20-VI-2008.
A strange turn of events on UA. One of the Torontians just had to go to James's place to check, and got word from the janitor that he, indeed, died some days ago. It's been weeks since we last heard from him.
Some notable traffic for today:
- a voice chat with Oliver and a guy somewhere in England or Australia about something
- eBay sent me another invoice to $-13,26, i.e. telling me we still got some money left (... 8 words...)
- another nonsensical exchange on UA:
>Others might protest that many movies would be less straightforward (as opposed to more crookedbackward) if flashbacks were replaced by actors waving around torches- unless the movie is something like the Hunchback of Notre Dame or Lord of the Rings, of course.
Which then begs the question, if a dinner is served in captain's quarters, and the captain veers off the main course and goes straight for the desserts, where will the ship go?
[update: reconsider the problem for captain's halves, thirds, fifths etc]
This year we merged the two landmarks for the south end of the nearby shopping mall. Something was called happy there (perhaps the meal in the mc, happy to be eaten or thrown into garbage, whatever comes first) and there was a „Red lobster“ restaurant. The place is hereafter called „happy lobster“.
(the following stuff is from my lengthy enth reply to Škrba on the subject of „why I don't like being tracked by m$“)
There are the so-called shop cards, which serve for you to have them and get a discount based on that. Costs nothing, and they also promise they won't sell your address to anyone (easy to check: you may a minor typo in your name, and then check what arrives with that typo in the address), anything anything just to make you come regularly and enjoy the discounts (which shift from item to item, so if you develop a habit on something, the kitty came to the little door...).
Well, one ambulance chaser slipped in one such grocery, and sued them for damages, broken leg or some such trouble - the classical scenario, the american dream (that you'll make big money on someone in court). These guys dug over his shopping card history, summed up the number of times he was buying beer, and tried to paint him as an alcoholic during the proceedings.
Of course, his lawyer dissassembled them into pieces, claiming that his client didn't use that card at all, that he actually had another one and that nobody can really know who was using that one. The fuckup was that he actually did use it, but these don't dare prove that he did, because the card's ID (which is the basis for getting a discount) and the transaction ID (of the check, debit/credit card, value card, whatever) are not kept together. Which may be even true... but these could be matched, by connecting the milliseconds when either showed up on a cash register, the cash register's ID etc. But if they manage to put that together, the whole story of anonimity flies out of the window.
My Kroger card is, accidentally, anonymous. When the old wore out, asked for a new one, said I forgot my glasses, may I take the form to fill at home, will bring next time - said the guy this one is already valid, and just slid it through the scanner and gave it to me with the form... Ha, so it means the card is valid right away, there's no validation. The form stayed intact until we got home, didn't throw it into their garbage can, but rather into my own :).
...
What awaits me is the part of the app which should run on the clinics' njeb sites (so the patient ladies can log into Feds, fill a questionnaire here and there etc), so I'll be doing web from fox, didn't do that in quite a long while. Entertainment will come :).
The next day we went to Sandbridge. The weather was smudgy, cloudy and muggy, but we weren't bothered, it was quite warm and the water wasn't cold. Actually, the better, the beach wasn't crowded. This south end rarely sees any crowds, it's the far end and the Amers don't feel like driving the extra two miles through the whole place.
We strolled a lot. This is the farthest end of this end of the beach, and the poles there actually have razor wire on them and who knows what other gimmicks, because there's the so-called amphibian base, guess that's where the navy keeps them submarines, frogmen and whatever they may be called.
About downloading SF books to read... a file with 10000 books is making its rounds. Who'll cull that... well, quite easily. Kill off the excess authors. My firing rules:
- author has two or more titles with „The this of that“
- author has two or more titles with biblical themes
- two or more titles of pretend greek or latin formation (whizbangion, dumbassius, lookatitos, loandbeia)
And who'd a thunk, the chaff was blown out in a single afternoon :)
On twonytherd Zeta took Lena and me for a ride in her Essex, freshly boosted, it's got two additional dials in the little clocks on the left edge of the windshield. A real racer... I sat in the back, under the slanted rear glass. Ummm, it could have been a bit spacier. Not that the legroom is any problem, can put them sideways, but the headroom. And the fucken accoustics, the resonance from the chimney kept thundering through my head, didn't understand a thing of what they were saying. She drove us through the unbuilt south ends of the town, two swamps away from Carolina, and we eventually reached the boardwalk, south end, where once the first street was and then they dug a channel to the pond, to build a marina there. I made dozens of shots, video too, though the Fujica is not the greatest in that dark, or maybe I wasn't paying it much attention.
I also drove it a couple of times, guess I was supposed to go fetch Lena immediately, when Nina was away, guess she drove the corolla to have Ender look at something. Not that I'm not able [to drive it], if I could manage to get my bearings in the blazing hot Dacia or trabant or the haul truck, why not this. It's just that everything's offhand, as if you suddenly swith to a kontraš* bicycle. The pedals were hard, stick hard, the steering too direct. I begin to understand why they call them spors cars... muscles are a prerequisite. But okay, I drove it, it was fun, didn't feel like repeating it.
This panoramix I stiched only today (and no other day!), sixteen years later. That bay is on the left, boardwalk begins on the right.
----
* the old type, where it had the front brake outside, working on friction against the tyre or rim, and the rear was in-hub, activated by pedalling backwards. Takes time to get used after switching to or from.
Mentions: Ender Aquila (Ender), Feds, fox, Fujica, Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), James Olsen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Majkrosoft (m$), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Oliver Byford, Rozeta Gunaroši (Zeta), trabant, UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian
8-I-2011 - 5-VII-2026