05-XI-2011.
On 31st I have only one photograph, from nokla, of the saxo loaded with styrofoam boards, about 100x50x5 cm, about twenty of them, which I laid over the asbest sheet rock boards that were covering the hole for the (once in distant future) staircase. We concluded that that hole, being almost 1x4m, is the greatest heat leak we had, so then just cover it with insulator. We did have stone wool, but it was on just tar paper on one side, and loose on the other, so it would fly around and cause itch and iritation. So we dumped it with the first big batch of junk last year.
We're switching to firewood this year. Went to the marketplace (on 1st), there are trucks with meter long chops, and we bought five cubic meters. I guess they didn't steal more than 10%, maybe 15%, by using the simple geometrical trick of showing you the side with thicker ends. I wouldn't bother, at 4000 dinars per cubic meter. They dumped it, as fast as they could, in front of the gate, and went away. It took us a few hours to line these up in the garage. I'll have to buy a chainsaw, if I didn't already.
On 2nd, later in the afternoon, Lena called - not feeling well, so what else, we got into the car and went to see her. Which wasn't so easy, had good fog on the way. I made a bunch of shots from her window, as far as the little Fujica can reach, nothing special, just shows how well you can see that you can't see much. She didn't feel that bad, just needed company, so we brought her home. Fog got worse. In the evening, around 21, we already chatted with Nina, saw Raja.
There's also a shot of my current reminder paper. I see that on 9th I procured the gasoline and flint for the lighter. Found that good zippo in the kitchen drawer in Klincaid, all good, in working condition, starts, goes, just needs fuel. I used it perhaps the whole winter, then gave up, because the gasoline kept evaporating, and it needed a refill every other day. I hate gadgets which demand that their balls be scratched all the time.
On the evening of 3rd we cracked wallnuts. We have good crackers, but our nuts are a tad too tough, so after a while I switched to use the little card-sized universal tool that Ender left in saxo's trunk - black holster, black carpet, near invisible, I found it, mine now. I'd poke the tiny stem hole with the sharp corner, designated to open a can, and would twist it a little, enough to crack the shell's structure, and then the cracker would finish it easily. Which worked swimmingly first 40 minutes, then my concentration slipped and the tip swung over my left index finger. The tool is made of high grade steel, laser cut, and that tip is surgically sharp, so the cut was straight, clean and bleeding copiously. She said the best would be to powder it with hot pepper powder, the tastest wound closer. Won't it burn? Nope, you don't have the receptors for it there, only in mucous membranes. And really, the bleeding stopped in a couple of minutes, and the next day the cut was just a thin line. Three days later couldn't find the line, except by slightly disturbed fingerprint lines. That also reset itself in a while. A miracle.
Lena was here on friday too, so we brought dad for lunch, and he got a cake from that Brižita, I recognize her style - it was her birthday - everything by our unspoken protocol.
On fifth we went to Klincaid, to redistill the weak. This season we separated the patoka and accumulated it for this, this one time. In later years we'll change the method. What garden we found the time to work had given ample fruit, which we mostly didn't have the time to pick - broccoli, cabbage and few other plants grew and overgrew, too late to pick now. Could have been a rich crop. The remaining three quarters of the garden are just weed, overhead, dry and brown.
On the way back we dropped by Zeki and Lenka, had coffee and chatted some. Then I said „about those 500€... let's convert that into milk. You owe me a ton.“ - which made him visibly happy on the spot, he agreed wholeheartedly, as he had no chance (or will) to repay, his big triper was a bust, and on top of that he lost a whole pigsty in a fire, because he lit it by lamps powered through a chinese junk extension cord. Of course the cable overheated, there's no theory that it'd be full 1,5mm2, it was barely 0,75. Later I saw we also had a couple of such cables, and stopped using them for anything serious. When I needed a good workshop or yard cable, I went to an electric supplies shop, bought a length of proper wire, plug and outlet, and put it together myself. No worries then, those work for years.
That day we took first five liters which counted against the debt - what we had before was neighborly exchange, we'd bring them vegetables, they'd give us milk.
On 6th I did some more work on the doc2pdf converter, using TxTextControl. Here's what I wrote to someone (from Das's team, same city...) about this, in april 2023:
From what I remember (looking at my code from 2011) I don't even .load() the file, the only contact between the document and the AX control is what you saw. The whole thing was about getting the right document type (9 for old style doc, 12 for docx). I remember that this trick stopped the error from appearing. If you have a different cause, well, so much from me.
One more thing: frames, if used in the document, used to create chaos in the pdf, as they were somehow floating above the coordinates of the document, and the renderer was supposed to flow the text around them, which Word did right, but Tx control didn't. We simply converted those using Word automation, and gradually phased them out, replacing the frames with other types of shapes in the template documents. Word automation had its own problems - just like anything else in Office, it worked fine in demos, but couldn't bear real load. It would fail to return memory when unloading the document, so I had to kill the word object after every 40 documents and instantiate another one.
Word was always trouble. Well, it's m$. They give you automation, then later realize that it's not used by just power users, it's used by programmers to do some heavy lifting, then they say „but it's not intended to run on a server, this is end user application“. Yeah, right, because you never even tried to make it clean and robust. It's just another case of rust holding the ship in piece.
From the blogue:
Horseradish
And they said "market will provide, as long as there is demand". The invisible hand of Adam Smith or some such guy.
Bullshit. Market is... the green market, where the peasants freely sell their product, i.e. produce. We had that in socialism, believe it or not. Free market. The green market nowadays, same here as in the US, is not a market. It's an outlet, controlled. The trick was simple: first, revoke the ban on resellers. Second, put up the subscriptions to the stalls and collect the offers. And prefer the whole year subscriptions. The real peasants, who sell when they have something to sell, can't afford that. The resellers can.
We tried the green market in the US, and it was the same. Same as here, and same as the supermarket. Same unified plastic tomatoes, same price, the only difference being that we were sort of outside. On the roadside. And eleven truck trailers were churning their refrigerators, just so we'd know the vegetables were fresh. Not exactly fresh off the vine, but fresh, for certain values of fresh.
But this is about horseradish. I love horseradish as it used to be. The kind that my dad would get into the garage to clean up and grate, so he alone would overwork his tear ducts. Didn't have goggles back then, and I wonder whether they would have helped. The recipe for those was simple: finely grated, soaked in a solution of water, vinegar and salt. That's it. You had to be very careful when eating, because any amount over a couple of grams at a time would clean your nose with fire, starting from your tonsils and going up.
Then in the US I found horseradish in neat little jars, done by the exact same recipe, but no fire. It was bland. I mean, it had the taste, but it didn't burn, and didn't have any effect on my breathing at all. The essence was gone.
Now we're back home, and I had some of dad's horseradish, and guess what: no fire. Not the same kind as it used to be. It's americanized, for lack of better word.
Yesterday, bought this:
It says "Ren" (horseradish) on the label. But...what is this:
net weight: 350g
Composition:
Root of horseradish (59%), vinegar, mayonnaise 10% (vegetable oil, water, yolk of egg, vinegar, sweetener: saccharine, mustard (water, mustard seed, vinegar, salt, spices, sweetener: saccharine), salt, stabilizers (guar gum, xantane, carob), spices, salt, citric acid E330, antioxidant: ascorbic acid E300, sodium metabisulphate E223, sweetener: saccharine E954)
Produce to be kept on a dry place and at temperature from +2°C to +21°C.
Usable by date impressid on the lid.
Lot: empressed on the lid.
So what?
First off, I wouldn't trust a company called "SremFood". "Food" doesn't mean anything in Srem. Serbian language has only a few words where o is doubled, like zoološki vrt (a zoo), zoologija (zoology), neooptimizam (what you think it is) etc, none of which are pronounced as a long u. Sounds like one of those trading post wannabe outfits, which speak this bastardized engrbian. OK, I took it too far: I don't know how they speak, I only read the labels as they print them. The main reason for this engrbian is the old belief that the merchandise with labels in foreign languages (and there can be only one) were done to some higher standards, and almost passed the muster for export but, eh, we made too much, or the date was in the wrong format so they sent back the whole train of this good stuff, or the politicians screwed up and the deal was off... but they really bought this out in the West, and liked it.
That kind of story passed for real in sixties, maybe seventies. Sometimes it was even true (though I didn't notice the food being better than what they sold here... but the yugo for the US was indeed better than what was sold locally). Nowadays, when half the items have English more prominent on them, and Serbian part of the label is either smaller or absent, this is rubbish. They are selling a cat in a bag.
And, reading the label... yes, they are. Only 59% of the real stuff. All of 10% of mayonnaise - who ever put it in there? It's a filler, and it's not even proper one, it's made with canola oil. Canola is cattle feed here. We have excellent sunflower oil, corn germ oil... and these guys make mayonnaise of canola oil? That oil was used only for railroad lanterns, when we were a poor country. Now it's food? Yep, just like in the US.
Few neat details: 1) there are three no-name companies involved, whom I wish all the luck, if they get their act straight, start printing separate labels for export and domestic market, and start some manufacturing from local vegetables. One is the importer, the other is mixing and packaging, the third is wholesale. Of course, they all made a profit. Wait, wait... importer? This sanitized (no fire, of course) horserubbish is... tada... from Austria. Nice. 2) The "Lot:" is new engrbian for "partija:". Even the internal slang at the jar filling line is engrbian. 3) If we had a judicial system faster than a rheumatic snail, I'd sue them for fraud in advertising. The label says "extra hot" (don't remember in which language, and I didn't keep the jar around after dumping the contents into garbage), and it's bland. 4) Would their profit be heavily jeopardized if they bought horseradish from locals? I've seen it grow to almost a meter. And I intend to grow my own, if only I can find heirloom, not sanitized, seeds. FU, sanitizers.
So, where is the market to supply my needs? I want my horseradish hot. I sure am not the only one who'd buy it if it was available and clearly marked. Just like I'd buy sausage, salami and a few other things if only they'd guarantee there's only the normal water content (not brimming chock full with all their emulsifier can soak) and no soy. I'm willing to pay, and I'm, again, sure I'm not the only one. Actually, I didn't find it offered in the US either. And I can't find any parmesan at all. I'd even go for the bland replica sold by Kraft, but I'd prefer the Slovenian (by Kolinska, IIRC), that we had 30 years ago.
Should I conclude the market is equally not functioning here and in the US? Or that it was functioning, at least for some foods, better in socialism, when we were a poor country?
Џаба сте кречили.
The expression which I'll meet tensome years later is „entshittification“. If I'm so often ahead of my time, why am I so often not at all pleased with that?
Mentions: blogue, Ender Aquila (Ender), engrbian, Fujica, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Jovan Dimijan (Zeki), Klincaid, Lenka Dimijan, Majkrosoft (m$), Mohandas Raj (Das), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), nokla, Ryu (Raja), saxo, triper kombinacija, yugo, in serbian
24-V-2023 - 8-IV-2026