04-II-2009.
Two evenings ago went to pick Lena from another tour with the quiz team. She's in the first reserve, as there are four strong guys in the current team. Most of the time I was just sitting in the car, smoking and generally fooling around with Fujica. The school is Princess Anne (not on the eponymous boulevard), just as big and well equipped as her school. About two notches above the near school, where she'd belong geographically, had she not been accepted into this magnet program. There are far more black kids in our area, specially between our street and the school; more away it's mixed.
I shot this after a long musing over the secretary... would she still be so reserved if I appeared in person and engaged my charms... and would she be worth it?
Wrote a check for 86$ for "AP calculus BC", which IIRC should be some tests that Lena is passing in order to gain extra credits (the AP being "advanced placement", whatever placement may mean in this context). Money goes to her school.
This is somewhere along the way to Lena's school. It's tax return filing time, and this corner is somehow popular for puting up any kind of sandwich man to advertise accountants who'll do your taxes for you, for a modest fee. This guy is dressed up as the statue of liberty, advertising 'liberty tax'. They don't give a fuck for any connotations or how stupid it sounds, as long as the name is catchy. The guy is actually dancing there, trying to attract as much attention as possible.
Currently trying to build the fully automatic setup builder, using my bag of tricks and Inno setup compiler. Latest report is "SetupFeds5.2.31.58 comp2x.exe is where I have replaced dat_homepage.view_master with one which doesn't inherit from view_treatplan but straight from view_master, and has recompiled the whole project and built an exe before copying to everything temp directory, and has recompiled everything once more before replacing all vcx/scx code with *. still behaves the same as what we had yesterday - it works for homepage now, but on treatment page it misses cCycleno and cIcu_id, which are parameters to some view that isn't used, or shouldn't be used."
At UA:
>>In this case I meant to. Let me try again. It is "alpha.bmp".... The file has been refuse because of size.
I think only jpg and gif formats are supported.
Even if it was supported, bmp format is not compressed at all. It's more or less a simple video memory dump, three bytes per pixel. I've just picked up a 3696*2464 image, mostly dark, so it compressed well - the jpg was about 180K, and saved it as a bmp. There's some 54 bytes overhead so it was w*h*3+54... about 26 megs.
The only reason for proliferation of bmp format is that it requires about zero extra processing. It can be dumped straight into the video memory... provided there's no scaling, offsets, clipping etc... which was sort of fine with icons, they have a fixed size (*). The more plausible reason was that m$ wanted to be loved by hardware makers and sellers. More memory, more disk space, faster processors.... the year when newspaper article with a headline "Why are vendors smiling when you say you want a Windows machine" appeared was 1991. fox didn't support anything but bmps until... VFP6, IIRC. In pretty any other m$ app the bmp worked right away, the other formats were somehow supported much later. Some of them weren't supported at all until gdi+, i.e. we had to wait for the fundamental graphic processing code at the system level to acknowledge the existence of these formats... while the most clumsy format was working everywhere... well, under every version of Windowses.
I'm still getting indigestion when I see a bmp saved to desktop - worst format, worst place.
(*) come see Ubuntu - icons are svg, vector graphics, arbitrary size. Size them as you like.
Managed to talk to Bajlo on skype. Not sure if I already had the skype recorder installed. Some fox-related chat with Marinko, again.
Yesterday, in an email from dad, heard that Tejka has died on 2nd, Dragana called him to report. The funeral is most probably today. I've heard loads of shit about the whole family in the last few weeks (from him, though; I called Dragana once, around 18th of january, but don't have a recording and have no idea what we said). Tejka's sister is in deep shit - her husband (was a minister for a while (!)) has a daughter on the side, and has moved to live with her mom; their son finished some engraver high school and has no work. She eventually graduated, russian language (of all things) and of course can't find a teaching position, works somewhere as a school librarian. She didn't wait for their mom to die to open the question of inheritance - did that three days in advance, while she was still alive, though unable to speak due to stroke. Dad heard most of this from Ivka's husband, who lives in the area and they often meet during their walks (from Lesnina to šećerana park was always a popular route). His daughters did most of work for that funeral, as Tejka was already unusable for anything, and so was her husband. It seems that her father was the only regular guy in the family, and he died first.
Tejka spent last two months in an alcoholic coma, very thin, just skin and bones. They found her lying by the path in front of Lesnina, in that little park. At some point, after 45 days, her husband decided to move her to a bigger hospital in Belgrade, and there the doctors cursed both him and local doctors for taking so long, and then refused to accept her under the given conditions, so she was delegated back to our local elite corps. Then these guys didn't want to take her back, but eventually relented under lots of pressure and begging. Her husband later told how they gave her completely wrong treatment.
Dragana, Bajlo and Staša dropped by and brought the original notes (those 88 pages...) and a CD with the pictures from the last year's gathering (which I already have).
...nope, the funeral was on 5th. Dad went, with Sneca. Said he was greeted as my true delegate, except Sredljak, who held a bit aloof. At the daća, he sat with Sneca, Bajče, Bajlo, Dragana, Milica, Biljana and Jasmina. Staša was absent (scool schedule), and let it be said that Zova was absent too. Special greetings from Veca and Sneca. Veca's husband had chemotherapy, lost most of his hair, cut the rest to zero.
Mentions: Biljana Grgurević, Branislav Bačikin (Bajče), daća, Dragana Vitas (Dragana), Feds, fox, Fujica, Gradivoj Sredljev (Sredljak), Ivanka Tomašić /Čardić/ (Ivka), Jasmina Vlajin, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Lesnina, Majkrosoft (m$), Marinko Protić, Milica Erceški, Nenad Bajlo (Bajlo), Slavica Tejin (Tejka), Snežana Stojanović (Sneca), Stanoje Serdarević (Staša), šećerana, UbiquAgora (UA), Vera Stojanović (Veca), Zdravko Smetovački (Zova), in serbian