25-XI-2005.
Двајздругог пазарили којешта, нарочито у Глоцу - два велика халогена рефлектора of 500 W(... 144 words...) room slippers too, all puffy and fuzzy and very colorful but all blue-green on the photos, because I adjusted the white point to halogens, and forgot to revert. The big photo session was as late as twentyfifth. The reflectors we hung on nails, which I put of the opening of the frame between the big room and the kitchen, so to have them lit from both sides, professional like. In the end, didn't like the result. The sheen on the items was just fine, but the tiny Minolta wasn't quite up to the task of rectifying the colors, something was still off.
On twonysixth we went to Richmond again, and found a parking place with miraculous ease. It seems I still haven't noticed that my shooter is adjusted for 3400K color of light, so it pulls to bluegreen... which is why this looks so. It doesn't matter that it's already november and that the leaves here finally fall off, I love to park under a tree, this only tree in that stretch of the street. Later (december 2024) she remembered that it was a ginkgo, when she was combing her memory for such a tree, she'd need its leaves to concoct something to fight garden vermin.
The girls already had a Playstation, guess a deuce, they got a television set so hooked into it, and hit it.
At work, I wrote something back in august and messed with it a bit today, about shrinking the transaction log, which keeps growing and if the last state of it is not, at times, written into the database itself, at each launch the server will read the last state of the database and then replay the whole log line by line, perform each logged transaction to achieve the current state. Which can last.
And I fiddled some about the backup, probably for the eskewell server. The idea is that it's backed up at UniJewel every evening and then downloaded, unpacked and restored on David's server, so they always have last evening's state from Nyork.
Today's wisdom:
Nice thing about switching jobs is that you can pretty much forget the bugs you left. Or, if you have to remember them, you may be paid extra.
Bad thing about switching jobs is the involuntarity of it :).
And I posted the code for the getex.prg, which I wrote as of 14-II-2002., someone needed [it]...
From email exchange with dad:
We're yet to see about the power, but judging by august (when the AC worked all the time), compared to june the consumption fell from 1800 to 800 KWh, which means a lot. Though, on the bill it's 90$ instead of 120$, so it will take some time to pay off the investment (this whole AC parade cost a total of around 2400$), specially with the power being cheaper in the winter.
We count on energy never becoming cheaper than before, and that every such investment pays over time. The other variant would have been to spend something in the vicinty of 200$ on the repair, and in the end still have the old machinery which devours electricity and works as it does (ie cools as it does). This way we have a complete automatic, the thermostat is programmed once and needs just a new set of batteries annually. It's smart enough to know when it should warm and when it should cool.
It wasn't seriously cold here until today. So far we had two-three bouts, a row of miholjsko summer then a row of rain. Since last wednesday, when Aladin („al ladi“ - „how it cools“, i.e. the AC) started working backwards (i.e. the AC started heating), it worked for some fifty hours, of which three hours this week, because the last two days it didn't switch on at all, and worked three quarts of hour on monday. The thermostat is studded with buttons like a mobile, can pull all kinds of data out of it.
Cross pumping the heat is in principle three times heaper than production, ie to produce 3 kilowatts of heat, it consumes only one. Anything else has to consume at least as much as it produces, or more. We count on it paying off in five years - which isn't much of a logic, but then it's a better investment than pushing that money into repaying the loan. Only the first year (i.e. one heating and one cooling season) the saving* should be half more than we'd save on the loan interest. We did plan to take a new AC, but maybe not this early. At least we'll live in a warm house this winter, not just two-three rooms like last year.
It was over 20 [degrees] outside yesterday, only in the evening it started blowing cold, and today [one] already needs a jacket. Which is what I always liked about zrenjanin clime: when there's mud, there's no dust; when there's dust, there's no snow, when there's snow, there's no mud. Except when it thaws and all three could be seen at the same time.
The bus to Nyork goes six hours. And it's still better than airplane, because to the airport you need to go an hour earlier, pass through search (hand luggage is ex rayed, and if for any reason you become a suspect, they frisk you or worse than that), and in the end you land 30km away from your target and need to wait for transportation, which may take another two hours, unless you take a cab, then it's 30-40 minutes. And on top of it there's no red-eye on this route. All together it's an hour shorter, ten times more expensive, and much more of a hassle than this. True, the elbow space is scarce - the bus to there was spanking new and they managed to cram 61 seat in it, plus the toilet booth which takes space of three seats, but at least didn't have to wait in a queue, not once.
The UniJewel pays my actual expenses, as per receipts I supply. Sima (i.e. Simon, but I've translated/renamed him long ago, for internal use) says that Jüzek pays various expenses without breaking a sweat, but to pay someone to eat, or anyone's hotell at a rate of more than 100$ a night, that's where he's not just stubborn, but he says he was seen making a scene at a hotel desk and almost getting into a fight over some twenty bucks. My hotel cost 140 the first night, second almost 200, so I was curious to see how will that go, but I got refunded for all of it to the last cent.
If that becomes a problem, I'd offer to be paid a lump 100$ per diem to manage myself, and would then split the amount with Mohan and nobody the wiser :).
Lena wanted to discard this, but we really liked it and the happy mother means to frame this and hang it somewhere. She did it at school, of cardboard, noodles and sandpaper. I barely managed to find an angle from which it's all visible, because these are all metallic colors, each with some sheen so the look depends a lot on the angle of light and eye. The background, houses, towers - packing box cardboard (the towers stand out by thickness of it, the dark around them is the shadow). Stars on the sky - noodles for the soup, painted silver. Lines on the house - noodles. Hills on the left - sandpaper painted copper. Tree crown on the right - crumpled paper or peeled cardboard, not sure. The shutter on the left window - upper crust of a napolitanka. The fake cobblestones bottom right, rice.
About homemade cheese... Takes about five liters of milk, plus a quarter of some stronger kind (buttermilk they call it here), which I don't know what we'd call, that's the greasier kind, for the coffee. And the milk for the cheese we take full fat, of 4$ - our regular is 2%. Interestingly, until a couple of years ago all milk was priced the same no matter how much it was skimmed; now the price strolls, so full fat costs up to 3,60$ while fully skimmed is below three per gallon.
When you observe that the ordinary cheese is not below 3,20$ per pound, and any better one costs at least five, the three-part steel vessel of 35$ in which she does it already paid off. Not to mention the pleasure :).
About Nina's driving: she's doing fine, maybe even better than I did. Nothing to be amazed at, her instructor has some pedagogy, and remembers well how his instructor annoyed him :). She's gaining the sense of the pedals, her starts and stops are getting softer, now only to master the petty maneuvering and gain the feeling for the reach of the corners of the vehicle, and we can venture into traffic.
In news from home, Števa is being cured from drinking, daughter drives him to the hospital daily. Imagine, they were late to pay the phone bill, so it's tued off. They can't call, but others may get connection to them. Means he's off to the deep end. And what we spoke last summer, he didn't sound particularly at home, but at least spoke clearly and what he said made sense.
There was always booze at DBA, but him I didn't see with a glass; Sale and Fefi drank more and more often. But I also don't remember him driving on the way back ever - at the customers', he never refused. Speaking of them, Vanji is working in Libya, says the dough is good but he has to stay there few months at a time, then few weeks at home.
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* not „a savings“, please!
Mentions: 14-II-2002., Aleksandar Raskov (Sale), David Krakovski, DBA, Ferenc Farkaš (Fefi), homemade, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Mohan Merchant, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Simon Buchs (Sima), Stevan Garaj (Števa), UniJewel, Vilmoš Baranji (Vanji), Yisaac Kwiatnik (Jüzek), in serbian
14-VIII-2024 - 25-III-2026