Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

[Melody]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

I had never had Spam before until I met my wife. She's Filipino, and Spam is big with them as well. She makes one of my favorites now on the weekend for breakfast, Spam fried rice and eggs.

I usually eat Tofu in place of spam. The shit they put it in doesn't sit well with my stomach. I'll fry it up then use the Tofu to soak up the flavoring then eat that along side some rice with two slices of buttered wheat toast. Good stuff.

[Yygdrasil]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Spam fried rice and eggs.

I don't have a reason for why that sounds tasty.

[Melody]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

I need to get a box of Triscut's again, having a few of those with orange slices is good for a snack.

[Mezlo]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

and this on the side!

Sriracha sauce - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Melody]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

and this on the side!

Sriracha sauce - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Seen plenty of those in Bodega's.

[Armando]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

His general belief is that it's less than 10 miles, I should be good. We shall see, because walking in the middle of the day, even in October, would be ridiculously uncomfortable.

My Lancer still has 2.6 gallons left when the needle hits empty, and it gets about 26 MPG in worst-case city driving. I can drive 60 miles on an "empty" gas tank. Granted, you have a truck, so the MPG is worse, but from the sound of it you're still above the fuel line, so I can't imagine you'd run out of gas on a 10 mile round trip.

[Mezlo]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II



Sylvia Kristel obituary: 'Emmanuelle' start Sylvia Kristel dies - latimes.com

[Melody]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

My Lancer still has 2.6 gallons left when the needle hits empty, and it gets about 26 MPG in worst-case city driving. I can drive 60 miles on an "empty" gas tank. Granted, you have a truck, so the MPG is worse, but from the sound of it you're still above the fuel line, so I can't imagine you'd run out of gas on a 10 mile round trip.

Armando, wanna do me a favor and move all my Minecraft post to the thread please? Also....uhh....that a favorite person of yours Mez?

[Akashimo]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Slowest two nights at work, 2 hour dead zones, no calls, no internet orders. So weird. Upside, got to clean up and full inventory count by the time we actually closed, so yay, out 30mins early!
Side note, I'm out of things to watch on netflix I haven't seen already five dozen times =/

[Etra]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Edit: Wanted to post a video, but the thumbnail gives it all away. Sadness.

[Armando]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Catroulette

[Feba]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

if you've never studied a language with chinese characters, you can probably skip this.

so I'm trying to learn Cangjie, which to be simplistic, looks like this:


Those kanji map to various shapes and strokes, like this:


The idea is that every Chinese character can be composed from combinations of these shapes, and thus typed. Here's an example of an actual character, and the components that go into it:

this is radically (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA that's for you, Ray) different from the most common modern input methods, which are phonetically based. Phoentic typing systems are piss simple to learn. The typing system I have been using for Chinese is the one that's most common in Taiwan; Bopomofo. While it's not as straightforward to English speakers as pinyin could be (Ni hao ma -> su cl a8), once you have the basics of how bpm works, you're still sounding things out and typing them in. Cangjie for ni hao ma is based not on the sounds, but the shapes of the characters, 你好嗎; which works out to 人弓火　女弓木　口尸手火　（onf vnd rsqf）.

This does come with a few major benefits, though. First of all, unlike phonetic input systems, you have to remember how to write the character in order to input it. While this might be seen as a disadvantage, it's a great memory aid to have to input based on the character instead of the sound. Even some natives do this, to counter-act the recent downfall of handwriting.

Second, Chinese characters are used across more than one language, and having a shape based system allows you to write what you want to say easily and quickly in any language, without having to do silly things like typing in completely different pronunciations in mandarin. For example, "I'm sorry" in Taiwanese is phainn-se, but to type the most common characters for that in Mandarin, you would input "Dai shi", which is very counterintuitive. In cangjie, it's MNI　GIKS (æ¹å‹¢). This system could even be extended to typing in Japanese, although it would be poorly suited for long texts, short excerpts in a mainly Chinese text would be no problem. Furthermore, this makes it far easier to access characters which would essentially never be used in Mandarin, but are very common in other languages, such as 冇，which is essentially only in use in Cantonese; but if you want to type Cantonese, it's incredibly common.

Third, typing like this allows you to quickly show multiple variants of the same character, instead of having one readily available, and the other hidden deep in your candidates menu; for example, 爲　為 are the same character in every way except writing style. My old input system had a consistent preference for the first, despite that character being far more formal, and something which I almost never would choose to write by hand (also, it wasn't always compatible with dictionaries, and I would have to painstakingly search out the more common 為). This also allows you to switch between simplified and traditional without switching modes, and there are plenty of times you might want to do that for illustration, or just making a point/showing personality. Handwriting switches so frequently that many natives barely realize that they're abbreviating words and using simplified characters, until it is pointed out to them.

Fourth, going off that ability to clearly pick words, gets to the biggest advantage: no more 'candidates menu' to sort through. Every character can be quickly looked up through it's own short code, and whatever time you lose in typing out five "letters" instead of two-four, you more than make up in the fact that you then instantly have the character you want, instead of having to search through a list which is frequently dozens of options long. It is for this reason that character based typing methods are the fastest for Chinese languages, be as it may that they have a very steep learning curve.

tl;dr: I'm going to type slower for at least a month, but at the end of the pain I am going to be typing so much faster, with much less stoppage, and quite possibly putting pixels on the screen faster than native speakers. This will pay off when I actually have to write reports in Chinese though.

[Mezlo]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

I think that's the first time I've ever actually skipped directly to the tl;dr.

[Yygdrasil]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

I learned something today.

[Raydeus]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

That is actually pretty awesome. o_O