Sometimes I am stuck with getting fast food but I will avoid the normal ones that I grew up with. There isn't any more of the "Craving for McDonald's hits us hard. No substitutions please." here. If I'm going to do fast food, it's going to be something along the lines of Five Guys, Panera, Chik-Fil-A, or something like that...
The closest Five Guys is in Manchester near the Buckland Mall. And it's been at least 3 years since I've been there. I have no desire to go there because there's nothing of any real interest anymore...
Are we talking Five Guys or the mall? I agree with your assessment of malls in general. I dunno if it's because I have grown older and tastes have changed, or my tolerance of people in general has gone down...
It's not so much that my tastes have changed, it's that the only stores in the mall are mostly women's clothes, women's shoes and home goods. There's no hobby stores, no toy stores, no video game stores, no music stores, no party stores, but they have a Barnes and Nobel book store. That's about the only thing interesting there now. But my tolerance for people has seriously gone down and the amount of entitlement people portray is way too high. And Five Guys is near the mall and I really detest driving around that area because of the number fuckwits that really have no business sitting behind the wheel of a car...
I know what you mean. I haven't been to an indoor mall in years and typically go out of my way to avoid them if I am out running errands and end up near one. Traffic and people suck, I think that's why I've been spending more time at the cabin. Sure, it takes 40 minutes to run into town, but that means that other than the summer traffic by the lake and Chimney Rock, it's a nice drive through the mountains if I need to get supplies...
There's something about a leisurely drive (and by leisurely, I mean being able to do 20mph over the speed limit and making vroom and screech sounds as you take corners)...
The Z3 does great on those roads, but I'm more often in the truck and it's not a great vroom and screech sound maker...
The sport bike makes a lot of vroom vroom sounds, but I certainly don't want to be hearing any screeches through the corners...
I've got one that has a more throaty deeper vroom vroom than a sport bike...
Oooo.. shiny. That's nice. I was trying to think what would have a throaty deep vroom as well one that screams vroom and I went through my pictures and found it. The one good thing that Standard Register did for me was send me to a Formula 1 race. And as small as these cars are, it's mind boggling to feel the ground shake as they pass by...
Ooooh, awesome!! How did SRC send you to an F1 race?
Yup, and it's way out of my price range. I can't justify $2,700 for a 1 day course driving a Formula 4 car (that has less horsepower than my car and 0-60 slower than my bike). I was actually looking more at a rally course that's offered by Team O'Neil but even at $1,600 for a 1 day course is a little steep...
(my complete album here:
NEFR)
Rally does look like fun. I've got friends that autocross and they have a blast with it...
I have written a program for picking numbers and it did surprisingly well as a statistical experiment but it really failed in actually getting the right numbers. Granted my subset was only 2 years worth of data and I would only run a subset of 10 iterations to pick numbers (basically, here's 10 tickets worth of numbers). Each ticket would have 1 or 2 of the winning numbers. I imagine if I were to up the subset to 100 iterations it'd probably generate at least 1 ticket with 4 winning numbers. But I don't gamble big money. The most I'd plunk down would be $20 and that'd be like maybe 2 times a year. Instead, I'd be more comfortable writing something like this...
Many many years ago I wrote one that used the entire set of powerball picks from the beginning and it did reasonably well. I didn't play regularily but when I did it frequently picked three. I would say that of those that I did play, I pretty much broke even...