09-I-2013.
Nothing much in the beginning of the year. (... 33 words...)
Lena was here on 2nd, and brought johana in in the evening, to pet her while we talk with Go on skype. She was doing her homework, lined up some things on the armchair below the window in the yellow room and took to painting that.
On 3rd we talked a lot with Go again. Neša, how ever he looked thin and scrawny first couple of months, is now fully rounded, skin is tight, shines like a full moon. Talked on 5th again.
On seventh I took this shot of the (near) final version of the painting. This is where she again went on with her threedee effects, she does that well. For lunch, of course, dad came, we had the full programme - soup, roast shoulder, česnica*. Drank his brandy, there was none of ours.
(... 2 words...)
More woodwork. On 8th (... 19 words...), and then next in line was a shelf above my desk, three rows, unaligned.
As I see, one of the old brown ceramic cups is still alive, I think bought back then in SR Romania, now with flowers painted. I had one of those in Hungary, for coffee, and now this one holds pencils. On the right end of the table there's a stack of papers and a triangle(... 12 words...). In the coffee can there's tobacco, we're buying it surreptitiously on the green market third month in a row, keeping an eye out for žardinjerija. That's not how it should be done, it's a hit and miss, never find the same guy twice, the quality varies. We need a reliable supplier. This way we sometimes get bad stuff.
There's a phone on my desk, the third. We found the old Tompson or whatever from last century, same as the one we had over there for a while, and likewise replaced it, when I felt like treating myself with a gadget, with something multipart, with handheld that we can carry around and use as a walkie talkie if needed. Then dad complained how that phone was bad, he can't understand a thing we say, so he bought us this Panasonic. The understanding didn't improve, because his problem (which I understood later) was that he held the headset's speaker against his ear, where he hears nothing, not against the hearing aid's microphone.
The tiny table in the corner is from tanti, she gave it to us when we moved here.
The lam which we bought two years ago when we were making brandy, is now affixed to the desk, but still no good, it's too low and always something snags against it. There's also the mirkowave (see mirko) rag for spectacles, a can with old negatives (the cardboard frame for reshooting them is on the right desk, still not finished), a length of green insulated thick wire which holds the webcam (same one from 2003), Sennheiser headset (from 2007) and the spitter printer which we rarely use. We practically gave up on it, for it prints five sheets in black and white and then complains how it ran out of yellow and black color. You have to blacks, you moron, don't bullshit about spending 20g of ink on five sheets. Scumbag.
On ninth, with Laura and Hana (at 1:30!) about some test install with escuelle, something somewhere now doesn't work now does. Some sore spots in CAAR, the 2013. version has new lookups for just about everything, and there's always more of that to be done. And this is just by the specs, once the nice ladies there at CAAR (I even talked with them a couple of times, pleasant company) start getting the data from some six clinics of ours, more of what was misunderstood will emerge...
Geoff complains that he's out in the field and forgot his mobile, communicates by email and skype alone, „as if I forgot a leg“.
David is clobbering some guy at Oxford to enchant the lady from Hubblesex to give us login access so we can work. Around the dog then through the small door. She's got a problem for having installed 64-bit Office, and some of our reports use VBA, which is then a problem because we're 32-bit. Perhaps downgrade her Office to 32-bit? Jan found how that can be done. This conversation took until midnight, in installments.
Jan got it into his head to have metadata for conversions, with field descriptions, formulae and whatnot. Mmmm... if it was menus or buttons or any such thing, where metadata actually save you lots of code, I'd go for it. This is a one-off, one clinic is converted exactly once and never again, and I somehow prefer to have it easily readable in neat code, than to hunt for relevant records in the metatables. Specially that it take me five seconds to steal some of my code from one clinic's conversion and paste into another, while copying relevant records would take at least five minutes. It begins to look to me that he's looking for a way to cram various ungainly gangly bits through identical square holes. To make it worse, this is a belgian clinic, one of the three that we have in two similarly named cities. We fucked up several times talking about them, and not realizing we were not on the same clinic.
By evening, Arpi and his friend**, i.e. Dragan's dad, came to have a sit and drink (Arpi had coffee...). The friend was amazed by Lena's painting, „it's like a photograph“... and then at some other time commented someone's photograph as being „pretty as a painting“.
The lamp, as I see, was already rescrewed to hang down from the shelf. Still not how I imagined it, but already much better. Good enough.
Then a couple of days of nothing much, just buzzing around and preparing. On twelfth, straight to Surčin, Nina, Ender and Raja have arrived. For dinner, of course, a gulaš. It's a must.
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* the serbian christmas cake.
** child's spouse's father... we have a few weird relationship names, but this one takes the cake
Mentions: Arpad Gunaroši (Arpi), CAAR, David Berton, Dragan Umljanić, Ender Aquila (Ender), Geoff Gearney, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Hana Burberry, Jan Brenkelen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Johana, Laura O'Hare, mirko, Nenad Berger (Neša), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Ryu (Raja), tanti, žardinjerija, in serbian