Hot Eastern

I wandered into Chinatown for dinner, and decided to be adventurous and try a basement restaurant under Avana Sushi. At first I noticed $20 special entrees, then some more like $12 ones. Then a menu of cheap BBQ or something like hot pot, mala tang. I ended up getting beef mala bang, a spicy soup with lots of 'exotic' vegetables -- lotus root and some sort of fungus and whatnot. It was pretty tasty. Medium spice had me blowing my nose a lot but not in sense-obliterating pain. Would return. Also there's an $8.50 lunch -- though there's a $5 lunch nearby. :O

The alcove to the bathrooms had a lot of poster art. Mostly obviously Chinese -- martial arts movie, something looking Maoist, others. But also one of Astro Boy, and another of Card Captor Sakura. Nice to see Sakura in a random place, and it sure did feel random.

I wondered about the owners. 'mala tang' and 'mala bang' sound like Indonesian names to me. I saw 'Shohoku', likely Japanese, on something. Also saw a poster of German beers.

There were also multiple frog-based dishes. I was not feeling that adventurous.

I'M TAKING OVER THE WORLD

Or at least my office.

I think I've snarked before that my company would be an IT department's nightmare. By last May the three of us were using three different VMs, Linux distros, and shells. My boss later fled SUSE for Ubuntu though a later version than co-worker W3. (He preferred old SUSE but newer ones weren't working for him.)

Today we wanted to install some new packages, and discovered that W3 had not been updating their distro, and that Ubuntu releases have a 9 month lifetime. Apparently meaning that the package repositories *go away*. W3 had been on 16.10, so by now, the next version 17.04 is *also* expired, and thus there is no upgrade path. Fun!

Boss tried to install 17.10 on VMWare, which was already annoying because 18.04 LTS is coming out in 4 weeks, but we can't wait for that. It turned out to be even more annoying, he wasn't getting shared directories working.

Fallback plan: install VirtualBox, and copy my image over to W3's computer. This turned out to work. I should have been more confident in that, since that's how I got my image onto my second laptop, and my personal laptop, and for a while I'd been running off an image on a USB stick until that died rapidly.

W3 probably doesn't care about using VirtualBox. W3 is a Windows-based web developer who was using Unity, so will care about a CLI-based Arch Linux install with XFCE4. But hey, what works. And actually, the fact that you start X from the command line makes it easier to try out different GUIs!

W3 did like the zsh capabilities I showed them, though never actually switched from bash. Maybe now's my chance! >)

While trying to do helpful research, I discovered that 17.10 had switched from Xorg to Wayland, but that was successful like Prohibition so they're switching back in 18.04, along with going to GNOME 3. I'm glad I'm not using Ubuntu any more...