Yesterday, I to Škrba:
Last night I ran into a guy who has Szivárvány (a swallow or a rainbow, my hungarian is getting rusty), which is a certain band from Čurda (semihungarian place by Zrenjanin), the protogenitors of šogor-wave. Šogor is actually brother-in-law, but our Hungarians use it as a general name for „related to me but fuck me if I know how“; my late father-in-law called everybody that, regardless of nationality, so it was his nickname at work. Šogor vejv had its golden age around eighties, when Hungary didn't have its own narodnjaci yet. Their variant of simplified čardaš sold so well over there, that truckloads of cassettes were delivered from Čurda to Hungary. Of course, they are as close to hungarian folk music as the Kings of Gypsum are to classic spanish guitar. For a while I was borrowing my atarist to them so they could program their synthesizers a bit, but of course I didn't see a dime of it, allegedly the season was a failure.
Then he to me:
There's one in Kikinda, called exactly „Sogor Bend“. There's a statement, for which traces exist that it is probably correct, and which is that each of their 3-4 cassettes went in Hungary at more than 100 thousand sold, of which one almost twice so. What is a fact: my neighbor across Lacika, automechanic, all of a sudden some 7-8 years ago completely renewed his workshop and today has a complete equipment for undercarriage alignment, all possible and impossible tools in the quantity as if 16 of them work in the shop (and it's just him and two sons, the shop still fits just one car), mini-equipment for vulcanization of tyres and wheel optics (doesn't advertise at all, says he won't get his yard dirty, but works by the way), pneumatic machines, tools and lifts... And a mečka [a female bear, aka merc] not older than 10-12 years (at least its paint is as shiny as on a yugo 48 hours old) and a Renault van for the band. When I ran the car to him to do the optics, he suggested it would do me good to replace the sleeves on the joints, and then from his stock he brought Dunlop sleeves which I paid to him exactly double cheaper than they cost in one shop in Novi. And it is known that all this on the parking and in the shop came from the tambour, and he's not hiding it.
And here we meddle with some eyetea business. Eh, wish I'd been smarter, today I'd have been a locksmith and would make iron gates and fences, just like my late father used to do. And would play at nights. And wouldn't have to think about antivirus packages, service packs, troughput quotas and buffer loads. A mother had two sons, one was smart and the other one did IT.
This morning when she took Lena to the school bus (i.e. nearest corner), the bus barely squiggled its way around the fisix carousels which spread over the intersection. Reason - the carousels were of the red, fireextinguishing kind, different from real carousels by having more flashing lights, being self-propelled and having a hose and a ladder. They appear also when someone complains that a squirrel climbed up a tree and doesn't know how to come down. This time there was even a fire, and the house was, accidentally, one of the few wooden ones - the rest of them are plywood or just slats. The firestorm was of incredible scale, ie. I still can't believe it actually was one - I walked there an hour later and couldn't even guess which house was it, they all look completely normal, within the framework of local definition of normal.
The auntie Ema joke (v. Fefi) is now posted among the programming jokes on sGradlj.com, though it wasn't called that yet, I still didn't buy a domain and the whole site was hosted on Geocities.
Which didn't last, I think within a year the Geocities were bought by Yahoo, and they immediately started inserting ads into my pages. Which is the sleaze of the lowest calibre, so I took the site down and moved it to my then host, I think Earthlink, i.e. to whatever space I had there as a subscriber to their services.
At Zero, we're about to go live at some hospital in California. Ford needs to know the username and password for the VPN to there, but I knew only the name, someone else typed the password for me and it stayed memorized, never saw it.
The music player we used, namely WinAmp (on headset), is now prohibited on office machines. Certified apps only, which means m$ and nothing else. Their media player is, thus, the only anointed one, and fuckit it's so slow to draw the fancy little screen, and so trying to organize my files into whatever it wants (as someone said, every app wants to be a database when it grows up), and as for playing, it's just bad. Its playlists were so damn slow on a 200MHz machine I had then, that it took minutes just to refresh the display.
So I wrote a player of my own a while ago, and today I emailed it to myself so I can finish it at home. It's using the same engine, i.e. the media player COM object, it's just that the GUI isn't unnecessarily complicated by gold plating. It was an early predecessor of the mrz pludger which I'll write 23 years later, and served the same purpose. Didn't use it for long, though, and I think the source was lost, which is not too bad, why would I ever want to use media player 6.4 OCX, it may stop working at any corner.
From Avai, Joja is leaving soon, just waiting for whichever job to come through. The Dutches eventually told him to fuck off, not in those terms, they were very much dancing around the real reasons, but he eventually got them to confess the real reasons, which were of strictly commercial nature, but they couldn't put that in writing. He got back to the airport just in time for a serious downpour, and his car stalled twice - he had to find a way to dry the cables, but at least he got home. Some others stayed by the road, waiting for the rain to stop. There's some outfit from Slovenia where he could fit in, but the trail got cold, so he may try to search again.
Meanwhile, he's asking for some help with compiling our apps into executables, because in some places where they still had DBA's apps as well, there were traces of someone messing with our code. It's been a tradition to leave source open everywhere, because if anyone was able to mess with it, he'd have to understand it first, and then we'd offer the guy a job. The compiler, ie. project manager was complaining about not finding all those path related functions from fpath.plb (later foxtools.fll). I gave him what instructions I could, and pointed him to the two tools I wrote to help complete the exe. After all, what we did in Szoftex needed them, and so I wrote them then.
In post scriptum, he said he almost missed my email, because I sent it to his Avai address, and he's barely spent five hours in the office this year, he's permanently in the field, but it was Laza who dragged him by his ears to the screen to read it.
On my side, I was trying to finish the HosTract, visual fox version, though I have no idea what was I using, probably what framework Rick left.
Then a long exchange with Vanji... told him that I was really busy these days, with Lena's birthday, then Nina's machine (linux doesn't see the network card, tried to install W98 on it just to free zmajček so I can get work done... eventually succeeded today). Told him how we get the error reports from users here - they do a screenshot of the problem, paste it into a word document, send that as attachment in an email (which adds substantially to the size of the email, but possibly the then Outlook wouldn't recognize a bitmap in the clipboard so you couldn't just paste an image into email... and I've seen this image in a doc technique as late as 2018, when it surely could, but nobody told the users). Takes some training of the users, but I've heard such a crash course take two minutes over the phone and email arrived in another three, problem solved within 30 minutes - the PC Anywhere just works. Well, except with California, noise on the modem line. But with two most important customers we can connect over internet, so a six megabyte exe ships in five minutes.
He's hiring another guy, a beginner, so the employment fund will be paying his salary for a year. Accidentally, he'll now be only the second guy in the office who speaks hungarian. Well, I said, Cica should speak some, about the level Joška spoke it first year there.
Regular trouble with the network at zzzzz... ever since we added the third box. Must be that its cable passes by some nasty machine which interferes, pretty much like the x-ray at Gemenc did.
2-IX-2022 - 7-IV-2026