Wrote recurse.prg on 11th, smoothed it out by 19th. It's a piece of code which passes through all objects which are members of some higher objects, and applies to them a routine, the name of which was passed to it. It comes handy when, for example, a whole form needs a shakedown, either while editing it or in runtime, because they are prone to being even ten levels deep, which is impossible to walk through, for many reasons. One is the tediousness of the process, there may be hundreds of them inside, that's hours and hours of work, attention fails and new bugs are born, and it's also possible that some of them came without source, it's an alien component. But at runtime even those have properties exposed just the same, so it's possible to change, to all of them, how they look (font type or size, various colors), or hook code to them which would react to some change. It was really useful, many times, and found unexpected purposes.
Nina's labor permit arrived. Since she won the green [card] lottery, the process is proceeding nicely and regularly, without problems, and now this came too.
On nineteenth I signed an agreement to some head hunters from Falls Church that they may represent me about employment somewhere in Bethesda. Of which nothing really came out.
Discussion with Burt about movies, what can be found and where, on UA:
Living in a bigger city helps a lot. Potomac Video, a Washington area chain, will have two or three bookcases full of foreign films and a British comedy section in a typical store.
Even Hollywood and Blockbuster have about ten feet of shelf with rest-of-the world movies, average age 10 years. Not that bad, I got to see some things I never thought I would see again, but then that's not much either. Very limited.
I don't buy new recorded movies or TV shows much, but it probably helps to know of certain specialized sources. One source that I do know is Trash Palace, which is at www.trashpalace.com and carries old B movies. That probably isn't what you are looking for, but it's an example.
By the way, I know about Trash Palace not because I watch a lot of women-in-prison movies but because I am acquainted with the owner.
If you really want to be Mr. International, and if you don't need subtitles, get a multi-system VCR (or multi-system DVD player, if such exists) and start digging in Europe.
I have a couple of friends I could ask about where to find stuff.
You proved my point. The promise of "all the cultural treasure of the world will be available" comes down to "start digging". It's not really available.
Cable TV was supposed to bring choice and a multitude of channels, and the blossoming of the local TV, because now you didn't have to build or rent a network of repeaters to cover the territory. Which actually happened, except for the choice. You can't choose channels, you choose packages. I once asked Adelphia why aren't there channels a la cart, why can't I choose which channels do I want and which I don't. The answer was "it would be more expensive that way".
Some of those channels probably cost you very little.
They still come in packages, or you still have to have the basic package, and there's no way to opt out of anything from that basic package. Just imagine being able to pick a channel of your choice, and having a teletext to find out what's playing where in a few seconds, without having to wait (almost four minutes now) for the list of channels to scroll, and paying only for what you really watch. The technology is available, and if it was mass distributed, it would be cheap. It's just that it would shatter the rating system, so it won't happen, regardless of any "popular demand" or anything else.
[this last thing eventually happened, almost twenty years later, when the feature content was distributed by streaming, and the ratings were expressed in thousands of minutes of screen time. They still don't know how many people, if any, were watching those screens.]
22-XI-2023 - 11-IX-2024