30 years ago except for the basics a trip to Spokane was required. Most stores like REI wouldn't charge the sales tax if you produced a MT license. Now we have the full selection of big box stores -- and ID and WA license plates in the parking lots.
It's a 400 mile round trip on I90 but if you're shopping for $3000 refrigerators or similar items it can be a profitable day trip. Or at least it was. Feeding $5 gas to the F150 SuperCrew can persuade you to shop locally.
Whispering 'sales tax' is political death although the marijuana excise tax didn't have a problem passing. That says something about the demographic. The majority of the voters were fine with legalizing marijuana and equally fine with the stoners kicking into the state coffers. Only fair since there is an excise tax on beer and wine. The state runs the liquor stores so there isn't a direct excise tax just the markup.
Liedtke might have gotten a little carried away when he took an ax to Mach. I remember some of the commercial 8051 RTOS offerings. 'Er, did you leave me any memory to use?'
We have one programmer who is in love with hashes. He uses hashes extensively to prevent the same data from being sent again. Very efficient except when you want to send the same data.
If... There's that delicate balance between the gulf and the Pacific that determines if and when.
I spent one winter, '96 I think, when the balance worked out so it rained most of November and December. At one point the washes were running so high I could neither go up to Ajo on 85 or get very far on
No big deal for me. However there were people living out Tanque Verde that couldn't go home because of those cute little places where the wash that is never supposed to actually have water in it runs over the road. That's the year when people learned what 'rio' and 'hundred year flood plain' meant.
Spring was gorgeous. Even the seldom seen wild garlic Ajo is named for bloomed.
I get a high proportion of fur or even worse a meat that looks like roquefort cheese. Some batches are excellent but I've never found a way to assess the quality. Still, they're worth the hassle.
Ouch! I gripe when I have to drive across town to buy oriental food supplies.
I would buy on my business (resale) license. But, that meant more record-keeping in case I ended up consuming the articles. And, periodic "Transaction Privilege Tax" filings. (though you only had to file with state/county so could save a few points on the city!)
Stores located just outside the city limits tout the 2.5% savings. Particularly effective for car dealers (though I suspect they just fold that into the price, elsewhere).
They tried to pass a $1B bond issue for roads. Failed (despite the roads needing repair). OTOH, let's reappropriate 0.5% sales tax revenue -- for the next decade -- and it passes. Tells you how much clout homeowners have in avoiding property tax increases! (let the renters and winter visitors foot the bill for the roads!)
Yup. OTOH, if you rolled your own -- with YOUR criteria in mind -- you can get performance and economy (if you are willing to embrace certain tradeoffs)
It's just silly to bang your head against the wall to save a few pennies, nowadays -- esp when those savings likely come with added complexity ("trickiness") that brings along latent bugs.
E.g., my current project relies on nodes communicating over ethernet. So, there's a support level required in the hardware for the NIC, connectors, PoE conditioning, *wiring* (labor!), etc. Once you've put that in the budget, the differences between a dog of a processor and something "plusher" tend to fall away.
Likewise, Liedtke's complaints about IPC "times" is silly, in the absolute -- Mach *today* would perform with times better than L4 *then* (of course, L4 *now* would also perform better but if N usec was "intolerable" back then, it's clearly not the case, now!)
And, Liedtke's design required hand tweeking each implementation based on the targeted processor. Yeah, that's a fun thing to do... folks AVOID using ASM for a reason!
Finally, Liedtke required you (me) to add layers atop his "bare bones, nothing more than IPC" (what about RPC? resource accounting? capabilities? timing services? deadline handling? etc.) so what value to his "solution"? (why not skip it completely and just do everything on bare iron?)
I took the opposite approach; imagine what HARDWARE features you would want in a processor and emulate them in software (because designing BIG processors is complicated and costly and obsolete in a year or two!).
Once you have gobs of "surplus" horsepower, you can come up with more interesting solutions to problems! E.g., my "garage door controller" uses cameras to determine if anything is in the path of the door's closure -- not just an "electric eye" that only looks at one point in the door's travel. And, if anything is located in the path of the door's *opening* (e.g., if I've left a ladder up so I can work on the GDO and SWMBO happens to pull into the driveway while I'm not in the garage to inhibit the opening). And, anything located on the *floor* in the path of the incoming vehicle that could be damaged or could damage the vehicle.
You can design an enable/inhibit implementation with an MC14500 (!)... but, trying to process live video in real time would take a metric buttload of them!
[And, when there is no activity in the garage, you'd have all of that surplus computing power just sitting idle -- wouldn't it be nice to be able to EASILY use it for some other task ALREADY RUNNING ELSEWHERE?]
In my case, it's a win for verifying a file's integrity (I have a daemon that periodically reads every file's contents and compares to stored hash to verify it is (1) accessible and (2) intact) as well as locating duplicate copies of a file (that may have been corrupted). E.g., taxes/federal/2021 and personal/taxes/federal21 can be the exact same file -- potentially on different volumes -- without you being consciously aware of that! Until one gets lost (accidental erasure, volume failure) or corrupted.
I used to plan on July 4 as the practical start of Monsoon. In the past, there was some obscure criteria (the FIRST of three consecutive days with DP above 50?) which was *practically* useless (you don't know Monsoon has started UNTIL the third day??). Now, they've determined a fixed range of dates, regardless of dewpoint (imagine defining Vernal Equinox based on "observed conditions")
Yeah, we purchased flood insurance one year, back then. The 100 year flood plain comes JUST to the property line (we're about 200 yards from TV wash)
Road flooding is pretty commonplace, even in "normal" rainfall. And, the inevitable "dumb motorist" rescue when some idiot thought
6 inches of water was easy to traverse.
Yeah, "pot luck". You don't know until you actually are "invested" in it.
I used to drink a beer (/Augustiner Brau/) that was like that. Some bottles would be smooth as milk shakes. Others would have a "bite" to them. Of course, you'd drink even the "bad" ones and then roll the dice, again, hoping for a *good* one. This could quickly become a self-limiting process!
Spokane does have a Asian market with real fish sauce, not that brown, salty stuff you can get anywhere. The clerk tried to steer me away from it, pointing me to the brown juice.
One place in town used to carry it but the owner went back to Thailand so the pickings are slim.
When I went to Tucson I had my usual route down pat. The Co-op Warehouse, North 4th for laughs, Bookman's on Speedway, and then to an Asian market. iirc it was in a mini-mall at Grant and Stone. Ajo had stores for day to day essentials but when the list got too long I'd make a Tucson run, or sometimes Phoenix or Casa Grande. Casa was the closest but was limited.
I did that, with a basic round robin scheduler. The trick was making sure each task played nice. As you say, a very specific target device with no attempt for a general purpose solution.
I miss the MCS-48 and similar uc's. It was like playing chess with every byte taken into account. When I interviewed for my present job one of the questions started with 'assume unlimited memory' and I thought 'Oh, hell...'.
Network traffic has been a problem for us. It's gotten a lot better but in the past sites with iffy networks would complain 'your software is too slow' and we would answer 'your network is a pos'. Not exactly a productive discussion. However VM's have also gotten more prevalent. Sure, you can spin up 5 VMs on that server; now about that one NIC...
Go bitcoin mining :)
Sort of like thimbleberries. They aren't a candidate for domestication but they do illustrate the process. 'Yech. We're not going to save the seeds of that one!' It doesn't seem to apply to chestnuts though. 'The nuts from that tree were really easy to peel. Let's plant more of them.'
The market we frequent is a long haul but caters to many oriental/polynesian cuisines. It's set up as if it was a collection of markets; each aisle (or group of aisles) carrying an overhead sign indicating the cuisine in that aisle (thai, vietnamese, etc.). As a result, you may find the same product in different aisles (sometimes different prices simply because they only price the items -- with self-adhesive labels! -- when they put the items on the shelf... which is whenever that shipment arrives!)
All of the products are labeled in their "native" languages so you have to rely on pictures to understand what you're (hopefully!) buying.
Price isn't a good guide to quality so you have to experiment with different offerings to find the ones you like, best.
There's a large produce area (two or three times what you'd find at a regular supermarket) full of the odd fruits and vegetables you'd expect at such a market. I don't think you can find *celery* :>
There used to be a store (on 17th street) that had an excellent selection of teas, spices, nutmeats, etc. I'd go there to hunt for teas -- they had two 50 ft aisles devoted to tea -- and buy spices in bulk (e.g., a pound of basil or garam masala). But, they sold out and the new owners didn't have a clue as to how to keep the (successful) business going. They wanted to sell clothing, guitars, etc. Didn't take long for them to shut their doors.
So, now I buy tea and spices (though in smaller lots) at the oriental stores in town.
There seems to be a common approach to "oriental" store management, here. ALL of the inventory is on the shelves. Typically with "price tags" instead of "unit labeling" like you'd find in a supermarket. So, if you see only a few pieces of a particular item, you *know* that there's none "in the back room".
And, they all seem to wait until there are LOTS of items in short supply (or, gone, completely) before reordering. This, coupled with the distance to the market, means we keep a pretty good stock of the items that we regularly use, on hand as we're never sure what we will be able to "restock" on any given visit.
Sort of like the folks coming from south of the border! Amusing to see all of the "Sonora" plates in the local Costco parking lot.
You can get *really* lean! If you don't preserve *any* state (other than PC) for each task, then you can do task switches in a couple of microseconds. It is surprisingly easy to code under such an environment -- but, only if you're writing in ASM.
"Ah! A byte! I can get 8 bools in that! And, if bool#1 is used in routineX, which NEVER runs when routineY is active, then I can effectively give it a second name for use in that 'other' routine!"
An early 8085 product (when 2716s were $50) ran a few hundred bytes over a 2K boundary, necessitating another $50 of product cost. So, we simply tallied up the number of each subroutine invocations and assigned the most frequent ones to ReSTart vectors, trimming each of those 3-byte CALLs to 1 byte ReSTarts. Easy peasy.
It is a VERY different mindset. You focus on what you want to do instead of always trying to tweek things for efficiency.
E.g., if you were to process video, you'd likely have <something>
filling a frame buffer and <somethingelse> examining that buffer. To allow these to co-execute, you'd have several such buffers and play lots of pointer games to keep track of which buffer was "owned" by which process (to treat them as atomic objects).
Instead of passing pointers around, I pass the entire *object*, regardless of size. This lets me use call-by-value semantics everywhere so I don't have to worry about <something> altering an object that it has conceptually *passed* to <somethingelse>. If <something> tries to change it, then the RTOS makes a copy of the object, on-the-fly (copy-on-write) so neither task sees any influence from the other.
[Imagine when you are "passing" that object to <somethingelse>
on some other node! Pointers just won't cut it!]
Lack of VMM hardware on small processors makes this approach impractical; how do you know when <something> is trying to write to an object that it has already "passed"?
[Reiterating: I cringe when I think of all the opcode fetches I burn for these mechanisms! But, it sure makes t easier to develop robust implementations!]
Yup. I have 4 NICs in my ESXi server just to ensure there's no network bottleneck. Likewise on the SAN that hosts the VMDKs.
<frown>
I've not found any problem coming up with "work" for them to do. Detecting commercials in broadcast TV/radio programming, training speech models based on recorded phone conversations, training neural nets based on observations of users' actions, etc.
I suspect the days of "dumb" devices (previously misnamed "smart" devices) will quickly be drawing to a close. It's just too cheap to buy resources, nowadays (and too many younguns are using these "framework" environments that aren't particularly lean)
I've wondered about the source of the produce. Somewhere there must be farmers specializing in a niche market. There is a local Hmong community and the extended Moua family has taken over the farmer's market as far as produce goes but there is nothing exotic. They may grow some for their own consumption.
That's another lesson in adaptation. They ran a restaurant that was mostly Thai, that being a safe bet. It was better than the other Thai restaurant that was run by an actual Thai but so it goes.
They ran a food truck operation in parallel with the restaurant for a few years, sticking to the Thai motif. The pad thai was excellent. Then they went fully mobile and dumped the restaurant expanding the truck fleet. The Thai emphasis slowly moved to teriyaki since there was a vacuum in that market for fairs, concerts, and festivals. Still Asian although a Japanese might have burned the truck down for cultural appropriation.
And then... Dutch funnel cakes from Sua Moua's old family recipe.
Ajo had what may have been the last Sears catalog store and Radio Shack collocated. Tony played guitar so there was guitar stuff too. A lot of his business came from Sonoyta. They're a captive audience. It's on Federal Hwy 2 but there's a whole lot of nothing on that road until you get to San Luis south of Yuma. Going east you can sort of get to Nogales eventually.
What else is there? Okay, I'm lazy and even when I messing around with the Atmel chips on the Arduinos I use their version of C.
Yeah, we've got a couple of places where flags are cunningly set in a bitmap. Why stop at 8 when there a 32 perfectly good bits in an int? To really ice the cake we have places where the same resource can be referred to as the arithmetic value or the bit position:
Try explaining that to a support person. 'Well here bam is 8 but over there it's 4 and if you want both foo and bam that's 9 except when it's 5.'
GUIs were another learning experience. Driving a custom LCD display is a bit different than building a Motif blivit.
The bottlenecks keep moving. Back in the day of single core processors I''d remind people that no matter how slick it all looked it was one processor running one instruction at a time. I've had to change my rant to 'sure it's got eight cores. That service is single threaded and only runs on one of them'.
No, they're not. Angular will happily eat you out of house and home. When I got a new machine with 16GB of ram I thought I was in tall cotton. Then you try to open a link in Brave and it says 'sorry I don't have enough memory to do that' before the box crashes.
I'm on the Windows Insider dev channel for 11 so I expect little annoyances like that but one of the testers inadvertently went to the production 11 and saw the same thing last week. A couple of people got
11 and we're not exactly sure how but I think it was an innocuous little question during the windows update like 'do you want to destroy your life' that got clicked.
I suspect you can buy damn near anything, if you are a produce buyer (and willing to pay "the going rate"). We are increasingly seeing more exotic items even in mainstream grocers -- dragon fruit, lychee, kiwi, jicama, leeks, bok choy, coconuts, etc. There was an excellent produce market in one of the Chicago suburbs that I used to frequent as they seemed to have damn near anything you could want, and at any *time* you wanted it (obviously drawing on suppliers from around the world to compensate for different growing seasons). It's not just "blueberries, lettuce and celery", anymore.
I strongly resist writing anything in ASM, nowadays. I'm forced to, of course, for some of the "locore" stuff, context save/restore, etc. But, even ISRs get written in HLLs. It's just too much of a PITA to port anything else!
I often have to resort to using fixed point (not integer) math in places (e.g., Qm.n) when I can't count on having floating point hardware available (and when a FP library is just too damn slow). But, that's still tolerable. Esp if expressed in a HLL.
IME, folks opt for OTS solutions when they are faced with "traditional" UIs (vs. "dedicated buttons"). They seem intimidated by the notion of writing a BLTer and building an image from component parts, glyphs, etc. Likewise, the notion of an up-down keyboard confuses; seemingly unable to think in terms of anything but "keystrokes".
I've seen lots of designs that opted to be "PC-based" simply because the developer was hoping to leverage the user interface hardware and API... and, chose to ignore just how many hoops he'd have to jump through to make the code act in the way they *needed* it to act under that OS.
Of course. But, they are effectively of the same type. Some resource (memory, MIPS, time) that has to be shared and against which too many "leases" have been assessed. As long as you don't stop thinking about the details of what's under the hood, you can continue to make intelligent design/usage choices.
My current design is "open" in much the same way that a personal computer is open; I have no control over *what* a user will decide to add to it. And, no control over how those things will behave.
So, I have a "workload manager" on each node that admits and ejects processes based on its observations of how under/over-loaded the node's resources happen to be. A developer who is piggish can shoot himself in the foot by being too greedy; if the node is overloaded and the workload manager can't find another node to reduce some of the local needs, the "fat boy" can be unceremoniously axed to enable other, less greedy processes to continue to run.
I.e., I can't force you to be benevolent/cooperative -- but I can punish you if you aren't! :>
But you don't tend to find those sorts of bloat in *appliances*. There's a different mindset in terms of how the hardware can be used in that it often can't be upgraded after the sale.
My condolences. :> I *tolerate* using windows but draw the line at developing under it! I much prefer a stationary target than one that (seems to) change on a whim. (I avoid Linux for similar reasons -- if it ain't broke, don't fix it!)
I don't understand how folks can NOT have control over the software that they are exposed to -- whether it's on their PC (routine updates of OS, apps, etc.) or in their appliances (cars, TVs, etc.).
I can much easier learn to live with a set of problems than I can continually have to adapt to changes (which introduce yet-to-be-seen problems)!
I particularly enjoy looking back at the detailed justifications MS wrote for various UI/UX issues... and, how they "suddenly" changed, over time. ("And what makes you think THESE are the final verdict?")
I wouldn't call coconuts exotic. I remember dueling with them as a kid and the coconut usually won. A couple of the local markets have durians. I knew what they were because a friend married a Thai woman whose family had a durian plantation. It shares the honor with surströmming as being a food banned on some public transportation but with durian it's strictly the smell not the danger of the cans exploding.
If nothing else it keeps the supermarket checkers on their toes if the stuff isn't barcoded. They have enough trouble telling a butternut from a buttercup squash. The latter is being displaced by kabocha around here.
Market forces and all that. The original target was AIX on RS6000 systems. Y2K helped end that. The IBM patches required fairly recent hardware. Many sites looked at the cost of upgrading the IBM boxes, rolled the dice, and went to Windows. We used Linux internally for development but only two sites used it and that was only for the servers.
MS possibly made the same mistake as IBM with Windows 11 and its hardware requirements. So far I see no compelling reason to go to 11 particularly if it means buying new hardware.
The showstopper for my personal laptop is the requirement to log on to your Microsoft account to set up 11. When I set up the new 10 laptop it was not even connected to the net, and I run as a local user. It whines every now and then about not being connected to an account but that can be ignored.
A lot of developers are gun shy. UWP has been widely ignored. MS would love to get rid of WPF and WinForms but it's not happening. They could shoot Silverlight but that wasn't all that popular.
MS has Apple envy but never developed the fanatical fan base that will jump through any hoop.
It depends on what the local population (customer base) wants to buy. Growing up, never any demand for coconuts, plantains, dragon fruit, kiwi, etc. You saw generic fruits and vegetables (tomatoes, cukes, various melons, turnips, radishes, romaine, etc.) nothing like arugula (but endive!) or napa cabbage or jicama or...
Similarly, you wouldn't find Gouda but would find various Romanos, some Swiss and maybe "American". And, far more cheeses that were aged long enough to be used for grating. Hot dogs/sausage were made by local suppliers -- but ne'er a taco in sight!
Vendors want a platform that:
- their customers have adopted or will adopt
- that will continue to evolve to address new technologies and hardware
- that won't "go away" (GEM, anyone?)
*Users* want products that don't significantly change (!)
[SWMBO still runs Office 2K as she has no desire to rebuild all of her Access DBs just because MS wanted to make changes to it!]
[[I won't move beyond W7 as I've far too many tools that I *know* run on it (after losing some that only ran on XP) and I've no desire to repurchase the capabilities that I already have, nor any interest in learning yet another way to do the same thing!]]
[[[I develop SW under NetBSD largely because I can maintain the OS and tools. No compiler extensions/non-portable pragmas -- my code has to build under at least three different ecosystems (x86, SPARC, ARM) and I'm not keen on getting in bed with just a single toolchain as I can't assume folks using my codebase will be keen on that!]]]
I've not seen any need (as a user) to move forward on MS's OS offerings. I don't develop for that platform so don't care if the platform evolves beyond me. And, I don't see any compelling
*features* that it offers as a user environment nor any compelling APPs that are only hosted on newer versions of the OS
[If I did, I would likely just set up a small VM and not bother moving/upgrading any of my other tools... too much inertia!]
My workstations are older but still reasonably competent (six of them: dual CPU, 6-core Xeons, 144G RAM, 6T rust -- there's just THAT much inertia to overcome!) and I *know* the machines spend more time twiddling their thumbs waiting for my meatware to decide what to do next!
[Also, growing up with dog slow development systems means my work habits are inherently multitasking -- don't sit waiting for a machine to finish a task, move on to some other task!]
My Windows machines are all HP/Dell so SLIC with a "genuine HP/Dell install DVD" gets me past the need to activate licenses, on-line. Download the updates of interest. Run machines air-gapped and you can largely ignore future updates.
Other machines run NetBSD and don't have the need for "activation" (and the updates I pursue are usually major release updates, nothing incremental) E.g., I keep a little netbook to which I attach an external USB drive and periodically rsync my "distfiles" archive. Then, take the netbook and the external drive and put them back in a desk drawer. What need to update that "appliance"? :>
I opted not to upgrade my Adobe suite (to "CC") for similar reasons. What do I *gain* from that to justify the cost, time and *risk*?
Windows is a Chevy; if it still runs and gets you from point A to point B, then there's no real NEED to replace it.
Of course, all software vendors (and product vendors, in general) WANT you to think you need the latest and greatest. Otherwise, you might be happy with what you've *already* purchased! :-/
Tacos were some sort of Califoria in-joke like Knotts Berry Farm that I didn't get as a kid. For that matter pizza was something you got from shady looking taverns run by gangsters. We did have a variety of cheeses and I was adventuresome although my go-around with Sap Sago (Schabziger) was puzzling. Gjetost was much more satisfying. I still get that from time to time.
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Tobin's was the major hot dog supplier although there were several smaller stores that made a variety of wursts. Fortunately the hazmat situation was only ammonia from the cooling apparatus and not a trove of heavy metals mixed in with the hot dogs.
There was a bar/eatery in Kitterey ME that catered to the shipyard. We were working on refinishing a wooden hulled yawl at a boatyard also in Kittery and went there for lunch one day. 'Taco' was on the chalkboard and seemed a little expensive but I figured why not. The taco came in a bowl with the shell in the bottom layered with the lettuce and meat sauce. It was like they'd read a recipe but had never seen a taco and played it by ear.
Not surprising for Maine. My lead tech asked me one day what you did wit those shiny black things that were starting to appear in the vegetable section. This was an intelligent woman in her 30's with a family that had never encountered an eggplant.
I did eventually make it to Knotts Berry Farm in the '90s. It was entertaining and not as disappointing as when I made it to Haight Ashbury 20 years too late.
I never heard the term growing up -- the "communities" were all composed of european descendants so lots of "ethnic" foodstuffs in THAT sense. I probably knew 30 different pasta shapes (and the advantages of each) and at least that many different pasta *dishes*, sauce styles, etc. Galobki, pierogi, potato pancakes, etc.
My favorite pasta shapes being cavatelli and fusilli col buco. The former I make, from time to time. The latter are a technological wonder, to me!
Pizza was either NY style (purchased) or "italian bakery style" (the latter being far superior and considerably less greasy).
One thing I noticed, later in life, was that many dishes that we made with ricotta were, instead, made with meat, in The West. This was a delightful revelation as ricotta falls in the "I don't like cheese" category!
My first homemade raviolis were meat made and I had three helpings. (By contrast, my folks had to buy meat ones "special" for me growing up as I wouldn't eat the cheese ones that they all ate)
Likewise, my first "western lasagna" was made grinding up a *roast* to get the ground meat for the filling -- with just a nominal amount of ricotta as window dressing.
Martin Rosol's was the local vendor for most "sausage-like" items. You could pick up "fresh" and eat, that evening.
Too funny.
For me, the OhMiGosh moments have been encountering "produce" in its natural state. E.g., you KNOW citrus grows on trees but seeing them is a different story. And, more exotic varieties even moreso (e.g., the sanguinellos are actually *red* skinned, at maturity)
"Gee, that's garlic!" "Wow, is that how artichokes grow?" (if you've ever seen one in bloom, you'd lament the fact that it was harvested before that time)
We grow sage and rosemary (but not to harvest) and the dogs would come in the house *stinking* of those scents (a little bit goes a long way!). You had to wonder if it was deliberate, on their part!
Pineapple is a surprise when you see it "native". As are cashews. Pomegranates are interesting to watch mature as you can see the vestigial flower in it's "ass".
That;s about the timeframe I visited KBF. "Oh, a DisneyLand wannabe!" I'd been to DisneyWorld some decades earlier. And, of course, Riverside Park, Lake Compounce, Catskill Game Farm, etc.
Didn't make it to CA until the early 80's (traveling for work). Recall standing in the back of a pickup -- in the rain -- driving to San Rafael (Guide Dogs for the Blind) singing GD songs (no room in the cab as the two passengers were blind and we obviously needed a sighted driver!)
The tacos and KBF were from California TV programs. 'And the prize is a pass for two to KBF' was usually said that led me to believe it wasn't rated too highly.
I recall spaghetti, lasangna, maybe shells, egg noodles, and the ubiquitous elbow macaroni. 'Pasta' wasn't used as a descriptor with the exception of pasta fagioli, but that was said as one word 'pastafazoo'. When pasta became more widely used I thought it was sort of an upper crust word for spaghetti.
It was NYS so I guess it was NY style by definition. A far as I knew it was just pizza. My uncle lived in the city and I liked going to his place. He'd phone the bar at the of the block and later I would go pick it up at the ladies' entrance. We never had pizza at home s it was a treat.
That was much better than when the half in the bag adults would try to make a pizza from a Chef Boyardee pizza kit.
For me, ricotta falls into the 'gimme a spoon' category.
As far as I can remember any ravioli I've ever had came out of a Franco-American can.
I haven't dine lasagna in a long time. I think the last effort was spinach and a variety of cheeses.
Shades of the Gilroy Garlic Festival. It's often foggy on that stretch but you know when you're getting close. I've planted garlic when the cloves were sprouting just to see what I'd get. I've never seen an artichoke in bloom. I've eaten pickled artichoke hearts but never did the field strip the thing and dip the ends in hollandaise sauce thing. Life is too short.
Ah, cashews, a relative of poison ivy. Forget the first person to eat a lobster; who was the first person to figure out there was something edible in there.
I liked the Catskill Game Farm. No Disneyland, Sherman's Amusement Park at Caroga Lake was the local hot spot. Averill Park was down to a carousel and miniature train ride when I was a kid but it was only a few miles away. It's claim to fame is Jerry Lewis once worked as a soda jerk at the drug store. Later he was just a jerk.
A couple of summers we went to Old Orchard. It was seedy the last time I was there but I think it's made a comeback.
The trucking company I worked for had a terminal near State College and Ball Rd, a mile from Disneyland. I was in town for the Rodney King riots, sitting in my truck reading, when Dizzyland had their evening fireworks extravaganza. Needless to say I was out of the truck locked and loaded before I figured out what it was.
Never went there although I did make it to Disneyworld in the '80s.
Ah. So you had to live there to understand the reference.
/Pasta e fagioli/ -- pasta and beans. A terrible thing to do to pasta!
Fettuccine, Linguine, Spaghetti, Spaghettini/Vermicelli, Capellini -- different thicknesses of long, straight noodles. Bucatini is spaghetti with a *hole* through the entire length (dunno how it is done!) Fusilli col buco is bucatini wrapped around a ~1/8" dia form before drying (like a really long screw-shape!)
Conchiglie (shells) tiny, small, medium, large -- too easily stuffed (with ricotta!) :<
Penne, Ziti, Mostaccioli, Rigatoni, Tortiglioni -- tubes with or without "decorated" exterior surfaces (e.g., ribs)
Manicotti, cannelloni -- the pasta equivalent of a cannoli -- more ricotta. Ick!
Pastina (diced spaghetti?), orzo (rice-shaped).
Fresh made capellini is delightful! I don't think you even need to CHEW it! Cavatelli are nice and heavy -- but not as heavy as gnocchi. Fusilli col buco is just plain *fun*!
The problem with most pastas (when it comes to hand-made) is that it's too hard to make extra. So, you end up eating the entire batch.
We'd drive into the city for shopping trips. Meals at Grotta Azzurra on Mulberry. Sweets at Ferrara's on Grand. Not the sort of neighborhoods you'd want to get lost in... <frown> (and ignore the nice gentlemen with the black suits!)
Any pasta in a can has to be pretty gross. I recall eating C-rations of spaghetti... I never knew pasta could be *fatty*! :-/
You can make fresh ricotta with heavy cream and milk "despoiled" with lemon juice or vinegar. I'd rather see the heavy cream get used to make ice cream!
We'd purchase them from The Ravioli Kitchen (name sure is apropos, eh?). You could freeze them if not eaten "fresh".
I now make a veggie lasagna as SWMBO isn't keen on meat and I'm not keen on cheese. It's surprisingly good -- mainly because of the flavorings of the sauce. But, it's a PITA to make as you have to prep the noodles, all of the veggies, etc. For that much effort, I'd rather something tastier!
The plant produces seed at the top as well as cloves at the bottom. The seed at top takes two years (crops) to yield good garlic.
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The plants are pretty tall -- they're a type of thistle. Of course, once it blooms, there's no value to eating it!
I prepare them by stuffing each leaf with a seasoned breadcrumb mixture (cheese, salt, pepper, garlic, bread crumbs) drizzled with olive oil. Then, steaming for a long time (I have special stands that support each artichoke over a water bath in a covered sauce pot). Then, baked.
Peel leaves (from bottom up), slip in mouth, close jaw, scrape bread crumb mixture and "meat" of the leaf into your mouth. It's akin to eating pistachios with about the same level of satisfaction. Though I can't eat more than two as they are kinda rich.
I always avoided the hearts. Then, late in life, realized how foolish I'd been!
Lake Compounce (poor man's disneyland) had a small train that circled the lake. Train was originally on the grounds of the Gillette "castle".
Visited a colleague in SoCal and was treated to a *day* at DisneyLand. After dark, everyone gathered at the water's edge ("What the hell are we doing, here?"). Delightful show on the island, fireworks and "Tinker Bell" rides a wire down from the top of the Castle (midnight?).
My visits to DisneyWorld never extended past evening so this was quite a surprise.
I heard COuntry Bear Jamboree had been shipped off (Japan) at one point. But, I've also heard it is back (in Orlando). Dunno.
Of course, the animatronics look hokey, now. But, as a youngster, they were interesting.
It used to be. Kilowatt hours of energy consumed is now a more accurate metric.
But burning coal oil and gas is no longer the cheapest way of getting a kilowatt hour of energy.
Some people have noticed. Others still think that burning fossil carbon is the only way to get energy, and haven't noticed that climate change is an inevitable side effect.
That is very true. It is very addictive as well. That was my point. So addictive, in fact, that even in the face of altering our plant's climate, possibly permanently, some of us live in denial and choose to continue on the same path of excessive consumption that has pointed us in this direction. Slow down? How absurd!!! Turn back? Of course not!
That's called, "entitlement".
Good thing technology will deal with the issue, hopefully, in time.
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