15-XII-2010.

Met with Todor to finally buy that house in Čankovo. Waited for a whole hour in the courthouse, because the network was down (I guess the in-house network), and then when it was our turn to have our signatures registered, it turned out I brought my Virginian driver's license instead of ID card. So I had to take a cab home (only 4€!) to fetch it. Sleet everywhere, ankle deep.

We paid some extra for the two corn machines (one to get the grain off the husk, the other to grind it); for the two freezer boxes we said nothing - maybe they're in the house, maybe he sold them (weren't, did). Went to old sdk, which used to be chock full of accountants and couriers from the whole city, getting their payments through (although that was also replaced with pay-via-modem back in nineties). It's the state tax service now, and there we shuffled more paperwork to see who pays what to the country, and when. The clerk was excellent, spoke very clearly and reasonably. Turns out she was Bajče's ex, and remembered me from that evening in 1975. when I accidentally got a ride home with them.

Went to the pivnica, had a beer and a coffee. It was empty. The forty-some tables, us and the waiter. Eerie. Todor was reminiscing of his days with the cultural-artistic company, when he was traveling the world, including Iraq and Florida, and of his days as a TV reporter (for Romanian language), when he covered the last Party congress of Ceauşescu.

Then we had a burek and a yogurt in "Ohrid" (Lena liked it). I logged back into the platoon chat on skype only at 16:24. Jan has returned from Ireland, with five pages of notes, mostly about the things we need to do for this clinic, half of which were already planned for Feds 5.3. Laura is trying out some report for SFBC which takes more than five minutes to run, and it ran okay on the previous build. Probably Jiang and more extraction of scientific data for her research. After 20 minutes, she started pushing Jan to do something right away. Eventually, after an hour and a half, „Since its is querying a very large table and joins with another very large table, the cause might be because of outdated statistics, table fragmentation, running out of resources, missing or out of date iindexes... IOW DBA work, in stead of programming.“ My old rule of thumb is to not do joins of large tables on the server - bring the partial cursors down into fox, then join them locally. Far less to pull down the cable. But he wouldn't listen, he'd rather optimize the server side stuff.

Messing with Lab, some early version, testing it in Feds 5.2, using SQL 2005 express locally. David asks how's SHET - my reply was „I lost four days (again!) rebuilding my machine almost from scratch. Got it to work last night. but what's listed as bugs (so far) seems like doable in one day altogether. So, I guess, this time tomorrow.“

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Mentions: Branislav Bačikin (Bajče), burek, Čankovo, David Berton, Feds, fox, Jan Brenkelen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Jiang Wong, Lab Intro, Laura O'Hare, pivnica, sdk, SFBC, SHET, Todor Mirča, yogurt, in serbian