TheCockSportif

My first two words, usually try to knock out AEIOU, assuming that my first guess is fruitless. RAISE is a favorite starting word.

This totally sucks.

"I didn't sign with the Buffalo Bills," says this guy. "But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night." Also, Von Miller?! HOLY SHITBALLS.

Correct! And we had that horrible storm in April 1997 as well. Good times. Now my wife and I live in Maine; it's got the small town vibe of WNY, and at times we get hammered with... ocean effect snow. You can taste the salt as it hits you in the face. That sounds lewd. Oops!

March 1996. Boston to WNY. I almost moved to Silicon Valley in the winter of 1995. Netscape had me in the final round of interviews, but I didn't get the gig. Most people didn't get the gig. So, I found myself driving to Boston, with my best friend from high school (SJCI), to Boston, for a job interview, in mid March 1996. Weather was terrible going out, but by the time we reached Boston, it was 55oF. After 5 hours' worth of interviews in Cambridge, MA, snow was heavy in Boston. It took 12 hours to get back to WNY. Roads were terrible on the Mass Pike. Roads were terrible on the NYS Thruway. You couldn't see ***** 10' in front of you as you drove. It was ***** grim. Plus I was running out of money. Yeah, I was finishing UB that May, but here I was, on the NYS Thruway, trying not to crash my vehicle. I was 24 at the time, and yeah I had insurance, but if the destroyed the car, then that was the end. 400 miles of white knuckles. That's what the 12 hours was.

Excellent analogy. I remember when Art was signed by the Bills. Thank goodness that never really materialized as a long term plan. Yes indeed. The guy's still clearly got anger issues, but if he's been able to stay clean, that's huge -- and will hopefully open up cycles for him to work on himself.

Thank you! So long as I keep myself busy, everything stays on track.

I've been spending this offseason doing what I wanted to, unofficially, through New Year's Resolutions in 2022. Don't dwell on the (bummer) end of the Bills' 2021-2022 season Don't argue with people on any form of social media Continue to avoid binge drinking Stay away from what triggers my depression (why do I follow this team, again?!) Keep on the diet plan (20 pounds away from goal -- yay!) Work my guts out professionally Mix and perform on as many musical tracks as possible (side career) Learn how to use that sous vide contraption that I got for my 50th in 2021 Moar (!) rotisserie chicken on the grill Formulate new recipes for the smoker Stay happily married (entering year 14) In that light, I spend about an hour of screen time per day, and most of it is on YouTube. I follow a lot of music and food-related channels. Somehow, sports-related channels started coming into my feed. From that, Ryan Leaf started appearing in my feed on YouTube. I remember his career in the NFL. It was a total abortion. I remember watching in awe at how bad he was, how his personal conduct was abysmal, how he got a few opportunities to stick in the NFL, how me moved into college ball as a coach, how he got arrested, how he ended up in prison, how he's had domestic violence issues. and how he has been on a redemption tour for the past handful of years. You may not believe the Ryan Leaf redemption story, and I readily admit that I'm frequently dubious as to his claims of progress. I'm always conflicted as to whether or not he's a bad guy who's trying, through fake contrition, to build a career out of a redemption story, or if he's somebody like me. Still, as someone who's fought obesity, depression, and alcohol abuse, his message resonates with me. After all of his shenanigans, I find myself rooting for the guy, that he'll get out of his own way, that he'll get his arms around his demons. What are your thoughts?

After the crushing playoff loss in 2022, I've basically been offline regarding Bills talk. However, did you see haul that the Broncos gave up (source: ticker via ESPN)?! There were times in Bills' history where many (@jrober38) opined that the Bills should give up draft capital to trade for... Jay Cutler. It happens. "GO BRONCS!" he'll say after every game. "YEE HAW!" Sure, he's better than what they have now, but you need to build from within. GM > HC > QB. That's what gets the job done. Do you trust the Broncos' GM or HC to get the job done? Time will tell.

I'm surprised that BBMB lasted as long as it did. The team sucking that hard for so many years, the looneys that came out of the woodwork and were both incapable of joy / and posted the same stuff ad nauseum, the debates about TT vs EJM. It was... a lot, and OBD management must have thought that the entire fan base was off its rockers. In that light, I'm not surprised that they pulled the plug. I'm just wondering what took them so long. Maybe Russ Brandon was actually/secretly participating on BBMB, getting his jollies over trolling folks about how EJM was a good QB or something -- so he insisted that BBMB stay online? Who knows? Having written that, the EJM / trade for Jay Cutler threads, each being at least 100 pages a thread, were comedy gold. I would enjoy reading them each morning over coffee. One of the "QB whisperers" eventually ended up here, kinda started the same kind of schtick, harped on Allen a ton, then basically apologized for being wrong, then stopped posting to TBD from what I can tell. My point being: the quality of TBD is really, really good, and I say this as someone who would much rather read the myriad great takes here -- rather than posting a ton of stuff for no reason. Had I known about TBD sooner, I probably would've never joined BBMB.

Great singer, and was superb in both his run with QOTSA and in his solo work.

It isn't that easy. Read the franchise terms for both PH and Domino's. Domino's is particularly invasive, so yeah, they are a data company. Domino's literally handcuffs the franchise into marketing in a certain way, and they take a large cut, so they have a huge say. It doesn't matter if the franchise owner lives in WNY or not, and frankly, given the draconian nature of the terms of Dominos' agreements, they are in the money business rather than the food business. Money business == data company. My money goes to a local business, that's independently owned, 100% of the time. But, wait. Why do I care at all? I have two sin days per month, given my current diet, and neither will be spent eating pizza, much less franchise pizza. Divesting from this thread. What was I thinking?!

As a musician/engineer/mixer/whatever, I'm gonna enjoy The Who for what they were.

So long as you are willing to buy the enterprise edition, then yeah, it's solid.

Years ago, as sales engineer, I sold a bunch of software to Domino's. Fun fact? In the first meeting with them (they were trying to buy a ton of storage on the cheap), they said, straight up, "we don't look at ourselves as a pizza company, but rather as a data company." No wonder the pizza tastes like that!

Ardour is good, as is Reaper. Full disclosure: I've been using Linux since The Very Beginning, and after decades of contortions to make everything work and to use Linux as a workstation -- again, this is just MO -- I run my hardware/OS of choice as my primary system (mainly for applications that I need) then rely on virtualization to use Linux. Or I spin up a system or systems in AWS or GCP as I need it/them (my company gives us accounts to do this, given our roles, but cloud computing has its own cost). While there is a *ton* of benefit to running Linux, lifting and shifting to Linux from another OS is a non-trivial process -- and learning UNIX/Linux basics is definitely possible, but also has its own set of challenges. That's why I recommend the virtualization route (posted elsewhere in this thread) to anybody who's interested in giving Linux a try.

Here's what I do: https://www.virtualbox.org/ . Run VirtualBox on your PC (in my case it's a Mac), and install your Linux of choice as a virtual machine. I prefer Ubuntu these days 'cause CentOS has an uncertain future. Usually I go with the LTS version of Ubuntu. By doing things this way, your PC stays the same and you can play with Linux alongside whatever you're doing. And if you don't like Linux you can simply delete the virtual machine and/or uninstall VirtualBox if you don't want to go down that road again. Between this and log4j, it's been a banner month for computing.

You're back! Welcome! So, for Italian, it's this one. https://ilovechefs.com/ Check the scheduling 'cause it's dodgy later in weekend and early in the week. I caught it one time with my parents when I was back in WNY, but the second time was a no go. Still, it's friendly and fun, and their execution if Italian food, at least in the diners/drive-ins/dives kind of mantra, is really good. There are better Italian restaurants in WNY certainly, but this one meets the casual and pricing vibes.

While I divested from responding in TSW in this offseason, and given the obvious reasons, having a Mongo-hate thread devolve into a really fascinating pizza thread is pure bliss. If Mongo wants to make a pizza brand, and yeah I would totally give a Mongo pizza brand a whirl just to taste it, then awesome. Put your money where your pizza oven mouth is, yeah?

If I had to choose, and full disclosure that I moved out of WNY in 1996, I would pick Swiss Chalet easily over Pizza Hut. That place used to be ***** great. I guess that you can still cross the border and buy their awesome chicken bbq sauce, but jeezus. Wrong move. Pizzerias exist all over WNY. Why bring this trash heap back into the mix when there are already plenty of solid choices?

Steely Dan. I thought that it was a cool name for a band that made cool music. Two days ago, probably 40 years into listening to them, I learned that they were named after something, in metal form, that some might throw on to the field at a Bills' game. Yep. What's yours?

I'm confused, but I thought that his name was Johnny Caravella. Seriously, though. Awesome show. Great actor. RIP. (For those who have seen it on DVD, or at least around 2007/8, they ruined the show by not being able to license a lot of the original music that was a great setup for jokes/dialog.)

In the best possible way.

You make a good point. The worst advice? "Don't marry that woman; she's trouble." And 14 years of marriage + 3 years of dating later, here we are.

From my Dad, ahead of my first year of college Don't have too much sex, which is interesting because I had a great senior year of high school, or at least the later part, where I had sex, multiply, with this woman named <redacted>, with the door open, in my bedroom upstairs. I liked her. She was pretty, and she was *stacked*. And I would mention that perhaps that she should remove her clothing, you know like rhetorically, and there we landed. I am curious about why he offered this advice, but perhaps I will ask when he's on his death bed or something Don't have sex with men. Not my thing. And not that there's anything wrong with it. But, WTF DAD?! Always wear pants of some sort Stop watching the Buffalo Sabres (the man knew this... in 1989!)