Storm Over Budapest
I'm legendarily unlucky when it comes to catching lightning with the camera, but tonight we had such a storm that even I could snap some usable photos about it. :-)
Daily WTF - Milk
As I don't have a car, I usually organize my grocery shopping around distance vs. weight, bringing heavier items from a smaller store called CBA which is closer to my place, even though their prices are always higher. I pretty much always buy soft drinks and milk there, just like today. On weekends they close by noon so it was a pressing issue, I got there around 11:30 and as I know the optimal route in the store, I went for the milk first. Here we mostly have milk coming in sealed cartons, valid for months, so usually there is no reason to look for expiration dates. I noticed that they got my favourite kind Milli 1.5% which is becoming a rare catch these days, I really don't know why; usually I have to fall back to Parmalat or something else. I was happy to see my favourite so I put 5 cartons into the bottom of my basket, covered it with Coke, frozen pizza and two strawberry yoghurt Milka chocolates (yumm!) and went to the cashier.
They have 3 lines, two were open but I went to the usual one where they accept cards. The lady who is there most of the time knows me already after so much shopping and when she got to the bottom of the basket where the milks were, she seemingly froze. I didn't know what's wrong, it's 5 cartons, can't be so hard to count and not like she has to do the math herself... She started whispering to me, cautiously glancing around, asking if it was on this tag price, 269 HUF which is about $1.35. I had no idea what she means, it's on the price tag, and that's the usual price of this milk... She still looked puzzled and told me that she doesn't understand, this one was priced down to 140 HUF (about $0.70) all week, she knows it because she bought some earlier as it expires tomorrow. But I haven't heard it from her... I looked at it closely, she was right, expires on February 13th. WTF?! We agreed on that I quickly take the milk back where it was and bring something else, so I did and returned with 4 cartons of a different kind that expires sometime in May. She was worried whether I told anyone, I assured her I was moving silently like a ninja, she's safe from prosecution. Kudos to her!
I still can't wrap my mind around this. I ran into unfortunate stuff in their store in the past like buying margarine which is supposed to be fine for months but expired in a few days; it probably was the same scam and then I learned not to buy margarine there, that's not a heavy item anyway. But milk? Really? And what bastard tries to realize extra profit on expiring milk this way, pricing it up from the earlier discount for the last one or two days? Sure, people probably won't notice, who expects that to happen, I sure didn't, but after such an episode how can they expect me to trust them with anything that can possibly expire? What's left for me to buy there regularly, coke and toilet paper?
Budapest Sunset
I didn't get the chance to use my camera recently, so I was glad to catch this pretty colorful sky just before nighttime took over. I'm going to miss this slice of the sky that I claim mine.
Digi Internet Issues
My internet connection in Hungary is provided by Digi, they have a sweet LAN based connection on which I get 20/10 megabits for next to nothing and it works like a charm. Well, it usually does, but today I ran into a weird connection problem again which I can't really understand or safely avoid, but as a note to myself I will document the solution here.
I'm connecting to them using my router, their ethernet cable is connected to the WAN port directly as it should. The connection type is PPPoE with a username and a password. Sometimes, like once a year I guess, the router just loses the connection and can't reconnect to their network, no matter what I do. Unplugging, waiting, ethernet cable removing, manual reconnecting, nothing helped and it's not that I was impatient, I left it there to try and retry for nearly 3 hours. Note that the username and password are correct in the router's settings and I never touched that. It worked yesterday, the day before and so on, it's fine.
From experience I know that when I call their support line, they always want me to plug their cable directly to a PC and build a new broadband connection in Windows. Since my router is in a little, dedicated server room with a bit cumbersome access, I tried to do this with my laptop before calling them. Username and password were correct, called the connection Digi as they always suggest, but no luck, error 651. Then I called their support line, had a chat with a nice lady who of course asked for the same thing, so I had to go to the router again and build a new connection, but this time I just left the default Broadband Connection as name, since Digi was already taken in my system. It gave the same error 651, she had no idea what's wrong because the router in the building seems to be working fine from her end, so she promised me a call back from a technician.
What I didn't know that time was that I accidentally mistyped the username at this second try by one character (they generated my username weirdly) and when I corrected it, the laptop connected to their network like a charm. Which is weird because the same thing named Digi did not... Of course after this the cable back in the router worked all fine, it could connect right away. I wonder what kind of kick the broadband connection builder in Windows gives their network that the router itself can't do... And the same thing happened with a different kind of router last year so it's not the given device's issue.
In all fairness, I just went back to the server room with the laptop, built a new connection called Digi (deleted the old one by then) and despite the correct username and password, it gave me error 651. But when I tried to connect again, and sort of again after a too long test I chose to cancel, it connected properly. So it's not the name... Well, not entirely. I have no idea what's going on here sometimes.
The bottom line is: whenever it happens, just build a new connection on a PC, try to connect with it directly until it actually works (it may take a few tries), then the router too will be all fine for several months. Spooky, isn't it?
Earthquake!
Tonight around 6:45pm we had an earthquake. It doesn't happen too often in Hungary and it was the first one I fully felt. On the New Year's Eve of 2008 there was one near Budapest, but then I was watching a movie at my desktop PC, with my legs put on the desk so I only felt something weird, like my chair moved and turned a little. I've seen later in the news what happened and I couldn't believe I missed it. But now it was different. I was sitting at my desk, chatting with my friend Ákos online when I heard weird crackling noises from the walls, mostly over my head and when I looked up, the lamp was swinging a little. Then it continued to swing harder and harder, bad noises everywhere, my chair was shaking a bit, I felt the floor shaking with my feet, the desk was moving which made my display nodding. From the first chair movement I instantly knew what's going on so I started typing "Earthquake!!!" into the messenger window while the event was still going on, like that moron in the Bash quote: "OMG my house is on fire, AFK BBL" :) It probably didn't go longer than 5 or 10 seconds but it definitely felt much longer. And I have to tell you, it was scary!
I still couldn't believe it happened, we're not in California after all, I started looking at news portals but of course nothing was on about it yet. Then I remembered how Twitter is basically used as a data assessment tool by seismologists and other scientists dealing with natural disasters, due to people posting about events almost instantaneously, providing an exact location with timestamp. So I went on and no surprise, a friend already posted about the earthquake. I wasn't hallucinating after all! Later it was confirmed to be a 4.8 strength quake with the epicenter near Oroszlány, about 40 miles from my place, fortunately causing only minor damages.
Knowing that (hopefully) nobody was hurt, all I can say... How cool was that! Since usually there are aftershocks coming with this event, I went on to watch 2012, eating madártej (Birds Milk, or Floating Islands as you may know it) that my mom made me yesterday. If I gotta go, I'm gonna go in style. :)
