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Dec. 2nd, 2008 @ 08:22 pm
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Stolen from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) anodynefaerie
1. Answer each of the questions below the cut using the Flickr search engine.
2. Choose a photo from the first three pages.
3. Copy the URLs of your favorite photos here.
4. Then share with the world.
Questions:
1. Name
2. Favorite food
3. Hometown
4. Favorite color
5. Celeb crush
6. Favorite drink
7. Dream vacation
8. Favorite dessert
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love the most?
11. One word that describes you
12. Your livejournal name
( Pretty Picture Enclosed )
~DroidI am:  calm |
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Mar. 19th, 2008 @ 05:01 am
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I'm 27 now... Hooray?
Later,
~Droid |
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I found my first gray hair yesterday... I feel old.
~Droid
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Two more restaurant reviews, both were better then the last review, but unfortunately neither of them are in Boston :-(
Black&Blue Steak&Crab, Rochester, NY
Self described as a “Steak house with a twist” the menu had definite steak house influence with more modern preparations, and some unexpected dishes as well. The dinning room was obviously trying very VERY hard to be modern and stylish, unfortunately this came off as rather forced and unnatural. The dinning room was also very very loud, with a large (and loud) bar area right in the middle of the restaurant that echoed over the whole building. Here is a run-down of the food.
A fairly good meal in SPITE of the fact that literally all the food that we had was sweet, even the steaks.
Henry's, Upper West Side Manhattan, NYC, NY
A Modern American Bistro on Broadway, comfortable and non-pretentious interior and service.
This was a wonderful meal, everyone that ate loved their food. I can even forgive that the server forgot to bring us bread at the beginning of the meal. To be completely honest, I would go back again for no other reason then the creamed spinach.
Later,
~Droid
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I heard a couple of quotes this past week, and I just couldn't resist :-)
"'An eye for an eye' only leads to a world full of blind people" - Mohandas Gandhi
"They 'outta call you a German porn star's mouth, 'cuz you full of shit" - Fat Allen from Drawn Together
Later,
~DroidI am:  amused |
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I have had the unfortunate experience of having two mediocre to down right disappointing meals at quite expensive restaurants recently, so I thought that I might as well write about them for all to see and laugh at my misfortune!
Bamba Bistro, Rochester, NY
This French influenced "fine dinning" restaurant in the nice part of Rochester is housed in an absolutely beautiful restored mill building and has a phenomenal dinning room with domed ceilings. Unfortunately when we went the dinning room was almost completely empty, there was my table for two and another table of 6 that showed up half way through our service. Apparently this restaurant used to be a formal jacket-required type restaurant with food that was twice as expensive as it currently is, and that reputation may still be damaging the popularity of the restaurant. This was also the day after thanksgiving, so it might have just been a slow day, but still this was extremely empty. Service was good with a fairly knowledgeable waiter and prompt yet not rushed service (this should be a given considering how empty the restaurant was). Between myself and my sister we had the following:
( Meal Details )
Overall this was an alright meal. You can nitpick all you want and no dish is ever perfect. My overall impression is that the meal at $80 per dinner was over priced, I know many places where I can get a better meal for less in Boston!
Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, Boston, MA
This restaurant is located in the old city hall building in downtown Boston, a stunningly beautiful building with old school architecture, giant 20 ft ceilings inside, and a view onto a old cemetery from the main dinning room (that is a bit unusual). Unfortunately the entire restaurant was kept in near darkness it was so dim. I had a very hard time reading the menu and actually used the light coming in the window from the Christmas lights in the trees outside to help read the damn thing! Very aggravating. The restaurant features an extensive list of wines, scotches, and aperitifs, and had approximately 25 wines by the glass available. We had 7 people as my table and here is a rundown of what we had.
( Meal Details ) Overall I was extremely disappointed with this meal, at $100 for just me I was expecting FAR more then what I got. To give you an idea, the appetizers, soup, salad, sides, and deserts were all $10-15, for that amount of money I expect a great salad, spectacular sides, and a brulee made properly and to order. The sizzling plate idea is interesting, and certainly has a good presentation, but the execution is flawed and leads to unfortunate side effects and compromises in the quality of the food. The service was quite slow, requiring just under 3 hours to complete a 3 course meal, I have had a 6 course meal in this length of time. In general, I always have a problem with the "traditional steak house", you know exactly what to expect and nothing is ever imaginative, new, or different. When the steaks from a place like this are crap that just makes it all the worse. Oh, and to top it all off, the waiter forgot to have my car brought around from the Valet service (I gave him the ticket when we were eating our deserts), so I stood in the cold for 10 minutes waiting after I finished my meal. Do yourself the favor, spend $10 more per person and go to the Oak Room or Grill 23.
Compare these with a meal I had recently at Fugakyu Cafe in Sudbury, MA, and the differences are night and day. Fugakyu Cafe has good authentic Japanese food although with slightly poorer service and not a beautiful of a restaurant. I would go back to Fugakyu Cafe over EITHER of the places listed above in a heartbeat. Although I do have to admit that I would much rather go back to Bamba Bistro then Ruth's Chris. This is the third disappointing steakhouse meal I have had in a row, I think it might be time to take a break from them.
~Droid I am:  disappointed |
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It snowed this morning :-D
~Droid |
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Hello hello... so I went back to the glasses place and took some pictures of myself with the glasses on. Please kindly disregard the poor quality of some of the pictures, as it turns out it is actually quite a pain in the ass to take good pics of yourself... As it turns out I managed to capture some decent cleavage in the "Side" shot of the Jhane Barnes frames... at the very least you can check that out.
Right now I like the Oakley frames and the Jhane Barnes quite a bit. They are both metal frames, but made with formed sheet metal as opposed to wire frames like I have worn in the past. Any feedback you can give would be appreciated :-D
Later,
~Droid
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This past weekend me and a bunch of friends went to Las Vegas for a Bachelor party, we had a BLAST! It was a very fun but expensive weekend. I ended up losing $750 at gambling, but that is ok, I brought $1000, so as far as I can see I came home $250 richer then I expected to :-P as for what actually happened at the Bachelor party... what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas! I will defiantly have to go back there some day though.
The time comes again to get new glasses... I always have trouble picking new frames, and I usually just go with whatever the woman at the shop tells me to get. I think that is it time to move away from the thin wire frames that I have been wearing for the last 7 years or so... change is good! I talked with Katy a bit this weekend and she suggested that I go with something "nerdier", with "thicker, darker frames", that "make women say, wow... he is a hot nerd... I want to have sex with him." So I went to the shop today looking for frames that say that, and here are some that I came up with.
http://oakley.com/images/catalog/generated/380x340/83/44f379b81f6f7.jpg
http://oakley.com/images/catalog/generated/380x340/ab/44f37b03af7b0.jpg
http://www.framesdirect.com/cdimages_lg/06092049.jpg (this is the brown color, I would get black)
http://eyeglasses.go-optic.com/DFRAMES/IMAGES/jhanebarnes_segment_black.jpg
http://eyeglasses.go-optic.com/DFRAMES/IMAGES/jhanebarnes_tangent_black.jpg
I personally like the last two quite a bit, but I am bad at this. Please let me know what you think of them.
Later,
~Droid
QOTD: "Don't Lose" - This year's Vegas Trip mottoI am:  curious |
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I found this website yesterday, and have spent FAR too long watching this mother of all blenders blend up everything from marbles and whole chickens to an iPhone... Very ammusing. http://www.willitblend.com/
~Droidicus
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HDTV!
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Jun. 25th, 2007 @ 04:33 pm
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So I recently got a Bonus at work (WOOHOO!), and thought to myself "It would be awfully nice to finally get an HDTV." Well, I have finally done it. I bought a 46" 1080p LCD from Samsung http://www.samsung.com/Products/TV/LCDTV/LNT4665FXXAA.asp The thing is BEAUTIFUL, and finally complements my Bose surround system with a great TV as well. I also got a TiVo Series 3, that has HDTV capability and replaces your cable box allowing you to record 2 HDTV programs at the same time. Now I have even more of a reason to be a couch potato! Now all I need to get is a HD-DVD/BlueRay combo-player and will be set for at LEAST a few years.
Mmmmmmm.... electronics.
~Droid
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I had one hell of an interesting night last night... Myself and some friends went into Boston for some drinking and hanging out, I was having a lot of fun and it was starting to get late. I decided to have one last drink, but only one because I knew I was getting close to my limit. So James ordered a Long Island Iced Tea (LIT), and I decided to have one as well since it is one of my favorite drinks! In my drunken stupidity I had forgotten that LITs have a LOT OF LIQUOR in them, so instead of one more "drink", I had like 3-4 shots in that one LIT. Well as you can imagine at that point I was pretty drunk.
So we left the bar and started to head home, I was pretty out of it, we got into a car, and I thought it was a taxi, but it ends up it was the car of one of the other people we went out with. As you can see I was pretty far gone by this time. The car ride didn't help my situation, and it made my stomach quite upset. Half way back to my friend's place I realized puking was imminent, so I had the driver pull over to the side of the road. Unfortunately I then proceeded to puke half in the car and half out the window. Yuck. I am very sorry about that BTW.
Then we finally get back to James' place, and apparently I had to poop (I don't recall this part of the night though, so this part is what I have been able to reconstruct). So I proceeded to poop, and then passed out still sitting on the can. Apparently I wasn't quite done puking though, and puked in my pants around my ankles while I was still sitting on the toilet, and passed out again. I woke up at around 6am still quite drunk, and found my legs totally asleep and puke in my pants. So I flushed the toilet (yea, I hadn't done that after pooping either), washed my pants as well as I could in the tub, and realized that I couldn't even go down stairs and sleep on the couch as my pants were wet and hanging up to dry off. So I layed down on the floor of the bathroom and slept until 10am or so.
By this point my pants were sorta dry, but still damp. So I put them on, went downstairs, let my friends laugh at my misery for a short while, and went home to sleep a few more hours. Interestingly enough I have very little of a hangover today, sure I don't feel great... but I would have expected to feel a lot worse.
I hereby swear off alcohol... Ok, so that is a lie, but no drinking until like next weekend or something...
~Droid
QOTD "Ah beer, the cause AND solution to all of life's problems!" - Homer SimpsonI am:  nauseated |
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Spidey
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May. 7th, 2007 @ 11:21 am
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So, I went out to see Spiderman 3 last night (after a wonderful meal at the Hungarian/French fusion resturant), and I can honestly say that it was really REALLY bad. Honestly, don't waste your money seeing it in the theaters, netflix will have it soon enough.
I won't give away any details, but here are some things to consider.
1) The acting was really poor, the small bit parts had very poor actors and actresses in it, but in addition the main characters just didn't live up to their ability. It was an obvious directing problem, and plagues the whole movie.
2) They tried to do WAY WAY too much in the movie, there were something like 4 parallel story lines, and it just wasn't done right. The movie ended up feeling like it had no motive force, rather it was dragged kicking and screaming to the outcome the writer wanted instead of flowing naturally. None of the stories were particularly good, and they all meshed with the other stories poorly. One of the stories was especially poorly integrated into the storyline, and broke continuity with the previous movies.
3) Imagine this... you are watching a sold-out movie in a theater packed with people. A climatic scene is unfolding on the screen, the HEIGHT of the movie, but then the whole theater just starts laughing. Not because it was funny, but because it is so campy, poorly done, and melodramatic. Yea, that happened three separate times in this movie, including in the climax of the whole movie. VERY bad sign right there.
Not to belabor the point, but it wasn't very good.
On to happy things, I spent most of the weekend working on Bonsai, and it was very fun. My hands are all bruised, blistered, sore, and scratched up. Makes me feel like I actually accomplished something, even if that is just making a little tree or two. I did learn an important thing last weekend though, large trees are HEAVY. So I bought a burlaped 5 foot tall Japanese maple last weekend, and thought to myself "hmmm, this is going to suck getting back up to my condo" as two strong looking guys from the garden center were struggling to get it into my car. Well I was right, it took me 45 minutes lifting the tree up 1 step at a time all the way up 2.5 flights of stairs to get it into my condo. After I got it all the way I I decided to pull out my bathroom scale and weigh it, total of 100 Lbs of very awkward weight. Well, I showed that thing, I reduced it to about 15 Lbs this past weekend, it is literally a fat trunk in a pot now, and I am going to regrow the whole tree from scratch :-D
Later,
~Droid
QOTD: "With great power comes great responsibility" - Uncle Ben from Spiderman 1
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I got some good news today, I'm GETTING MARRIED!
APRIL FOOLS! I got you good, didn't I ;-)
in TRUE news, I spent 4 hours today working on my bonsai. The trees that are still in the greenhouse at the bonsai nursery are in full spring right now, so there is lots of work to do. It was quite enjoyable.
~Droid
QOTD: "Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves." - Robert Anton WilsonI am:  chipper |
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v-day
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Feb. 14th, 2007 @ 11:32 pm
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I hate v-day. That pretty much sums up my mood. The reasons are many and varied, but it pretty much comes down to the fact that I have never once been in a relationship I on this particular date, heck I was even dumped a week prior to v-day a couple years back. Anyway, I was intending to write a long post about all this crap, but it is late, I am tired, I have been drinking since I got home from work (which was early since we got a ton of snow today by Boston standards), and I don't really feel like it anymore.
So here is a condensed version of what I was going to write: I recently read a book called "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert A. Heinlein (you grok?), and in this book was the best definition of love that I have yet come across "'Love' is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." Given that I have never "been in love" in the way that 99% of people would define it if you just asked a random sample of people on the street, I am not sure if this definition is accurate, correct, or precise. Assuming for a moment that it IS correct, accurate, and precise... then I do feel love for a select group of people I call my friends. The phrase "this is going to hurt me more then it will hurt you" comes to mind whenever I even contemplate doing harm to a friend of friendship of mine in any way, and I cherish every friend that I have.
So in conclusion... 1) Fuck v-day and the society that shoves my personal failings into my face. 2) Here's a "shot-out" to all my friends, I hope your v-day was better then mine.
Later,
~Droid
QOTD: "Valentine's Day is a holiday for people who are already in a relationship, for everyone else.. it is just 'Wednesday'" - Dr. Chase from the TV show HouseI am:  I hate v-day |
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So I have had a crazy couple of days this past week. But before that I went home for Christmas. Did the usual family things, had some nice home cooking, and spent some time talking with my Mom, Sister, Step-dad, and Step-brother. Then as usual me and a bunch of friends from High school went out on Christmas night to celebrate the Holidays and Ryan's Birthday. We had Ryan, Meghan, Sean, Jeff, Ben and his new wife, Erin and her Brother, Mark and his finance, Adrien showed up completely randomly which was nice because I hadn't seen her in a LONG time, and I am sure I forgot a couple of people (no offense intended :-P ). It was really nice to see all of them again, I think getting together like that is a great tradition. It is also amazing how you can tell almost immediately through a simple hello, a handshake, or a hug if someone really still cares about you or whether they are just going though the motions. I value all of my friends and it is great to know that I still have friends from that time that are now scattered all over the country, and still care.
So on Thursday I made the decision (or perhaps "Other Meg" convinced me, I can't quite recall) to go down to NYC to Katy's for New Years. So Friday myself, Meg, and James all hopped in the car and went down to NYC. James drove like a bat out of hell because we wanted to get there early since Katy had something to do that night, we ended up arriving at Katy's place just on time, it was a new record for getting from Boston to NYC :-P.
On Friday night went out to a little restaurant that had Italian and wood-fired oven pizza, the food was really good, but the service was questionable. We ordered an appetizer for the table, and each of us got a main dish. Well, my pizza came out first before even the appetizer, then the appetizer and Meg's Salad came out together, and then 10 minutes later Jame's fish came out. Very bizarre and not so pleasant. Oh well, the food was very good, and I enjoyed the meal despite the crappy service and annoying Manhattan kids with "designer mullets" at the next table over. After getting back we just chilled out for a while and went to bed at a reasonable hour. I only had a couple glasses of wine this night.
The next day we went out to do some errands and ended up going to Harlem for some stuff. Very interesting experience, this was the first time I had been to Harlem. In the space of a few blocks the whole "feel" of the city changed, I am not talking about the color of the people we were walking by, that is not meaningful. But, I mean that the architecture changed, the background noises changed, street vendors sprouted up all over the place, and even the cleanliness level of the sidewalks changed. It was almost shocking how quickly it happened, it was literally like crossing an invisible line in the sand. So afterwards we went to a very nice little Caribbean/Soul restaurant in Harlem, one very interesting thing is that the four of us were the only white folk in the whole place, kinda made it feel like a secret that the crackers hadn't found out about yet ;-). Excellent food, excellent service, and excellent drinks. Just before we left some live Jazz music started up, very nice and mellow without being so loud you couldn't still talk, I would have liked to stay a while longer but the meal was finished and we had some more places to go.
After going back to Katy's, changing, and getting ready we went downtown to a couple of bars and met up with some of Katy's friends for a while in the East Village. We went to the "Four-Faced Liar", the "Slaughtered Lamb", some place I cannot for the life of me remember, and "The Black Pussycat". The Slaughtered Lamb was by far my favorite of the night, they had this downstairs that was all done up in a mideval dungeon theme, very chill and nice place to talk. In the Black Pussycat there is a lower lounge with dancing, but I was denied entry because I was wearing sneakers... Whatever, fuck them and their "rules", so James and I stayed upstairs while the girls went dancing for a bit. They also charged double the cover to Men then they did to Women for the lower lounge, so double fuck them in the corn hole. After that we caught a cab back uptown, stopped on the way for a gigantic slice of pizza, and went back to Katy's place. We finally got to sleep somewhere around 4:30 or 5:00 am. I ended up passing out in a chair still in all my clothes, and was like crunched down in a very uncomfortable position, I didn't wake up again until 10:30 am, at which point I changed into my PJs and got into my sleeping bag on the floor. Thanks for not waking me up guys, my back still hurts from that one ;-). I got absolutely WASTED this night.
The next morning (actually the next early-afternoon), we finally crawled out of bed and all had hangovers, so around 1:00 pm we finally got out of the apartment and went for some food at a pretty good place just around the corner from Katy's. Then we went back and I cooked for a few hours while we got the place ready for the New Year's Party. Around 8:00 pm people started to arrive, we drank, we ate, we drank, we played some games, we drank, we watched the ball drop, we drank, we walked around the block banging pots and pans together (no, I am not kidding), we drank, we watched the New Years celebration in Mexico City on the Spanish channel (on mute no less), we drank, we played some more games, we drank, we all farted and badly embarrassed Katy in from of her current male interest, we drank. It was a good time! I honestly have not laughed as hard or as often as I did last night in a LONG time. We finally got to bed around 7am, I tell you that last game of Uno lasted for over an hour, and we had around 3/4 of the deck in our hands, it WAS NEVER GOING TO END, so eventually we just said that the person with the fewest cards wins, and it ended up being Meg with TEN DAMN CARDS! I got absolutely WASTED this night.
Finally today we crawled out of bed in the mid-afternoon, and went to this Mexican restaurant around 3:00 pm (a REAL Mexican restaurant, none of that Tex-Mex stuff here). This place was VERY good, but again we got really weird service. We sat down and were not given any menus, then our waitress came over for drink orders, so we asked for drink menus. About 10 minutes later she came back with the drink menus and we got... what else... Margaritas! Fantastic idea in my opinion! So then we had to ask for FOOD menus, and about 10 minutes later we got them and a bit later finally ordered. After that the rest of the service was fine, but my god WTH was wrong... it's like they didn't want to serve us or something. Anyway, the food was really good and we finally got out of there, went back to Katy's and then started driving back to Boston.
And I cannot believe that it is 2007, I am so old... anyway, in years past I have made this long list of resolutions and crap, and screw that because it is too complicated. So this year I only have one:
Get back into the shape I was in 2 years ago.
Seems perfectly reasonable, I will have to get on that soon. But anyway, I gotta get to bed even though I only crawled OUT of bed 9 hours ago, I am exhausted!
Later,
~Droid
QOTD: "These shoes are three hundred dollars. These shoes are three hundred dollars. These shoes are three hundred fucking dollars. Lets get 'em!" - Kelly http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHFC6rlGsH8I am:  contemplative |
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Yummy
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Dec. 30th, 2006 @ 02:35 pm
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What are you subconciously thinking about?
So there!
Later,
~Droid
QOTD: "Hey betches" - M.M. |
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Nov. 20th, 2006 @ 04:08 pm
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This is a list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels [edit: or series - perich], 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. Bold the ones you've read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.
( Books inside )
I need to get back to reading again and less into the slaughter of horde filth...
~Droid
QOTD: "Pants, pants, pants..." - FrankI am:  bitchy |
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Wow
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Nov. 2nd, 2006 @ 11:52 am
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I don't know how this works, but it hit the nail on the head!
| What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop." | | The Midland | | | The Northeast | | | Philadelphia | | | The South | | | The West | | | Boston | | | North Central | | What American accent do you have?
Take More Quizzes |
Now if only they asked the question "Is calling something 'Wicked' referring to a good thing or a bad thing?" :-D
Later,
~Droid
QOTD: "G.F.Y." - A co-worker about 30 seconds ago
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