27-VI-2009.
Tik died. The guinea pigs are prone to contract something on their skin, which then becomes a scab, and if the scab is in a place easy to scratch, it never heals, because their talons are sharp. This was on the neck...
So we now had only Chu.
Its pen used to be there in the middle of the room. Its bedding, of course, flew around. The heap of boxes by the window is already hiding my corner, the right monitor and zmajček are barely seen. In the largest box is the unpacked Aitchpee's printer, which Nina got when her outfit switched to work from home, so to have a home office. Next to it is my old monitor, which we never get around to getting rid of, just like the other one under the small desk by the shelf (the laptop on that desk must be nanovo). On the printer box there's a smaller box of the Dymo printer, left over from UniJewel times (so its four years and still not thrown away), and on the top of the box is my new monitor's box, which is unreasonably fat, can't believe that the pedestal was in one piece, it's almost always something to clap on.
The dark blue blot in front of the old monitor is my five pounder barbells. I got myself into stubbornly refusing to cede ground to atrophy, and even though I never did any heavy or complicated exercise - I actually did most of them lying supine - those that I did I repeated for fifty or hundred times in a row. I also had a pair of heavier weights, eight pounds, bright yellow, but these turned out to be too much, I felt later hte tendons around my clavicles tensioning, there was even some pain, so I forgot them in some corner and reverted to these.
Under the television there is the video recorder, still, though nobody can remember anymore when we turned it on last time. I don't know now whether the shoe box above the television contained veeaitchess tapes or ceedees. Probably seedees, those with boxes and labels. The two or three hundred we fried are in cakes* by the box.
Chu is barely visible here, sitting in Lena's lap.
Around the top of the shelf, below some voodoo candle holder (the red thing in the middle), I see a stock of homemade soap. (... 61 word...)
On the staircase, all the way down right, is that crank light. You crank it for about half a minute and then it has two minutes of light or thereabouts. I'm strongly disappointed, I counted on those five tiny diodes not being able to eat up that much power, and that, say, three minutes of cranking would accumulate enough power for at least half an hour of light. Which may have been correct if it contained at least an AAA battery, but nope - the piece of shit has a button battery, the kind which holds the clock on a motherboard. I shit on your sound film. The transparent box contains perhaps some screw plugs, but don't see why would we have that here, we finished work on the house two years ago. Perhaps that was some veterinarian accessory we needed for the guinea pigs.
In the patio, the cucumbers are progressing nicely up Juliška's shed. The plant on the right end is a tomato. That one will climb all the way to the roof eventually, which is two meters; the first cucumber of it we'll eat on 3rd of july, not modest in size. And we'll eat good tomatoes.
The pole in the middle of the table carries the clothes drying rack, the type with four bars strung with clotheslines. The cucumber will grow above the roof (which occurred two days later), so not to have it climb over it to Juliška's, we spanned the distance to the clothesrack with some jersey cloth strips and would lead it then in that direction. Just when it got really rich, it was attacked by something fungal, and it began yellowing and wilting, bottom leaves first. We tried several tricks, even neem oil, but nope. We had cucumbers - it's already blossoming, not that it didn't - but still it was sad to look at.
Although it's a saturday, Firriver doesn't sleep - I had to insert into a chat (with David, Laura and Das) an explanation, for some user from, I'd guess, Ireland, which directories with old data, i.e. which backups, can be fried ono a seedee and removed from disk. Because these piled up.
Some time later, Laura has a fuckup with upFeds... because it tells her that „C:\Feds\Feds 5.2.31\upFeds.exe CreateProcess failed; code 740. The requested operation requires elevation.“ Translated the „requires elevation“ as „run it as admin, in Vista speak. Said „How do I do that and why has it only happened during the last 2 installations“. „don't know, I had the vista for only a couple of weeks, but I guess right-click on the exe may offer the "run as admin" choice. You'd need the admin password, though. or you can always log out and log in as admin - again, if you have the credentials.“ „who knows, future shop set it up. I still think it's odd that I used to be able to do this no problem“.
„depends on whether the Windowses think you have the right to do that or not. We may need to rename it to SetupDbfs.exe so the Vista would let it pass - "setup" in the name makes it somehow OK and doesn't require extra rights.“
And, of course, m$ must have documented that somewhere, in tiny print. And I must have burned my fingers on that, seeing how quickly I knew what the matter was.
In START.PRG I removed the GetHomeDir function, because the same exists in the main procedure file already. This was back on eleventh, but there's a yesterday's version, probably because of some minor change.
At UA, someone suggested „The solution to the twit-filter crisis is to rename it as the oh-exhalted-one-filter. Everyone will feel happy about being on it. Yes, this seems like a great solution. Let's rename it. It would be such an honor to be in someone's exalt filter. As in "your words are too good for me to read them"? :)“. To which I added how „Our brewery back home once published an ad for "beer technologs" - the "technolog" is basically your production line engineer, in this case someone who graduated food technology. Except they were actually hiring unqualified guys to load and unload the crates into/from the trucks. They had a hard time finding anyone for the money they were paying, and these were seasonal jobs, but the students and whoever would work in the summer were more keen to be on the receiving end of the bottle than to aid its transportation... so instead of increasing the salary, they just renamed the job to make it sound pompous. Don't know whether the trick worked.“, to which Nick added „Good to see you posting. I thought maybe you had twit-filtered all of us. You can't leave without finding a replacement language ombudsman, you know.“. „Most of the time I was just busy or seeing the questions which are already answered in the FAQ or thread itself. And, frankly, I've found, about a year ago, a forum where the political atmosphere is not so... spherical. In Serbian, though - and they have some real linguists :). Imagine when one of the threads was "which language is this" and anyone supplies a mp3 or a youtube sample, to anyone's guessing :).
And know what, it's UTF-8, so anyone can quote anything in any language - I write Cyrillic there. I see that we still have
...content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
on all pages here, which is strictly western, to differ from the years of old when UA used to be international. Alphonse, I'm getting deurinated**. This takes about five minutes to fix in the template(s), and the rest is, I assume, already ready - if it worked fine in dbfs, it will work better on SQL.“
Which he, indeed, soved soon, but not anywhere high at some base class level, but rather first for the message body, then next year for private message body... I never checked whether he also got it working for message header, users' names... And, of course, I keep finding things which used to work fine until he decided to quit fox and switch to dot nyet.
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* the expression „cake“ for such stacked and packed up disks was lobbed by someone on oldwave
** These years some christian faction convinced Alphonse to apply a decency filter, so the forum app refused to accept any message which contained any of the measly four words that they don't like... Eh, had the forum been in serbian, he wouldn't even get started because the list would never be finished. While this lasted, instead of „pissed off“ I wrote „deurinated“, then „shit“ - „stool“ (excrement sometimes), „fuck“ - „know“, biblically speaking.
Mentions: Alphonse D'Alchembert, Chu, David Berton, Feds, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), fox, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Juliška, Laura O'Hare, Majkrosoft (m$), Mohandas Raj (Das), nanovo, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Nick Greene, oldwave, Tik Tak, UbiquAgora (UA), UniJewel, upFeds, zmajček, in serbian