25-VII-2009.
Some ailment attacked our cucumbers, just when they climbed up to the clothesrack. Now they should start making shade. Leaves yellowed, withered. We found some oil of an indian tree, called neem - don't know whether there's a serbian word for it - so she'll spray that. We tried with sulphur, but it didn't stick. Bluestone is nowhere to be bought, allegedly banned from sales because it's a poison. Yeah right - any town has in the gardening shops, on the shelves, enough thisacides, thatacites and whatchamacides to kill all of its denizens few times over. The point is that bluestone is too cheap, margin is low, can't charge as much as they'd like, it's bulky compared to other stronger stuff which are sold in tiny bottles and cost who knows how much. On top of it, you can barely find the what's inside in the small print on the packages. On some of them it doesn't say it at all, on some you can see only when you unpack it and peel the label off - the instruction is inside, and still may not contain the contents. They handle the poisons on sheer trust.
The instruction manual has, with all the possible HTZ* warnings (about 30% of the text), list of properties (matter of fact, just advertising, 69% of the text) and then somewhere in tiny tiny print, if you manage to find it as it may be entirely missing, the composition. Allegedly, the formula is a trade secret. The folks are completely clueless about what they use to poison their lawns and selves.
Something's eating the tomatoes in the back alley row, half of it chewed off where it was close enough to bicycle tyres. Some cayenne peppers are already ripe, in bright red color. The rest are stitll dark green.
We went to Walmart less and less, and what we did go was because it was simply the geographically nearest supermarket, and because they had clothes by the yard for pittance (a dollar per yard, two dollars per yard - in the few other shops keeping the metraž... yardage goods it cost upwards of five). But they as the worst chain have a forever problem that they are attracting the poorest clientelle, that they're miserably underpaying their staff (the only rung below flipping burgers is to work in Walmart), that they are permanently understaffed, that out of the many allegedly hidden cameras maybe one quarter is actually there, the rest are fake, and even those are not guaranteed to have anyone's eye on the monitors... and the staff is nicking stuff, and so do the customers. They so have a system that the suspect customers are asked to show their receipt and their cart being checked against it at exit etc. Nina and Ender went to buy a skateboard the other evening, she wanted to try that too (and she enrolled in aikido course, beginning soon), and the cashier told them to keep the receipt, they'll need it. She probably guesstimated something as suspicious, or she got a tip (customers don't see her screen). So she was asked to show the bill at exit, which she did, but the guy yanked it out of her hand and she yanked it back and they went into a dispute.
So we decided not to venture there anymore, if you don't trust us, we trust you even less.
A new Trader Joe's opened on Hilltop (which is a ridiculous name for a location, no hill no peak, whole Virginia Beach has no hills except Mt Trashmore, which is a grass-padded old city dump, no taller than two storeys). The access is a bit screwy, because the regular way goes over the thickest section of the boulevard, or via a unwieldy exit from the highway into a sidestreet. I'll have to think of a shortcut.
It's yet another grocery chain, but with a class. For one, the staff are relaxed, courteous, they have the time for a bit of chat with the customers, and the assortment is... almost everything you can't find anywhere else. I guess they have their own supply chain, that's why. The rest of them, what one has so does the other. They all sell the same stuff, and the shops being huge, full of goods and look like they have everything doesn't mean, at all, that you have a choice on every item. Just listing the stuff that can't be found anymore - apart from bluestone, we barely managed to find lye; the acid for perm we found in the fourth drugstore, they had one last bottle; salfalada (knackwurst) are gone two years ago (and they were really good, exactly the taste the franks had when I was a kid); charcoal maybe in some places, everyone sells the pressed dust with phosphorus; edamer ball cheese, sold for half a year and gone, everyone sells just the semi-boiled bricks from allegedly different manufacturers; CFLs which weren't dyed to shine yellow, found somehow after three years; chocolates apart from Hershey's oversweetened and who knows what they contain, that's a hit and miss, there were some from some Zachary, sold for a year or two then gone; there were belgian imports for 1$/200g, then 1,30$, 1,50$, 2$, then again 1,60, then gone.
At Trader Joe's we found french cheese, rather close to kačkavalj (caccio cavale), excellent; now we also got some dutch edamer, we'll see. And belgian chocolate, „Pound plus“ brand (because they're 500g...), these we started taking regularly, did a hat trick with 5,5kg yesterday :). And we hat a long chat with the cashier girls (like everywhere, one types, one bags the goods - they have thick sack paper bags, double, when everyone else pack it in plastic). And yes, they have milk too, not more or less expensive than the competition has it, but it says it's guaranteed that the cows weren't force fed growth hormones.
Marinko gathered, from the example of how _access method was triggered, that fox's debugger isn't quite neutral; whenever you watch an object which has an _access method, the method is triggered whenever the watch window is refreshed. A school right there.
To differ from previous interenet providers, the Cox guys (company providing our phone and internet, over television cables, which we canceled, part of the same firm where Nina works) have a very fine elaborate mechanism for troubleshooting, which I needed only three times so far. It would happen that the connection knocks out, then I call them, and first a machine takes me through standard diagnostics, with a nice female recorded voice, programmed in a really smart way - for many things I can see it's checking the connection state on their side, I didn't have to say when I was done. And for the conversation, there's no „press one on your phone when you're finished“, it recognizes the voice, at least the few basic common words are coded in, more than would be unfeasible with the many different voices out there. And when that's over and the problem still isn't solved, I get a live technician on the line, who, again to differ from all previous internet providers, knows all he should know about my case, I don't have to explain all over again.
More shit on SHET front.
I: would someone be so kind to kill Elon Walthaus before I do something worse to him? If "we are not a clinic" could be branded into his hide along the way, the better.
Jan: I would, if I could
I: and WTF does he mean "sign an agreement" - Takamura at SFBC signed it last year. Again? This is plain "you can't know what you buy before you sign" - this should be illegal even in the US. "When one of you becomes President of SHET please change this policy" - I just love this :D
David: I know... I think these agreements have to renewed yearly ("by the clinic")
I: so... would you just send a reminder to Takamura in that regard, so we get this ASAP. I guess they'll change a lot of fields (judging by what I saw during that sitting with Eminah two years ago), and I may need to remodel the whole thing. Time may be tight.
Well, this seems to mean that a new version of the specifications is coming out, and as usual, they don't give it to software companies but only to their customer clinics, and then when these remember to pass them to us... So we lose three-four weeks each time. It needs to arrive at the clinic first, then it needs to be noticed and passed to the relevant person, then to someone who knows that we need it, then to have it finally sent to us... Same bullshit each time. Because they won't talk to programmers, only to clinics.
On 28th we bought a regular microscope - something suited for a high school or simpler lab, not really scientific class but no plastic toy either. And it never saw much use, because we never bought a proper set of thin glass plates and contrast tints.
I also made this shot of my favourite finger trick, which I pull from time to time to amuse the present company. I have a few more in my skill set, and didn't do any special exercise to be able to do them. It came from playing accordeon at the crucial time, stretched my tendons then and they remained so.
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* higijensko-tehnička zaštita, hygiene-technical protection
Mentions: David Berton, Ender Aquila (Ender), fox, Jan Brenkelen, Marinko Protić, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), SFBC, SHET, in serbian