28-IV-2008.
New monitor, don't remember why. I already had two flatscreens, but probably 1440x900 wasn't enough anymore, and/or I gave one to Lena. So zmajček got an upgrade. It's all here, from left to right: the movable light left from Nina's school desk of nine years ago. Stack of burnable disks, mostly dvds, some cds. The phone. The coffee can with pencils, covered with stickers, many of them diamond package labels. The sennheiser headset. The brother printer/scanner. The new monitor. The central speaker on it. The old monitor, upright. The front speakers to the left of the printer and the right of zmajček. The logitech keyboard and mouse. The tasmanian devil coffee cup. The ashtray I got from Ricardo for a birthday some years ago. The controler for the sound next to it. The bass speaker on an adidas slipper (so it wouldn't send so much bass through the floor). The rear speakers are spread out, not on the picture. The mat on the floor so the wheels of the chair wouldn't snag in the carpet, nor damage it. The table and little cabinet I got on Orion's expense.
On UA
Jack: I eat next to nothing. I rarely eat breakfast or lunch. Maybe, at best, 1800 calories a day. My wife is 5'1" and 94 lbs (size 4 soaking wet) and she routinely out-eats me.
me: We say "her tapeworm has worms".
In another thread
Nick: My experience with online bill payment has been very similar to Tracy's. My checking account is with a very large bank (Chase) and their bill payment service, which costs nothing, is terrific. You set up payments for a designated date and can then "check" when they are processed. With the exception of a couple of small operations like the village of Round Lake (water and sewage bill), which receive their payments in the mail and take 5 days, everything is processed in a day or two. No paper checks involved with those. The new Check 21 regulations 4 or 5 years ago were a big change in the industry. Basically Check 21 processes payments electronically rather than with paper checks. (It's also why you probably don't get canceled checks in the mail any more).
I was also with a major bank - Wachovia - for the first few years, and have set up electronic payments as soon as I bought a computer and got it connected. But they screwed up royally within a couple of years; one water bill I paid 4 days ahead (so it showed on my statement) but the billing processor got it two days too late (!). I had argued for about a full year with this billing company (who were billing the water for the county), the amount due increased by a fine, which was ridiculous, $7 fine for a $12 bill, out of which $10 was actual water and $2 was the billing service - until I realized I'd better check with the bank. By that time they also didn't have any clue what happened 11 month before, and weren't about to dig either, they actually knew this was one in the series of screwups at the time, and just asked how much. They credited my account for the amount of fines, silently and swiftly.
I don't care how many ingenious ways they find to keep my money on their accounts for a day or two longer, so they can artificially increase their "cash on hand" report and thus claim larger money-emitting rights (i.e. loan capacity), slowing transactions down in this manner is soooooooo slllllooooooow. It's like the banks in Hungary in the nineties - every business was carrying wads of cash around, I actually never saw so much cash - because a bank payment would take a week, and that's from one's account to another's bank, then another week for the partner to actually get the money. Now with all these electronics, 15 years later it doesn't take 14 days, it takes 4 or 6?
Some time next year the mistery of this was solved. The water and sewer were the same company but two invoices, going to different accounts. I mixed them up when typing into the credit union's webpage, and a dozen days later the checks returned. Checks? Yeah right, electronic checks. Fully electronic, the printer that prints them doesn't run on coal or gas, it's electronic. And so are many devices in the system of snail mail. WTF - I remember back in 1992 when a sixtuple transaction would pass through sdk's computers in 30 minutes, and all seven participants would immediately see it when they logged in. That's the fabled B2B transacting. Now this is sixteen years later, and these fucking banks are setting up electronic payments by physically printing checks on paper and sending them via snail mail. Face, palm.
In a later comment, I said "There's still the option to use ships for mail. Slower, but cheaper. It may take a shipment two weeks to get from, say, Boston to Miami. I wonder why don't banks use that, they'd save a bundle. "
At work, David reported from some hotel in Australia that he's in contact with our (prospective?) client there, and that we should consider doing the NPSU soon. That's their equivalent of CAAR or SHET. George, Jan and I were discussing formatting the code - tabs vs spaces, indenting CASE statements, use of beautifier (which I do dozen times per hour). Feds was at 5.1 at the time, 5.2 being in the works. Creating a build was on me this time, the 18 steps of the process were on George hosted wiki. A tornado passed through the next county, 700m wide... and then it was ten blocks away from us. Oliver said "keep your head down", and Hana said "hang onto your hair". But nothing much happened, just some rain. Though, the pics I took in the back yard were rather dark, so if I was trying to document the damage, I can't see what it was.
Burt notified me that Kristin is doing a lecture at PAFOX, which is not so near for him anymore since he moved to Maryland, and too far for me anyway. But still, "fer yer info".
Mentions: CAAR, David Berton, Feds, George Whiteley, Hana Burberry, Jack Baran, Jan Brenkelen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Kristin Peiser, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Nick Greene, Oliver Byford, Orionware (Orion), Reginald Burton Cape (Burt), Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), sdk, SHET, UbiquAgora (UA), zmajček, in serbian