26-XI-1999.
Our first black friday in the US. We decided to follow the natives and go rather early in the morning to buy a TV, in Walmart. It should have been a 100$ thingy, but by the time we arrived (after 7:30, I guess) it sold out, so we bought the next one, a 125$ 19" Orion. Funny that that name would pop up after all these years, Orion was one of the first ones I ever saw. Some dad's uncle had one, and I guess some of our neighbors on šećerana. I think even the one that was in kantina or the nearby library was the same brand.
We went alone, the girls were still asleep. She put the box in the cart and rolled it to the old Peugeot (the Poozhoe), wearing the black leather jacket with fringes. On the picture, behind her, there are two guys in short sleeved shirts. The weather was still the crappy neither rain nor fog but both. The Walmart didn't seem so far now. It seemed to be behind god's feet (bogu iza nogu - rhymes in serbian), but now we knew the road.
We had the little portable TV that Emmy supplied within days after our settling at this address, but in the middle of a forest, with just one stick (not even proper rabbit ears) for an antenna, we never saw much, save for a couple of episodes of "Allo, allo", and even those were from the last seasons, which we knew by heart.
We also went to Kmart and bought a mirko. Making coffee the usual way can resume. We didn't even have to switch - we were on instant coffee for years already, just switched from Nestle to Kroger's house brand or some other. We'd keep switching from brand to brand every few months, just to keep the taste slightly varying.
Few days later, when we got the cable connected, we saw maybe a couple more of "Allo, allo" on PBS, and then never saw them again. They switched to "Are you being served" or "Keeping up appearances", thinking the britcoms were interchangeable. Well, not.
The DS9 had already finished by that time, so I never saw the final season on TV - and, by the same token, didn't even know when it started back home, so missed a few years at the start. I remember seeing some of TNG in the late eighties, when we got that 16" color TV. Anyway, got to watch the whole Voyager, now that I was at it. Wasn't too happy about it, the colors were somehow wrong, they intentionally toned it down. [checked in 2023 and yes, it was made in lively colors, it was this channel that pushed them down]
From a message to boys back home:
„BTW there's a Bosnian in the Giant grocery [explanation of ’grocery‘ as ’bakaluk‘ here]“, which is sized like Nama once was if it would have been all ground floor... we noticed when he was giving two of his countrymen a tour of the place and provied his expert explanation of various things around. I didn't tip off myself, abroad you just don't deal with our folks unless you do a thorough background check first. Instead, we're hunting for a good chance to bring Greg to approach him with a proper „đez ba, ša imaaa*“ - he practiced the pronunciation and got very good at it.
That TV served us well until january 2006.
Again a message from Boća, he's got an email from Zyanna, announcing her concert in three weeks, on occasion of publishing her new seedee. Said „what can I tell you, have a good time and send her my best“. Yeah, right, I was just thinking how to pull off a hop to the Deesee in the middle of the krismisi (v. house dictionary) rush, can just about imagine how it can be.
Then he went on about envying me for at least having the possibility to go to a concert. He was putting his drawers in order the other day and found a bunch of old tickets from concerts, and was then shocked when he remembered how many years passed since the last one...
Then some talk about how does Dune look on a deevydee... all that unsurfuckable sound, the Lynchean deep hums in the background... Now that the film is thin is a different matter, the story is huge and you just can't cram much of it in the two and a half hours even if you're Lynch himself.
Found somewhere a bit of code, dated twonyninth, which was an attempt to send email from fox by automation, through the Outlook. Which sort of worked except it didn't - the problem was, just as it was each following time, the SMTP server. Specifically, who is the sender and who is verifying his credentials. Of course it works when you send from your own server under your name. As soon as you try to make it work for the user, slow fuck ensues because who knows how and through which channels he sends his, it takes adjusting things likewise on the spot, which may not be even possible. This problem will recurr over and over for the next twenty yeaars, and there was no solution which would work everywhere.
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* literally, „whe're [you] bro, what's up“, in accent and ellisions typical of Bosnia; traditional bosnian greeting nowadays. Yup, „traditional“ and „nowadays“ in the same sentence, traditions come and go.
Mentions: 24-VII-2023., Božidar Sokolović (Boća), fox, Greg Reubenthal, house dictionary, Kantina, Meagan Marburg (Emmy), mirko, Poozhoe, šećerana, Zyanna, in serbian
4-III-2014 - 6-II-2026