05-X-2004.
New tangled net of my travel plans - I reported to belgian embassy that I'm finally trvelling, and they said „now that more than three months have passed, what you originally sent has expired, so send the paperwork all over“. First I need a guarantee letter from Antwerp, which I now need to wait to arrive, then need to scan the salary slips and bank statements, then to fill the request form from scratch... there's no theory that I'd make it within the scheduled time. I should have been flying on 11th october, and to fly from Belgium to Belgrade on 27th. Now there's positively no chance for that, the whole thing is delayed for minimum of ten days.
Trial run of DSS. Ow, fuckit, how that got complicated. I stayed in chat with David until 18:30, and then he went, finally, home. That was half an hour into his next day. All in all, we spanned eleven hours.
There was lots of everything, even the Access app not seeing an item which exists in escouelle database (which we can access as well), and then when you try to create it, it's just accepted. It begins complaining when you try to access it. Just chaos, nothing to see here.
A special problem was... well, a dozen of those. For example, can't reach their server from home, but I can if I go through the NYC server. Or how to know to which date do the data belong, because the date on the file changes in almost every step, and with the timezones it may be off by more than a day. Or the Citrix making some things inaccessible at times, then allows them later or the other way around. All in all a hundred tacks and nails, no wonder it took all day.
But, in substance, the thing functions, it's just the myriad details, on top of which David is such a display stickler, of the type „the image goes in the header band, 1mm from the right edge“, „all dates be in dd-MMM-yy format, across the board“, all codes need to be right aligned etc etc. None of that is hard at all, it's just the amount of it that's big.
On the shots I made in the evening I see she's playing Slobamira (i.e. 5 in a line, but with images of Sloba and Mira). The big desk is in place. I see I found a source of tobacco, there's a can of Smoking Joe's, probably already ordering by mail. There's still a roll of carpet under the window, probably let for Nina's room, when its turn comes.
On sixth we two went to Lowe's to... like, buy stuff. Don't remember whether we bought any if building related materials, it will probably be something for gardening. And when we got there, it was all in a krismisi setting, studded with tiny lightbulbs, a spruce with a small railway track with their pretend st. Nikola and reindeer harnessed to pull [his] railcar. Well duck fuck you, there's first the night-o-witches in a few weeks, by the time this guy gets the scene you'll have to dust cobwebs off him at least six times.
I couldn't miss taking this shot (among others). Well may the whole school of design fuck you, this is all imitation of glassware from hundred years ago, where's the imitation of our design from seventies, at least? I shit on your sound film. And it's all yellow except the bathroom section, despite seefyells being sold for at least five years now. Actually there's not a single table or standing lamp the shade of which would be long enough for a seefyell, it sticks out of each. Just two years ago I had to extend it with seedees.
Ah, yes, we bought some shade for Lena's window. She had a curtain, some length of cloth, sewn edges and then hooked up over the window frame, but it can't move and she can't open the window, the room gets quite hot in the afternoon (facing west).
Seventh, writing home how we fermented the cabbage in a vessel... actually sold as a trash can, which we bought and repurposed, the shape fitted. It soured quickly, it's still warm, only this week I switched from shorts to jeans, and we burst with grub. The envelope for Draginja Sejina „I sent now on saturday, being always busy when the post office is open, I even had the envelope in [my] car for ten days and until I got around to send it. Spoke with her an hour ago, we spoke at length. Said she got it overyester, everything went fine“.
Eighth, David's losing patience about the pagination, because to avoid chopping a report amid section, I'm inserting page break before each section which wouldn't fit (because there's no way to tell the automatic pagination to keep them together), which still doesn't work right each time. Also, any template sheet with origins in Antwerp, which lost its way and arrived here, will not help as it was set for A4, while here they print on letter sized paper, half a dozen rows shorter. Pagination is trouble by itself, and excel makes it much worse. We lost practically all day, we typed some hundred lines in the chat again, finished at 17:15 (his 23:15).
Here I developed a trick which sped up his, otherwise quite ingenious, tricks to deal with sheets. Specifically, when he's inserting a whole table, he makes an empty row in the sheet, then fills cells in that row one at a time, which works, but is dead snail slow, because each addressing of a cell incurs the lengthy cost of a COM call, which goes who knows how many calls deep to make that value written where it should be. Instead I found a trick to expand the range to the necessary number of rows in one step, and then write the whole set of all values for all rows in the next step - in fox I just copy all the rows into the stevka (clipboard, v. house dictionary), and in excel I just paste them into these new rows. The speedup was at least twentyfold. That's when we started being dealt good cards...
The editor-in-chief of a fox magazine tried to find me about the article I submitted, and in the end he came to the UA to ask how to find me. Well, fuckit, I just changed snail mail address, phone number and email, all in the same couple of months. Well, we found each other, and the article was published, in november issue.
Ninth. After some discussion with Škrba, he sent me the app which came with his Canon shooter, to stitch together several shots into a panorama. Then I couldn't get it to work so I sent him the shots, and then I got it to work... now I don't know which version is this, his or mine, they turned out pretty much the same. Either way, this is my first panoramix, aka autopatch. Then I went on experimenting with the technique...
Mentions: David Krakovski, DSS, fox, Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), house dictionary, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Sejini, UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian