feedback loop

 my mom's arriving in less than a day and a half! so now i'm starting to worry about how and when we'll all be getting sick as usual. i'm taking antihistamines and hoping for the best.

...

saturday night:

the deployment took quite a while, and i was very grateful to have asked for my coworker's support - not only did i need it, but my boss mysteriously bailed on us for a "meeting" just as we got underway. anyway, it was ultimately successful and our customer didn't have much downtime.

yesterday:

i started yesterday pissed off because i hadn't realized that our security team had booked me for an early meeting and it threw my plans off. the meeting itself wasn't interesting, but our new devops guy was deeply concerned about something that's not a real problem yet (and it'll be good news if it becomes a real problem), so the boss and i had to talk him through it...

we had lots of new people in the office, we're definitely growing!

a large chunk of the work day was spent getting our workshop set up, and it felt like we were quite successful. i rushed home to take mr smear to the end-of-year class presentation, and along the way got stuck into helping a coworker do a deployment that neither of us was prepared for 🤦

a script i asked him to run managed to break things, and by that stage we were running late and i had to abandon him to take mr smear to the school - i was quite relieved this morning to learn that he managed to come right eventually...

the presentation was awkward, and mr smear was being weird and annoying while i thanked his teacher and made it clear that we're praying she'll continue on next year (a lot of the teachers are quitting, and she apparently hasn't decided yet).

then we waited forever in a line for cotton candy, which really made his day, and then we came home and i worked some more.

mr smear and i had dinner (gd had prepared it before leaving for her haircut), and we mostly had a good time. then i watched some news and it sounds like the "ceasefire" with iran might end soon, so we prepared a ready-bag and hopefully we won't need it.

today:

i didn't sleep well, but i didn't have a particularly bad night, i guess. and it was a pretty relaxed morning.

work was a complete mess of back-to-back meetings, surprises, and overlapping demands. i took one of the new guys with to pick up a sumsum salad lunch, and discovered that he's just come back from a year and a half at columbia university - what a shit-show (O_o)

one of the security team sent me a very sweet message out of the blue to say that she'd put me up for employee of the year because of how helpful i am, which i found touching. then i had my one-on-one with my boss (which was just a one-on-one, i explained that i'd been concerned because the calendar event made it look like an HR intervention), and i was caught completely off-guard by the praise and appreciation, and we were both happy with the mutual feedback by the end of it.

and with all of that stuff going on, gd sent me mr smear's report card which - aside from some funny remarks about his lack of interest in a couple of subjects - was surprisingly positive across the board. we rewarded him with a day of no homework and alternating half hours of screentime, which he was really stoked about.

the end of the day was extremely frustrated, as everything that had worked in our little workshop mysteriously died and we ended up leaving pretty late because it took forever to get everything functional again. and i was so excited to get everything functional that i forgot to check if one of the attempting fixes actually worked :P

the evening was good, with only a minor peep from mr smear after bedtime. i did some work, and was going to do some more when i realized that i'm starting to fall apart, and i wanted to get this all down before crashing.

the secret

 i've complained about the bullshit misconceptions regarding "the secret" before, but there's one aspect of it that is valid: if you decide you're going to have a bad day, you'll be sure to get it.

i began the day trying to disable avatars in zoom:

am i the only person who finds the idea of a zoom "AI companion" creepy, and am concerned by the fact that when i tried to disable it it warned me that that would mean deleting biometric data of mine??!

i mean, i've never heard of the AI companion features until i signed in to disable avatars so that my son's zoom class behavior would be less chaotic...

possibly related, by a bizarre sequence of events gd was forced to re-enact the scene from the dirtiest toilet in scotland this morning and we were all thoroughly traumatized.

most of today was spent indoors, alternating between random shit and napping. i finished reading danny the champion of the world, which was superb. we bought noita, which looks amazing, and i have to say mr smear gave it a very fair chance before he decided he was bored. he wanted to like it, but after going through some of it with him and then reading up on how long it takes before it starts being fun, we requested a refund.

oh, which reminds me - i started investigating entry level gaming PCs last night before going to bed, i think i might have found a good solution but i'm going to ask my coworkers to vet it first.

we also tried to get the MIDI controller working with garage band; it does work out of the box, but i couldn't for the life of me figure out the controls.

after spending some time trying to compile the sonnet comics images into a format for the printer. i was horrified to learn that i don't have all the hi-res images, and that some of the hi-res images are slightly different resolutions. fortunately, mr cat was quick to respond positively and he's going to (re-)deliver them soon.

...

i planned to take mr smear to the charles clore park for an outing, which started off positively but he soon found things to complain about and became progressively more convinced that he was having the worst day ever. the fruit shake was great, the ice-cream was great, being on the promenade on a beautiful day was great, and having dinner at mexicana was great (although once he actually tried the food he remembered he didn't like the rice, goddammit).

on the way home his bike started acting up, so he decided he was going to walk. *i& didn't want to walk because i was on blades and moving slowly over long periods makes my feet hurt, and we'd already travelled pretty far. so i grabbed his bike and rolled with it, he jogged alongside me, and this was going great until he tripped on some sunken bricks and really hurt himself.

the limp home was painful for him, and i ended up having to "walk" anyway so it was painful for me too. and we had a few characteristically unpleasant moments along the way, although we both seemed to handle things better once we got home.

now it's just about 10pm, i've almost finished my strong tea and i'm about to get to work 🤞

bumpy ride

 wednesday:

waking up early and sending mr smear off to school, still broken from lack of sleep

arriving to the office really early (but still with time pressure) to discover that my installation station had been stripped of all its cabling (amongst other things), and it would take about an hour and a half to get that sorted out.

at least the installation itself went relatively smoothly.

one of the aussies gave me and another aussie's cousin (he's helping out) a ride to the test site, where the story of the afternoon was hours of set up for very little payoff - not only were there loads of hardware issues, but the issue that i'd resolved by midnight the previous night turned out to be not fully solved, and it cost another three hours to understand what was wrong and resolve it.

and then cursor started bugging out, because we use devcontainers and microsoft (fuckers!) are now preventing vscode clones from using their extensions.

i don't know at this point how much of the solution to the problem is an actual solution to the problem, or a workaround for ms (and docker) fuckery.

anyway. at least i figured out the cause of one of the other issues we had (aws syncing syncs impossibly slowly if you have debug logs being printed)

anyway.

after wrestling with a bad router/switch setup, and waiting 90's download times for an OS installation, we were finally able to leave one of the machines in a state where i should have been able to continue the installation remotely, and we hopped in the car and rode back to tel aviv.

i arrived home around 11pm. signed in to attempt to finish the deployment, and discover that the machine was offline.

very frustrated, i went to bed.

yesterday:

i feel like the whole city woke up feeling more rested. mr smear went off to school again, i took care of a bunch of things that had been piling up over the course of the week, went past the clinic to get authorization for gd's procedure next week, and continued on to the coffee shop where astérix gladiateur was waiting to be picked up.

of course, i had to pick up a coffee and nurse it all the way to the office.

it was an exciting day in the office. the two most significant pieces of work i did were recording an online demo from a contractor (who threw up a little in his mouth halfway through 🤢), and taking a couple of guys with IT / devops experience into the warehouse and beginning to get a workshop set up there.

another highlight (in addition to the workshop, as opposed to the not-highlight of the demo) was a department weekly with lots of enthusiastic new faces, and a happy hour making a new convert both regarding shakespeare's sonnets and my vision for our software solution.

after putting mr smear to bed, i had a call with my boss; i suspected that i was going to be answering for having been a bit miserable the previous day, but it turned out to be a discussion about how to go about doing a deployment we'd had to defer and arguing over when to do it. we ended up settling on tomorrow night, so 🤞

today:

i guess i slept alright last night, at least better than has become usual. i was avoiding screens before mr smear left for school, and reading a canticle for leibowitz, or trying to at any rate. some of it i've really enjoyed, but the last quarter is proving to be a slog and with everything else going on i've decided to give it up.

while going through that, i realized that even if i'm not on screens i'm still focused very close to my head, so i decided to walk mr smear to school in order to give my own eyes an opportunity to "stretch". surprisingly, gd had had a similar idea simultaneously so we all walked together, which aside from an  encounter with a brazenly irresponsible dog owner was an enjoyable experience.

i had some important stuff to take care of, which generated a fight with gd that put more shitty vibes on the morning, but eventually worked through it and we hit the mall to do some grocery shopping and upgrade my phone.

it turns out the issue with my (old) phone has been that it's only got 4GB of memory, and with my "new" phone (the display unit, i got a significant discount for that) it's clear why it was so unresponsive; my baseline usage with nothing open is 4.6GB, and that's after uninstalling and disabling every app i don't need on a daily basis...

i'm a little concerned about the battery usage, but i'll give it a few days before i decide whether to complain or not.

on the way out of the mall, an older guy came out of the retirement home and lit up a cigarette while still inside the mall. i asked him to please not do that, to which he made stupid excuses and then started calling me a quibbler (not sure if the translation is good). so i called him a jerk, but he continued to act like a jerk and although i succeeded in walking away, it only takes one asshole to ruin a good day, and i'd already had some shitty experiences, and he occupied more brainspace than he had right to for the next while.

it was hot (summer's here) and i was sweaty and tired by the time we got home, but i had to rush off to pick up mr smear and help carry home all the books from his locker. i spent the next while napping on the couch listening to the audiobook of the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, waking up to gd reading asterix to mr smear.

i spent the remainder of the afternoon and most of the evening getting the new phone set up, while listening to insane AI covers like system of a crown and neon maiden.

we went to our friends for friday night dinner, which was a really pleasant evening, both for the adults and the kids.

it's now almost 1am, mr smear has just gone to bed and i'm about to jump in the shower and probably also go to bed.

unceasefire

 how the hell was yesterday only tuesday?

we woke up to sirens (i'd barely slept, i was feeling more broken than ever), and the fuckers slow-dripped the missile attacks so that we were all up and down the stairs for a couple of hours. the old lady across the hall was really, really struggling :(

we were in the shelters when we learned the disappointing news that we'd agreed to a ceasefire.

as much as it would be nice to have some respite from the missile barrages, anything short of total victory against their terrorist regime is a terrible mistake. they're ideological zombies, they will never give up trying to destroy us, they are incapable of surrender, and they will never accept peace.

anyone who thinks negotiating with terrorists is a viable strategy is a fool.

hearing tom nash's analysis does make me feel considerably better, though.

i crashed on the couch for an hour before dragging myself to the table for breakfast and heading off to the office, where our first actual devops guy was waiting. we spent the morning getting quite a lot of onboarding done, but by lunchtime (with two of my previous teammates joining me and my old boss) things were starting to go wrong.

i was there with a job to do, and everything was broken. what followed was a frustrating endless loop of trying to uncover the root cause with a few of the others. by the time i needed to come home for dinner we'd gone through a list of theories and found something that might have worked, but we couldn't figure out how to make it.

my break for dinner was pretty good, we did have some rough moments but not due to any malicious intentions. as soon as mr smear was in bed, i sat down and continued my investigation...

... i finally, after seemingly infinite iterations, found what i was looking for around midnight, and just before 1am successfully deployed a new release to our dev environment.

just in time to get a few hours of sleep (hopefully 🤞) before taking mr smear to school (🤞) and rushing to the office early to initiate a deployment before rushing to our test site to do a deployment...

... and all the while, urgent personal stuff has been piling up and i haven't had a moment to spare.

glassy eyes and smooth brains

i got a lot of work done before finally going to bed around 1am, but we were sent rushing to the shelter around 3am, and after we were finally able to return home i couldn't sleep and so continued to work for the next two hours.

i was bleary-eyed but satisfied by being able to push a clean, working solution before crashing for an hour or so, then waking up and working some more before our parental guidance meeting.

we talked a bit about how tech children communicate strangely, i had an interesting thought but i'm too tired now to recall it :/

oh! i forgot to mention yesterday - i finally got through to someone in the municipality regarding mr smear's art school application: he didn't get in, but he's no. 2 on the waiting list. we'll take it🤞

...

i'm disappointed to learn that there's some unknown issue with gd's cannabis license application. again. i fucking hate these people.

...

my mom discovered that godmother has the original copy of their maternal grandparents' ketuba! and their other sister happens to be visiting for the first time ever, so she's going to bring it back. i'm praying it gets into my mom's hands in one piece 🙏

unfortunately, i was so excited that i reported this piece of information to someone who's supposed to be helping us, and she immediately responded with "oh, nice, so just take that to them then". fuck.

...

i was just telling my boss how i couldn't go back to sleep after the "lame" missile attack in the night (one rocket?) when the pre-alerts went off, so we packed up and rushed downstairs. our sirens hadn't gone off, neither phone nor air-raid, for an oddly long period of time so i ventured outside for internet access to see what was going on and as the door closed behind me there was a massive explosion close by, so i rushed back inside and swore not to do that again.

the day was a mad rush of deployment testing and troubleshooting, being an "onboarding buddy" to a new guy (who's hopefully going to take some pressure off of me personally), and wrangling mr smear.

mr smear pushed hard today, and things got bad before they got better. the day ended on a positive note, but it was long and upsettingly shit until it got there.

...

did i mention the thing on my face seems to be healed (yesterday) already? i'm not complaining, just confused by the speed. and i'm struggling through my beard's itchy phase because i won't shave until i've really sure my cheek's alright, and it's getting hotter.

...

according to iranians, us striking the entrance to evin prison is their equivalent of the berlin wall coming down.

the IRGC attacking qatar (and everything else they're doing) is insane and suicidal, it feels like they're trying to martyr their way out to avoid surrender.

a whole kernel through a nostril

we woke up this morning to another massive barrage. in addition to discovering that our neighbors are also vegan, we also learned about the US strike on the primary iranian nuclear facilities during the night.

now i'm listening to how islamists are attacking churches... they're deep into phase FA, i can't wait to see them FO.

...

yesterday:

after the midnight attacks on friday night we had relative calm. it was a day spent reading (i read about half of danny the champion of the world), we played (or, more accurately, i picked up a copy of webbed and mr smear played a lot). and getting the basis of the frontend for my language project.

in the afternoon, mr smear was invited by his friend to play table tennis, and i joined them and his friend's mother, scouted the area for a bomb shelter, and then enjoyed watching mr smear actually get into playing - giving him breaks by taking turns, and i was quite surprised by how good his friend is!

he came home with us and joined us for dinner, and his mother and i both made the screen-time rules clear. until dinner the two of them legitimately played, amusing themselves in hilarious fashion, and it was a treat to witness it. dinner was nice, but i was concerned about getting him home before mr smear needed to start getting ready for bed (and before the expected iranian attack), so i accompanied him home.

and then felt super awkward when i returned home to find mr smear still eating (demolishing a large pile of corn-on-the-cob), so he could've stayed later...

today:

it was a busy morning, and i was a wreck even though i slept a little better last night (not well, but better). i spent my work day in meetings, and working on something that took a lot more time than it should have, so unfortunately i'm going to have to continue working after posting this.

on a positive note, my mother sent me a whole bunch of documents and images of her parents and grandparents, and aside from being fascinating it gave me what i needed to respond to the people who've offered assistance with her aliyah process.

the saddest reason for a lot of lost time today was mr smear, two days after getting his privileges back, losing them again over homework (and lying to me). so that sucks.

but in positive news, we received the next two illustrated harry potter books (books four and five). it occurred to me that purchasing more beautiful books while we're under threat of getting our apartment bombed might be a mistake, but thinking like that is just silly.

[knocks on wood]

the beginning of week two

 yesterday:

the day began with a massive strike on us (hitting a hospital ward, fortunately already evacuated), so that was a way to wake up in the morning. then we headed to gd's pain clinic appointment, picking up a last-minute insurance authorization on the way (whew!), and coming home just in time for my first meeting.

the first few hours of my work day were occupied with sorting out other people's problems (we have a couple of devops joining us next week, so i might be able to actually work on my own tasks).

around lunchtime, a taxi showed up with a "care package", which made everyone's day (mr smear couldn't contain his excitement over an unexpected haul of vegan treats) and [this evening] gd and i did shots of the really nice vodka to usher in the shabbat, though sadly it appears she's not a fan 🤷

i got stuck into an unnecessarily difficult problem with one of our external devs, and i had just resolved it when i received an urgent call from my boss instructing me to drop everything and head off to our test site. so - after gd assured me that they'd be okay* - another taxi showed up, i hopped in, and after picking up a package from one of my coworkers we headed out.

* that's a big deal, that she was able to accept it so quickly under the current circumstances

about an hour later, we arrived. an hour spent worrying about what we'd do if there were sirens, working on my laptop in the back seat or staring out the window feeling sorry for myself for not having had my afternoon coffee yet.

fortunately, as soon as we arrived i found that we had the facilities to make turkish coffee, so after a brief introduction to the site and preparing a cup i went outside to talk to one of my coworkers. i'd been on-site a total of maybe five or ten minutes when we looked up and saw an iron dome missile fire - i've never seen that with my own eyes before - and moments later the siren sounded.

i'm still amused that the last guy into the shelter brought in a sixpack of beers. genius. 😂

it took a lot more time to prepare a station than i would have liked, but the entire site is full army vibes and aside from learning new and interesting things, it was fun. the first part of my work went pretty smoothly, but then i ran into unexpected issues with my coworker from tuesday's code, and it took forever to find a solution. and not even a good solution. but i pushed on, and eventually managed to get things to a point where i could continue to work on it remotely so that i could stop holding back my coworker who'd offered to give me a ride back to tel aviv.

the ride home was entertaining, but also scary. not only was it made clear to me that we weren't going to stop for any sirens, but my driver was an absolute cowboy and i had to work hard to keep from visibly slamming on the passenger brakes :P

i arrived home pretty late, showered and ate (effectively all i'd consumed since breakfast were two bags of crisps and an energy bar), and then jumped back in to figure out how to continue the work (i'd left knowing it was possible, theoretically).

it was about half past midnight when i finally succeeded, and it wouldn't have been possible without the deep dive i'd done earlier in the day for the external dev 🤘

today:

it was weird waking up in the morning without having been jumped by a siren. the day began well, with a very excited and grateful mr smear getting his minecraft account resurrected.

i did get a little work done in the morning, but i was mostly distracted by random things and the news cycle. then we headed down to the mall (which has taken a fair bit of damage from some of the strikes), where mr smear and i milled around waiting for gd and he badgered me until i purchased death note black edition, vol. 1, which he subsequently completed reading by dinner time; so now we're all watching the anime series together :P

i was feeling very tired by the time we got home. my mother's had some potential success with her aliyah story; she found familysearch.org, and located some really interesting documents which might prove useful.

we helped gd with some cleaning today (mr smear and i cleaned standing fans together, and he helped with the vacuuming too), and aside from two big missile barrages it's been relatively calm.

...

it's 4.30am now, and i started writing this before dinner. but then i was too tired to stay up, but had really bad insomnia for the first time in a little while, and when i finally did fall asleep we were woken by the second missile strike :/

six

 omg. sailor said if we could finish this war in under six days it'd be a new record, today's day six and already many iranians in the government and military are defecting and declaring for the crown prince. we just came back up from the bomb shelter, so it's definitely not over, but i'm praying that this is all actually real and that it's not too good to be true.

i cannot imagine how the iranians must be feeling. after half a century of oppression. no less the rest of the countries in the region.

...

my work-from-home day was mostly meetings, and supporting others, and not getting of my own tasks done. and occasionally helping mr smear, or getting upset with him for not respecting my work-from-home boundaries.

and watching a lot of news. i can't stop, but we perpetually stand at forks in the path, and each fork leads up into the light and down into the darkness, and i'm as anxious about someone somewhere taking the wrong turn as i am excited but slightly skeptical about the too-good-to-be-true outcomes we're seeing out of iran right now.