30-IV-2006.
Visiting Go and Ricardo in Richmond. More shots of various textures around the place, specially the staircase where we go out to smoke. It's a fire exit, and of course it's wooden. We had a coffee can, galon sized, that we used as an ashtray. It got quite full over time, but there was always more space to stick another butt between other cigarette butts. Initially, there was water on the bottom of the can, but it soon got partly soaked up by the filters and partly evaporated. But with sticking it like this, the remaining ember has no air and extinguishes*.
Very few people used this staircase, except maybe to catch some fresh air - but by the time one needs fresh air, it's worse outside. Perhaps in winter. The building also had no central AC, so there were window units. Actually, haven't seen too many wall mounted units in the US. They are everywhere in the rest of the world, not here. If you own the building, you install central. If you don't, you don't install anything, you make do with a window unit. Make sure you never get too drunk to drop it out.
This layer of paint was probably adult at least once, and even then it wasn't the best paint. Everything that this Brytehood guy, or whatever his name was, rented out, was the cheapest kind of spit and polish, using worst materials applied on the run. He didn't care, he had the location and the space - the rooms were rather big, there was power, phone, internet, water. And the university was two blocks away. He could charge what he wanted, and nobody really cared about the ceiling above the bathtub, the cockroaches, the rough surfaces of the walls, the ghetto style back alley. And yup, that includes rough paint every decade or so.
This on UA the next day:
I'm with you. Getting away from your desk is a good thing. I had that conversation with someone at whilfest (coming back to the thread topic). People were talking about not taking lunch breaks or eating at their desk. I said that I always take a lunch break and often, by the time I get back to my desk, I've solved whatever problem I was on before lunch.
I discovered this (about how my mind works) really early on, after maybe just a couple of years at the keyboard. Usually any problems I needed to solve would miraculously solve themselves after I drove my bicycle two blocks away.
My usual place for that sort of work is to lean upon a wall and stare into the garden through a window. My wife once said "what are you doing?". I had to think of a proper answer for a few seconds, and it was an honest "I'm working" :).
I still remember that scene, though not the year. Could be any spring or summer between 1994 and 1999.
For UniJewel, lots of work on final packaging of the production app, while waiting for David to arrange a meeting in NY, though he was sort of dragging his feet on the subject. The next trip is, actually, becoming unlikely. Well, we can deploy remotely, that is not a problem, it's the staff training that sounds downright scary, they are so different from my regular users so far. And training them remotely is something I'd rather not do. Though, it's done completely under David's guidelines, it looks like his apps do, behaves the same, no hidden tricks, no surprises. Perhaps training won't even be necessary.
The packaging mostly consisted of generating code to create a blank database with all new fields (and optionally populate from the old one), the code to check for all added fields, with comment on each. There were a bunch of these new ones.
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* 'ember' is the weak replacement for žar, can't explain, also, extinguish is just as weak translation of ugasiti. Sorry.
Mentions: David Krakovski, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), UbiquAgora (UA), UniJewel, whilfest, in serbian