24-I-2008.
Putting together Lena's machine. Neat. Took all evening, but looks cool and runs like mad. Now she has two monitors, four speakers, motherboard with double processor (actually zmajček is the last one in the house with a classic single core unit), cooled with five fans, out of which two are quite large, so they turn slower and more silently.
The tiny controller for the sound system was always getting dragged away - its cable is many times heavier than it. I tied it to the rear side of her new box, so it became almost a part of the machine.
"Sve novo, i uspeo je da nešto zgrumfuje" was her comment ("everything new, and he managed to Grumf something up"). Grumf is our engineering god, sort of. Nina and Ender keep grumfing her car every now and then so they stopped criticizing me when I do something like that.
I see there's the hand torch on the floor, the crank type. That is, it has a rechargeable battery and a crank (the black part swings out) so you crank it to charge it. The bulbs are LEDs, shines well but the charge is short - one minute of cranking gives you perhaps five minutes of light. Later I discovered why - the battery inside is a button, just the same as the one keeping CMOS state on a motherboard. C'mon guys, couldn't you put at least an R6 (aka AA)?
The next day I got my logitech 5.1 sound system, for 140$. After all these years with hand-me-down and pre-owned sound equipment, I may treat myself to something good. Sounds great. Over time I gathered a few albums and movies in this format, had my time with it, and then just decided it's not worth the trouble - cables etc. This equipment is still in top shape when I write this (2020) but actually not in use for almost two years now.
Four days ago Nina's playstation 2 arrived. She managed to hook it into the TV and they played all day. There was some snow during the day, didn't last until morning.
On UA:
>You should start setting out the false beacons. Try and attract a shipload of scotch.
Try first, detect later, or in arbitrary order?
Of course, he didn't understand the question, just said „?“, so „well if you say to do one thing AND the other thing, the question is whether they have to be done in that order or it's arbitrary. As in 'let's try and understand the guy' - fat use is understanding, after the guy was hanged after a fair trial“.
About teenagers and alcohol, with Cathy (whom I actually met at both conferences):
My oldest is 15 and only has a learner's permit but I have told them often .. when the time comes if they are at a party and they've been drinking or their driver has been drinking, call me and I will come and get them .. no questions asked. I'd rather pick them up at a friend's house than identify the body at the morgue.*
When some teenagers drove over a couple of teenage girls last winter, the whole right wing cabal tried to use it as a reason for a whole new wave of campaign against illegal immigrants (which the driver and his pal were). The whole local community got very loud here, basically telling Thelma Drake et al to shut up about their favorite game and do something about DUI instead, which is a huge problem here. Accidentally, within a couple of weeks (before or after this, can't remember) there was a case of a guy who had 22 cases on his file... well, files, because he somehow managed to keep only one or two per jurisdiction, and those weren't put together until he slammed a toll booth on the Chesapeake Bay bridge.
And right, I'd rather have them have a drink or two, or have their one blackout while learning the ropes, with any assistance we can give, than doing it on the side and ending in a hospital.
Thinking of half a dozen of nicest girls from my generation, who all met alcohol around 8th grade (to the point one had to have her stomach pumped out and got caffeine shots at the hospital for ethanol poisoning), only one (not the same one!) became a drinker, and it's just her walking with crutches and one more limping, from car crashes. Luckily, everyone is alive, mostly because we didn't have cars and didn't really need them - watering holes were within walking distance ;).
Ricardo finally finished work in Orlando and is en route to Seattle to join Go. By train, four days. I guess he wants to see the sights. Should arrive today. Meanwhile, she is pulling images of naked girls over the 3d models she made. I've seen those chicks later, for the Vegas game (which never got published). Sexier than real. She says she finally found a garage at a proper location to leave the car. So far she parked in places where she had to move the car each day. Now she discovered that her job isn't that far on foot.
My folks, among the rest, report that their mobile providers also engaged in creative billing. „The buyer gets for 10 months 250 dinars credit, under the condition that he pays and spends 200 dinars each month. That's a pied fake for the kids, because a regular owner doesn't spend 15 dinars a day on talks, considering that each house has a normal line too“. Of course, they offer for free what you can't use, but still have to pay later. Competition doesn't necessarily make the best one win, but te one who confuses the folks the best.
Dad asks whether I'm still abstaining from tobacco. Yes, 3,5 months and 4,5 kilograms.
They have a consolidated utility billing - they get one bil and virman for all of them (onto which they snuck some uncontracted insurance, whereby they assumed that if you start paying you're covered, only that you never knew what's covered). To which I said
Should have done long ago. They had that in Belgrade 20-25 years ago. And here there's no theory [shorthand for „not even a theoretical chance“] to introduce such a thing without a revolution. Every rat for itself. Just for phone I used to receive three bills, and could have had five if I wanted.
For water there's two bills, and that's from the city - one for water, one for sewers and rainwater, which is important here, this being the flood area. Intercity and international phone I canceled, we do that over internet now - much cheaper and also we just prepay some amount and use it while it lasts, unlike these guys who'd charge us three dollars for billing alone, and two dollars of real intercity phone charges. We have the internet, cable and phone from the same company (where Nina works, it's just that she's in some classified ads division) and they still send two bills.
But it's okay, it came down to some little stuff - those two, then power and then water every other month. I'm waiting for the real estate tax on the house to arrive, should have been in december, but the credit union folks seem to have not told them yet that it's been paid off and they aren't holding any tax escrow anymore, and the city folks are still redirecting the bill, or whatever, don't know when that will come.
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* this open fracture of grammar, whereby she mentions one child which then turns into plural on second mention, and stays there, which is caused by avoiding third person singluar, which has, oh the horrors, a gender (!)... is now normal, if not the norm.
Mentions: Alan Ford, Ender Aquila (Ender), Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), UbiquAgora (UA), virman, zmajček, in serbian