18-XII-2001.
I made a bunch of screenshots of various screens in the HosTract app, VFP version and sent them to Avai. I did this quickly, because Berix sent me a ton of stuff to learn. I converted the app in some shape of GenerAll converted into VFP, though I never liked how it worked, too much DOS legacy trailing. I still didn't have a clear idea how it should work in VFP and what exactly should it do - and what would fall out of its scope. Luckily, this never got off the ground, nobody really needed it, so I didn't have to develop it to any kind of final shape - as Bill Gates would say, „this was just a demo“.
The „šta će mi život bez tople vode“ value in the functional units editbox is a line from, saying „what do I need a life for without hot water“ a parody to the old semi-folk song „what do I need a life for without you, dear“, from Indeksovo radio pozorište („Index radio theatre“), which was a popular radio show on Beograd 202, the semi-independent and semi-commercial (the other one is „owned and operated by official station“) radio, 13:00 on sundays. By this time the team went independent and mostly staged satyrical stage pieces, with a few songs like this. They also indulged in prank phone calls to classified ads, back in the eighties, and also had Steve Hannington (from Kenya) on the team at times, whenever they needed someone to play a student from Africa. The best skit with him was when he was looking for a room, and they recorded his calls, that was hilarious.
This to Anuška from Zero, who was our project manager for a while (when K.N. was fired and before the last guy jumped in):
How are you doing? Surviving the Christmas craze? Have a good one!
(... 11 word...)
I actually saw you leaving Kroger on Theo Hill last night, but was slow to react, and then would have felt a bit stupid yelling after you. You may even have run away, I don't look that tame at night, didn't want to scare you away :). BTW, I got a job - in Pennsylvania. I'll be working from home until summer (and school year end) and then we may decide to move to Harrisburg. Take a look at BerixWorld .
One of my long disputes with one of the two or three religious nuts on UA (who, luckily, were absent for many years) had this episode for today:
Oh, sure.. I'd think that whenever you get two people together you start some sort of organization. We need this to interact. It's when people are made to serve the needs of the organization rather than the other way around that it always seems to go into the dark side...
The virus which turns any religion from a personal matter into a hierarchical, army-like, power-hungry organization is the desire to spread. It inevitably needs (or leads to) getting organized, having generals, lieutenants, errand boys and probably secret agents. Have you read Rushdie's "Satanic verse". One of the layers is the political struggle of a new religion. These guys feel the urge to win - and to do that, they become something different.
Wonder what people will have to say for themselves should they stand before God to give an account for their lives... Not much I'd imagine.
So that's where the accountants got the idea they're like gods... they think he's one of them. Well, they can create different realities, right? Ones you can't distinguish from the real world.
This in a reply to Alphonse
I don't know if it's the forum or my switching from cable to DSL today, but the speed seems incredible today. Only this morning it took me maybe ten or twenty seconds after clicking on "all messages from this one" and it had more than 10-15 messages to download - now it's as second or two.
To think that I was happy with 56K (with actual speed as in 28K) just couple of years ago...
The reason for the switch, BTW, was that the cable was from Adelphia, who bought this monopoly and swam in it. The owner family bought helicopters to visit ball games around, Las Vegas etc. Which means they didn't invest in infrastructure. The cables were laid long ago, for TV, but you need routers at street level and these guys didn't add more. So the speed quickly went down, specially on a weekend, when I'd get hundreds of "USB device timed out" dialogs. It's a habit I acquired in Zero, to never turn my machine off, and then also not to close my browser either, and Alphonse's forum app refreshes its button every few minutes... and if it gets a dead line, the dialog pops up. And then another one...
Sent an email to Željko, just to tell him I got this new adress at Earthlink, forget Adelphia (and fuck Yahoo too).
Go sent a screenshot of her ethics course at the NOVA (north Virginia community college), straight A.
Back home, they had -17C, a 30 year record low. In my memory, there was no serious snow until january, and no serious freeze either. (... 41 word...) For st Nikola (tomorrow) we found some good ham. Not as dry as we'd like, but it can be pohovano so that's the plan. Nina stays at home today, she went a bit overboard with not sleeping so mom forced her. She also has some cough, but there's no fever, doesn't look ill, just needs an extra charge of batteries.
A shot at english (lack of) grammar, on UA again:
I can live with a few exceptions, it's the rules... like "any word will have at least three different meanings, depending". I think I have already mentioned the "electric pencil sharpener" which is an useless gadget, because everyone knows the electric pencils don't need to be sharpened at all. Or why do you "toss the salad", when it's actually other stuff tossed on it, and then the stuff is called dressing - so what would a "salad dressing gown" be? Btw, what are the gowns which are not for dressing? And then, when you want to buy one, you can try it out in a fitting room, so you will feel fit, and have a fit when you realize they're not selling fittings there and you have a plumbing problem. Or you have a drinking problem but are not sure what does your problem drink. Or if you smoke, the cigarette smokes as well, so you have an identity problem (like "who's the smoker here?"). Or if there's a problem with pipelining in your processor, do you nead a (lead) pipe? Where does that lead get you?
The final stage of computing will happen when AI manages to understand English without ambiguity :).
Amazingly, among other stuff, I found a few files which get generated by EONS import... and the only place where this could go would be Leevor... yet there's no communication with Leanne today, so perhaps there was some work ahead (or behind).
Mentions: 08-I-2002., Alphonse D'Alchembert, Avai, Cecilia Roxbury (Berix), EONS, GenerAll, Gorana Sredljević (Go), HosTract, Leanne Harper, Leevor, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), pohovano, UbiquAgora (UA), Zero Distance (Zero), Željko Popov, in serbian