01-V-2015.
No real mayday celebration, but took a day off, why waste. We went to the hardware shop on the green marketplace first, to buy a soil drill. Took that to Čankovo and drilled four holes, between the summer kitchen and fence wall. There we put three poles, which were previously holding the pigpen roof. Then we nailed the chicken wire to them. Planned to put a proper door there, so we could come in and feed them - the thus fenced area will be our attempt to keep two dozen chicken there and have free eggs. There's grass enough and other stuff, so we wouldn't have to feed them, perhaps collect some of the grass we mow. The fence was there to keep the stray dogs away, as there's always some and they're always hungry and our fences are low, bent, rusty and half fallen. We'll have to do something about it soon...
Looking at the stuff on this picture, there's nothing we did here, except this drill, and the corner of her shallow crate with saplings, peeking out from the left. Everything else is just junk that we still didn't find the time to get rid of. And the black thing hanging in top right is the straps to hang švorceniger on.
The chicken have grown just enough, we can't keep them in the (now double) wooden cage she built. So on 3rd we loaded them into the largest cardboard box we had (of the mitre saw), legs tied and covered with our old dark curtain. They took well to the travel, except it was too hot for them in the box, and one died. The box would fall apart if we carried them in it, so she brought a barrel and we carried them four at a time.
But once there, they felt at home, found a roost right away, had grass knee high to poke around. We put the long tub, which came with the still, to collect water from the summer kitchen's roof, so we wouldn't have to bring water too much. Secured the loose end of the fence, where we wanted to make a door, with a barrel, which we also filled with water. And it held, and they were fine.
We even brought a feeder and filled it, so they'd have some of the familiar food to start with, so they can gradually switch to the greenery and what they dig out from the soil.
Lots of chemtrails in the sky, so we expected another few days of rain. The foil we stretched under the arches was a series of puddles.
At Firriver, Suez and Geoff are meeting in Brussels tomorrow, by Eurostar train from London and airplane from Cork respectively, to start training and setup for yet another clinic there.
I tried to restore some database, but the dialog in the stupid SSMS won't even open, for whichever reason. m$ is shit. Later I'd write a script, for exactly this reason. Just paste the filenames and logical names... which was still a mess, because there are six of them - four filenames (the source database's original path for .mdf and .ldf files, ditto for target) and two internal names (for the source and target databases), and it's not that you just have a dozen places where you can fuck up, it's also that you don't know what requires which credentials - whether you'll be even able to put the backup where the server can see it, or whether it will be allowed to read it from where you put it. Always a mess, but after a while I learned a few shortcuts.
Nina sent a picture, a phone selfie made in the car, so I wasn't sure of the tint - the CCD may do it, the car windows may be tinted... so was it that the lower end of her hair was more burgundy toned? Looked so on the pictures, but couldn't decide whether it was that the hair changed color with elevation, or was it an artifact of the photography gear?
We visited the hens again on 4th, and it's already visible how the grass around the feeder is trampled and plucked out, some of it probably eaten too. Good so, I don't like to mow there, the branches are low and there's bricks and shit, very unwieldy to wade through by either mower or švorceniger. This way it'll take care of itself.
On 6th she went on bike (Lena's, this time, something was wrong with hers), and I took the saxo to get her home after work). The area of fresh but trampled grass got somewhat wider, even under the cherries.
Nina scheduled some meeting with Jan and Laura for monday, for whatever reason. I went with David about the Brunswald conversion, from eBaby or whatever competition, where things that worked last week just stopped now, because of m$ fixing things which previously worked. The whole Brunswald business was a test case - we had a copy of eBaby's database to play with, remotely only though, to see what we (namely, I) can do about converting it to one in Feds. Most of the stuff was rather straightforward or at least not too scary. Their questionnaires turned out to be even more convoluted than Jan's Rube Goldberg schema we had. But I was getting somewhere, at least for some types of them.
If that worked, we'd have a ready model to take over any of eBaby's customers. They were already approaching us, so why not. „Data archaeology“ was mentioned (Jan coined the phrase), my addition was „but without any map“.
Lena is buying an Arduino robot making set to Milan, for his next birthday. Told her I'll by any tricorder he makes, need it dearly when I go to get groceries. I want to be an informed customer, and that'd be my information gathering machine.
Mentions: Čankovo, David Berton, Feds, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), Geoff Gearney, Jan Brenkelen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Laura O'Hare, Majkrosoft (m$), Milan Nastić, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), saxo, Suez Lima, švorceniger, in serbian