(date is arbitrary, could have been any time this spring-fall)
At klaanca I had an interesting problem. They needed six digits printed in as big a font as possible, to be stuck on crates in a cold storage so the forklift driver could read them without leaving the seat. I went straight to the printer driver (and they had dot matrix dl2400 and 3400), using esc/p language) and stored an image of each character in a memo, then just added the positioning codes and dumped the whole composite image to the printer. Basically, I took whatever imaging software I had then, and printed one single character (I think only digits were needed) into a file, then analyzed the file, took out the image itself and saved that part into a memo. Then wrapped that up in positioning escape sequence, then wrapped that all in reset printer + images + eject page code. Took a few hours to do.
Around this time we had another stand at the Tech fair in Belgrade. Far better equipped this time, and with more pre-printed stuff, and we even had our badges designed around our fresh modern (ugly gray) logo. The girl who made the logo was quite interesting, I'd say a Herzegovinian but small of stature, and with an interesting nasal problem which was, she said, mostly resolved after a few surgeries (!). She looked kind of cute, though thin and fragile. Dunno where Vanji dug her out. I didn't like the gray, but the logo did look great and distinctive, and so did we. Never saw her again. The only other trace of her, that I know, was that she designed a similar logo, based on the same trick, for Students'.
The fair I don't quite remember. I know I did fewer days then the first year, perhaps just one. The ventilation in Hala X was even worse than before, as there were more software companies and more people on the same space.
The possible date of the small maturski for IV5pp in Bečkerek should be the 19th, but what do I know. Of this I remember even less than the one in 1994, only that I was giving away the big badges that DBA made last year. Who was there, how many of us were there, is all lost to me.
These days I was working a lot in LebarProm. Maybe that was some time this summer - don't quite remember and their floppy, while preserved, is nowadays unreadable. One thing I remember created lots of problems was the tax. Because it was correct on each invoice, however when totalling it for monthly reports, the total tax was different from the tax total from invoices. Not by much - it was perhaps less than a whole dinar different, on a total of twenty thousand, but still, this is accounting. And then it dawned on me that I was doing it the most precise way - totalling the amount to be taxed, then applying the tax rate, thus minimizing the roundoff error. Wrong. It need not be the most precise, but it has to add up. So I added the tax amount field on invoiced items table, and stored there the rounded amount for each item (retroactively too), exactly the same amount that was printed on the invoices. And then for periodic reports I just totalled that field. The result was less precise, but it added up. Of course, because it was made by addition... And, ah, I noticed that the rounding error didn't quite compensate on invoices, because there were too many of same items repeating - a supermarket would order same 20 loaves of the same bread every day, 30 pogačice etc and with dozen other such items the error would keep falling the same way over and over. I was lucky that they didn't notice this on any per-customer report, the difference would have been much worse.
The other issue was invoicing. It was done by a different division, so the girls there didn't actually know us, specially me, being in a different building at the opposite end of the big factory yard, few hundred meters away. So I had to introduce them to the system, and to explain a dozen things they'll now do differently (and more comfortably), our apps being so much more user friendly than the previous Cobol stuff they had, from kombinat's erc.
And then one of them asked „will we have the file?“ (using proper domestic term, „datoteka“ for file). „What do you mean have the file? You already have hundreds of them.“. „No, I mean the datoteka of invoices“. „Well sure, here it is, look - and I issued the „dir promkd.dbf“ command and there it was. „Nonono, I mean datoteka“. Obviously there was some disconnect, difference in terms, so I gradually asked what she meant. Was it something onscreen? Was it a report? Yes, a report. Well, do you have a sample? Sure, wait... here. And it was a simple weekly recap of invoices, and the colleague from erc, not quite knowing what he was making, put the caption „izlistana datoteka faktura“ - invoice file, listed off, which got reduced to one, wrong, word in the house slang. The title was his own way of dealing with ambiguity, that's what this report was for him. And they didn't think the report's name was nonsense or meaningless, it's from a computer, so it must be that way - and the name stuck.
Sure, I had such a report, even somewhat better - didn't have some programmer's fluff which doesn't mean much to users, but did have a couple of other things that did. All was fine, in the end.