march 1977.
Memory is thin on this period. The only news that I can firmly place in this month was that the science-education council for mathematics decided to revoke groups. We had two - computing and educational - with fortysome of us on the former and just four guys on the latter. Partly because programming was cool and promised better future, partly because its curriculum lacked algebra three, but had Numela instead.
There was one particular formula in Numela for which the professor chose these special letters for indices and variables, just to make it sound funny. And it worked - I reconstructed this in OpenOffice's formula editor in 2010, because I still knew it by rote, word for word. And it didn't work - I completely forgot what the formula was about. Must be something about calculating something in a matrix, but whether it was to solve as a system of equations, or to find its eigenvalues, eigenvector, who knows.
My memory is faint on this sudden change of course (pun intended) ended. Whether we still had lectures on the revoked courses until the end of month or a couple of weeks more, whether we were allowed to pass these exams in april, without waiting for june, blank. Either way, we had lots of free time in april and may. There were weeks I'd visit the faculty just as many times as I did Borsalino.
While learning stuff for the course in computing machines, we even had some electronics. Not the actual circuits, no voltages or pulse forms, just the logic of it, mostly on how to build a scheme to do a specific task out of given elements which perform some basic tasks. We mostly played with the staircase switch, aka exclusive or circuit, which requires three wires for two switches. Then it gets complicated when you add the third switch, and very complicated with the fourth. To do five we'd need much more paper and a larger table, so we didn't even try.
Ljuba and I enhanced he room a bit - he started cooking at times. He made beans at least twice, we overfilled ourselves. We also had a stock of empty beer bottles, not too many, just enough to avoid paying the kaucija, i.e. bottle fee. Which is avoided by returning the bottle from last time, so we started with one bottle, just made sure it clinked twice when we lowered it into the big basket for returned bottles, then bought two beers. Then next time returned two bottles and exited with three beers. Ended with just four, didn't take it further.
We found curry and adžišio somewhere. The curry was of „kombinirajte okus jedi z štiriinpedesetmi začimbami“ (combine taste of food with fourandfifty spices - as the advertising in slovenian went; they make their numbers between 21 and 99 the german way, so 54 is four-and-fifty), now fuck me if I remember whether it was by Droga Portorož or Kolinska of Ljubljana or some third outfit. The adžišio was allegedly an enhanced salt, and the advertising claimed that the secret ingredient is called „adžinomoto brutamata“. It became clear, some forty years later, that Ajinomoto was the japanese company which sold it, and the ingredient was (mono)sodium glutaminate, aka MSG, which is a common ingredient in far east cuisine and also in vegeta, so nothing mysterious there. We were just curious and willing to experiment.
Curry was a special kind. Over the years I tried a dozen kinds, but none had this one special ingredient that this first one had, hence they all lacked that one component in their taste. Whether the missing piece was angelika or tamarind, wish I knew. Still miss it.
Mentions: Borsalino, Ljubivoje Tomić (Ljuba), vegeta, in serbian
14-V-2023 - 23-II-2025