9:40 AM Pe când am terminat de scris paragraful acesta, cineva a claxonat foarte tare pe alee, și a dublat enervarea mea. Așa fac ei întotdeauna când scriu ceva critic.
11:10 The woman upstairs came home about an hour ago after missing for 2 or 3 days. Then the most terrible smell appeared in the bathroom. It looks like there is a sewage leak somewhere. She is very rarely if ever using the toilet. I hear more often a toilet flushing from the next apartments and that is happening when i sit on mine.
11:30 I flushed the toilet several times. First it went kinda hard then the second time went ok. The smell is subsiding. BTW, just remembered something. That dead dear carcass on Dundee variant (just before the curve to the left when coming east bound) is almost dried like in mummified, after about a couple of weeks sitting there.
11:45 I just discovered this video was missing from my yesterday's post. Without it, the whole post didn't make much sense.
12:12 Strangely enough, can't find any post about the toilet leak in March 2021. Possibly because i was too terrified those days to write about. About 2 weeks after this guy moved in (March 2021) a toilet leak from upstairs became apparent in the bathroom.
For the one and a half year he's been here he did exactly like all my neighbors did before (torturing) but with a vengeance. I believe he is/was a historian from Japan, specializing in ninja history.
They came to fix it though the maintenance guy who came in our apartment, opened the ceiling in the bathroom and then closed it back (didn't do anything else, but the drywall was wet and soft) had its doubts the fix was going to work. I saw the tall handywoman climbing the stairs with a vacuum for plumbing than i heard much noise like from fixing something upstairs.
He even said to me. It is sealed and it is not. I thought he was referring to the type of seal they used, that might have been like this one that in certain conditions may backflow sewage gas. He also said there might be some "remnants" that have to dry out, which means it was going to smell for a while.
There is right now a "remnant" smell in the bathroom. I think they are trying to make the story with the dog poops changed into something else. Or they even might be two different ongoing stories. Or with my numbing toe, three. As cause for numbness, my bet is the toe (had leaks before but never got to this).
I know for sure that there is a leak from our bathroom fan pipe. If i start it i feel the flow of air coming from any whole like a plug whole in the wall.
I also started to get numb but don't know if because of my exposure to the smell in the bathroom or because of my toes and the fact the antibiotics i took last night wore out. And it is not because of diabetes because i haven't eat anything after 5 AM this morning. BS sugar is 312 right after i ate something but it was only about 10 minutes before.
1:15 Market mini crash today (NASDAQ more than 3%) was half caused by oil. Scroll down to bottom performers (left) and you'll see three energy corporations on top of those and then a bunch of giant semiconductors like NVIDIA, Intel, etc..
Those usually go down when i post (unintendedly) something critical. I think it is considered one of their AI failures (Sabrina done entirely or partly with AI but modeled after a real person). Because they need a real person to appear in public though that real person may not have such a perfect (ballerina dancing in the sand miniature type of) body).
3:30 It is almost every day i draw in my mind my balance sheet and damage assessment. It seems like i'm in the red at almost all chapters. Days left included.
It is true. That all life flashes before your eyes when you're about to pass the corner. But to me it's slo mo, i have the time to really pass through every major event. Got almost two months where my life depends on my daily intake of antibiotics.
There is an evolutionary reason to this. If one miraculously escapes just before that moment, whatever he sees/remembers just before that might help clarify things, survive (same thing with day dreams of the past when one can extrapolate past into possible branches and then realize the true causality (using newer knowledge) of what really happened).
Maybe just a little but enough to pass his successful, surviving genes. With the help a willing young unconscious being. Or his knowledge to others.
It may be an instinct. Young ones "respect" elders giving them time to pass their knowledge, when they have no interest or passion left in anything. At least that's what's happening in nature. With humans before they became a (hierarchical, stagnant) society.
And what keeps coming over and over is most glorious moment of my career. Those days when i finished a salary program at Direcția Apelor Bacău.
All conditions were set. I had the greed for the money. I had the experience after building a data acquiring app in assembly and Fortran, an accounting app with Pascal and half of salary app in Fortran, and they had the means and it was the right timing. But some guys intervened (and now i know who they are) and sent me there.
Their director, though not enthusiastic, was willing to let me do it. I think the motivation was, there was a Russian link to. That firm was a branch of the government and at that time etc.. They wanted to do a lesson for everyone that is.
Their IT department were still carrying bags with punch cards at the Centrul de Calcul, a place where companies in town were renting running time on an old IBM 360 (licensed from licensed to the French) to do their apps dough they had a brand new PDP-11 (clone) that was working with terminals they didn't to complicate their lives with it.
So i made a contract with them and started working. And then the guy in Salary department. At first i was very happy with his rigorous bureaucracy, his tendency to stick with the rules (could have also be part of the bigger plan i didn't know about). It's a programmer's dream. Having to collaborate with a person like that.
In programming there can be no mistakes or bending the rules (also this put a very strong print on my thinking, for the rest of my life). Though programming and especially in an unknown or experimental area is nothing but a long series of trials and errors.
After "Ceaușescu" (those around him) brought in the PDP clones, nobody in Romania was willing to learn how to program them (mostly bureaucracy but also laziness, or a combination). Some adapted the old Cobol programs from the IBM that had running time up to 24 hours with manual flow control of the whole procedure.
The chief of IT department was sitting there at the console 24 hours and issued the commands for the next phase in salary app. But then he/she could party for the rest of the month.
That's why was unknown and experimental. And i took that opportunity and huge risks (well, it was what i thought it was my career, i don't think they would have taken my retainer back). But i was scared like i was about to surf in a water full of sharks and big waves and not doing it before.
The idea was very simple. On single database with one key retrievable record per each employee with hundreds of data fields.
One video terminal interface based on my old data acquiring app (they looked similar to IBM 400 for those who remember), black and white, or better said green or white, with a number of screens that were popped with programmed function keys (like at PC, above main keyboard). One read and one write instruction in Fortran using the same format on an indexed file (by multiple keys) on the hard drive.
Because that 16 bit address computer only worked with pages with 64k of memory per app, one or 2 megs in total, i had to do a segmentation with multiple branches while keeping data on a root while the library was in a virtual hard drive in a different memory page. I might have invented what Microsoft called later "late binding".
Nevermind, i just used the instructions (code) following the Fortran manual (printed from the help files, in English), not knowing what it was really called, like Ed Sheeran. (I even went for a job interview here in the States and still did not know what it was when i was asked the question!).
Once you entered the employee's code, you could navigate through screens, change data and when you were done with it, everything else was recalculated and all data re-rewritten on the hard drive. I have to confess, i inspired a little from spreadsheets (it was 1992).
Once you were done with data entering, that could have been one single employee to 1000 or more, you could launch the printing of reports which was a number of loops using different keys of that single file and it was instant.
Think about. From 24 hours run time at the Centrul de Calcul to instant on your own computer and from a team of 20 to one single data entry operator! But everything i've done was extreme, by any standard and i squeezed the best out of that tiny computer, by today's standards, and it worked brilliantly!
(But here at interviews i was just crushed and nobody (except one guy) wanted to give me a break. Except for that guy who was part of a team which organized a show with me in the main role, not knowing (1998, Portland branch of Quadramed, if there ever was such thing). Ask Andy Carson, the local channel 12 meteo man, "the manager" though i could exactly what they needed me to do, i just didn't know it and especial didn't know how to talk with my basic English back then).
From there, i started to do accounting on (newly emerging) PCs. Usually with one meg of memory and 40 megs of hard drive.
One day i went back there for some reason and i saw a guy in the same office where i worked, in Salary department, trying to transfer my app on a PC. Also because they knew it was all they needed, cause it worked on a mini with one single operator, and the PC was far more advanced in software, with environments like dBase or FoxPro that were almost ready to use.
But i didn't say anything, cause i had enough with that rigorous guy who asked me for so many modifications (it looked like they immediately grew a taste for the possibilities of my new solutions) and improvements (in data acquiring screen, data fields, calculation algorithms) that the money i got from that contract diluted to the the equivalent of Angela's salary in the same time (about 6 months) the accounting department at the company i left to do this.
Yeah i know i wanted to write about greed, the biggest motivator in this world, my eyes are really blurry, can hardly see what i'm typing and the guys who were behind all this (at different higher levels) but i kinda lost momentum. Maybe next entry.
Ok one more phrase. Greed got me in the States. Thought i could do so much better then Romania, after i've done what i've done there professionally (not even having formal IT training, me being a mechanical engineer by trade). But
There, i had a roof above my head, my own small but decent apartment in a concrete built condo, and could ask questions in my own language, exchange knowledge with bored people who weren't competing for nothing, with all those somewhat advanced computers sitting all around and not doing nothing and they were ashamed and intrigued and gave me their best answers.
And i didn't know the contract was entirely a setup, creating all conditions for me to do it.
But things were advancing fast. Before i left in 95, people i worked for (with accounting apps) wanted to move to Windows, object oriented was the new norm and at 35 i was kinda burned out already while people were coming from colleges with fresh knowledge. I remember when my PC at home broke and one young guy fresh out of college came with a diskette and eradicated a virus and i had no idea they really existed.
Everything was straightforward in IT before object oriented. In the same time ready made accounting and salary apps became available on PCs so i don't know what i would have done there either.
Could have entered some scientific area, i don't know. But with what i know today, after i have browsed the whole internet (kidding).
5:50 How many times i did that? A few months ago i removed a fan i had in the bathroom on top (or better said bottom) of the main fan. A little 4 inch one that was passively turning faster when the big one was started and rest of the time was pumping a little air in the exhaust pipe. Mainly to prevent "air" and especially dust from backflowing.
As i said, there is also a leak somewhere in that pipe that brings that exhaust into the walls. Including when you use the restroom. So the little fan was also refreshing the "air" in the walls, through that leak.
But it became dusty, dust got into the bearings, probably, and was turning slower and slower to the point at times it stopped. So one day, i just ripped it off, thinking. Must have been crazy when i installed it. What for?
Several months later, i (again) know what for. If it was only for preventing dust falling from the generous amount (half inch maybe all over the inside of the 4 inch pipe all the way to the roof) when everything vibrates, like with the black BMW. So yes, today i put another one there, bigger (all i had handy). Waiting for results (to see if i get better) in a few days.
