19-IX-2020.
On 13th I managed to boot zmajček, after remembering the old trick from the nineties, "šlogiranje CMOSa" (causing a CMOS brain clot), i.e. took my phone to shed some light on the motherboard, found one pair of pins without designation but in just about the right place, and shorted it with the car key, with machine unpowered. It just worked - it offered me a choice of going through setup or just continuing with the defaults. The first kind of worked but got stuck before being able to boot. So I repeated it, just going on with the defaults, and it worked. So I did the pictures from saturday and distributed them to Žuca (for IV4), Borko (for himself) and to the IV5pp mailing list.
It didn't last, though, on 16th it got another brief powerout around 8:00, and the machine ran out of magic smoke. Took it to my current HW shop (with Nena and Rile's shop being now closed for more than a year) and they said the power supply, motherboard and probably processor were fried. A couple of days later I also brought the UPS, because they had compatible batteries for it.
So I was using nanovo for a few days, for just browser and spider solitaire. m$'s solitaire is awful - no buttons, so for new game it's menu or f2, then a dialog; the resize is strictly proportional, which is ridiculous for spider, it requires more vertical space to show the tops of the cards, which quickly become unreadable in this app. The dialog at the end of the game is redundant and confusing, looks like a system error message, we accidentally closed the game because the default button is exit; for new game it says "quit and play again" - what, quit the program? After a couple of days we turned off all the animation, was taking too long and became annoying.
On 14th I wanted to take the van to the garage, to check the brakes, as the guy at the inspection had complained last year, and the guy at the garage said the brakes were just fine, fiddling with them may take hours and not make anything better than it already was. So I dropped at inspection first to schedule it for the next day, but he had a free slot in 30 minutes, so I went to a token-operated carwash and quickly sprayed it. The pressure wash didn't quite remove the dead insects on the windshield, nor the tar from the trees, not even the cobwebs from the rear view mirrors. But it passed inspection fine, and the brakes specially passed as excellent. And even the reverse light, which allegedly had a burned out bulb on one side, worked now. It's only missing oil in the power steering - but I didn't notice anything strange, it just works like it always did.
In the afternoon we made more brandy, the tutifruti, which is actually what we were doing all summer, as we had only 5l of sour cherry in the beginning of the season, and then didn't have much of any fruit to make single-fruit brandy.
On 15th I took Nina to another visit to her dentist in Lena's 'hood. New kind of mineral water, zynced Knjaz, in a fancy blue bottle, excellent color. So it was four programmers and a dog, again. We did talk about the website she's building, for project cars. She needs a database designer, and that's me.
On 16th I had nothing to do, and the girls' sleeping schedule went out of whack - Sanda would wake before nine, and would sleep in the afternoon. So I took Linda alone for a bicycle ride. We managed to go past Lidl without her noticing (good, because I wouldn't have anything to buy, she was there with Sanda in the morning), and settled for Roda, next gray box in the line. We just walked in and out, without her asking to have anything bought (and I didn't have a tote anyway, and the bungee I usually have on the backseat is now engaged holding the garage door, which warped and won't close - the guy never came to fix it). Then I put her into a loose cart and pushed her around for a while... altogether, we stayed out for almost an hour.
On 17th we went to Čankovo to get the last of the fruit and brought some of the pumpkins. We didn't measure them (except the largest one, 75cm length, 17kg), but among the twenty none were below 8kg, and the average should be between 12 and 14 or thereabouts, so we estimate it to be about 250kg total. Plus the estimated 50-70 kg stolen by neighbors.
(... 105 words...) She finally used the food processor, aka Hasan 2 (Hasan 1 is the salami cutter; we had both in the US but with names reversed, in order of appearance), for something else except horseradish, and even that happened only twice.
Finally, on 19th, I took out the vacuum cleaner and sucked out both the sand from the van, and the bits of biomass from the saxo. We synchronized with Lena and Milan and managed to meet at the new (two years) restaurant within 15 minutes. It's "At the old quince", in the zone of vikendica (weekend houses) on the Belgrade road, about third of the way from here. It's a typical such restaurant, actually I can't remember any of the better places outfitted in any other way - wooden beams, old style chairs, caré tablecloth, brick floor (though this one's aren't ground smooth and polished, so my chair was a bit wobbly). The food was great, my lamb chop and ribs from under sač (an iron bell which gets covered with shimmering coals and stays so for hours) was excellent, I cleaned it to the last bone. Even the salad was great. The only remark is that gulaš could have been larger - or at least brought in a pot, for repeats.
At least it has a huge yard with playground - same carousels, see-saws, swings and trampolines as everywhere, except they were in rather good working order, albeit without safedy net on trampolines. Got a few good shots of Violet on it, the boys were trying to impress her.
Lena is getting an offer to switch business (can't say "job" if you're self-employed in a single person agency, and only have customer contract... with a company where she now even owns some stock), from a couple of guys who were leading the project on their last gig. Now she's in a dilemma, because this thing in Frankfurt pays well (plus stock) and it's taking money from lawyers, and this new one, where she should be the first programmer, to lead the front end development, is about optimizing HR management, which is morally dubious. But then, after having talked with the lead guy there, it actually isn't that bad, and the pay may be just about the same. On the other side, the Frankfurt gig is making it impossible to work - they already have a commissar to keep checking the political correctness of everybody, and they have four transgender persons (or three trannies and one ungender, who'd know) who keep doing nothing, meddling in every conversation and trying to catch you in using a wrong pronoun. It's now pretty much impossible to avoid various meetings where no work is getting done, it's more about collective work with discussion (six people writing the same page of code, taking turns and discussing each addition), team building and whatnot. Milan is also disliking what it has become, but his annoyance treshold (treshhold!) is higher. But as they say, "we serially work together". Next talk is with the other guy, who was, accidentally, his classmate once. Small world, the Belgrade IT gang.
Mentions: Čankovo, IV4, IV5pp, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Linda Sredljevich Aquilla (Linda), Majkrosoft (m$), Mališa Borkovski (Borko), Milan Nastić, nanovo, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Nevena Žaja (Nena), Rista Stančulov (Rile), Sanda Sredljević Aquilla (Sanda), saxo, Violet, zmajček, Živana Armatović (Žuca), in serbian