02-III-2006.
Ricardo made these specs and that's what I ordered: MB ASUS A8N5X NF4 939, VGA LEADTEK PCIE 128M PX6200TC R (served fine until 2018), power supply ANTEC TPII-480 BLUE RT, ATHLON 64 3000+ 1.8G 90NM R (my first 64-bit processor, though I ran 32-bit XP at the time) and 512Mx2|CORSAIR D400 VS1GBKIT400.
The monitor was still the same old 19" crt I got from Zero. The old box was rebooting too often, couldn't get much done last few days.
So I completed the purchases, got all the parts and have put together the new incarnation of zmajček, the #2. Back in the old big box, as the tall fan couldn't slide in through the opening in the sliding box. And actually I liked this box better. It held Lena's computer for a while, but then she got a brand new one, and this box was unused. Here's what I reported for oldwave:
...when I was rebuilding the machine three years ago. Inserted the new disk, made it the boss, the old one the servant, raised w2k and shoved everything in, and then took out the old disk. And there was a sight to see: I partitioned the new disk while it was the butler, and now that it became the boss its partitions are D: and F:, and the C: and E: vanished with the old one :)
But no matter, so I at least lived without a C: partition for a year and a half, and installed oodles of stuff, saw loads of code written dirty, such as doesn't know how to breathe if it can't scribble over the C: disk. One can't believe how many are trying to do such things :).
Then something broke, I reinstalled the W2k, and there's the screwup, it's C: and F: disk now. Since then I held one autoexec with „subst d: c:\“ and it all functioned just fine. When I added another disk, I partitioned it into M: N: and O:, and when daughter asked „which letters you consume for the second disk“, „ima m n o disk“ (there's m n o disk), she heard „imam no disk“ (I have no disk) :).
And, um, yes, as part of diagnostics for the old [mother]board (which actually still works, just croaks sometimes), I shoved HR SP1, and noticed a few things:
- it didn't ask, not at all, where to install itself, just created c:\windows... just when I wanted to install it into c:\njhr, which would confuse half of the flimsies
- the m$ nicely said that all the sopstver (v. house dictionary) has to swear upon the registratura and that other places for pee-marking the teritory will not be recognized. But theno only Ofis and some Sony's software that came with the burner refused to work, i.e. only them I really had to reinstall. Also AVG didn't quite agree to work, so I copied for it some section from the old registratura, after which it reported that I should refresh the installation because something got discombobulated. Passed on third try.
Everything else, but literally everything else just worked, even m$'s stuff (i.e. both versions of fox, eight and nine, and I tried the seven as well, works). Open Ofis lost some of my toolbar layouts, some apps required copying of deeellells from c:\w2k\system32 into the new one, had to move some things from old C:\Documents and Settings\... into the new one. And that is all.
Which is to say that the merry coder folks is so enchanted with the idea of keeping all the eggs in the same basket. They write something there just pro forma, because the boss of the system (m$) demands so, but they themselves almost don't need it.
Marinko was asking something about COM objects, eh.
News from home, dad says they may still get another round of snow, and it was already -26 last february, this time it didn't go below -17, so it's not that bad, just rain and a few flakes. Over here, it's finally getting cold, windy, temperature around zero. Air is dry, but amazingly the static electricity isn't so bad this winter. In Kroger the boss took my complaint to heart and ordered some other wax for the plastic floor tiles, so I'm not getting hit with some voltage every time I touch an item on a shelf. For leaving the car I already have a honed skill, foot touches the ground first, so it goes through the sole. And these southerners are crazy, it's never cold enough - we wear padded jackets and they wear shorts, t-shirts, slippers.
Winter doesn't change much in driving habits here, Amers in their cars behave as if in kitchen - make phone calls, drink coffee, lift a leg on the table/dashboard, check their makeup, have a dog in their lap... one can't expect that to change because of a paltry 2mm of snow on the road. So you see them stepping on it and waltzing through the green light.
David doesn't have time to breathe, he's not even checking my progress. I did deliver what I promised, and on time (ok, 15 days instead of 14, but that was caused by hardware), and now I'm waiting for him to take a look at it. And then it should be back to the bigger app, that I haven't touched for three months, ouch. Remember, remember... what's where. Specially now that we're trying to take over the production and workorders from that horrible Access app written by that fucker (who still got rich on it, has a huge macmansion in an expensive part of NYC).
Nina is learning to drive. These days we practiced city driving, had a tour to the airport. The thing she didn't master (and probably never will) is parallel parking. I faked one in the back alley, lined up trash cans and the old door to denote the car in front and the rear, and she didn't quite get it, saying the height of the door doesn't match the height of the curb. But then most Americans never master the technique. She's going for the exam this saturday. Tomorrow's a friday, so I'll run her through rush hour. Then she plans to visit home, having graduated recently, her usual european trip.
n.b. This page became somewhat more popular than the averaga, because of all the brand names in the first paragraph. People keep looking for them, and the Gugao finds this... trove of technical information.
Mentions: David Krakovski, fox, Gugao, house dictionary, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Majkrosoft (m$), Marinko Protić, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), oldwave, Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), Zero Distance (Zero), zmajček, in serbian
23-IX-2020 - 5-VII-2026