18-X-2007.
Took the day for tourism. Breakfasted at the same place, but only at 10 this time, then strolled to Capitol, White house... but I see I messed, in some important part of it, with the treatment plan bizobject, which pulls a bunch of data when loading a patient, I added error logging... because I found that Jan's error catcher catches a few more basic cases, and if it's none of those, it moves on and keeps mum like shit in the grass.
Same error logging I added in questionnaires (in fivesix places), and in main patient form.
Jan insisted to have shots in places, to show his kids. I've also found some blacks present on the other side of the fence - black squirrels on the lawn, which I haven't seen for years. Rare kind.
Around the house... many protesters of various kinds, some camping, obviously staying there for quite a while. Photo of Bush behind bars, nice wish.
Then we went for the museums, which are all lined up there. There were more of them than we had time, so we went for nature and cosmos. There I shot him with the dynosaur skeletons, probably snapped shut* while taking a break from producing oil. They also have a live zoo - a glass cage where you walk around and observe live archaeologists or zoologists cleaning up soil from bones.
This shot made her very happy ...because the only good squirrel is a fossil squirrel. It's all quite impressive, but the question remains how much are those dynosaurs made out of actually found bones, and how much of it is creative reconstruction, conclusion by analogy and wishful thinking.
The more interesting was the astronautics museum (which must by no means be called cosmonautics, that's russian space; likewise only astronauts allowed, no cosmonauts on the premises). I don't know which dick is the glass sculpture doing in there, it's all raw geometry and lightplay, with an etched likeness of that silly son-in-law of mr Marić inside.
Dunno where we lunched**, perhaps in the hotel itself, not bad at all. Afterwards we gathered our laptops in the lobby, some coffee some beer, and hit it. I see that embryo scoring has a version as of 7:05, when we either slept (by eastern time) or were still in the museum (of we add six hours to server time). Possibly it was Jan's brother or Das who touched some detail.
No fuckit, it was me - there's a comment with my name at 7:16... which means we were in the museum an hour before that, but I haven't switched the time in Fujica to winter, or some other timezone snafu happened - this could be one of those weeks where the US are only 5 hours off from the CE timezone, because the mad guy Bush extended the datetime savings one week in one direction and two in the other. There was always some fuckup about times in the office in those weeks.
Around 15:00 I added something to the main toolbar, to instantiate the SHET button only when running american locale and the add-on is actually installed (perhaps less than a half of US customers were using it) - it was just an option at the time.
The woman who was now in my place at Orion sent me an email to tell me there's now an empty position in Falls Church... three months, to assist transition to VB (visual and basic, i.e. likeness elementary) from fox. Thanks, but really no, thanks.
In the evening joined some gang for dinner, on a hotel terrace with a view of the White house from top right. Said I felt like a real secret agent, here just 200m from it and with an expired visa... Around the table were the four of us, two guys and a girl from Xyorg, and two ladies from some pharmafia. There was a cute scene when David remarked, along the way, that here we have a guy who just quit smoking a short while ago. The two poisoners immediately asked what was I taking. „Nothing, cold turkey“ (everyone knows the phrase, ever since John Lennon used it for a song title). They were seriously offended that I dared stop smoking without using any of their products. There you go, I was always a DIY guy.
David chugged a bit more wine than normal, and hooked onto this Xyorg girl, to the point where he was becoming a bit obnoxious. Not that she wasn't worth it, but all the same, for the peace around the table I convinced him to swap places with me... so I sat next to her. She became quite talkative, probably drank equally with him, and I remember her main story line was how much heat she can stand, level sitting in Georgia in a greenhouse in august and wearing a sweater. The dinner was over soon after that, and we went for a stroll among those monuments, the lake etc. During the walk she stuck to the older of the two guys from her office, and he stuck his hand to her butt, discretely, nobody really noticed. The guy looked the oldest among us. When we came to the mirror lake, I took one excellent shot of the obelisk reflecting in the water, with her camera though, didn't bring the Fujica. There I pronounced the (later) famous sentence, „sometimes a phallic symbol is just a phallic symbol“.
On nineteenth we mostly sat in our room and worked. I sent a photo (of me at the stand) to Škrba with „pass this to rasejani because it won't take my emails from here. Godya***, I haven't been a standgirl for good 12 years, and they were good exactly because I wasn't one. Who hasn't tried, doesn't know what bliss it is... when you return to the hotel, unshoe and crash on the bed.“. Everyone on the mailing list agreed that it's a screwy experience, not recommended to anyone, except that Škrba himself had the best story: „I have REALLY once, after the informatics fair in NS in november 1998, fell asleep completely dressed, with shoes on my feet. I sat down to unshoe, get comfortable, have a shower before sleeping and in the process I made a cardinal error of taking a brochure to leaf through. The next thing I remember was horrible pain in my back and legs, brochure still in hand. Spent at least two hours in the position called 'was just sitting and then keeled over'“.
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* or is it snapshot, or snapshooted?
** yes, it is a verb in english, if you didn't know. If action can be a verb...
*** in serbian, „bokte“, abbreviated and honed from full „bog te mazo“ (got spread you), an euphemism for „bog te jebo“ (god fuck you); nowadays used mostly as an exclamation, like „dang!“, „gee“.
Mentions: David Berton, fox, Fujica, Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), Jan Brenkelen, Mohandas Raj (Das), Orionware (Orion), rasejani, SHET, in serbian