01-IV-2010.
A day like most other days. Few chats with the gang (voice only 10 minutes, amazing - these used to take up to four hours), working with George on the web app in the evening. Took some shots of another ugly sunset with chemtrails. Nina and Ender finally posed for a few shots at the back entrance to the house.
No good april's fool joke this year.
Email from my parents, commenting the garden photos I sent.
On 2nd, more correspondence with EnigMan about proofreading his book, „World of anagrams“. He said [and I tried to translate this as literally as possible, to preserve his turns of phrase]
A big unpleasantness happened to me. :(
The computer has automatically compactized the message in inbox, and arrived at an interrupt. When I, after that, looked at the inbox, I have noticed that all the messages since 12. december 2009. until today are „torn off“!! Amog those messages are, unfortunately, also those of yours where you sent me the corrections and suggestions about the book. Though, I also looked at sent and I found two of my messages which contained your messages. As much as it seems to me, to complete the materiel I only need your message of 3. march, in which you reviewed pages 15 to 93. Do you perhaps still have that message saved? If yes, please send it again, if not, I'll have to apologize and beg you most nicely to review it once more.
Apology again for this unpredicted situation!
Morale [of the story]: never, really never have I used Outlook :) [because it's the fucken m$]. I have the message archive in an unbroken chain since 2001. and what was lost before that, blame the Neskafe (aka Netskejp) when I fumbled around the disk and broke my bludgeon there, blame me for doing while not knowing what I was doing.
Actually, later I found and put together the archives, and Burt also sent his part (though in Outlook format, so I had to get some app to repack it into some humane format... fucket, there's so much missing, what m$ managed to remove from a simple text file. So now it'd be „in an unbroken chain since 1998.“.
njalter, on his side, tries to congratulate me eester or something, mentions some Christ and God, to which one of the standard answers follows:
Trying out a moša* on me, eh? Not taking... i.e. I'm not on speaking terms with the gentlemen mentioned. I am a staunch heathen, and the staunching got rooted while living here.
I'm not helping organized religion not even in the shape of antiadvertising. There's no bad publicity. I'm even avoiding churches when taking pictures, and they're sort of hard to miss here.
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Why don't you just invent an imaginary person and walk it over the forum? Let that be a project for you. Can be done - I once put one such together and led it, or rather let it lead me, through the testing for kviskoteka back then. Passed.
This last paragraph was my attempt to get him to return to forum. Didn't pass.
I remember your essay „we're all somewhat welders*“
Really nobody's a prophet in his own village. I.e. I never know what will make one laugh, what frown. The other day Radiša peed base oil hearing the one about electronics and magic smoke (stops working when it exits)... which I picked on the nets 20 years ago... okay make that fifteen. I inserted that one here and there, it got a few giggles, that's about the size of it.
Colleague, one may write a magistral paper on the subject, who gets which jokes and who not, what's funny to someone and what isn't... I've experienced here (and that in 2003 when I was a much fresher yugo, when my habit of doing fun-as-we-go** from home was likewise strong) that people give me a bit of weird looks when I say something potentially funny, so I told my roommate (the trimestral gathering of the gang, and he was next room) that I must be already worn out, I've lost it. Nope, he said, „you're nailing it, it's just that your jokes are mostly at some remove, solved in 2nd or 3rd move... I caught myself wandering what's this guy saying... and then it clicks in my head and I start laughing like crazy and they all stare blankly at me so I stop“.
So, eh... well.
This about getting jokes or not did happen in Cueblo back at the time, in the „bachelors' pad“. Written the nearest to the original, as I remember it.
Chatted some with George about javascript and styles, because I just got it into my head to, as I'm already doing so much of jQuery, apply that to solitaire as well (hosted on sGradlj.com, the Ozzie who also hosted it seems to have given up), while I'm at it. Had trouble setting a border on an image if the image is a link. The whole script came down from 28k to 22k... I like it nicely.
On third we bought a whole ham again, probably at Keymart, they are prone to bouts of local schweinerei. Good one!
In the evening, just like that, Bajlo appeared on skype. Much better connection from his village than with my folks. Possibly the lines less congested there, who'll know.
Juliška parked strictly on the line again. Her left mirror is trespassing, though.
Ender had a weird job interview. He dropped by to buy a part for a car, one of ours or of his friend's. Knowing the shop boss from before, used to work there once and bought dozens of parts afterwards, he just casually asked „you hiring?“. „Just fill this form and come tomorrow to talk“. Next day he came, and he was impressed how she pulled out his application from the bottom of the stack, ignoring the others. Then they haggled. He asked for 8 bucks an hour, and she flatly refused to go below 9,25$, what with him needing no training and having helped customers when he happened to be around, so many times, explaining to them which parts exactly they need to buy and what to look for.
On friday they sold the corolla, 1400$. The customers appeared within 10 minutes after posting the ad - one called right away, the other had to be put on hold while he finished with the first one, third appeared while he talked with the second, and four more sent SMS messages. Three of those said they can come right away with cash. The transaction happened a few hours later, as he didn't have everything at hand - spare keys, signed title (by seller, i.e. me). When it was all ready, he lined up all five of them and said the car goes to whoever came with the money first, unless someone bids up, at least 50$. But there's no way any Amer would go above the price he saw on the screen. The winner bought it for his son, who'll have to learn the manual shift first...
We split the spoils. It would neve have made that much had they not cleaned it, post flood, washed and polished for a few days. So it turns the car itself cost me 300$ a year, and if registration, fuel, insurance etc are added, I drove ten years for a $1000 a year. That's the average - the insurance was 680$ first three years and came down to 200; the registration went from 20$ to 60). This car went all over east coast, from Orlando, FL to Harrisburg, PA, went up the Apalachies a few times, made it to Atlant and Blacksburg, went five times to Undersville, a dozen times to DC and a hundred times to Richmond.
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* „variti“ used to mean both „to digest“ and „to weld“. Then the machine engineers found their anchor in the fact that „zavariti“ (finite verb now) means only the latter, and declared that it's the proper word to use for welding, the continous verb being „zavarivati“. Therefore, „varilac“ is each one of us, „zavarivač“ is a welder. They took the pains to invent a new word to avoid confusion, and to spread the word (literally) through proper channels (ie. MPSŠC).
** you won't see me trying to translate „zajebancija“, except in this type of drive-by-shooting transsomething; the cultural difference may cause open brain fracture in more rigid minds
Mentions: Cueblo, Ender Aquila (Ender), EnigMan, George Whiteley, Juliška, kviskoteka, Majkrosoft (m$), MPSŠC, Nenad Bajlo (Bajlo), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), njalter, Reginald Burton Cape (Burt), sGradlj.com, solitaire, Undersville, yugo, in serbian