Overyester another email from Boća, said the delivery of music wouldn't be a problem, as I got a good connection from Zero and he has a webmajstor already, so the guy'd give me access, he'd pass him the disk, he'd post that, I'd download at will.
Thanksgiving. We went to lunch at some professors' from Nina's school, in one of the nearby streets. The weather was crappy foggy november, neither rain nor fog, but rather a concert effort of both. Not too cold, though, felt like mid-october at home.
They had a russian sounding surname, but I wasn't too versed with the american immigrant demographics, so I didn't guess they were actually Jews. Seeing a menorah was a clue. Well, why not - except they didn't really want to even try to speak russian nor would they confess to know anything about slavic cultures or habits. The atmosphere wasn't too great, but the food was interesting. We were a curiosity, I guess, and had we performed to their expectations (whatever they were - perhaps showing some great thanks to the new country for this chance, or... I dunno) we may be invited again. I stuck to our old family policy of not making acquaintances of kids teachers until it didn't matter (i.e. they were out or almost out of school), so I felt sort of out of place, and I guess the girls did too.
We never invited them back nor made any kind of repeat contact.
Joja wrote about some OS problem (how to connect an old Xenix machine with an equally old DOS machine and transfer files), and generally wanted to know how things were going.
The phone bill for october was 98,55$, a bit steep. Studied it a bit ...
Speaking of phones... they aren't much into cell phones here. I talked with Greg about that, and he said it was easy to spread the network in Europe, with the population density there, there's more people per pole so it pays off faster. Here they try to, on one side, cut expenses and keep eyes peeled on the cost of investment into them poles, and on the other hand try to get the big cities make money for them to expand over smaller ones; the suburbia gonna wait. Actually it was one local rich guy, some Tunde, whom they pronounce Toondy (not tundy, because for german they adhere strictly to Yalta, it's fifty-fifty all the way, one they pronounce origigi, the other their own way), got more rich by building the towers and renting them to mobile providers. In a couple of places around town he showed me the land belonging to this guy, that's hectares and hectares. Of forest.
So now, at the beginning of the mobile net expansion, there are so many providers' ads. There's Cingular (which we read in serbian, as tzing-), there's ayteeentee, there's Sprint, there's Bel Atlantic, these guys, those guys. And next year, when Bel Atlantic and Jeetyee merge into Verizon, the pressure will start.
3-III-2014 - 19-VI-2024