06-XII-2008.
Go is now our guest. Her new eos40 was still below 1000 shots. The main tech toy she had was the iPod, on which she had the bejewelled2... which she got me to play with (only on 11th), and I liked it. Got the gist of it very quickly and then forgot about it. Remembered it only next year. The iPod was of some interest to Nina and Ender, they played with it the whole evening, while I was trying out the eos40.
The whole arsenal is on the table: her long lens, the video camera (not sure whether it's the same one from 2003), the eos40, the iPod, old Motorola hockey puck, and her gaming industry business card from the su-ya-ya-eal company*. And may not the frog shaped cap, or vice versa, be forgotten.
In CAAR, just found there was a Return within a Try-Catch block. Ouch. That's specifically mentioned as a possible cause of nasty bugs, including the C0000005, aka memory fault. You simply don't do that.
Marinko had some trouble with dependent forms, where the child form would fuck something up. Eventually I told him I have a full house and can't find the time, to which he
yeah sure, no problem. Just thinking "aloud", nothing urgent in there. At the same time to let you know I was thinking along those lines. to not turn out a complete waste of your time. It is not as straightforward as on first sight it had seemed to me. A bit of more detailed analysis and even when I put it on paper, it opened full of questions. Thanks in any case :)
True follower of the local newspaper, completely compliant with their policy by which, if you are not „quite“ „sure“ that what you wrote is 100% literary language, put quotation marks just in „case“.
George is suffering the difference between dem_pk and xxx_acu_id, because the former is there because it has to exist, and the latter is an actual key that connects to everything else. He's used to apps written by programmers from scratch, while Feds was initially written by a doctor...
On top of all the commotion, found the time to post this on the blogue:
What am I losing on the house?
This is a conversation wife and I have about every time they go on NPR about homeowners losing on the houses in which they live.
Losing what? Value? What's the value of the house in which I live? I don't care, because we aren't selling. The gain or loss is probably expressed in the same imaginary dollars as the value of a company rises or falls with the price of its stock. No money changed hands, nothing happened.
In case of stock, imagine there are, say, 5000 stocks of company XYZW, worth $10 each - all together, $50,000. Now 100 of these are sold for $20. What's the worth of the company now, $52000 - which would mean that these guys just paid $20 for something that's actually now worth $10.40, or that the company is now worth $100,000 - which would mean that $48,000 just appeared out of thin air. Now if everybody tried to cash in on those imaginary dollars, that would cause a sudden drop in value to, say, $3, so the company would now be worth $15,000 - what then, how much of the value was imaginary - $35,000 or $85,000 or what? You tell me. The whole story doesn't make much sense to me either.
What about the house? Its value is in its utility value. We have a place to stay, a roof under which to sleep, an ambient in which we are free to do whatever we want - which we did already. We painted our walls, imagine: white. Not the subdued greyish drabbish creamy nameless off-white, but just plain white, because WE CAN.
Not only there's no landlord, there's also no care for any market. We don't give a damn whether painting one of the girls' rooms bright orange raises or lowers the value of the house. It's not on sale. What we do care about is that not owning a house would have cost us about ten grand a year. Are we losing value? I don't think so. Any money we throw into the house remains in our pockets, as it preserves the value of the house in the long run. Just a few years more, and the total cost of it will be less than the total rent (and other crap, like tie-in with the cable subscription, blown-up water bills, tie-ins with their own contractors, advertisers etc, where in the end you don't have a say but have a pay) for the same time. Beyond that, the house is a pure plus - we're left with more money than we'd be without it.
A word of caution: we've cut our mortgage interest to maybe 15% of what it would have been by, first, having 20% up front (which saved us from a ridiculous amount in additional insurance), and zeroeth, paying it off in less than three years. It can be done, trust me.
Whoever tells you that owning a house is economically not too wise, wants your money. Whatever you pay for rent is goodbye money: you will never see it again. Whatever you put in your house, stays with you. They can manipulate the calculation any way they like, but these facts remain. They can only choose to hide them, when they want to sell you something else.
We even managed to call my mom over skype, on 8th. The image was minimal, 320x240, but at least did have all those pixels and showed her as she was. The sound wasn't great either, though we had DSL on her end and cable on ours. I wondered why, but then, give what you give. At least we talked.
On 9th they all (girls and possibly Ender) went to the oceanography something... ocean zoo. Go shot dozens of pixs of fish, turtles and whatnot.
On 12th she made ćufte... among other home cuisine specialties that we had this week. As has become customary, Jan called while they were sizzling in the pan, and skype defaults to the camera's microphone first, I have to switch to the headset's, which is close range. So he hears them sizzling, asks what's that sound, and now has a conditional reflex when he hears them and becomes hungry few hours ahead of time. Then I remember to switch to headset's microphone. This scene repeated maybe twenty times over the years.
In the evening the girls went to a dinner on their own, and, judging by the shots, had a good time. Can't qute see where, there's no whole shot, but one can see shades and other bits of ambience - out of focus, of course, as Go zoomed in her sisters' faces - sufficient to see it's a restaurant. Even if there was a whole shot, I wouldn't know which one, I don't know the places, we didn't get out to eat, did maybe once a year.
On thirteenth we even spoke with Ricardo over skype... and look, I already found where to play bejewelled2... and the above shot with ćufte is also onscreen. Is this meta enough?
Of hardware - the fraternal printer is on the left, covered with some paper. The webcam (same one since 2003 still gets the job done) is on the hundred CDs cake, on which there's a sticker printed on that Dymo printer, with Tik Tak's picture on it. Under the left monitor is the sound system controller, on it is the center speaker. On the left monitor, behind the TotalCmd, I see disk manager open. Must have had some shit with disks going on, I don't open that up without a good reason. The background is empty and dark red, so I'm using bbLean, not any explorer of them windowses, which was slow, devouring memory and liked to take zmajček to pee, pretending to cache the icons.
In the evening we escorted her to the airport, shooting another heap of shots while waiting. Because who knows when will the sisters be in one place again. She's flying over Deecee and London. Has citizenship, her corner hurts**, she can fly wherever she wants.
On fourteenth she was in Zrenjanin already, we even saw each other over skype.
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* whoever uses Я and pretends that it's an R and doesn't know it's a ya, should be summarily shot twice a day.
** unknown origin, means „doesn't care“. More frequent is „ear hurts“, rarely „elbow hurts“ and mostly „dick hurts“. Some etimologies have it as being „dick hurts not“, i.e. „I don't have a problem“, being abbreviated to its opposite.
Mentions: Bejewelled2, blogue, CAAR, ćufte, Ender Aquila (Ender), eos40, Feds, George Whiteley, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jan Brenkelen, Marinko Protić, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), Tik Tak, TotalCmd, zmajček, in serbian
24-V-2023 - 8-IV-2026