Preparations for the trip home are underway. Just bought yet another Logitech mouse, a terabyte disk, set of filters for the Fujica (the polarizer is the one that matters - the other two are just fillers), and a spare battery for nezavisni. On Newegg, of course. The guys there just keep on being great. Here's what I wrote to them, in way of feedback
Just to let you know that my visa verification has failed - I once gave my daughter wrong instructions, thinking she's trying to go to my bank account while she was at the visa verification dialog, so my card is marked as unfit for online transactions until I call the issuer.
Seeing it failed, I tried to repeat the process and pay via Paypal, and good that I didn't go through (my wishlist and cart were now empty, so I traversed back my browser history), because I noticed the laptop battery was now unavailable. It seems I'm getting the last one. So I tried to contact you, which didn't work, I was circled inside the same dialog a few times (could be my NoScript deciding that you have some external source of js?)... and meanwhile I got two emails confirming payment. So... it's OK as is, it's just that the nasty dialog from Visa is confusing, and I never remember the password and have to go through the extra questions instead - you are the only website where I shop that's actually using it, so I keep forgetting what was the last password. And it doesn't work, because the payments got through despite the verification's failure. Confirmed by logging into my account at the issuer's site, and sure enough, the two payments register there.
At least I didn't pay twice, like I once did :).
Suggested fix: work out the wrinkles with the Visa verification service, it obviously didn't return proper info. This should qualify as a false positive - the payment shouldn't go through, as the service indicated to me, but it still registered as all OK on your side. Or, if you can, have the verification happen under your control - the trip to visa's server leaves your web app in the dark a bit, and the info you get on return isn't foolproof.
Other than that, given the complexity of what you're doing, you're doing a superb job - take that from the colleague in the IT field.
In a private chat, talked with David about finding one more programmer who would take some burden off Jan's and my back. Didn't materialize yet.
Sent the final copy edits (which is a really bad description of "korektura" - the correctura, i.e. the stuff to be corrected) for the anagram book to EnigMan in Belgrade. It's funny how this worked - he'd send me a pdf of the current version of the text, I'd then
My folks remember to ask about Ricardo, „did he finally get a position he'd like and be satisfied and not to have to go to Canada to guard houses“. Reply: „Seems to have fit in... every now and then he brings a piece of hardware - 'Billy doesn't need this', 'Greetings from Billy' and such :). Some of that really is a writeoff, they calculate with some percentage of equipment to die in testing“. I.e. he's a tester at m$, temporary. Just like most of them there are temporary, for years.
Guarding the house, well, that was some guy in Vancouver, which isn't so far, inviting him to guard his house while he's away. The story didn't quite hold, though.