11-IV-2001.
Ford offered me another courier job, i.e. to drive to DC and pick Željko and his wife (also member of the team - and both presently, IIRC, employed by CompuWiz). I declined, claiming the double Easter on sunday (true) which we're kind of celebrating (just a big lunch). Actually, Go is coming, so...
Overyester, our freshly fired project manager, Clara, responded to my email:
Yep, no matter how hard I work or how smart I am, finding a job really just boils down to luck...and losing a job boils down to who hates you ;-)
Tom J. called me Thursday night. He seemed very upset about the whole thing and I guess he was worried about me. It was nice of him to call.
One thing that really bothers me is that Janna hasn't even called or emailed me to see how I am. That hurts
my feelings alot. I thought she was my friend.
I've started a list of places to hit, but there just doesn't seem to be much out there that looks good to me. This is going to take some time...
So you have a broken elevator but great parking now. What a riot. Well, I better get back to job hunting...
On UA, I tried to explain my trick for quick painting a grid - instead of having a function which would return the color number, even as simple as rgb(r, g, b), have a field containing the number and set that field as expression for the dynamiccolor properties. I'll have to explain this another dozen times over the following years, and yet it seems nobody remembers the trick.
Nina's machine arrived (yesterday). We went to buy a monitor separately (at Office Max, I guess). Not any kind of top notch machine, the box was kind of flimsy, compared to my box. But it served - she installed a linux there and played with it a lot. The monitor wasn't much either, 17". Just couldn't do much better under the circumstances. When we put the components together and pressed the ON button, nothing happened. Did I finally lose it? Has the technology went too far for me? On the contrary. The brackets in the mains outlet were lose. I had to tighten the prongs on the power cable to gain contact - the same crap I had to do for years in so many places. The installation took a while, so Lena went to sleep with mom, and I took the vacant bed on Go's room.
Yesterday there was big rain. When it stopped, we (I guess the currently present yugos, me and a couple more of the boys from Zero) went down for a smoke break (most are non-smokers, but they deserve fresh air as well). So much water was coming down the slope, from the neighbors' parking lots (including the navy recruiting centre, facing our entrance), that there was a huge whirlpool around the sewer grate, right in front of our door. Impressive, yet despite its speed it couldn't pass all the water fast enough, so it was up to 15cm deep around it. By the end of work, it did drain out.
Nina is passing some extra exams this week, as these would raise her rating for college. The colleges (as I explained to mom and dad in an email) try to parse the paperwork to extract the best students-to-be, i.e. those which will bring them reputation - the better the reputation, the better they can raise their fees later. For the same reason they push the sports, as the academic leagues are almost equally popular as the regular, and the universities with champions attract powerful sponsors, again the money pours in. It's all business, although they do try to deliver quality. I.e. that the quality of their product is confirmed on the market. That, again, doesn't mean that they brag with "so many of ours have later PhD'd on Sorbonne" but "so many of ours have been earning 100,000 a year within three years after graduation" and such.
I'm doing some small work for Avai - HosTract should have been finished for the hospital but wasn't (because they lack workforce, with most of the guys now working for USquad), so I've taken over.
In my old street a new girl is born - two houses up the street - fourth kid in the family. She will later become the favorite neighbor, and my dad would frequently call her "fourth granddaughter". That's Zina.
Mentions: Allan Robin (Ford), Avai, Clara Milovan, CompuWiz, Gorana Sredljević (Go), HosTract, Janna Robinsen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), UbiquAgora (UA), USquad, yugo, Zero Distance (Zero), Zina, Željko Popov, in serbian