16-IV-2006.
Thinking of getting rid of the shed and replacing it with something that's not so rotten, stuffy and unwieldy. Went to Lowe's and just had to take a shot of this:
Had I not seen this kind of contraption dozens of time before, I'd never have guessed what it was. It's a barbecue. When I think of dad still using that tiny box he bought in 1967 on Baš Čaršija... And this doesn't burn charcoal, it burns propane, which heats the lava rocks, which then heat up the meat, and the fat drips on the rocks... so it's got almost all of the goodies, except charcoal. Don't ask what do the six dials do. One should be the main valve, and possibly one could be the igniter, beyond that one whistles (see house dictionary).
We didn't find anything that we'd like, so we just thoroughly looked at what's available of materials and started looking for ways to build our own shed. Or maybe we wouldn't need one, we'll see. The house is big enough.
Building the shed soon turned out to be far more complicated than we thought. There are so many regulations as to the size of it compared with the size of the house and the general type of neighborhood, there's a prescribed distance from the fence, the height has to be within cerain limits (there's a minimum too) and there are only a handful of allowed types, can't do anything fancy at all. Generally, the whole thing turned out to be more trouble than it was worth.
At least I made a bunch of shots of various textures, including the rust and warn out paint on the flatbed cart, with some interesting bits of raw metal, both shiny and not, because Go needed those for whatever she was doing. Now with her having graduated, and Nina too, she was stuck there with Ricardo until the end of this semester, because he was doing a double major. Okay, we'll pay the rent for her. To avoid paying for the other room, they subleased it to some hindu guy, Hitash, whom they called Hitachi and barely ever saw. He'd just sleep there.
Along the way (some ten days ago) I told her how Joe is weak with icons, I see he uses some stock [ones] from fox itself, which look ugly today, being seven years old.
„The guy is a bit of a cheapskate, but I keep doing his stuff because it's simple, doesn't take much time (I just fiddle with the script which is below hundred lines... okay, then, four such scripts) and he does pay willingly and on time, through Paypal. The graphics he currently has is lousy - look at his website and it'll be obvious. So, last night I built some stuff for him and noticed that the icon on some add-on is not his, it's from fox. So I told him, and he went on complaining how his graphics lady screams at him so much that he doesn't dare ordr anything unless it's really critical. So he asked about you. I said I'm charging 40$ an hour, and that you probably wouldn't charge more than that, being, as it were, a rookie.“
For Gary I updated the routine which would export and import dbfs into text files and back, selected fields (and memos!) only. Set some limitations so he'd clearly see which rows are delimiters and which are text. As in all cases when a text file is supposed to contain both data and text, there has to be a consensus between writer and reader on how to know which is which. Which is fine while they're alone; as soon as a person intervenes between write and read, there's a near 100% chance that the consensus will be screwed up, and the protocol broken. It doesn't matter which format is it, whether some text processor's own shit, or rtf or html or xml or a seeassvee, all the same - any manual messing with the file is a sure way to get a file which looks good but the reader will, at some point, understand wrongly and produce unexpected result.
This time he needed to produce a text for tomorrow, and couldn't import properly, so I told him to send me everything, and lo and behold, the sample contained surprises which I haven't encountered in the original sample. Because each text import requires a sample to work on, and that initial sample never represents all the shit that'll happen in production. There's always something he didn't think I'd need to know. This time there was a blank line and a plus sign before the header line, which I didn't count on - this utility should import anything that it exported, and it'd never put anything before a header line. I deleted those by hand and it imported fine.
All of this already existed as a part of the zod project, which I updated the next day and sent him a fresh zip, the 45th of zod.
Bought a couple of 2,2kg barbells (5lb), to prevent rust. As I told dad, it's not the size that matters, it's the number of moves you make. Now that we've finished most of the larger works around the house and gradually switched to doing it the easy way, this is just the light winter flexing. Not doing any strength exercise, just the simplest stuff, but do a round of 50 of each at a time. I started with just a 1lb few years ago, then went to 2lb and I think I've reached my level now. Need nothing bigger.
For listening of music I changed my game. I'm not putting together a playlist anymore, I always trick myself into listening what I thought I wanted. Enough of that, now I've put it ALL on the list, and whatever begins to annoy me, flies off from the disk. Ad one, it took several minutes until I scrolled through the whole list, until it read the lengths and added up the lengths. Total: 142 hours of music. There oldwave began to pitch something Calexico to me... well okay, I'll add that and we'll see. Epilogue: the kings of gypsum, no matter what the recipe was used in cooking, are again what they were. Erased it.
Just this year we finally realized that nobody is forcing us to celebrate anything, and we nicely sent it all into. Perhaps next year we'll paint the eggs when their time is due - on equinoxe. Of rites, we kept only my spring trimming (why not shortening?) of beard - everything grows anew. And visiting the little garden regularly, to see what's in blossom this time.
Heh, once I ran into some guy in the grocery - I shouted something to [my] daughters, and the guys thought that [it was addressed] to him. The face - pure gedža (peasant of central Serbia), long and thin nose, small mustache, you expect him to begin „pierce... ha, ha, ha, ha“ (piercing bus tires, in „Who's singing back there?“, a cult movie from the eighties). And then he asked whether we were Germans - even so dead drunk he noticed that I had an accent. Nope, I said, just speak it a bit. And then we went into mixing german with english (where he spoke both [of them] worse than I [did]). Turned out he's half a Kraut half Cherokee or some such :).
I completely dislike Clooney as a presence, seems to me like a Sean Connery from first trial batch, discarded as below standards. But then didn't see him doing a bad act yet. May even get used to him.
Mentions: fox, Gary Brandywine, Gorana Sredljević (Go), house dictionary, Joe Dioballato, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), oldwave, Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), zod, in serbian
28-IV-2024 - 14-V-2026