After I joined the Army, my propensity for Linux was not well tolerated, and I had to switch over to Windows again, but in 2012, I was a free man, and I immediately steered back towards Linux. Of course my old distro had withered and died, so I had to find a new one.
Linux Mint was particularly appealing, owing to the fact that the system could be installed with full multimedia codecs in a mere 20 minutes. Everything just worked, and the Mate Desktop Environment was so clean, simple, and intuitive that I really didn’t have to Google info on how to use it.
Now while Linux Mint offers a variety of desktop choices, their flagship is called Cinnamon. It’s a home grown desktop very similar to Mate, but slightly more hackerish. It also seemed glitchier to me, and it looked very dark. I prefered Mate. It was lighter, seemed to work better, and it was easier to find everything.
A small failing of Linux Mint at the time was that it was based off of Ubuntu. While this made rebranding and packaging a snap, the whole OS had to be reinstalled about once a year when the latest version was released. An alternative was Linux Mint Debian Edition. It was a little grittier, but I wouldn’t have to keep reinstalling it so often.
So LMDE (the Debian branch) became my OS of choice, and with it, I could just get things done. Of course 3 years ago, LMDE became LMDE 2, and just recently it became LMDE 3, and wouldn’t you know it… They discontinued the version that included the Mate Desktop Environment, so you can’t just upgrade in place… Nope. I had to do a fresh install with the Cinnamon desktop.
OK, so all is not lost. This is Linux after all. After installing LMDE 3 with Cinnamon, I just installed the Mate desktop packages (of which there are many) and switched to using it instead of Cinnamon. With three desktop installations, that was a lot of downloading and installing, and it went a little over the usual 20 minutes.
But still, the computers have all been updated, and everything seems pretty much like it was. Given how the interfaces changed from Windows 7 to 8 to 10, keeping things the same is a relief. I take comfort that the Linux community is dedicated to keeping desktop computers alive and well for many years to come.
So special thanks to Clem and company for all their hard work on creating and maintaining Linux Mint.
Also thanks to this week’s joke contributors: Glenn and George. I wouldn’t be able to keep doing this if it weren’t for their contributions, because I ran out of jokes a long time ago. If you would like to contribute a joke, you can submit one here or email me at flush2x@gmail.com. If your joke is used, you’ll get a thank you from me and a warm fuzzy feeling inside!
Pax,
-f2x
An elderly gentleman had a serious hearing problem for a number of years. He went to the doctor and was fitted for a set of hearing aids that allowed the man to hear again.
A month went by and the man went back to the doctor for a standard follow up.
The doctor remarked, “It would seem your hearing is nearly perfect now. Your family must be really pleased that you can hear again.”
“Oh, I haven’t told my family yet,” said the old man. “I just sit around and listen to the conversations, and I’ve changed my will three times!”
The university was offering a course in paranormal studies, and to get a feel for his audience the professor asked, “How many of you here believe in ghosts?”
Nearly every student raised their hand.
“Well that’s a good start. Out of those of you who believe in ghosts, do any of you think you’ve ever seen a ghost?”
About half the students raised their hands.
“That’s interesting. Has anyone here ever talked to a ghost?
About half of those students raised their hands.
“That’s great Has anyone here ever been touched by a ghost?”
Three students raise their hands.
“That’s fantastic. But let me ask you one question further,” said the professor. “Has any of you ever made love to a ghost?”
One student in the back raised his hand.
The professor was astonished. He took off his glasses and said, “Son, in all the years I’ve been giving this lecture, no one has ever claimed to have had intimate contact with a ghost. Please come up here and tell us about your experience.”
The student made his way up to the podium.
The professor said, “Now, tell us what was it like to have sex with a ghost.”
The student replied, “Ghost? From back there I thought you said ‘goats’!”
A tourist, visited the National Memorial Hall For Israel’s Fallen where there is an eternal flame monument to Unknown Soldiers.
At the base of the memorial, a sign was displayed: “Here lies Seymour Ruthenberg”.
The tourist asked one of the attendants how was it possible that the unknown had a name.
The old man replied, “As a soldier, that Seymour was pretty much unknown, but as an accountant-Oy! He was something.”
A husband and wife decided they needed to use “code” to indicate that they wanted to have sex without letting their children in on it. They decided on the word Typewriter.
One day the husband told his five year old daughter, “Go tell your mommy that daddy needs to type a letter.”
The child did as she was told, and her mother responded, “Tell your daddy that he can’t type a letter right now because there is a red ribbon in the typewriter.”
A few days later the mother said to the daughter, “Go tell your daddy that he can type that letter now.”
The child went to tell her father, returned, and announced, “Daddy said never mind, he already wrote the letter by hand.”
A blind skydiver was being interviewed about his hobby and asked how this was accomplished.
He explained that many things were all done for him. “Others make sure that the parachute is properly harnessed, and I am placed in the door and told when to jump. Even my hand is placed on the release ring for me”
“But how do you know when you are going to land?” asked the interviewer
“Oh, that’s easy,” grinned the man. “The dog’s leash goes slack.”
Burger Time
After telling my guest to help herself to the ice in my freezer, she opened the door and held her mouth slightly agape for a moment before getting her ice. “You sure must like hamburgers,” she said with an uncomfortable tone.
It just so happened that my local grocery had a sale on 80/20 ground beef recently. The price was low enough that I made the decision to stock up. Once I got the meat home, I portioned it into quarter pound patties sandwiched between wax papers. There were over 50 patties stacked neatly on the right side of my freezer, so I can see where a casual observer might think I was a tad bit obsessive.
Of course if she’d looked at the shelf on the freezer door, she might have also made a similar comment about the pork loin chops and chicken breasts. Somehow the stacks of frozen vegetables next to the burgers completely escaped her perception as well. It’s a carefully organized ice box, and there’s enough food inside to last for months. It’s not a vain attempt to survive the apocalypse. It’s actually economics.
Meat prices tend to be volatile, and they spend more time being too expensive rather than reasonably priced. For this reason, I buy a lot of it whenever it goes on sale and freeze it. After all, food stored in the freezer will basically last forever. and this gives me the ability to enjoy the foods I like, even when the prices are much higher than I could justify spending.
So yes, Michelle, I do like hamburgers. In fact, I like a wide variety of foods. What I don’t like is spending more money than I have to, and that’s why I stock up on volatilely priced goods when the prices are low.
But this wasn’t over. Next came the comment about how “GFS has really good frozen hamburgers”.
Now I’m not a fan of store bought premade frozen hamburgers. I’ve tried about a dozen different brands from the budget to the gourmet over the years. They always say “100% Beef” on them, and I’ve never seen any other ingredients listed. While they do taste like a meat patty, and some are almost enjoyable, they don’t taste like a normal burger. No matter how you cook them, there is always a slightly rubbery texture, the smell is gamey, and the fat seems to have a much lower viscosity when it melts.
And here’s the kicker with store bought frozen hamburgers: If you thaw them, things get really weird.
“Thaw them?” she remarked with palpable disgust.
Yeah, like if you want to make chili, tacos, sloppy joe, meatloaf, or anything that uses ground beef that isn’t in the shape of a disk.
OK, at this point her brain was about to break. She understood the idea of buying ground beef to make these things. She even understood the concept of freezing ground beef and thawing it out later to make these things. The problem came with the idea of using frozen hamburger patties to make a meatloaf, and couldn’t grasp why anyone would even think to do that.
Because it’s ground beef?
Her head couldn’t wrap around the concept. If I need a pound of ground beef for a recipe, I take out four of my home pressed ground beef patties and let it thaw. I can then break it apart to make brown ground beef, or mix it with ingredients to make meatballs or some other dish.
“If you’re going to make something else out of it, then why make it into a hamburger [patty] to start with?” she pointed out.
Because when I buy the ground beef, I don’t exactly know every meal I’m going to make with it. It’s easier to just turn them all into 1/4 pound patties, freeze them, and go from there.
She shook her head in bewilderment. This was just too much for her brain to wrap around. Apparently in her version of reality, you’re supposed to know exactly what you’re going to make with the ground beef before you buy it, and not buy more than you need over the next week. Changing those plans after that point somehow violated the sanctity of the food. And using a raw hamburger patty for anything other than making a hamburger was definitely a bizarre notion only a madman could conceive.
But when it comes time to make a meal, it’s easier to turn four frozen home pressed hamburger patties into a meatloaf than it is to turn a frozen pound of ground beef into four hamburger patties. When I buy the meat, I just portion it and press them all, so later on I have easy options available to me, and I buy in bulk so that whenever prices go up, I’ll still have great food choices available to me for many weeks to come.
It’s not a hard concept, Michelle.
Pax,
-f2x
P.S. Another special thanks to Glenn and George for this week’s jokes. People who contribute the jokes to this site are truly the best people in the world. You can contribute jokes by going here or by emailing them to flush2x@gmail.com.
