27-III-2004.
Two days ago Burt reported that he finally sold the Alfa on eBay. „ The text describes the rust, but the pictures don't really show it. I decided to sell it when it had a problem which would be expensive to fix and cause it to fail inspection. The rust was getting bad enough to need attention pretty soon, and the emissions equipment was dodgy. If I waited another year, the car would be 25 years old and not need as much inspecting. But the rust restoration estimate was $4000 from John's Auto Body. My mechanic said that the car looked as if it was getting ready to cost me a lot of money and selling it was a good idea. It was hard to bring myself to do it. I intend to get another Alfa sometime when I have savings. Maybe a newer one with Electronic Fuel Injection.“
Sale also emailed me:
We generally agreed eventually, one eye closed, the other squinted, and concluded that once when we retire we should sit and talk properly. I hope us to be completely senile by then and that the subject of the talks would be the unreachable younger female exemplars of our biological species.
If you drop into our ends we are not hard to find. I hope to arrive to your end (briefly), but it's a huge space, so we may miss each other (and maybe not).
Greetings and best wishes to the whole family (my kids used to regularly visit your klinceze's* site, but now I'm not abreast of what they do, they hooked me off and live their lives).
Now I wonder with whom did he agree, perhaps Vanji. But he lost the lawsuit and had to pay a hefty damage, from which DBA never recovered.
Lots of email with Gary yesterday, where he's basically trying to add a few things without touching what the web team (Mohan, Ermilson) do. He keeps mentioning the big blue box, which is, as far as I can remember, the picker where he'd add PPTs to an event - who was performing, who made the poster, who did the lights etc, and now he wants to add the writer (of what?) into the mix.
Now here's the confusing part - all the pictures of David's stay in Virginia Beach are of this day, and on 30th I was in NYC. (... 34 words...) And I know he was here for a few days. So it must have been somewhere between 23rd and 28th, roughly. He came to, allegedly, teach me the ropes and all the important things a programmer needs to know about diamonds and what goes where, and above all else to cram it into my head what must be done this way and must not be done any other way, i.e. discipline his way. Which had a lot of rough edges, but eventually wisdom won, I tied the horse where the boss said, and also learned that it's not my responsibility either, I did as he said, it's his. Over time that will crumble bit by bit, and he would change a lof of it, and his guidelines will be reduced to gui mostly, because the users' habits are firm, nobody's that insane to try to change them.
The whole hardware arsenal is on this shot. There's his laptop, with the shit gray keyboard and its ridiculous belgian layout, crazier than hungarian - couldn't they have just taken over the french azerty (or maybe they did, would I know?). The box on the yooessbee cable is probably just a hub, don't know what for, I don't see any mouse pluged in. My tozna is also there, by the mrz (aka mp3, see house dictionary) player and one of those ballpoints which cost buck fifty a dozen in Glotz (aka Big Lots). I see his laptop is hooked on the gray network cable, I first thought I unhooked Lena's box, but then remembered that I already had a router and probably spare cables (finally, all my life I never had enough cables for anything). There's two cakes of seedees, landline phone, my tasmanian devil coffee cup and, in the corner, the aitchpee printer, and on top of zmajček, the Pioneer amp (from Burt). It's all there.
Now why was he in my chair, probably using the larger monitor to connect to UniJewel via Citrix, fits with what I see on the monitor.
The repeated use of word „rough“ above is still nothing when compared with how he spoke - because in diamond slang, „rough“ is the uncut, unpolished, raw stone, and also the name of his app handling that.
Of course, he designed this as a vacation for himself. Picked a nice hotel on the beach, walked down the boardwalk, sipped something, ogled the waitresses and whatnot. I'd pick him up in the morning, take him home (except this one coffee session in a bar by his hotel), and then the two of us would work all day, except for lunch break. I know there was a pizza one day, of the kind he never ate, homemade. (... 63 words...)
He taught me something about Amers, that I sort of knew already but didn't apply to everyday procedures. Namely, he wanted to buy a local sim card for his phone, and wouldn't buy it on Manhattan, where everything is at least twice as expensive. So I took him to the nearest mall and there to a shop of his Teemowble (though I also heard it as teemawbuyl), and there he asked about such a card. The guy said nope, don't have any such. I already moved to go out, but David stopped me, whispered „wait, these are Americans, just a moment“, and turned back to the clerk and asked „and do you perhaps have it in some other shop of yours?“. „Ah yes, they should have it in the other shop“ and pointed to the north end of the mall. Um, yes, I know the place, between the bike shop and Walmart. We went there, and sure enough, they had one. There he said „you see, these Americans, they'd never answer a word above what you asked. You have to learn how to ask questions around here, they won't volunteer any information you didn't specifically ask for“.
Oh fucket, at home, even if one works for a privatnik, or is the owner himself, if he doesn't have what you ask for, he'll tell you where they have it, even if it's his worst competitor across the street, because he wants to serve the customer the best he can. And this guy won't even mention the other shop of his employer, he's not specially paid for that.
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* klinac - a tack nail, or a small spike - is a mildly mocking word for a kid; it being of male grammatical gender, and in several cases parallel to princ (a prince), e.g. in genitive etc it's klinca-klincu-klincem and princa-princu-princem (in plural they diverge - klinci vs prinčevi), so someone, perhaps Ršumović, invented a klinceza, as a feminine counterpart, which perfectly rhymes with princeza, a princess.
Mentions: Aleksandar Raskov (Sale), David Krakovski, DBA, Gary Brandywine, house dictionary, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Mohan Merchant, Reginald Burton Cape (Burt), tozna, UniJewel, Vilmoš Baranji (Vanji), zmajček, in serbian