july 1990.
Yet another year when we didn't go to vacation, but at least we had this trip to Germany and few other small trips. And started moving on with the house. The upper floorboard being put on, we started getting ready to build the upper floor.
This is the month when we decided the girls may have some musical talent, and why not, get a synthesizer. Bought it from some guy in Dženk's building, and it cost perhaps about 100 DEM or thereabouts. I liked the model (a Casio) mainly because it had a ready midi interface - and I already had the cables, bought a bunch of DIN 5 and DIN 3 on that trip, so we could plug it straight into the atarist. The girls used the combination to play a tune slowly from the ST into the sizer, and press the keys themselves too, i.e. used it as a training device. I tried out a few sequencers (a shitty name for a music editing app), but they carried too much information to show in the TV resolution - which wasn't much on the Atari, you either had 320x200 with 16 colors (from a palette of 512), or twice that in only four colors out of the same palette.
Over the years, the Casio would be forgotten and remembered at random. Thirty years later, it still works just the same, and I still hate the demo button which all the kids love, it plays always the same song ("Für Adeline"), which I likewise always hate.
(reminded myself of this after reading what I wrote on sezam in august 1991):
Once at the swimming pool we met the girl from that other experimental youth company, after which the DBA was initially modeled. They gave her, a machine engineer, to draw a copy of an italian lathe (she got a workorder to pirate hardware!). She starts doing it and sees how obsolete the machine is, how many design flaws it has, all rubbish, this could be done cheaper, that smarter, that improved... but no "if it was good for Italians, it will be good for us too, don't touch anything..." and she had to copy the whole idiocy verbatim.
IOW, the matter of status, if we're comparing experts there and here, is to be respected for your knowledge, to let you do what you know how to and to respect your expert's opinion. The money is secondary, follows automatically when the first requirement is fulfilled (they'd have to find a way to express their acknowledgment, and it will come from their asses into their heads that an expert is profitable).
Among the apps I was working on, the two main ones were the buyers' analytics and production line warehousing with invoicing. Now why only buyers and not suppliers (and if anyone ever receives or pays an account, please let me know how you did it, anglophone accountants keep pretending both things are feasible), beats me, I inherited someone's half-baked app before I learned the ropes of accounting. Which caused a problem in LebarProm, when they tried to use that for suppliers, because there it goes in reverse, an invoice credits, a payment debits. To handle that somehow, I introduced an add-on, a special field with the type of analytics, which I named in an unfortunate way. The fuckup was, as usual, in the length of the fields and the trouble of putting two words into those 10 characters (for field names; for filenames it was 8, variables and routines 32). The name was „vrsta analitike“ (type of analytics), abbr. into VrAna, stored uppercase in the table header. A month later I couldn't remember what the crow (vrana) was.
Worse pearl happened in Žabalj next year, where they asked for some sales tax recapitulation. Doing a whole report would be too much, takes too long to do, so I roughed a side table and just made sure it was up to date, and showed them how to look into it. The table was supposed to be named „suma poreza“ (sum of taxes), abbreviated into SumPor... and two months later I was surprised to see sulphur (sumpor) among the tables.
And that buyers' analytics (and, on the other side, suppliers), it never needed to be a separate app, it's where the division of labor from the manual accounting was simply translated into software, who knows how long ago... Well, not the first nor the last time that an app would be done that way, to force the computers to repeat something invented by an accountant many years ago, when that was necessary to get the job done with what semiliterate staff he had at the time.
Four years later I did that much simpler, with not just haveing all of it in one general ledger, but they actually could create analytics at will, by simply ticking the „has analytics“ on the account's record. Any account with that ticked would henceforth have analytics, period - be it suppliers, buyers or whatever. And these were widely used.
This is just a look down to šećerana, on an evening with almost full moon and weird cloud coloring. We still knew how to do color negatives well.
Dad playing cards with the girls (and susjed's daughter) in the garage. Looking at the background, the leaned-to slats are actually the stack of doors and windows for the house, which we bought in 1986 from that loan. These will stay there until next year, when we'll finally install them. The bags of bavalit (bavarian something - the surface coating with ground white marble) will be used last, that's for the façade covering. The casio's box is behnd dad.
By the layout of cards, they were playing canasta.
The real chicken soup was almost a must. Seeing as it's in a glass vessel, I'd say it was made in the mirko, but she said she still cooked the meat on the rešo, just poured into this and boiled the noodles in the mirko.
It seems I smoked Bond or Best (never distinguished really, and remember even less) and she smoked the Classic.
There are three plates on the table, because the two chairs in the corners were permanently heaps of stuff. I'd pull the writing desk's chair and sit in the middle, and she would eat whenever one of us finishes. And this was an improvement over the times when I worked shifts in mašinska, though now I'd do a lot of field work, at least once or twice a week, but at least on some of other days I'd come home on time so we could eat together. It will change soon, as Nina will enroll in Zmaj and they worked lower grades in one shift and upper in the other, switching monthly. So the girls would always be in opposite shifts for the next four years. We said we could often eat all from one plate, because not even two of us would eat at the same time.
Mentions: atariST, DBA, Gradivoj Jankulov (Dženk), LebarProm, mirko, MPSŠC (mašinska), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), rešo, sezam, šećerana, Zmaj, in serbian
12-VII-2020 - 6-II-2026