In Hungary again, but this time privately, getting some job for Ileš done. He had some meter reading app (for gas or water or whatever, he said he already finished the cable billing) and it was to have a bit of code on PsionOrg, in its own language. We stayed until long, at his place (there was nobody home and he didn't have the keys so he climbed through the terrace). Some code, using the GenerAll, was written that day.
Too bad I didn't have a camera. The horizontal roof above the entrance to his building is a real botany conservatory, with fifty different plants, from simple lichens to some complicated models of ferns. Colors vary from pale green to dark rust. On that one square meter.
His apartment is a warehouse, there's too much furniture. They may be planning to move into a larger one or who knows, we barely waded through the daily room. The water heater runs gas, from the pipeline. I saw only such one before, in that house where I lived with Franci twenty years ago, but that one used a bottle, this is pipeline. And one feels the smell of gas much stronger than then, just like in the houses where it's used for cooking.
We went a bit to downtown, so I could call home, he bought me a phone card with some money on it, and with that I paid an international call from a street telephone. Lo the technological miracle, this is the first I saw that. The miracle was not in its existence, nor in my personal contact with it, it was that the cards were available at each kiosk and that each booth phone had a card reader, i.e. that the system was put in place in the short time of my absence.
Thinking it over now, I find it silly that they established that system at all, because Hungary went the way of mobile already. The big expansion we saw in effect two years ago, when Westel and GSM were fighting over primacy, which system will prevail, as they didn't talk with each other, maybe connected through the wired network. (even here, as of 2026, these phones still work, and accept these cards, but nobody's selling the cards because nobody was buying them)
This summer I took one afternoon to maintain the bicycles, the chains would rust so I scrubbed them with wire brush, and eventually oiled them. The trouble with oiling is that in these ends there's always some dust in the air, which sticks to the oil. Well, a solution for that was found - šivanol is thinner and less greasy, and attracts far fewer dust than ordinary machine oil [does].
Lena came along and asked what I was doing. I explained. Go came, and Lena reports right away, „dad is smearing bicycle with oil“. The point here is that „with oil“ should be „uljem“ (instrumental case), but she said „sa uljetom“ (accompanying instrumental, i.e. oil and I are smearing it together, and the infix -et- is quite frequent elsewhere, specially in neuter gender, but not in this case, so this was altogether funny, she managed to say it and convey her meaning, it's just silly wrong way). Of course Go, suppressing laugh, ran inside to report the latest pearl. Nina comes out and asks Lena what was dad doing. She repeated the sentence verbatim. Nina ran inside to tell mom. She also had to come out and ask, but Lena got suspicious, I said something wrong and they all laugh, so she changed tack, „sa mašćetom“ (with grease, but that'd be 'mašću', a rarer feminine gender declension). We all remember this as long as we live.
Later I stopped keeping the šivanol among my tools, but used the doubledeeforty instead. Works the same.
6-XII-2013 - 5-VIII-2026