03-XI-2010.
A little rant for the blogue, yesterday.
Lying bastards of the gamehouse.com
After my old PSP crashed on the floor today, I decided to give bejewelled2 another try. Not from PopCap, of course, I'm still pissed of at them asking more than 7$ for a game they sold for 2$ to iPod users. I am very sensitive to racism, even if it's not by corporeal features.
But then there may be other versions - someone may be offering to play again for free, for the odd chance that I may click on one of the ads (which I won't see, thanks to AdBlock+). It worked before, but I lost the link.
So I found this [link removed] (beware, it contains links to at least four known ad servers - AdBlock+ says so). And it says "DOWNLOAD FREE". OK... let's see this free version. It doesn't say it's a trial version, and they say they guarantee no spam, no viruses or other junk, fine.
It took quite a short time to download, but then it nearly froze my browser window (the other window stayed fine, so it's not any network congestion) while it installed... and then it said "start your nn day trial". What? If it's a free download, not a free trial download, at least have the guts to say so in advance.
The game stayed installed on my box about six seconds. The uninstall reported it was done in a millisecond, then it took about a minute to unfreeze the AddPrograms applet. I guess it made a lot of network traffic, telling everyone what a cheapskate I am, or what I have installed. Just because I wasn't in the mood to turn my detailed firewall on and see who's it trying to call.
I may have considering a purchase, had they posted any price... but on all of the page there's not a single dollar sign. How do you guys mean to sell anything if you don't say the price? Who's gonna buy a cat in a sack? You think we wear straitjackets? Well, some of us probably do, or else you wouldn't be in the business.
Gamehouse.com is blacklisted on my machine henceforth. It sucks.
Meanwhile in Virginia, Nina had a visiting dog, hoping for adoption. Its present owners are a military couple who are moving abroad.
By the weekend they were declined when they offered to host another visit. Somehow they weren't the proper parents for the pooch, so no second visit.
Firriver had me think of Irish visa. But the thing turned out to be too complicated, specially with me being officially uneployed and specifically not registered anywhere here, other than having an ID and drivers' and paying my bills. But no social services and no tax authority is aware of me, so most of the paperwork they ask for is impossible to get. I never went to Ireland.
SFBC has another cockamamie scheme to get the answers to their endless questionaires packaged somehow via 3rd party app, which is a bubble sheet this time (confuse not with bubble wrap - this is a sheet with printed circles in fixed positions where you fill one on the left for „strongly dislike“, right for „adore it“ and proportionately in between, and then it can be quickly scanned by some stupid OCR thing). Wrote a lot of code but never got any real samples, and the whole cuntscheme was for nothing. Not the first, not the last.
Our roof is being worked on for three days in a row. We had the classic slats-across-trusses with tiles hung on them, now we're adding planks between the slats and trusses. Because we finally can afford it. The one extra window, which was too big to fit in the bathroom so we bought a smaller one, is finally used for the roof, let the attic have some light. This was done in the end, on fourth... well, see the picture.
We were about twenty tiles short, what broke over the years and what extra was required for the window roof, and we found the same manufacturer from Bečej, same model, the 333, except the step is now 343mm. Luckily we had the garage's roof, from which they took as many as needed, and lined up the new ones in the bottom row, so they overhang the gutter by 10mm more.
Wow look at the rose bush by the gate gone wild. In a couple of years it would make it hard to walk by. (... 6 words...)
The majstor who did this was from the next street. A general practice specialist, he already replaced our crapper, installed the water heater, fixed the bathtub drain, so why not this. Ouch. This time it required an amount of materials. I had to go to the lumberyard twice, to order more, and they had to send the truck the second time for more planks and nails, because the guy plays it safe, so the investor isn't left paying for too much stuff which is then left over. The two extra hours, what it took me to get stuff for him, cost me more than if he had ordered 20% above needed. Well costs me nothing, actually, my monthly is fixed, but he also asked for cigarettes, borrowed some medical book for his wife, then came back two months later to take a piece of the asbestos sheetrock that he needed to plug a hole when he was working on (Lena's former) elementary school.
He's the same guy who in 1990 bought off the old škodilak from dad. He never returned the book, and the wife left him. We see him now and then, he's in the next street, and he's sort of famous in the circles of pigeon and poultry growers around town. I found him on a newspaper picture from 2002, in an article about pigeon growers' fair.
We never engaged him again, nor has he entered our house.
On sixth we got in a cab and went to Klincaid, Todor said he'll be ther to walk us through the house. Well he did and we saw it, and I made lots of shots, counting on seeing fifty more things on the photos later, that I wouldn't notice on the spot. Experience from this summer's house search, or the one from 2004. Well okay, I think we'll take this, fuck the house, the house is excess, we don't need it, but it's the garden that's exactly the size, 32 aress (0,75 acres), it's not too far from home, got asphalt, got electricity, got water. Also has a phone line but screw that, I want a place without one, cancel the line, cut it.
The photo is from the summer kitchen. The basin on the wall is... pretend. There's no faucet, water is brought in buckets. There's a drain, but it ends on the outside. There's a septic pit few meters away, caved in, covered in rotten planks with interesting lush moss on them... don't count it as a basin.
Todor took his mother with him to Novi. We did see her on next visit, I guess she remembered something to take from the house before it sells. She died within three months, couldn't live in an apartment. She got used to buzz around the house and always have something to do, she couldn't just switch to couch potato watching TV. There was a TV set in the kitchen, and I guess they had moved it to the summer kitchen seasonally, there were the antenna and power cables hung.
We bargained for a few details more over the next few days - he offered a machine to husk and grind the corn, two freezer boxes and some 125 liters of rakija that the old man kept for himself, at 150 dinars a liter. The price was excellent, such rakija would go at 500 or 600 at the time, so we took it all except the freezers. We tried the brandy, it was unfortunately a loza but a solid one. Dad was reselling Vanji's brandy anyway, so why not this.
Mentions: Bejewelled2, blogue, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Klincaid, loza, majstor, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Novi Sad, rakija, SFBC, škodilak, Todor Mirča, Vilmoš Baranji (Vanji), in serbian
4-I-2011 - 16-VII-2026