23-II-2009.
Rather early in the morning, in a chat with David... speak of the devil:
04:09:07 David: A new price quote has been submitted from the Firriver website. Please review the following quote request: Title Prof *Last Name karavukov *Email kvuk@sezampro.yu *Position not specified *Organization gak narodni front *City BEOGRAD *Country Serbia and Montenegro *Telephone Number 00 381635554444 Fax Number 00 381 11 4445555 Please send quote via Email When would you like to install Feds V.5? Within 6 Months
04:09:17 David: One of your people ? :)
04:33:22 me: sezampro is the BBS where I have spent 12 years... but I don't know the guy.
he never wrote a message there, but emails@sezampro.yu aren't restricted to BBS members (who are my people) but apply to anyone who has SezamPro (ie. Sesame, btw) for an ISP.
however, GAK (ginekološko-akušerska klinika) in Narodnog Fronta (people's front street) is pretty much the big state clinic. So... I may ask around, if need be.04:36:11 David (y)
04:37:20 me: I'm still in touch with a bunch of people there, specially the diaspora mailing list, and from time to time I'm amazed at what people we have - one is a professor at the university, another a hardware vendor... and they all know other people, so the network is at hand.
04:38:05 David: world's small...
04:44:53 me: btw, the area code for Belgrade is 11; anything beginning with 64 or 63 is a cell phone. Skype rate is 0.11$ vs 0.25$.
And this is how the dance with the lady of GAK began. She wouldn't purchase Feds now but rather when she goes solo, in her private clinic. I, thus, got the task to add serbian as a language into Feds and to run translation to fill the strings. Partly just for kicks, partly out of caprice, partly looking ahead for the possibility if some richer customer from Russia may come up, I did it in cyrillic. Nothing came out of it, she didn't need six months but rather close to ten years to go private, and then not solo but within some other clinic, and that's when she got shooed out of GAK. Well, at least I got a constructive proof that fox can do other scripts, cyrillic for starters, but then who knows, there will be other languages.
In the afternoon chat, another big one, we had lots of trouble with skype. People would get dropped out of a call, or would lose sound (specially Das, at least twice). First Jan hosted it, then we had to drop that, so I took over. A few times I had to add people whom skype reported as already present. David: „I heard a gurgling skype sound ....“. There were ongoing support calls in the background, so Suez, Laura, Norman had to leave and then to ask to be invited back in. George was busy so jumped in by the beginning of the third hour, which was about when we started losing people, it was their dinner time (or, for me, lunchtime? ...I really don't know how to understand the times in these records, it all depends on the timezone in which I was when I downloaded them).
17:51:57 David: Just got a message from Robin Thurswell -- he will make a guest appearance on our Friday call (but wont be able to join til UK 3 pm (toronto 10 am)-- for those of you who don't know...one of the world experts in PGD-- trained at UCLondon--was Scientific Director at the Mayo Clinic -- and now at one of the largest private facilities in UK [Tower]. His topic will be " tracking of inventory, lab events and prescriptions-- a view from the Tower"
...
18:15:30 Laura: Is the data entry history for a field every wrong? A screening test wasn't appearing on the homepage for male patients at IVFUS. I looked at system config on Friday and it said it was set to female which explained it. I changed it to both and it worked - problem solved. Blanche points out that the data entry history doesn't show it being changed to female. I set it to both on July 27/07 and then Support set it to both on Feb 20/09. It looks like it changed itself to say Female. Can someone explain this? I'm warning you that Blanche may get upset and very concerned if fields are changing on their own.
18:18:11 David: :S
18:19:03 Laura: I'm hoping that someone can explain how this can happen. It did say female on Friday, but there's no record of it
As long as we can say who changed it to female and that it didn't change on it's own.
And there she assigned the task of checking what really happened to Norman. He reported „ The Data Entry History was confirmed to be an accurate reflection of the Audit Trail records (s_Audit).“... well fuckit, will he ever write „I have found“? No, it's always personless and in passive mode. Ah, here it is: „That server drives me nuts; the regional settings keeps changing back to 'English (Canada)', and I can't type much without running into trouble... It switches seemingly mid-sentence! Then there's Citrix that figures we'd NEVER wish to type more than one capital letter in succession...“
That's about the time I excused myself, have a delivery at the door. The appliance we nicknamed aquarius (vodolija), because it catches the air humidity, runs it through some filter (for there are particles, filaments), then through some minerals to give it taste, and there's potable water. It cost 1500$, and is an obvious 1.0 experimental model - most of it being the software, which was actually okay, it did exactly what it should. The trouble was in some irrelevant details - one caster was broken in transport; the pipes connecting the filters were hard to connect, took us five tries until we managed to avoid leaks. And the whole filtering part is somewhat too complicated.
But it looked nice, and we always had good water to drink, and hot water for instant coffee or tea. Because it's a standard heat exchange unit, pumps the heat into one side, which it pumps out of the other, and the cold pipes are where the air moisture condenses and gets collected into a vessel, then goes through filters and ends up in the tank on top of it. The display was colorful but gave good information, and the overall design was excellent, I specially liked the color. In the years when the white shirts are the only thing which is still not gray, such a dark blue thing.
Virginia doesn't quite have the best of water. Perhaps closer to the hills it does, but here it's just rainwater, which is gathered in artificial lakes, then gets filtered for water ducts. Not that it's bad, but it isn't good either, and the bottled water sellers' lobby always manages to postpone investment in better filtration system until furthest notice. We even mounted some throughput filter on the faucet as early as that flat in 2003 and brought it here then - it helped, but still not prime time quality.
Chu and Tik are under the front window, in adjacent pens, just about behind my back. I made some timelapse video with the tiny camera on the monitor. They can be seen rummaging around, and m$ coming and going a few times.
In Feds, Jan just inserted the loading of Grigorij's library with screen candy and registering it. So the grand replacement of the classical buttons and menus with these ordering sticks (commandbars...) was in the course. Talked with him about this several times during the day.
Mentions: Chu, David Berton, Feds, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), fox, George Whiteley, Jan Brenkelen, Laura O'Hare, Majkrosoft (m$), Mohandas Raj (Das), Norman Shen, Suez Lima, Tik Tak, translation, in serbian