To home, via Horgoš.
On old sezam, we're getting regular live reports from the bosnian war.
„just quickly, I see you all wrote a lot:
Namely, Banjaluka didn't suffer !!! The city itself was not aimed at at all, though there was hits arround. Where - I have no clue ?! The repeater on Kozara is hit -was :)))
I can tell you we're good - the programme wasn't broadcast even under such condition just about 24 hours, maybe a bit more. Of course first some improvisation was made, and now again Kozara is in function. Well who plums Nato :)))
Therre folks just about briefly, nothing precise...“
In the last half of august and most of september we did a retail stock tracking app for MXM, as they had a supermarket in the far end of Lesnina, with offices upstairs, made by joining two apartments. I didn't have much contact with the owner brothers, they left the details to staff. They only wanted to know what is it they bought, what does it do. Didn't want to know how it works, for details see with Višnja. She was almost quite a chick, wore it like that and mostly managed to look sexy, and we were sort of pals, but I sensed something off so I stayed partly reserved. Possibly had her husband in mind, whom I sort of knew of and had a hunch or a hint that he may be an udbaš. He had the same surname as our secretary (who wasn't even imaginary yet, the Avai was mostly ethereal, had two workers then, Brlja and me and no address), and we never found out whether they were related. Višnja stayed with MXM for a couple of years, and then switched to some guy who is known to be connected with The Service - which is a possible confirmation of a connection. She was chief accountant, I'd say, and had one worker, a cute girl from same village as the owners, a real Sosa. And then she was once replaced with Zvezdana, whom I knew from Bangro... but that's later history.
Rade took upon himself to write this app, and it was probably the first one in town which took barcodes. Barcodes were gradually introduced for seven years already, I remember that Radoja and I attended some lecture on the subject, at the local chamber of economy back around 1988. That's when JANA (yugoslav association for numeration of articles, the article in serbian being an item of goods). The barcodes were read by a hand scanner, which plugged into keyboard port, and then keyboard piggybacked in the back of its plug. It would thus emulate keystrokes, so any numbers it would read would come as if typed. Having no buttons at all, it was set up by scanning some special codes printed in its manual, which would then be understood by its software as commands.
The app as such wasn't bad at all, it just ran and was possibly the best solution at the time. The problems came from a large number of codeless articles, because even after seven years since introduction, there were many manufacturers who didn't have them. That was solved by picking suppliers who had them, where possible, and for the rest, we printed the codes for the most popular items and the clerk at the cash register would scan them. Printing itself was a bit of a snag - first I had to find and download some software from sezam, then learn how to make it work, and eventually make the dl2400 churn them out. Then the scanner wouldn't recognize them, because the ribbon was getting thin on ink. I think this is when I started taking those ribbons to Branko.
The worst problems were naive suppliers, i.e. those who either never understood the reasons for barcodes, or didn't give a damn (serbian: their dick hurt for it), so they had the same barcode on all of their items. When selling to retail, they can show off as having it, and any problems later fall to clerks in the retail, not the guy who did the purchase. Well, initially and for a while.
We didn't wait for that to be solved. The staff in the shop handled these problems on the run, and then the brothers changed their mind and closed that shop. We never sold that app to anyone else.
2-V-2022 - 25-VI-2026