02-VI-2009.
Playing bejewelled2. May my worst score ever (screenshot made on 22nd) be remembered.
On the neighboring shots I seee Eleese was guesting for the weekend here. On sunday we replaced the poles holding the front door eave, which was almost falling, and the pretend poles from wrought iron were mostly rust. Two poles of 4x4 (now whether it was really 4 or just3,75...), painted in that white paint which is not allowed inside...
The birthday cake lasted somehow until sunday evening, because Nina and Ender delayed eating their pieces until they return from do-it-yourselfing, they finally replaced the engine on the nissan. Nina caught nice pink tan where her bra strap moved and where her pants pulled away, i.e. where she didn't apply the spread. The engine is in place, mechanically fitted where it should, now the wires and the guts, i.e. electricity, oil, water, 'letronics etc. That engine they bought as early as last year, and never managed to catch two weekends in a row to get it done, finally now. Starts, goes, it's just that it stalls when idling, and he forgot the gasket on the oil filter so it drips there. When that is fixed, it'll be like new.
These older cars are priced as a rarity, there's just a couple more in the area, and their owners mostly know each other, they're almost a club. The model was somehow done right, it's still made, in a new version, and we're seeing that one a lot on the road. Should have no problem to find a customer, unless solar payment* is required. Him being the one who drives around a lot, it happens that she needs to go somewhere at the same time, the nissan was the spare car for him, until further. Won't matter much even if it's sold, a real džambas** has other horses - one motorbike he got for free, the other one he got cheaply and sold much better, used the margin to buy the third one...
In Seattle, Time Warner is still negotiating the timing and terms, but has already started mixing up the staff between her team and another company from the other end of town (now under same owner). Her team boss should go there to pass the technology and practically serve as some kind of boss in the transitional period, while Go said she's already counted as a senior, i.e. people's artist of higher order, so her immediate boss and she should climb one rung up. Nobody asked the sparrows, but even they know that she knows [in serbian: is horseshod] 2-3 times more than that bhoss. Ricardo got a raise, from 12 to 15 dollars per hours (for comparison, I had 22 as an underpaid gastarbajter ten years ago). And it's at m$, where there's no permanent employment, it's forever temporary.
They should all get salaries at the Warner Bros levels in july (allegedly higher, with longer vacation). The teams are reshuffled, and the guys from Archipelago (one of previously bought companies) should work together with them, even to unite teams, while still maintaining the brand. They don't quite feel like coming over because it's far, and there's also a minor chaos reigning upstairs, neither informations nor commands trickle down in full text, so nobody really knows the whole deal, and many seem to avoid to transfer news which the public wouldn't like to hear. Though it also doesn't sound too bad, better technology spreads through the offices, gets better distributed, it's that someone will be less of a big guy than before, or will have to suffer some other sprained eyelash.
Go should switch to one of the teams where they do stuff she likes more - namely, the games she liked to play - but that would be a bit far, she'd even have to drive the car every day, or take a bus. On the other side, it still hasn't settled where she is, because if boss is moved, then the moving of his underlings a rung up, to cascadely fill the emptied spaces, should be made official, and that nobody knows yet, how will that unfold.
Dad writes „All sneakers here are either blue white or blue black and that's where the color spectrum ends“. Eh.
Here ALL the sneakers are gray, or have some gray parts. The invention of color is very recent, and the place where Go bought her orange ones are probably far ahead avantgarde. Last winter I once, to while out the time while waiting for them two to try out shoes, walked down the sneaker aisles in two or three shops, and all, but literally all, were gray, or at best white with some gray parts and gray soles. No more than 3% had some detail in color, and even that was never covering more than 10% of the surface.
Just like I'm now looking for lightbulbs which are not yellow. When these small neons started showing up, we went on buying them before they became cheap, and it was a good thing that we did so, it paid off then. They had cost some more than today, but had clean white light and are working even today, even though we bought them in the first two years and moved them so many times.
Of the bulbs we bought in the last two years (for the standing lamps, and wherever missing), two have already died and two more are getting ready, they blink at times. Manufacured by General Electric [something], chinese. And yellow. Pardon, it is called „soft white“, like the once milky bulbs, made to pull to yellow side to imitate the old incandescent bulb - that is, like, called warm color or something. Actually that among the coldest colors, around 2400 degrees Kelvin. I wanted something warmer, if not exactly 7000 kelvins like the sunlight is, but then at least 6400 like the bulbs from 2000 and 01 are. But I guess there must be some law around here that nothing is allowed to remain white...
Now the bulbs with light emiting diodes appeared, with pretty milky blueish light... and all they have in the shops (only one, for now) costs a devil and a half - one with just 9 leds costs 45$ and has a yellow filter! As Seka Sabljić said, I shit into your sound film. That is, if it can't be removed. [few years later I found out that what I saw wasn't a yellow filter, instead it was the plastic case refracting the light on edges like that; a led has its frequency which can be set to match any color you want]
For Lena the first result of those tests from a couple of weeks ago has arrived, for english. Of five or six parts, she had one point below maximum on two, the rest she maxed out. There were those who did those better than she, and were all self important, specially on composition, the „hooray, I bested Lena“. „Yes you did, but I'm still writing better than you do“. It pleased them to outdo her in at least something, at least temporarily. They are intellectually sufficiently self-aware to know that this was short range, as there is a difference between „I can write a composition better“ and „I write better“. And their professor said that those who write the best always slightly underperform on that part of the exam.
The professors voted her the best student in [exact] sciences for the whole third grade (in a school of 1600 students altogether), with the stipulation that she officially doesn't know that yet, she got just a tip from one of the professors, and at that she noticed the vote count on his desk - with just initials, though, but enough that she would know who was who among the handful of candidates. She got eight votes, the next guy four, the others two, one or none. We wondered how was it possible that someone gets a zero, and the probable explanation was that someone added his second candidate, the first being already listed by someone else.
At work, meetings galore... a separate financial meeting (not about the company's money, but in Feds, the part where the patients are billed and payments are registered and who paid what, patient or her insurance), a separate one for SFBC (they really are a penis sui generis). Some emails don't arrive into Sugar, but do to Laura's home and David's Blackberry (pron. blegberi in serbian). David is busy somewhat, rubberstamping invoices to customers. One customer complains of an error message about an esquelle command being too complex. Jan sais she shouldn't insert more than 19 straws at the time into the freezer, because of fox's inlist() function taking no more than 24 parameters, which happens only in its internal SQL, not serverside. Nope, says Das, there were 15 straws... Should she try from a different machine? To buy time until tomorrow, when Jan will look into that. Short roll call. He said he's postponing all of his list until thursday or next week because nothing's finished. I'm cleaning up the last couple of bugs in translation. Hana has nothing until Suez reports whether the thing was okay, somewhere in Lamster I guess. A discussion over FET (frozen embryo transfer) is in the plan, as DrSperm also had something to say on it, scheduling now.
I had some problem with zmajček, had to reboot in the middle of the talks. When I returned, Laura asked whether the peedyeff converter has anything to do with the email that Nick sent minutes ago. I asked myself aloud which is more hopeless, to email him or to try to phone him... well, why not both. Wrote to him first, then tried to call him. He does reply to emails eventually, and the calls he takes after about six tries. Some users see the (not-yet-)converted documents, some don't, something seems to go missing there... And the conversion is run at 0:23 every night, and all the word documents are converted into peedyeff versions thereof, and then the next day they see only the converted. Or should I just go charge each one of them a 100$ to explain individually, in person, that they can edit them until midnight, beyond that it's ciao ragezzi.
Then chatted with her for another hour and a half how are pregnancies counted in different places - how in SHET, how in CAAR, how do Ozzies do it. What's biochemical, what's clinical, where does the ectopic count, and whether in some definitions some 'not' was omitted... The times when you have to debug the specifications. And on top of thet they code ordinary values like this, e.g. counting fetal hearts: values from 1001 to 1007 represent 1 to 7, 1009 represents zero, 1008 is "no US", 1000 ectopic.
At the system level, I combed through all of the code to see where Applic.GetCaption() occurs, and found a total of just one (!) case. I expected this to happen in dozens. Because GetCaption() is a function which appears in hundreds, nope, thousands of places, it brings in the strings in current langage (even if 'language' is defined as a local variant of english - we have the canadian and british variant defined), and existence of the function in two places is no help at all. So in order to remove it from the Applic object, I checked this and found this one case somewhere in Norman's code. He was delighted to hear, cleaned it up immediately, and then so did I in the Applic class, and this counts as a successful codectomy for the day. No gift is small.
And for the next weekend, around sixth of june, Eleese was here again. The deal with Ender's former [wife] is that the kid is half-half, which is to say that she's with her on workdays and odd weekends, with him on even weekends and vacations.
----
* in serbian, „pare na sunce!“ - „money out in the sun“, i.e. let me see your cash.
** in rroma, a horsetrader
Mentions: Bejewelled2, CAAR, David Berton, Eleese Aquila (Eleese), Ender Aquila (Ender), Feds, fox, gastarbajter, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Hana Burberry, Jan Brenkelen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Laura O'Hare, Majkrosoft (m$), Mohandas Raj (Das), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Nick Scage, Norman Shen, Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), SFBC, SHET, Suez Lima, translation, zmajček, in serbian