23-III-2016.
On 20th went to see Lena. She brought me this fancy lighter from Thailand (not Taiwan, as I initially misheard). Looks fancy, works great, lasts a few months. First of all, like all those high pressure lighters with catalyst coil, you can never refill it to proper pressure. This fancy flame works only on factory charge. Never mind, it still works even so. But then the engravings turn out to be done not in the metal, but rather on a thin plastic foil glued over it, which quickly gained nicks and scratches and by summer was half gone. By september, it started leaking gas. Any refill would last perhaps a day.
But it was nice and cool when it was new.
Long day on the job. Telecommuting has its ups and downs. The up is, of course, that the commute is about 1m, from the dining table to the desk, and that I can smoke, visit the bathroom, go out and breathe some fresh air, take a nap (which I recently do frequently, now increased from 10 to 15 minutes, usually about one hour after lunch). The downside is that they expect me to be around at various times a day.
The network issues at Empyria are still not quite resolved. And it's not really my job. I was working on this e-prescription interface since august, and it's pretty much rock-solid, I've even passed the certification at the vendor (aka middleman, the aggregators or whatever one may call them) and it all works swimmingly, except that this clinic is a police state, just like pretty much any other university hospital is, where all sorts of things are forbidden. Now we're getting out of some of the restrictions but there still are some errors.
I ran out of ideas - there's only so much one can do in debugging the network restrictions and their effect on simple httpGetEx() calls - but Bruce had to ask me whether I saw the email. Fuck, I was working on a completely different thing all day (the database switching mechanism, which requires faking app shutdown but not releasing the menu and toolbar, which are a serious hack we bought from some russian guy, and for which we don't have the source). And then he did exactly the wrong thing, told me that "that email is 20 hours old", i.e. I wouldn't be bothered to take a look at it. Well I wouldn't - I was mentally exhausted, high strung for days, come to think of it the high alert regime was on since december or so (specially when David sold the web2 to some Texans promising delivery in two weeks, and then Nina had her trip to Phillipines smack in the middle of the extended deadline we boxed out so I had to take over). That pushed me over the edge. I started furiously typing something nasty but wanted to type too fast, adrenalin high, then almost broke the keyboard - but hey it's a new white one that I like. So instead I just shut down the whole machine, and the nanovo too (I keep that for Skype, as I don't want m$ knowing too much about what I do on the desktop) and went fully offline for the next 24 hours. Fuck off, even programmers have a soul.
For dinner I made a popara again. Classic popara is just old bread, softened a bit with water, with some young cheese, somewhat rebaked in an oven. That got me started, and ever since 1976 (when I first had a kitchen to experiment in) I kept doing this whenever there were uninspiring leftovers in the fridge - old bread, the last 3cm of any sausage, salami, bakon, what have you, and some cheese on top. One or two eggs are entirely optional. I top it with a few squirts of ketchup (the curry one comes better, and it appeared here four years later). Crumble some oregano on top. Oregano used to be a rarity, but nowadays in the garden I mow it with švorceniger. Of course, I stopped doing this in a pan when we bought a mirko, and switched to this glass pot from 1980. Sometimes, when she's here, Nina joins me and then it's a larger pot and two forks. I still regularly do this about twice a month.
Mentions: Bruce Furlane, David Berton, Empyria, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Majkrosoft (m$), mirko, nanovo, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), švorceniger, in serbian