Whether this weekend or the one before, on saturday, is the probable time when IV5pp had a parastos in Bečkerek. We did gather in june, but screw that, let's have good time on our own. We took triple table, there were enough of us for that, though I scarcely remember who attended. I clearly remember only two things - first, that I was giving away my business cards in hungarian and english, and that Dragana sang „My friends are“ from Bajaga straight to my ear, to which I was ashamed to admit I didn't know the song - the pretext being the 2nd line „pearls spread all over the world“, to honor my gastarbajter status. Looked it up later and listened through. Off the top, through the fog, I'd say Baki, Staša, Sredljak and Mandža and Bajlo and Tejka possibly Milica and Savka and maybe even Oli Boj were there, whistle the rest. No idea. Actually most of the years I actually forgot we even met this time. Only when I was gathering, for the sake of this writing, the times I visited this place, that this evening emerged.
To Hungary again. Got a temporary visa on the border. Because, fuckit, the administration - they consider us as legal as soon as we got something, which is probably some paper which enabled Szoftex to hire us, but this is not finished yet. We're still to get both the visas and the residence permits, which was probably this week.
The hungarian administration was never specially fast, and now they were dismayed by the change of power. They had elections this year, and the socialists have returned to power, because of course the ignorants screwed up their first four year term. There were, for sure, strange decisions, lots of syphoning, and the EC money which was poured into glitter and sprucing up the squares. For the latter they did have the popular support, incredible how everyone wanted to see the gleam of the empire restored... even though in the empire they'd be tending the horses or digging the ditches.
The banks were even slower. To transfer money from one account to another, the banks guaranteed to do it in five of their definition of days, per bank. So if the buyer and the seller weren't in the same bank, that's two weeks. And the guarantee was strict - if it was never longer than five days, it was also never shorter than that. The favorite pastime of all banks is to play with others' money for as long as they can (get away with). Which is why everyone handled cash. Haven't seen such hand thick wads of cash since... last winter. But at least this was worth something. And we got paid in cash, hardware was sold for cash, anything was done without banks whenever possible.
In catal6.prg v5.8b Joška has added that the arrow should follow the active column. And the function which would find out which was the active index was removed - why the fuck should it each time calculate something that's permanent - and replaced with just an array of everything we need to know about the indexes at hand.
In the menu system I added the automatic hotkey insertion, better than manual and avoids duplicate keys (which I've seen even in apps which cost dearly or were sold in millions of copies). This I did at home, on 14th. Then I also did the fox version of solitaire, just to see if it can be done. Now whether this was in fox 2.5 or did we already get 2.6... or, possibly, it was even 2.6 for windowses... Found a top 10 table with a bunch of scores from this week. I see I was using juski then on the machine where I played. Don't know why, we've switched to CP 852 already.
That 2.6, when it appeared in Szoftex, was some kind of miracle. It came on 17 floppies, all with the official labels by m$, accompanied with a strict instruction that this is for in-house only, this is a licenced copy. In programmers' room, just as in the hardware shop, there was a poster with a gloved hand removing a floppy from a drive, with large "vásarolja, nem másolja" (buy, don't copy) and m$ logo on it... because, accidentally, about this time Bill Gates visited Hungary, and accidentally the parliament passed an intellectual property law. Which lasted, in Szoftex, whole three weeks, maybe four. Then they again sold my machine and I asked for them floppies to populate the new one, and guess what, "dr. Zs. took them, he wants to try it out a bit". Aha, okay, I took out my one floppy and just installed it on the rough, just the parts I needed. I don't quite understand why does it need 17 diskettes (or perhaps just 4, the 17 was probably the 3.1 version of windowses), what I need fits on one.
Meanwhile, at home a new Pink television started broadcasting. I thought they'd run cartoons, even started asking around about antenna signal boosters, considering the accumulated experience with new broadcasters from Belgrade, who'd never have the range to reach us, halfway at best. This would be nice for the children... But later it turned out that some local channel, probably „Kablovska KTV televizija“ (yup, exactly as stupid as „automatic ATM teller machine“) ran „karton njušku“ (cardboard mug) aka „cartoon network“ in the mornings, which covered that. And the Pink turned out to be a special kind of evil.
29-VI-2021 - 15-V-2026