02-IX-2011.
After fifty years, a rerun: our street (different street now) is getting asphalt. This time we paid for it, back in 1986. Well, they took their time. At least, some lady engineer in the city's urban development insisted that we get proper width, not the garden path barely sufficient for one vehicle, like the neighboring streets got (for 1996 elections). And the manholes are flat with the blacktop. The main street which connects all ten of sidestreets is a slalom course - very few manholes are at proper heights, and most of them are pot-like, where the middle is supposed to be filled with asphalt. They initially were, but it gradually wore out, so now they're pots again. Anywhere else on the planet the drunk drivers are zig-zagging and sober drivers drive straight. Here it's the opposite.
In other pictures, Go and Stanley are in California, somewhere on the coast, driving around. Sleeping in a beemer station wagon.
At Firriver there's a brief fashion of trying to „tweet your activities“, i.e. just write a sentence into the communal chat about what you're doing at the moment. However it's not in the whole communal chat, it's jst Jan, Norman, David and me. Me being there twice, once with -ic and once with -ić. My contribution this morning is that I was trying to catch why some controls on the Belrap page don't get focus when the user clicks on lstErrors. That list has all the validation errors, and clicking on any error should bring up the page (the page has its own set of pages, actually) and focus on the control which has the bad value. Norman was on TDL (whatever that was, I think some analyzer machine attached to a PC) and compatibility of bMx (BioMerieux, yet another analyzer) with SQL server. David was doing more paperwork for the clinics in Cairo (yes, Egypt) and Atlanta. Jan was on Crystal Reports preview window, which was floating over the Feds main window, while the toolbar with controls for it was still on that main window and so frequently hidden behind. Moving the toolbar to preview window. Still waiting for sample data and data dictionary for the „redcap stuff we talked about with SFBC“. Probably another attempt to get the patients do the data entry, not nurses nor doctors.
For family chats, we were trying to get rid of skype and switch to ooVoo. Worked swimmingly for a couple of weeks, but then they wanted money or had privacy issues or forced ads on us, so we gave up on it.
On 4th, went with Lena to Kikinda, to visit Škrba. All regular - coffee and a drink at their home, dinner in a restaurant, coffee and cakes in a cafe on the main square. Their daughter is same age as Lena, just a couple of months younger. Both are college students real soon now, just waiting to pass qualifications. They seemed to have made contact, but then never met again - not studying in the same city.
On fifth Johana had a litter of eight - two black ones, two dark gray ones, two medium gray ones, two light gray ones.
On sixth, en blogue:
Internet account
Today I tried to send a Libre Office document as a pdf attachment to an email, which I regularly did before. This time, due to reinstall of everything (which is a periodic toothache which I contract every couple of years, this time because my system disk crashed), something in this edition of Windows didn't quite catch what is my email client... so it went to the regular route of "no email client? use default".
Now, this being W2003R2, it still thinks that everyone should start with Outlook Express, of all things - the nasty little piece of work which can't even be uninstalled, unless you know how to boot in console mode. I don't, I'm just a simple programmer with less than 30 years of experience.
So I get, tada... Internet connection wizard, no less. The aggregated wisdom of Redmond wants to help me, with all its wizardry, to finally get connected to The Internet.
Now, let's see... I'm writing this in a browser, so I should be connected already. I'm already using the internet for FTP to about a dozen places using three different clients (one of which is the Chilkat ActiveX which I use in my code), I got email to three addresses (and have a dozen dead addresses, but these happened before this installation, so it doesn't know about them), I use Terminal Services* regularly, GoToMeeting, LogMeIn, Skype, Oovoo, and about twenty pieces of software probably call home regularly... using what, two tin cans and a string? Because it seems I was mistaken: if Microsoft says I need to connect to The Internet, then it must be that I'm not connected at all.
So I try to cancel the wizard, and I get this (not worth a screenshot - this being a messagebox, a simple ctrl+c copies all text on it to the clipboard, which is a little known fact):
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Internet Connection Wizard
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The new Internet account has not been created yet.Are you sure you want to exit the wizard?
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Yes; No
---------------------------So the wizard thinks I need an "internet account". Great. As if there is a single account for everyone on one Internet. Though it does say "When you send e-mail, your name will appear in the From field of the outgoing message.", the caption is still "Internet connection wizard". Not "Email account wizard", no. Specially not "Outlook Express wizard". Outlook Express is the internet.
Just goes to show (nobody ever explained to me where exactly does it go) how confused was Microsoft when they designed the web stuff early on. And this being a 2003 edition of them Windowses, this is about ten years into the game, and they still weren't in the clear about what to tell their users.
I'm actually amazed they didn't call it "m$ Internet Connection Wizard". After all, the IE is not an internet browser, it's a "Microsoft Internet Explorer". As if there was a regular internet, and Microsoft Internet as a separate entity. Maybe they did see it that way. The above behavior and the wording used are just a symptom of it, whatever it is, I'm not a psychiatrist.
BTW, the first good definition of "internet account" I was able to google out is
A generic term for a registered username at an Internet Service Provider (ISP). An Internet account is accessed via username and password. Services such as dial-in PPP Internet access and e-mail are provided by ISPs to Internet account owners.
Every other link on the first page leads to an ISP in Sydney, called "The Internet Account". Smart guys :).
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* which always sounded to me like a name of a funeral home
Mentions: blogue, David Berton, Feds, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), Gorana Sredljević (Go), Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), Jan Brenkelen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Johana, Majkrosoft (m$), Norman Shen, SFBC, Stanley Berger, in serbian
2-I-2023 - 8-IV-2026