Going back from work at stour. The snow, ice etc. I'm getting my bike from under the eaves near the entrance (main entrance faces the yard, the paper delivery door is to the street). Pushing the bike until I get to the street. A black cat coming from the right, wants to cross my path. Takes a good look at me, changes her mind and makes a u-turn.
I thought so.
That's about the time my bike tachometer went kaputt. I treated myself with the gadget few years ago, not really meaning to check my speeds (that was the side benefit: 15 km/h regular speed, and when I started down the bridge and pedaled like crazy, I'd go over 30 by the time I passed Žitni square, only imagining that the bike was falling apart), it was to see about the kilometerage*. Well, with dad and I sharing the škodilak, it turned out that in one year (most probably 1985) we clocked among us 7000 km on it. I made that much alone on the bicycle.
The tachometer took the revs by means of a ring on the front axle, from which one prong would hook between the spokes. The revs would then be transfered by a wire to the gadget, screwed on the handlebar. The snow water from the eave (bad insulation, warmed the roof) was dripping exactly on that ring, and refroze where it touched the metal. I didn't quite understand what was going on at the moment, pushed the bike and something broke in the ring.
Radoja taught me an important thing, when I came to him with a great idea how to speed up some report. He asked me how often does that report run. If it's monthly, who fucks it. If it's weekly, well, if you got nothing better to do. If it's daily, show me.
The wisdom he drove into my head is to measure programmer's time against users' time. If it takes five hours of my work to save ten minutes a day for some 20-50 people, do it. For less than that, think first, is it worth the while?
Taught me another one... to screw the maths and precision, and whatever numerical methods, minimizing the error and any tricks we learned, serves no purpose. Because there won't be any mathematical committee to decide the validity of what we did, it'll be the accountants who'll have a say on that.
The method of calculating the tax on cigarettes changed. Instead the cost price being multiplied by the rate, now the tax was supposed to be applied retroactively to the predefined retail price. So instead of multiplying the cost with 1,25 to get the retail taxed with 25%, we now need to divide the retail price by it, or multiply it with 1/1,25 (i.e. 0,80) to get the cost price. Which is all nice and dandy with the nice numbers I picked for this example, but what about 37% and other screwed up rates? 1/1,37=0,729927, but the accountants won't be dividing by 1,37, they'll multiply by 0,73 and thus get an amount different at third or fourth significant digit, and they'll claim we were wrong. And probably the sdk will check them the same way, so what is mathematically more correct is still wrong when finances are controlled.
Tie the horse where the boss tells you to...
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* yes, kilometraža is a word in serbian, the -aža being the same french -age
19-X-2016 - 25-VI-2026