07-IV-2011.
Work most of the day. In late afternoon, went to the hospital to see mom. She looks a lot better, but it seems the whole treatment is humiliating - the catheter, the lassix to get her to pee as much as possible, probably the drainage as well. Brought her some goodies from home, but mostly the leafy dough stuff from the bakery (whichever, I guess "Golden ear" (of wheat, fucken english)). She asked whether my wife made those. It was a common old family in-joke to call any industrial made pastry (biscuits, napolitanke etc) as "dad made these" or some such - well, whoever went to the shop. So, keeping with my intent to amuse her as much as possible, I confirmed. "I can't eat that." Well, I thought it was something about her digestion - the stuff is loaded with margarine and young cheese, sometimes even I have trouble digesting them if I eat them hot and a lot. Only latter it occurred to me that she actually meant she won't eat what my wife makes. Anyway, there were other things that she could eat. She's being released the next day.
The new license plates have started this year. These were always a problem, because the system forever insisted on the CC-nnn-nnn format, where CC was the city, and the digits just the ordinal number. Which were hard to memorize, not too easy to read, and almost running out of space in case of Belgrade. The numbering was reset only once, around 1992; when FRY was no more, the tags just changed the coat of arms, sporting serbian flag instead of federal, but the count continued. This is the first time there are characters on the right side, so the address space is now much bigger, specially (I'm shocked!) that the character set is now not engrbian, it also contains ŠĐČĆŽ. While waiting for a cab home, after visiting mom in the evening, I saw this with YĆ, and just had to take a shot. It's nokla, so the quality is so-so.
The inclusion of these five characters was a cause for lots of noise, because it was the (IMO) right thing done all wrong. First, the vertical space given to the diacriticals was substandard, so from more than 3m C Č and Ć look the same. Setting letters without typographers, that's called making the bill without the bartender. The next blunder was that the parking was paid via cell phones and checked via cameras, where they never had these characters in their OCR routines, so the 30% of people who had these on their tags had trouble with parking (never heard what kind of trouble and how was that resolved, everybody was just screaming, nobody provided facts).
In the end, after about eight years, they stopped using these characters and went to the english 26 set. This reduced the address space to 676 letter combinations instead of 961. The funny thing, and a sign of the times, was that the screaming was not about „why did you make tags with barely visible diacriticals“, or „why don't they fix the OCR in the parking company's app“, it was only about „whose bright idea is to use our characters“. Ten years later the word autochauvinism was en vogue, and the one guy who promoted it left and right (a true loonie, though) was chided... by the same folks who despised the idea of using šđžčć. There's a mental step they made, while being unaware of it.
The thing that I can't get through my head is that, same ten years later, it turned out that the tag scanning app was written here. So, then, why didn't they make it work? Or was it that the ocring engine was bought and the rest around it written here.
[actually, Q, W, Y were also removed, as they don't exist in serbian language, X remained because of taxis, so the number of combinations on those two slots is reduced from 961 to 529]
And, en blogue:
The weird ways of Gugao
So I began writing this blog on Blogger... and in the end it seems to belong to Google. I'm posting my street photos on Panoramio, and then Google buys Panoramio.
Them being wed in this manner, I'm wedding them on this blog too. Looking at my Panoramio stats, I noticed one of the less prominent pics having a inexplicably high number of views. It's not in a specially known place, not a landmark of any kind, just an ordinary house.
Looking at individual stats for that house, I found a few places that link to it. And one of them is coming from homes.com, where they have included the google maps with the street view and the panoramic view from that certain spot, which is basically a flash page with pics from Panoramio taken by us, ordinary members.
Panoramio says we, members, have the copyright. So, I should be able to make money out of this, right?
Wrong - I don't need any money from homes.com. I want to have nothing with them. Real estate middlemen rank very low in my book, maybe just a notch above telemarketers, advertisers, pharma, pornographers, Hollywood, pimps and insurance. Banks are at the bottom.
Is there a way out of this? I can't imagine Google creating a special provision for selective refusal by copyright owners (us, members) to forbid certain customers of Google services use of their images. I guess my choice is just to pretend I'm ignorant of this and enjoy the view count. Or I could delete such images that I found linked by them. Or try to be completely absent, just like in Milošević's times, when you didn't want to be near any event his goons organized, because if his TV Bastille's cameras caught you, you may be seen on his news along with his gang. And then you'd have to wash your biography of them.
Well, here it is. I have nothing to do with any real estate agency of any kind. The cheapskates could have hired a real photographer and paid her honestly, instead of using amateurs' work for free. Well, they pay Google, but then Google doesn't pay us at all.
Mentions: blogue, engrbian, Gugao, nokla, in serbian
26-XII-2021 - 8-IV-2026