25-III-2016.
Raja's birthday, but I didn't get to see him much, just a wave at the screen, as I was quite busy. This was supposed to be my day off, but I used it to handle a little situation. The girl form Telekom called yesterday about dad's IPTV box, which is a very old model, probably ten years old, so he should bring it in for replacement. Being unable to get an understanding with him (he still hasn't mastered the art of holding the phone against his over-ear mike, not against ear), he gave her my number. Also, they offered to bundle his two bills together at a lower rate.
So I drove downtown. Nice weather, still a bit chilly but sunny, and I did all that. No luck in renegotiating my contract (expires in june) to a higher speed, as this is DSL and I'm 1,5 km away from the phone switch. I could pay for more if I wanted, but my connection speed wouldn't be getting any better at this distance. So... about time to switch to cable, I guess. Which I mostly avoid, not wanting to pay for the TV, don't want to contribute a dime to Fox, Disney et al.
Went to buy a new unimer (digital multimeter - we still call it that after a famous old local brand from SFRY). They cost between 1000 and 9000 dinars (presently, 8€ to 73€). I picked one at 2000 because it was yellow like it should be. The others were ugly gray. Also bought a LED stripe lamp for above the sink, but it was a no go. She just prefers nothing, after having three differnt fluo tubes. The old one we installed in 1981 actually worked the longest, all the way to 1999; the latter two were plain chinese junk.
The cafe „Paradise“, 20m from that shop, has a tomato as a dot on I, because in serbian, tomato is paradajz :). The cafe closed around 2019.
Took dad then to do our party shopping, to Roda, that big gray box near the busodrome. He insisted (which means said it about ten times) that he pays this time. We bought 1,8kg of pork neck slices, boneless; 1,5kg of ćevapčići (about 6x the size of the ones I remember as a kid), two kinds of frozen sea fish (dunno the names in english), plus toilet paper and ketchup for him. In the end I had to pay because his card expired by end of last month. Still, he repaid me as soon as I got him home. The bank should have sent him a new card a month in advance. Perhaps they did and he didn't recognize it.
The day off didn't turn the way I liked. The CopyRx deadline was the next day, in two days it has to be operational. And we were still on the dev server. I didn't have the proper usernames and passwords for production. And we had connection problems here and there.
(This should be the dutch office of Firriver, perhaps not Jan but his brother)
It took about six hours with a headset on my head, running sometimes three sessions simultaneously - one chat (with Bruce and either a girl from CopyRx, a Korean with a russian male name, or that macedonian fellow and a nurse at Empyria, plus one more guy, I guess a Chinese, who was testing things and panicking at times). Incredible. I'm on this since august; we had innumerable delays, things we weren't told from the start, things nobody knew we weren't told. We went through probably six case officers at CopyRx who passed our case to each other without passing any info, so I had to explain everything over and over. We had at least one case when they just blocked our access because their security cerberi applied this or that IP filter without even bothering to check which regulars to whitelist. And after all that, our final testing took perhaps 20 minutes and then we disbanded, I took a nap, and moved the whole thing into production within the next two hours.
And, BTW, skype just decided to be unable to login (why would it want to, when it was online for weeks?), IOW it would want a reinstall because I still keep at least one of its server addresses incommunicado via etc\hosts file. So the rest of the conversations I did over the nanovo while working on the zmajček.
Sounds like an old programmer wolf bragging and trying to relight the flames of his wild days, eh? Sure sounds like that to me, but it happened at the very same keyboard on which I'm typing this.
During the whole circus Nina called a couple of times, and eventually talked called mom on her new phone (via skype, off cross, it's spied on but free, whereas the regular call is spied on and costs). I waved Raja a bit and that was it. And guess what, the image and sound were actually better than on regular machines.
(for which we later learned the cause - m$ simply lowers the quality for the whole machine when it detects content which may be lacking proof of payment, so it did happen that a 20000$ ultrasound scanner suddenly start producing images in VGA resolution)
Mentions: Bruce Furlane, CopyRx, ćevapčići, Empyria, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), Jan Brenkelen, Majkrosoft (m$), nanovo, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Ryu (Raja), zmajček, in serbian