Lots of work for the Acc157 app in the morning; late in the evening, trying to do more with visual invoicing (that is, using VFP only for pretty printing the invoices, while keeping everything else in DOS, including the creation of those invoices).
In the last two weeks, exchanged a few emails with Burt. He's never heard the "no matter what they talk about, they talk about money", while we got that as an american proverb. He doesn't know what DEM and USD mean. He wonders whether we still have hyperinflation. Is it hard to import a computer? My response to the latter: "I write this on a 6x96/166L+ board, quantum 800M disk, color monitor, ess 688 sound card, 8x mitsumi CD and have a prolink 33600 modem :). OK, more than half of it belongs to the company (Avai, that is)."
Do you suppose that the opposition party has actually made your home town more beautiful, or is it just the attitude improvement?
They did a proper cleanup in the spring, and did finally put the pavements there where people walk (instead of trying to follow some architect's rectangles), now they're painting city busses pink :), and they're installing Internet site in the city hall*, and they've promptly written my eldest daughter into the voter's list (while the SPS erased me and my wife just for the mere gossip that we had changed address**) as soon as she reached 18 years of age... They can't do much more, really, because they have no money. All the tax goes to the state, and is then returned, partially, to the municipalities. The return rate was 50% for Belgrade, and went down to 25% as soon as the opposition's victory was recognised. In Vojvodina the rate never exceeded 12%; in my town it was 7%.
And, yes, it just that it feels a bit better :)
Around this time we (i.e. Avai) were scouting the pharma factory as a prospective customer. I wasn't in any of the teams who went there, except this once, when I was supposed to get a sample of the tables to convert. And I found myself at the table with two guys I knew - Bane and Ivan Bakračev. While the former looked the same as he ever did, the later was hard to recognize. Though he already grew to this height when he was at our wedding, I kept forgetting that and was thus surprised (again) at how big he grew. Because in my memory he was always the wee kid. Being two years younger than his brother, who was my year or next, the difference meant a lot when we were kids.
Don't remember whether we did anything that day or what we talked about, that was my only visit there, it was mostly Joja who was in charge of them.
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* the chief IT guy in the city hall is now Mika Fišer, and he was really proud of his achievement - the city was far ahead of other cities in this respect.
** but we never reappeared at the new address, were reinstated at the old one few years later
30-VIII-2011 - 2-X-2025