05-X-2010.
Yesterday I lifted 10000 RSD from zipper bank's serekeš and left just 993,06 dinars on the account. Before I close it. She bought a stapler, the usual serious job for attaching cloth to wood, at Šipoš shop in First Proletarian Street*, for 1700 RSD. Changing upholstery on our old chairs soon.
Laura and Jan about Word 2007 on the Vista (the worst of windowses since W98ME), where the merge template document seems to lose its datasource and won't merge. She claims the combo works fine with her and surely we have other customers with the same, so why this one clinic? He said „the office2007 problem only seems to occur when the mailmerge document is on the network. there might be other parameters, but that is unknown yet“. Word is nothing but trouble, specially when combined with such minutiae. WTF does it matter where the template is? Fuck m$.
More sex with SHET validation rules. There's no end to it. A special case: „SFBC has Q-Live birth which is not marked as pgo_endofpreg (!)“
My upFeds and generally the setup builder seems to be churning stuff. „ SetupFeds5.30.19.exe has been released and is available from the FTP/Feds/buildsfortesting folder“.
In the afternoon Beštara came by. Being a cabbie, he can take a break whenever he wants, and having probably dropped a customer nearby, he just knocked on the door. I was alone - Lena was in Belgrade, on that prep course, she went to check on Oma, and I also could take a break whenever I wanted. The perks of working from home.
We did meet somewhere, perhaps he even gave us a ride once, or we walked by - the station his union had was in the near corner of the big parking lot that Žitni trg was - so he knew that we returned, and I dropped a hint that we're having trouble with bringing the money in. This time he had some grand ideas on how it could be done, probably yet another triper as it were, but I calmed him down with „I've just solved it, elegantly, no worries, pal, forget it“, and went on talking about life in general.
He said he's having too many women in his current life. He's divorced, and the house (here near the community center) was split between him and his ex. So he does see her a few times a week. Then there's his housemate, sort of regular, live-in wife, with whom he's mostly okay but she also has ways to nag him and grate on his nerves. So, to relax, he has another one in Čurda, daughter of one guy whom we both know, an electronic majstor, who even had a shop somewhere in the city. And he hinted there may be another from time to time.
On top of it, their daughters live with them, or at least one, probably the one who used to cooperate with Nina from time to time a few years ago, around doing web stuff. I remember she was making some serious money (okay, not thousands, hundreds, which still meant a lot).
The talk meandered off quickly, don't even remember in which direction. We probably mentioned people whom we both know - where are they now, that's what I wanted to know, to reconnect to the old gang. And then he more or less felt that he went off the network for long enough, so he drove off, back to work.
He looked sort of well - the same nimble thin guy that he always was, same manners of movement and speech. Except he had this olive brownish tan, waxy somehow, and I remembered that Aleksandar's father had that exact shade of recently decent tan which was only partially bleached by one month of fall, and now looked weird. And it turned my premonition was right, Beštara died of heart attack two months later.
Don't know when exactly the Zrenjanistika website was shut down. It worked on Wordpress, and it was beautiful, full of data from the city's history. As I write this (late february of 2026) I ramble over the history of city's pharmacies, as I noticed Cikajlo being mentioned, of which I thought it was someone's nickname or at least a špicnamet, but no, it turns it's an actual surname of one of the pharmaceutical dynasties in the city. And I remember Kid went to the guy for something, during that one year of [studying] pharmacy.
And than that marvelous site vanished, because some parajournalists, instead of honestly paying, simply stole contents from it and published under their own names, as if they wrote it themselves instead of just finding it. To avoid the hassle with lawsuits, the author simply closed and deleted the site. I found it by memory, on archive dot org. The date of the found article is about now, so as of today it was still operational.
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* this was supposed to be „street of First proletarian [brigade]“, where the last word was originally still there, we didn't have any problem with long street names. Still don't, the main street is not Maršala Tita anymore, it's „of King Aleksandar I Karađorđević“. But this street name got shortened twice - first to just „prve proleterske“ (of ~, i.e. in genitive case) to just „prva proleterska“. So it's not that the street is of a proletarian brigade, it's the proletarian street. Says so on the boards. So if anyone ventures around the world to count all of them proletarian streets, this is a good place to start, this is the „First proletarian street“.
Mentions: Aleksandar Zarin, Čurda, Feds, Jan Brenkelen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Laura O'Hare, Majkrosoft (m$), majstor, Milovan Sebešćen (Beštara), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Oma, serekeš, SFBC, SHET, špicnamet, triper kombinacija, upFeds, Zoltan Čonti (Kid), Žitni, in serbian
24-V-2023 - 25-III-2026