25-III-2003.
Caught on eBay a mrz player for 128$. Turned out this one doesn't have a proper rndalica (v. house dictionary), ah the fuckup. Worse fuckup was that it was a Sony, so it croaked relatively quickly. The sound system that Go passed down to a classmate of hers was also a Sony, and it crapped with optical drives just the same, while everything else worked fine. And for the rndalica I solved the problem by churning out disks with files I'd copy to a subdirectory, then programmatically prepended random digits to the filename. So even if it has only one alphabetic order (or two) in which it'd play them, then let's pretend it's random and then swap the disk before we learn to know the next song. The cassette trauma wasn't so long ago.
To play that in the car, I had the insert which looked like a cassette and accepted a banana-terminated cable, which bluffed an electromagnetic field pretending to be caused by tape passing over the magnetic head and thus emulating a cassette... which worked but wasn't reliable and the quality of sound was limping. So I bought the cheapest car radio in Walmart, at mere 26$ (the same model, five years later, cost 34$), because it had the aux jack, which would fit a wee banana and make us happy, the signal would go through just copper, no conversion.
Wiring it in was a problem. The car radio connects via at least eight wires, mass plus four for speakers alone, but then there's few control systems which I don't have, but the standard requires them. Eh, standard - the corolla has a jack, so it only takes fitting those wires into a corresponding plug, which wasn't coming with the radio, because there's a whole chaos, each car manufacturer has its own system, its wiring specification, and the plugs for them are sold separately. It turned out that the only shop selling them in A-burg was nearby, on the twonyniner, the Crutchfield (yup, I also thought crutches were made, not grown in a field). Why them, they are the shop for hyphilistics in terminal phase, a bare good morning is gonna cost a hundred there. But no, it cost a pittance, it's still just a plug and a printed sheet with the wiring scheme.
I sweat out two shirts connecting it, I think I took a smoke break and a sip of coffee after every three wires, but I got it done eventually. Lena helped me find where does the next wire go, and then also later to fit it into the car. But it worked on first try. Now we can hit the road.
Actually, this Sony was the second player in the corolla, because I remember listening to seedees while driving to Atlanta, but then that was probably a different one (sort of remember having something from RCA, eh?) and then the Emerson (with a better rndalica was the third, once Sony croaked, as I don't think Sony lasted through to 2008.
Among the rasejani, something about ham:
me: that's not Ham, that's ham as per the standard recipe for american army, period
Škrba: the same as "danish ham"?
me: how do I know, what we had on the table was mostly from kombinat and were controlled by american miliary inspector
Stinge connects to that:
speaking of domestic products abroad... some time in the 90s, my lady and her brother lived in Venezuela. So, the said brother was much of a dandy, wore only top brands, down to the socks, and once went to NYC and came back with a coat, well done, cute solid thing. The guy said "see - when the Italian makes it, that's quality. It was cheap at 800 USD".
Then she looked at it, sure, it's premier league. Looks inside, it says Kluz :). Exported wares. She mocked him for months :).
Gary is curious as to why I haven't billed him anything recently, and generally how things are going. My response:
I figure by the time I get back the CD you fried (don't know why they call that "burn", when a pancake is a better analogy) will arrive, so I'll see what may be wrong. I'm glad that you managed to have it in some sort of working condition.
I'm doing really fine here, this job is probably the best thing that could have happened. And the gang here does appreciate and understand our weird way of making jokes - so even that is going fine.
The "working condition" related to some utility that I wrote for him, which was obviously relying on a clean instance of fox, which wasn't the case when he ran it, and I couldn't pinpoint the cause, so there were a dozen emails going back and forth all day. The main form had a Cleaner page, which meant there was lots of junk in his data, and he wanted a way to automate the cleanup. That got complicated in no time. The form had various grids, including the Big Wide Grid with 40+ columns; the ID and format (which is not really any kind of format, in classic poster parlance it was just another ID, related to some early compilations. These two appeared in
- poster grid on page1
- poster grid on page2
- poster grid on BWG page
- textbox on page2
- big grid on page1
- BWG itself
Any change in any of those was immediately propagated to all the other places. In case of multiple poster records for an event, the one poster I was editing was copied into the big grids; in case of editing in big grids, the change was propagated back into all the poster records. Took me some time to understand what he wanted and what was it that wasn't working as he expected.
Jeca emailed me back. First, it took her a while to read over sGradlj.com - lots of stuff there already - and then there's the work, she's teaching (maths) for five years now, in another mašinska but in Belgrade and a "sport tech" school, whatever that was, plus some private teaching. And she also paints, was in one of those painters' colonies.
This escalated quickly - she wanted to brag how she has a brother-by-uncle in the US, and included a friend of hers; the friend soon accused me of the classic "najbolje se Srbi bore kad prde iz dijaspore" (Serbs fight best when they fart from diaspora). I just showed her how wrong she was - I overstayed my welcome at home for at least ten years, gave my country a few extra chances, built two companies, about ten families still survive on the software I wrote, yet it's somehow me who took the easy way out. Yeah right. I put all this in an unambiguous answer and then haven't had any more emails from that source, ever.
Old desk is behind.
Got the dispensation from Orion to buy some office furniture. They were ready to cough up a thousand for a proper chair. Their preferred brand is Hermann-Miller, with fishnet back and all the proper adjustment levers, but I got what I liked better, from Berix - same number of levers but all leather. Instead, I got myself a corner desk and a small file cabinet. I nicknamed the Sony Vaio laptop I got from them Neboysha (i.e. nebojša), as per the chicken in the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons. In our translation, when Foghorn Leghorn says "Sonny boy", it comes out as "Sine Nebojša" (Neboysha, son). Also bought the cheapest possible car radio (see above) simply because it has the aux jack, so I can stuff the mp3 player's headset output in there and thus have music without interruptions and specially without ads. Just can't stand those idiots shouting at me to buy a new used car while I'm already driving a new used car. These guys are like beggars - once you give in and buy that new used car, they still won't stop shouting at you.
Went to Staples, I think - it's nearby, just about a mile - and found the desk and cabinet. I think it fit in the corolla, in parts. By 19:12 I sent an email saying "desk in place. no reboot :)".
Go was accepted into rasejani today, and got a question about video editing software right away - and look at that, she knew more then the rest of them together. Because she has such a subject in curriculum, she even got Nina to act in some piece which is mostly excerpts from Lynch's „Hotel room“ and some scenes she shot, the rest of it is just editing.
Mentions: 02-VII-2016., Annenburg (A-burg), auntie Janja, Cecilia Roxbury (Berix), fox, Gary Brandywine, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), house dictionary, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), kombinat, MPSŠC (mašinska), nebojša, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Orionware (Orion), rasejani, sGradlj.com, Stinge, in serbian
2-X-2020 - 5-VII-2026