On 18th Ileš complained that printing meal chits for the hospital's mess hall doesn't work. Technically, the hospital in Gemenc was not Szoftex's customer, but we hoped it would be, it was the real reason behind taking on the PolC project, as the Gemenc is part of the hospital, it's practically its gate, they patch what they can and what they can't they pass up the backyard into other wards. This chit printing was supposed to be a pussycat of an app, needs just to print them sheets, a certain number every week, with date and meal marked on it, no need to store any names nor accounts nor anything, just keep track of what it printed.
Except it wouldn't print. Ummm... okay, this was not the first time I combat a printer hand to hand, I already knew half of Epson's ESC/P language for dot matrix printers, and this Oki accepts Aitchpie's PCL, so... let's take a look. I waded through the documentation (well, at least we had that, I didn't have to waste time chasing it), then took my time and lots of paper. In two days I got it to the point where it printed whatever you threw at it, and even (maybe later) made a little mask with a calendar, so they can pick the dates they want to print for. Eventually added a report for the kitchen, with the specs of number printed for each day and meal. The command sequences in PCL were far from naive, e.g. esc + "(s10v12H" meant 10 point characters, spaced 12 per inch; esc + "(17U" was for codepage 852 (east-european for Dos) etc. I think it ended with pizza and a beer.
Maybe tuesday or wensday, or most probably the previous saturday, the stay-at-work weekend, we went for a picking - Šerci had a vineyard (or the missus had, fuckit, we didn't stay for weekends last year, so if he was already married then, we weren't invited). It wasn't far, the city is built on seven hills, it's a vintner's town, so streets below and the vineyards on the hills. I had the skill, acquired in dad's vineyard, and the welcome news was the sepet (hun. szepét), the backpack basket, actually a flat aluminium bucket, with straps. So you just cut a bunch, toss it behind, it falls exactly where it should, and when it feels heavy, you feel behind. If you can touch it, you go and spill that into the container (pretty much the same type as used for dumpsters), by just bending forward, it slides out over your shoulder.
Don't quite remember whether there were too many of us or few of the grapes, it was still daylight when we finished and ate the proper paprikaš, drank something, and we all got into the cars (Mihály and we three and the whole hardware team), and went to deliver the crop to the winery. There the dumpster was dumped to the scale, they weighed it and that was it, we dispersed.
„Whole hardware team“... except maybe the young Tamaš (Tamás) who was freshly married, which was on another weekend, maybe two weeks before, and we attended. It was in some third village (couldn't have been too far away, considering that he was commuting), in church only, we didn't go to the wedding party. I'm no fan of the ecclesial ceremonies, no matter that it's a catholic one, but okay wanted to see this, these days they're pumping up anything that's at least a bit un-communistic, specially religion, so I'd better have some idea of what it looks like. We stood far in the back, because we didn't give a rat's fart for what the priest had to grind. A young couple took to the same spot for different reasons, it being obvious that they've just discovered sex, and looked ready to get down to it and fuck right then and there. Eh, yeah, that's how it looks when it's all still fresh and gives you a lasting buzz in the head and a few other places.
After that wedding we stopped somewhere for beer (at office expense). We sat outside under a vine shade, just we of the Szoftex, chatted and killed time. I think we didn't go for the third beer, as it was getting chilly. Despite it being just slightly cloudy and early october and still daylight. Must be these hungarian Alps. There's no hill taller than about 100m tops in the area, still it's cooling you, we didn't sit for long.
Home, via Horgoš, on 20th.
There's some report in the BarSys directory of Zeki... but it's about transportation recap, don't know what it's doing there. Was probably meant as a base for some other report, and probably not written for him, but rather for MXM or someone else - can't know without having archives for all of our apps, which I don't have.
There's also a file written for that juicemaker in the south. The word „juice“ is forgery here, there was no fruit at all. The guy was importing syrup or base or whatever from somewhere - Greece or Turkey - and had built a bottlery in his yard, nice and clean. We probably made a second visit this weekend.
Likewise, a little routine written for Acc157, less than two hours after that, both in the afternoon. No comments inside, so sherlocking my whereabouts from those is very risky - probably Brlja did it, the filenames are his style. On a monday afternoon I'd be with my family, just chilling out before the next working stint. We'd usually take off in the evening, both the roads and the border being less crowded then, aiming to arrive at midnight, why would be go any earlier, we wouldn't be doing anything in the evening, and had no reason to be early in the morning. So we aimed for midnight, which mostly happened as planned.
Only two things could disturb that trip. One was a wait on the border, if it would be much longer than usual. The other was if the pee break happened when it was windy. It's not the wind, we all three know to turn downwind when peeing, it's that the break would be cut short, and Joška would disti... extinguish his cigarette, to save the rest for later. That stank, spoiled my experience for the evening. It'd stink when he lit it again, maybe even worse, but then that was outside and I'd be at a distance.
(... 547 words...)
Five tons of coal cost us 750 DEM. We switched to coal because in these post-inflation times the electricity was prohibitively expensive for amounts above 600KWH a month, the price doubled beyond that, and beyond 1200 it tripled again. We just couldn't afford that. So coal it was. I built some partition fence of siporeks blocks, and then we carried the coal from the street to the basement window in a wheelbarrow and dumped it through it. It fit there.
(... 4 words...)
2-V-2022 - 16-VII-2026