07-III-2004.
Our family trip to Winterhill. Actually had to drive (yesterday) back to A-burg and then to the Appalachies. It's already springtime, sort of, this is Virginia and there's no snow anywhere, but it's still a bit chilly. They actually do have some snow on the slopes, blown up by a machine, so the skiing and the tubing* doesn't stop.
We got a huge room in two levels, what with a lazy boy armchair, large teevee and a full kitchen downstairs, and an equally oversized bedroom and a whirlpool tub upstairs. Which is nice, except you learn that you should take a shower first, or else you get entertained by swirls of your own keratin on the surface. In the evening we just lazed it out, watched „Catch me if you can“ and had fun with Mrvica (of course we brought her along). Nobody mentioned anything about not smoking in the rooms.
I see I wore one of (... 3 words...) bracelets, the one I had on me while negotiating in NYC last month. Boy, that must have confused them.
The thing I was supposed to build was a connection with the house switchboard and what Paige's app - so that the phone costs get included in the room bill. No matter that this is not a regular hotel, it's a timeshare, still every such establishment loves to overcharge for the use of their phone lines.
It's a nasty piece of how these interfaces are always an afterthought, they're done by companies who do other electronics and now all of a sudden they have to interact with a PC. Luckily, this one was quite primitive but simple, once I got through the specs. The specs were sparse, badly printed, something like fourth photocopy, but then everything worked as it said, and the end result was simple to use. It went through a simple RS232c cable, in a command language as obscure as a crossbreed between Hayes modem commands and hl7, produced simple text as a result and then I left the resulting records to Paige to handle and use in his app. The Hitachi is in a small wooden cabin attached to the reception hall, which is a couple of miles ahead of all the other buildings, it had to be made there because they needed some flat space for the swimming pool etc. Everything else is on a slope.
(... 59 words...)
Sent a draft article to the editor of a fox magazine, as per what we talked two years ago. We're finally doing it. It was probably the first part of „Half-baked builders“. Also received a reply from Smokin Joe's, confirms the order of six cans of tobacco (at 200g each, IIRC) and 8 cartons of cigarettes (for her).
Around this time I rushed a couple of songs that Procol Harum sang in italian (!) to Škrba's office server...
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* ha, learned that one last year in Cueblo, when we were supposed to tube down the Rio Grand, which is „sit in a tractor tube and leave the rest to gravity“.
Mentions: 05-VII-2004., Annenburg (A-burg), Cueblo, fox, Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), HL7, Mrvica, Paige S Stevenson, in serbian
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