Bački breg.
On 21st I visited the Ledinje folks, still in that building in the kombinat's yard, their genious accountant came to an idea to perform a real triper on that phantom machine of theirs, to swap disks or motherboards between it and the new one, so this old motherboard gets something that isn't a „zgazi disk“ (tread on disk, aka scuzzy, aka SCSI, aka eshtzeshi in hungarian) but rather an ordinary Ide, because that motherboard never agreed with that disk, some shit kept happening. And he also wants the interest calculation app.
Went to zzzzz then, where the director was already the guy we knew, her junior year roommate's husband (all three doctors now). The guy was, ahem, well padded where needed, montagnari pedigree etc, wrote about that already somewhere. Since we were kind of acquainted - true, we did meet a few times, though never sat at the same table - he accepted us as his own and we started working on that sanitary checkup app, with the stipulation that it be connected to the lab so that the results would be attached to the checkup for which the swabs/samples were taken. Which we wrote, everything went fine, except the network kept fucking us. Some machine, around the middle of the ground floor, tore it apart. The network stack was the Lantastic, lightweight shoulder-to-shoulder and without a dedicated server, and the cables weren't too long either - perhaps 30m altogether for three machines, but still no good. As soon as that box is turned on, the network breaks.
Now (december 2024) I found a note I made, saying that there „I took the app by that idiot“ (have some foggy on who that was) and took it home to do it right. Further on, „in the afternoon they began switching us off, in the evening managed to launch that beast and see which dad's is it to it. It doesn't even conjtroll [konj=horse] the jmbg [unique citizens' registration number], which is even numeric in his case. The horrors and scary bits.“
The electricity matter is somewhat different from the one a year ago, when the kolubara lignite mine went on strike, and within 12 hours a shortage of coal was declared in the obrenovac power plant (which meant they didn't even have an honest daily reserve). so we went into the new year wondering whether we'll be freezing. The strike was squashed within a few days then and we were reallly warm afterwards. This time the reason was different, Sloba found a way to evade the sanctions. If the merchandise can't cross the borders, all road and track crossings were controlled, there are no controllers in the cables, so he started exporting power, and succeeded beyond reason, so he had to leave less than the minimum for us. First it was that we had power for 16 hours and then 8 not, then it was soon reduced to 12:8. The rhythm changed often and it somehow went toward the situation when we had less and less power, which lasted all winter. We had the luck to frequently be a victim of schedule hiccups, often rewarded with a double whammy, when the period when we were supposed to have power for four hours would happen four hours later than scheduled.
It somehow occurred that they never turned Klek off, because the village was allegedly on the same cable with the hospital, and they can't turn the hospital off. Accidentally, the municipality president (aka mayor, or was it the EPS director, or president of the municipal SPS, whichever) was from Klek. They are genetically prone to becoming directors anyway. But then when this dance with power repeated two winters later, it turned out that there were no technical obstacles then or anytime before, so they were switched off just like the others except maybe a bit more, someone found a way to settle the accounts.
On 22nd I rubberstamped a bunch of reports for PolC, had to do that sooner or later. Did a brusfull [brus is the scythe whetstone sheath, which holds about a glass of water] - we had a total of two hours of power in the afternoon. In the morning I kept Lena company so didn't do much, drew the auxiliary masks and stole the menus form Brlja's app, eventually turned out that I'm doing it all from scratch anyway“.
On 23rd I did the last fixes on catal5, the previous version of catal6.prg. It actually worked quite well, and already had this neat trick of inserting the call to generated code in the place from which the parametrized call was made... sort of replacing the floor under one's feet while standing on it :). Something you could do in fox 2.6, because it would compile into a .fxp and closed the .prg - later it wouldn't work anymore, because VFP kept both files open.
Still, Catal5 wouldn't pass Vanji's test - lay an open palm all over the keyboard and see what happens. If the app can eat the impossible key combinations, it passes. Well, catal5 would fail, because it had a routine attached to each key, which I didn't like, but it kept the apps going for the time. So it worked as a simple browse window with all keys overridden, so what, it was a miracle that it worked as it was.
BTW, my test was pretty much the same, just simpler, and I did it a lot on computer fairs: wherever they had an app running and keyboard available, I'd just press enter. On Interbiro (in Zagreb), Sajam tehnike (Belgrade) or Ifabo (Budapest), about half of the apps would just crash. From pressing enter.
Seems to be I kept working on zzzzz in parallel, as I see lots done there too, and that in the afternoon. Either it was done on some box with date off kilter, or I did it at home. This being the catholic yule, it's possible that we weren't at home for the weekend but rather stayed until 22nd, went back on 27th and then broke off until 2nd of january, we have our rights to have a doček. Don't know whether we had office space for Avai, that would probably be in spring.
In DentoSys there was something about postal codes, some additional check and whatever. What a closet skeleton, the whole postal code story was done ages ago, what else can happen there? That was a ready piece you could copy from app to app without changes. But no. [Doesn't end here - see 06-III-1995..]
„25.12.94 was with kids on the snow, made a snowman and half an igloo. power came around two.“
The igloo thing was... mostly born out of necessity. Our terrace is large, and when it's covered by half a meter of snow, when it thaws into slush, it will be just water sitting there. Since there's that crack, part of that water would find its way into the basement. To prevent that, I'd sweep the snow, throw it to the right on the hill, so not to obscure the basement windows under the left half of it. And as I'm piling it up on the hill. the heap grew into a hill of its own... and then the idea of an igloo wasn't too far. The next day I shaped it a bit more, chiseled out a tunnel using a spade, and there's the igloo. I love free toys, and the children are happy too.
27-I-2020 - 5-VII-2026