23-II-2009.
The max consumption so far - the power bill came to 130$. That's what it was in the last apartment in winter. Ender's folks' house looks twice larger than ours (but then it contains a garage), and they never pay below 300$, the median being around 400$. Nina brought him this week so he now lives with us - partly to get cured, partly to gather knowledge, because it seems we do three hundred things opposite to regular... and have no debts.
The treatment is going to take some time, because the doctors here screwed him up and down fine, has water in the lungs often, coughs - but at least he's not in the phase when he'd fall asleep if unattended for three minutes. And the cough also subsides. We feel a bit unusual, but as we use to say, he's ours too. And it's better that they're here, so it's somewhat amusing, rather than Nina always going somewhere with him.
Lena says she won't be allowed to teach yoga courses on her own until age of 18. There's no regulation, it's just the insurance's whim. I've lost count of stupid catches for which there's no reasonable explanation, but when you say it's because of the insurance, everyone rolls up the eyes and shrugs. Vis maior (translated to american legalese, act of god).
Dad asked why are laptops so much more expensive. Well they have to be, everything needs to be smaller, the cooling is harder to do, they need to be portable and robust (the standard test is to drop it on the concrete, the better models should survive that), to use less power and whatnot, which makes them twice the price of equivalent desktop.
Nina's laptop has a design flaw - the wireless card works fine, but its antenna overheats, and over time screws up some nearby component, so the card itself now works fine (take it out, plug into a different computer, works) but the computer doesn't (take a good card from another compuer, plug it in, and its presence is still not noticed). This malfunction surfaces only afer prolonged use, so the warranty expires and the manufacturer plays dead. They say the whole DV6000 has the identical problem, and the deurinated customers are gathering for a class lawsuit. My nezavisni is the same brand, but I use it less, and it's a DV9000 series, larger and with better cooling, so I don't have that problem.
[so I thought at the time, but the nezavisni had an even worse bug, the video chip would overheat to the point where it'd melt its contacts; yes the processor is properly cooled but the piece of coper draining the heat from the video chip was not thick enough. It worked for a while more, beyond the warranty plus month mark.]
Nina and I have some flu but without temperature. We did catch such before, but this is the first serious one in these nine and change years, it's holding me since wensday. Previously, these would last two or three days. Not the kind to drop you into bed, no fever, just a bit of joint pain at times, throat inflamed then not, sniffing and sometimes sneezing, done. No sweating or other stuff.
(... 30 words...) took out the nails from the top sheet metal strip, which underlies the shingles and protects the upper edge from moisture - one side of it was nailed into ours, the other into Juliška's. Now to remove the plywood and dismantle the remainder.
In chat with David, quite early in the morning... look at the devil, skype thinks this was 4 in the morning... and of the other call in the afternoon it reports regular 16:00. Eh, the timezones and what comes of the recorded times fifteen years later.
04:09:07 David: A new price quote has been submitted from the Firriver website. Please review the following quote request: Title Prof *Last Name karavukov *Email kvuk@sezampro.yu *Position not specified *Organization gak narodni front *City BEOGRAD *Country Serbia and Montenegro *Telephone Number 00 381635554444 Fax Number 00 381 11 4445555 Please send quote via Email When would you like to install Feds V.5? Within 6 Months
04:09:17 David: One of your people ? :)
04:33:22 me: sezampro is the BBS where I have spent 12 years... but I don't know the guy.
he never wrote a message there, but emails@sezampro.yu aren't restricted to BBS members (who are my people) but apply to anyone who has SezamPro (ie. Sesame, btw) for an ISP.
however, GAK (ginekološko-akušerska klinika) in Narodnog Fronta (people's front street) is pretty much the big state clinic. So... I may ask around, if need be.04:36:11 David (y)
04:37:20 me: I'm still in touch with a bunch of people there, specially the diaspora mailing list, and from time to time I'm amazed at what people we have - one is a professor at the university, another a hardware vendor... and they all know other people, so the network is at hand.
04:38:05 David: world's small...
04:44:53 me: btw, the area code for Belgrade is 11; anything beginning with 64 or 63 is a cell phone. Skype rate is 0.11$ vs 0.25$.
And this is how the dance with the lady of GAK began. She wouldn't purchase Feds now but rather when she goes solo, in her private clinic. I, thus, got the task to add serbian as a language into Feds and to run translation to fill the strings. Partly just for kicks, partly out of caprice, partly looking ahead for the possibility if some richer customer from Russia may come up, I did it in cyrillic. Nothing came out of it, she didn't need six months but rather close to ten years to go private, and then not solo but within some other clinic, and that's when she got shooed out of GAK. Well, at least I got a constructive proof that fox can do other scripts, cyrillic for starters, but then who knows, there will be other languages.
In the afternoon chat, another big one, we had lots of trouble with skype. People would get dropped out of a call, or would lose sound (specially Das, at least twice). First Jan hosted it, then we had to drop that, so I took over. A few times I had to add people whom skype reported as already present. David: „I heard a gurgling skype sound ....“. There were ongoing support calls in the background, so Suez, Laura, Norman had to leave and then to ask to be invited back in. George was busy so jumped in by the beginning of the third hour, which was about when we started losing people, it was their dinner time (or, for me, lunchtime? ...I really don't know how to understand the times in these records, it all depends on the timezone in which I was when I downloaded them).
17:51:57 David: Just got a message from Robin Thurswell -- he will make a guest appearance on our Friday call (but wont be able to join til UK 3 pm (toronto 10 am)-- for those of you who don't know...one of the world experts in PGD-- trained at UCLondon--was Scientific Director at the Mayo Clinic -- and now at one of the largest private facilities in UK [Tower]. His topic will be " tracking of inventory, lab events and prescriptions-- a view from the Tower"
...
18:15:30 Laura: Is the data entry history for a field every wrong? A screening test wasn't appearing on the homepage for male patients at IVFUS. I looked at system config on Friday and it said it was set to female which explained it. I changed it to both and it worked - problem solved. Blanche points out that the data entry history doesn't show it being changed to female. I set it to both on July 27/07 and then Support set it to both on Feb 20/09. It looks like it changed itself to say Female. Can someone explain this? I'm warning you that Blanche may get upset and very concerned if fields are changing on their own.
18:18:11 David: :S
18:19:03 Laura: I'm hoping that someone can explain how this can happen. It did say female on Friday, but there's no record of it
As long as we can say who changed it to female and that it didn't change on it's own.
And there she assigned the task of checking what really happened to Norman. He reported „ The Data Entry History was confirmed to be an accurate reflection of the Audit Trail records (s_Audit).“... well fuckit, will he ever write „I have found“? No, it's always personless and in passive mode. Ah, here it is: „That server drives me nuts; the regional settings keeps changing back to 'English (Canada)', and I can't type much without running into trouble... It switches seemingly mid-sentence! Then there's Citrix that figures we'd NEVER wish to type more than one capital letter in succession...“
That's about the time I excused myself, have a delivery at the door. The appliance we nicknamed aquarius (vodolija), because it catches the air humidity, runs it through some filter (for there are particles, filaments), then through some minerals to give it taste, and there's potable water. It cost 1500$, and is an obvious 1.0 experimental model - most of it being the software, which was actually okay, it did exactly what it should. The trouble was in some irrelevant details - one caster was broken in transport; the pipes connecting the filters were hard to connect, took us five tries until we managed to avoid leaks. And the whole filtering part is somewhat too complicated.
But it looked nice, and we always had good water to drink, and hot water for instant coffee or tea. Because it's a standard heat exchange unit, pumps the heat into one side, which it pumps out of the other, and the cold pipes are where the air moisture condenses and gets collected into a vessel, then goes through filters and ends up in the tank on top of it. The display was colorful but gave good information, and the overall design was excellent, I specially liked the color. In the years when the white shirts are the only thing which is still not gray, such a dark blue thing.
Virginia doesn't quite have the best of water. Perhaps closer to the hills it does, but here it's just rainwater, which is gathered in artificial lakes, then gets filtered for water ducts. Not that it's bad, but it isn't good either, and the bottled water sellers' lobby always manages to postpone investment in better filtration system until furthest notice. We even mounted some throughput filter on the faucet as early as that flat in 2003 and brought it here then - it helped, but still not prime time quality.
Chu and Tik Tak are under the front window, in adjacent pens, just about behind my back. I made some timelapse video with the tiny camera on the monitor. They can be seen rummaging around, and m$ coming and going a few times.
In Feds, Jan just inserted the loading of Grigorij's library with screen candy and registering it. So the grand replacement of the classical buttons and menus with these ordering sticks (commandbars...) was in the course. Talked with him about this several times during the day.
Mentions: Chu, David Berton, Ender Aquila (Ender), Feds, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), fox, George Whiteley, Jan Brenkelen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Juliška, Laura O'Hare, Majkrosoft (m$), Mohandas Raj (Das), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), nezavisni, Norman Shen, Suez Lima, Tik Tak, translation, in serbian
17-III-2024 - 23-XII-2025