on the edge

 today was just... unbelievable.

i almost made progress with my auto-doc, but had to leave halfway to make it to the office on time for my team daily that i didn't know had been postponed.

aside from reviewing a teammate's code (which happened to provide some very helpful hints for my auto-doc integration), i spent all of my client hours working on the golang service that i'd said i was done with, but kept diving down the rabbit hole and discovering weirder and weirder things.

before noon i travelled to my employer's office to meet with the gameis guy. i couldn't find him, but i had a sync with my mentor anyway. then i looked for him again, bumping into my sales team rep and getting some "insider information" regarding which way the wind is blowing - anyone who isn't "with the program" as far as AI is concerned is going to have a very tough time finding employment or staying employed. i still couldn't find him, and ended up being drawn in to a "tech circle" (which was interesting), after which i finally found him but only had 25 minutes of his time before he had to go off to something.

so i sat down with him and his friend, and learned that they're both working at our employer as a day job, but run a gaming company as a night job as well. they gave me all sorts of advice, and insights, in addition to a brief summary of their crazy journey so far.

immediately after that i sat down with a guy i'd met at the hackathon, and i spent the next twenty minutes or so flooding him with info and advice (mostly about working with AI) and getting him onboard with my "async" game jam idea.

then i spoke to my group lead, and introduced her to my auto-doc, and she was super excited when she saw the demo ^_^

the rest of the work day - in the office, and at home - was all about refining my golang service effort and incrementally solving each wave of issues. it's been a trip, and a very expensive one: i'm pretty confident that claude's opus model has suddenly becoming considerably dumber and way more expensive :/

i got home to find gd in a state of shock, she has no idea how to deal with a little boy whose family isn't particularly into hygiene (or boundaries). i took the kids for a walk to pick up snacks, regaling them with AI horror stories; apparently, i was effective enough that mr smear's friend stopped me to delete chatgpt from his phone.

we were musing over whether mixing the salt & pepper chips with the balsamic vinegar & caramelized onion flavors of country chips would approach a salt & vinegar experience, and i decided it was worth a try: the kids were horrified, but i bought them anyway and after our sushi dinner (which we all ate too much of) we gave it a try, and while it wasn't what we were hoping for it was still a case of the whole being better than the sum of its parts.

i managed to get the two of them showered between getting home and eating dinner, which was quite a story.

my sister came home pretty late, after we'd begun trying to get the kids to bed (they're camping out in the living room), and while they amused themselves with non-screen activities (much to their chagrin) the three of us sat in our office and retold some pretty hairy parts of our life stories. and then it was midnight, and the kids had been asleep for a while without us realizing, and now it's time to call it a night and get ready for an important morning.

getting stuff done

 it's been a busy morning! we failed to get gd's canadian crypto account reactivated (their verification is broken), but i managed to get my israeli one sorted out. this was after discovering yesterday that ethereum gas fees have finally normalized after all the upgrades, making it worthwhile transferring money, and that compound has been generating far less interest than promised.

i mean, with our amounts of money it didn't make a huge difference, but still.

while doing that, i managed to get the blast window for our shelter roped up so that gd can close it herself in case of emergency. gd and mr smear cleaned the house yesterday, specifically worried about all of us (including my sister and potentially mr smear's friend) having to sleep in our shelter bedroom together. apparently things are heating up, though i've been completely disconnected from the news cycle these days.

then i called and made an appointment for her to see the dentist, because of course she's in pain after her root canal and crown were done... at least her stomach seems to be doing a bit better today.

i think i've sent my insurance broker the documents she wanted - turns out my previous employer forgot to update the insurance companies that i wasn't working for them any more 🤔

finally, gd found our boxing gear (whew!) and i posted the mongoose's guitar hero guitars on the facebook marketplace.

so, all in all, it's been a morning.

[chokes on a raisin bran raisin]

sleep journal entry

i got some work done on my auto-doc last night, but then mr smear asked me to read to him and i ended up putting myself to sleep.

ironically, he was apparently up a while later, sitting on the couch and asking my sister if she could apply a general anaesthetic because he couldn't sleep 🤭

i had a rough night. general mental disquiet, and plenty of lower back discomfort which needed heavy stretching. during a longer stretching session, i could hear what sounded like a post-zapper fly dying, but i wasn't able to find it.

gods, i'm tired. i mean, i'm up, but i'm tired.

a day

 i'm not going rollerblading tonight. again. this time because i've been so busy this week, and there's more busy coming down the line, and i've barely touched the auto-doc which is immensely important to me. so that's my plan for tonight 🤞

[please universe don't laugh]

work today was annoying. the stuff i was supposed to be focused on is consistently being blocked by the owning team, and then when they do approve my changes they don't merge them*, and then when they do merge them it takes ages to deploy, and then when they do deploy it takes ages to run the tests, and then i invariably discover that something doesn't work as advertised and i need to start all over again.

* not allowing someone to merge an approved request is really, really dumb.

so instead of working on my primary task, i filled my time with the golang service i wasn't supposed to be touching... i realized my original ticket was still open and then confirmed that all of my changes replaced the original, obsolete log noise with new, very real log noise that shows that an aspect of the service has been thoroughly broken for the last nine years.

*sigh*

on my way home for lunch (mr smear's leftover pancakes from breakfast), i picked up lactase for gd whose stomach has been really rough today - even more than before. i've warned her that she'd better go to the clinic tomorrow if it's not feeling better by then.

i signed into the all-hands meeting on my way home, i couldn't care less about the details but the guys kept pronouncing "people" like "pilpel" and he talked about "eating" the sales targets, so...

once mr smear was done with his screen time, we went out for a walk to the park, and got back just after my sister returned from jerusalem. we had a great dinner, and then chatted with my mom, and now it's shower-and-bedtime for mr smear...

familia-rity

yesterday:

the last hour and a half of the night was the best hour and a half of the night. i actually slept, and my alarm forcefully ejected me from a dream and got my day off to a (literally) wobbly start.

...

i accompanied gd to the hospital for her toenail appointment that she's been waiting for since april. i think we must have sat in the waiting room, surrounded by wet coughing, for about an hour before we were finally called in. i got a bit of work done, at least.

[stops writing to hunt for and then complain that the kiffness' balkan song isn't available anywhere]

the dermatologist doesn't believe the second toenail incident was fungal, just that gd is susceptible to whatever the fuck is going on. not exactly confidence-inspiring.

on our way out, we took the elevator down and as we were leaving it a 300 pound woman walking out in front of gd stopped suddenly and took a step backwards, landing squarely on gd's recovering toe. un-fucking-believable. after helping gd out of the elevator, and struggling to deal with the combination of her rage and the horror of her toenail likely being re-injured, we parted ways with me warning her to stay away from others for her own safety.

i hopped on a bus home, and was just calling my mother to update her when gd called me to inform me that some old woman had rammed into her in the supermarket - same foot, fortunately missing her toe - jesus fucking christ.

i understand why she felt the need to take a taxi home :/

...

hungry and tired, i stopped at home for breakfast instead of heading through to the office as originally planned, then crossed the bridge and went in for a couple of hours. earlier in the morning i'd threatened my teammates with an openspec workshop, and i took the opportunity to run a private training session with dx and his manager.

...

i returned home for an employer meeting, which turned out to be a presentation by the boss explaining how the whole company is about to experience a massive shift in order to realign with the market trends. i already found our division into backend / frontend / full-stack strange - i've been having difficulty understanding the distinctions since before AI became a thing, probably because i'm a sort-of full-stack engineer, and devops engineer, but not a frontend engineer at all - but now things are getting really interesting and we're going to be divided into the kinds of building we do, and our proficiency with AI and depth of experience with harnesses is going to determine whether we cut it or not.

...

by the time we needed to leave for netanya, gd was certain that she wouldn't be able to join us. she's been properly sick (her stomach, mainly) for days now, and it's really frustrating and disappointing for all of us.

we left the city in heavy traffic, and it took us about an hour and a half to get there, with mr smear complaining about motion sickness the whole way and insisting that using his phone made it better 🙄

the evening with our cousins was just lovely. the food was a big issue for them, but we were fine, and there were soooo maaaaany kiiiiiids which was loud and wonderful. we also walked down the two minutes to the beach for an incredible sunset, and just generally had a great time.

the ride back to tel aviv was quick and whineless, with all of us singing along to my driving playlist (that spans most of a century of good music) and managed to shower and get mr smear into bed around midnight. my first "girlfriend" (who's married to the guy who introduced me to my friends in matric which fundamentally changed my life's direction) finally sent me the summer camp photos i asked for back in may, and they are AMAZING. i can't believe how young we all were!

so that sent me down a rabbit hole of looking through my and gd's photos, which was a trip, and then it was after 1am and i crawled into bed for a relatively good sleep.

unroutine

 oh. it's 00.28 as i begin writing this. i went to bed about an hour and a half ago, and i've been lying uncomfortably awake for the past half hour or so trying desperately to claw back the unconsciousness. my belly's been doing a thin all evening (again in the evening, again no idea what's triggered it), and my lower back's been doing a thing since i stopped sleeping, and my brain's been doing a thing since...

yesterday (saturday):

i wasn't very productive yesterday, mostly on purpose. i thoroughly enjoyed witnessing mr smear playing battlezone on the PSVR, and i tooled around most of the day arbitrarily, and i enjoyed a good afternoon nap.

in the late afternoon - around 4.30pm - my sister and i dragged mr smear out ("i don't want to go to the beach!") and we walked, in the not-too-unpleasant heat, down to the beachfront golda. after the ice cream break, we walked back up to the hilton beach, and enjoyed a lovely evening; unable to get mr smear out of the water, of course, and dragging his feet to leave the beach :P

after catching an outrageously packed bus home, and showering in turns, gd treated us to a great dinner and we all crashed.

today:

another reasonable night's sleep (only tonight breaks the streak). very reasonable, in fact. my sister left really early again (she went to tour the gaza envelope and see the nova site), mr smear slept in until around 11am and was annoyed that i'd bothered him (twice) because i think he should have some semblance of routine in spite of it being summer holidays.

i began my day on the balcony, then spent my work day in my office. the actual meaningful work i did was minimal, primarily because the people i need to approve my work are either on weekend time or enjoying the fact that nobody's work is properly monitored on sundays.

i burned a ridiculous amount of tokens improving dashboards and making an ai status tool look cleaner.

mr smear and i - and then gd - had a massive fight about music practice*, which eventually resulted in him actually practicing with a good attitude in spite of the emotional rollercoaster and having lost hours of screen time for being disrespectful.

* that he has to put his heart into it, not just get through it. and that he needs to treat it like a rage game.

we side-stepped the punishment by going upstairs to play settlers of catan, mr smear's first encounter with the game.

he enjoyed it!

aside from being vengeful (really just against me) and myself having a pretty rough game, we all had a good time and played pretty well. there was one incident which i still think is hilarious, but awkwardly so: big data's son got confused and thought that his dad had moved the robber to block him and mr smear, when it was actually me. but he was unshakeable, so i piled on against big data, at which point - in spite of my laughing - mr smear got caught up. this went on for a minute or two before i put a stop to it and admitted that it was me, which threw both the kids completely 😂

we got home at roughly the same time my sister did, and soon settled down for dinner. post-dinner i was becoming a bit frustrated with getting mr smear into the bedtime ritual, but i made good progress with the auto-doc project (i'm having a much better experience with codex than claude) and then read alice's adventures in wonderland to mr smear, which put me to sleep more than him.

the dinner party

i'm sitting on the balcony having just sprayed the edges with pidgeon repellent; it's not a bad smell, hopefully it'll work. our neighbor's just pumped up the volume on what, thankfully, isn't the worst music. it's another beautiful saturday morning on our little corner of the highway.

last night was really cool. dinner was at a beautiful rooftop apartment, with lots of interesting people. for the most part mr smear occupied himself with weird conversations with AI (i think i need to review them when he wakes up), but when there was social interaction he was cool and behaved appropriately. the food was great, but that's kind of cheating because gd was responsible for our dinner, and a lot of people seemed to really enjoy the challah-peño :)

i got stuck into multiple rounds of entertaining conversations and debates with a wide variety of people, beginning and ending the evening with real talk with our cousin who i haven't seen in ten years, but haven't spent real time with since i was a kid!

it was well after midnight by the time we left, and this happened while we waited for the taxi:

there were some emergency cleanups that took place once we got home, and then everything quickly and quietly went off to dreamland.

side quests

 i have got practically nothing done today! i accompanied my sister to her meeting with her friends, then returned home via the hardware store (for bird repellant), meeting up with gd and mr smear and doing a friday morning shopping run, which really is one of my least favorite things. it's been hot, i missed my second coffee, and i arrived home slow and tired and quite hungry. i helped gd make challah-peño to take with us tonight, started the process of locating the PSVR components because mr smear has been harassing me for a couple of days now to set it up.

then we left for the shuk, to meet up with my sister, and went up and down the market... mr smear and i feel very similarly about mall people, and shuk people are even worse. he held my hand and walked in lock-step behind me, and we came out relatively unscathed.

relatively, because our visit to the shuk began with him being pooped on by a bird 🙄

getting the bus home took more walking and time that anticipated, and i filed a complaint against the bus driver who almost injured us with his aggressive driving, but we came inside in good spirits and launched into uprising at full blast. then i set up my IDE to work with openai's codex, after which i spent the next while wiring up the PSVR.

and realizing that i, once again, had booked a car for no good reason and it was too late to cancel it without paying the full amount :(

i managed to get the PSVR set up, and mr smear got to play battlezone, and i called sailor for an hour long argument over what kind of "market research" is valid when you're trying to make a video game.

now it's evening, and we're getting ready to leave in an hour for dinner with our cousins.

bully birds

 i'm very upset right now. i just woke up after a long night; the first part was hours of being too tired to get up, but unable to sleep (restless mind) and being mildly uncomfortable, the second part - or last part, i should say, it was probably an hour or two - was sleeping soundly, feeling pretty good, and then waking up from a dream pissed off at my mother.

we went out to dinner together, and she ordered something called "dinner service". it arrived as a tiny serving for one of something that looked like noodles but with meaty-looking bits in it, with a price tag of R1500. when i asked her if it was as she'd intended, she nonchalantly said yes and took a bite of it. while i was being horrified by the cost, i learned that it was made of some kind of exotically cruel meat (kind of like foie gras), and i told her she'd be paying for it before waking up pissed off about the whole thing.

i got up, brushed my teeth, made myself a cup of coffee, picked up my laptop, and stepped onto the balcony to start my day, only to find a pigeon standing on our little table, having left a giant, wet turd on it as well as having had diarrhea in a couple of spots on the balcony floor. so i had to spend a couple of minutes cleaning all of that up, discovering that some bird had vandalized our glass railings by somehow pooping on it at an upwards angle. i was completely disgusted.

then i started writing this, and when i got to "we went out together" the damned pigeon returned, landing on the balcony railing right in front of me and not caring when i tried to shoo it away - i had to get up and chase it away properly.

fucker.

...

i didn't get any side-project work done yesterday morning, i mostly just went through my employer emails and found myself quite satisfied with the monthly newsletter i hadn't realized i'd been receiving 🙄

i had a good breakfast, went off to the office, and started the day with a particularly positive team daily. 

that was followed by a sad consult with the other contractor, whose reorg isn't going nearly as well as mine - his new manager's doing some messed up stuff and he doesn't know who's now in charge of his contract, and i advised him to immediately update his mentor and our team, let them know what's going on and find out who he's supposed to be reporting to. he's really nervous because he's convinced that our employer's having a hard time getting new contracts and he's worried about being fired... which is fair, but in my opinion if you're facing the same risk either way, it's better to be proactive and get ahead of it as much as you can. also, considering the last few weeks, i have a feeling he's less aligned with and more disconnected from our employer than i am, so if *i* haven't felt totally safe then i'm confident he's not feeling safe *at all*.

my workday was, like the rest of the them this week, flitting between my main project and my golang service side quest. with an uncomfortable half an hour being pulled in to an incident as a suspect, only to discover that my changes had nothing to do with it 😅

i've been working on this main project since the end of april, and it's been a massive (and long) rollercoaster, and yesterday i finally deployed the end-to-end code and was able to start testing it. while i found a couple of bugs at the end of the day, the project is essentially complete and ready for whenever they miraculously figure out the pixel matching component.

i also deployed the final fix to the golang service, so it's officially in good shape and actually maintainable by on-call people if anything goes awry.

for the company happy hour, i was treated to vegan nachos. as the only vegan around yesterday, i felt obligated to consume them, and for the second time had to deal with the weird childishness of a couple of people who made a show of being offended by the existence of vegan food. that aside, i enjoyed them, had a beer, and an exciting conversation with a new friendly who works with AI from another side of the org.

oh, i almost forgot. with all that, a good chunk of the day was spent debating with my friend and coworker. who, btw, has been putting some effort into my blockchain project, for which i'm very grateful. we've been discussing a lot of the current politics and philosophies of AI, and yesterday i (we?) had a really interesting revelation about the nature of consciousness which i'm planning to work through in an article.

...

i don't know what triggered it, but after the happy hour my stomach became extremely unhappy, painfully gassy. it was like that for the next few hours, and i ended up working much later than usual to finish up a report for my incoming and outgoing managers before heading out and doing a shopping mission on my way home. quite a roundabout shopping mission with mr smear, but a successful one and at least our time together was pleasant.

my sister got a bit lost on the way home from her day-trip, but we all arrived just in time for a really nice dinner (at that point my system had mostly calmed down). we talked a lot, and by the time we got up from the table it was quite late and pretty much bedtime for everyone.

...

it's friday morning, and gd's just joined me on the balcony, and my sister and mr smear appear to still be sleeping. i've just run through the plans for the day with gd, and now it's time to get started.

reception

 i'm sitting here on the balcony after a surprisingly good night's sleep, in spite of mr smear's incessant creaking through the night on his air mattress next to my side of the bed.

i spent a good couple of hours yesterday morning working on my auto-doc: i'm very happy with how it's going. i'm so relieved that the presentation went positively that i'm in "calm down" mode. i'm under immense pressure to include certain improvements, write out a one-pager for my team, and get it out the door. all at the same time.

...

i had my quarterly roadmap meeting with my mentor yesterday morning. the roadmap bit went very well, although there was an awkward moment or two when discussing my auto-doc because he suggested that i could have done it without AI generating the documentation. then the real awkwardness began, when he asked how i felt about the company and we got into it over me feeling disconnected and not seeing the bigger picture. it turns out a) linkedin's algorithm just doesn't put all the usual stuff in my feed (granted, i don't use linkedin very often) and b) that while i've been complaining about there not being a company newsletter, i've been receiving a company newsletter in my email - my gmail inboxes were configured by default to only show my primary inbox, and i've been (unconciously) ignoring everything else 🤦‍♂️

once the meeting was over, i flipped through my emails and discovered, to my immense gratitude, that i'd missed an urgent and important email that had a deadline of a couple of days: choosing a gift for rosh hashana. if my mentor and i hadn't gone down that rabbit hole i might've lost my opportunity to pick up a significant shopping voucher, which in our current financial situation makes a very big difference.

a couple of hours after my roadmap meeting, the thing that my mentor had suggested for my auto-doc popped into my head, and i remembered that just that morning i'd read an article on the topic. i reviewed a couple of well-known packages and sent them to him, and was surprised when he immediately called me. not only had he only learned about one of those very packages about half an hour before, but when i explained that it might very well be a good dependency to build in to what i've got i could almost hear the penny drop for him, and he seems to have suddenly understood what all the excitement for what i'm building is about ^_^

...

the rest of the work day was finally uncovering the root cause of the golang service crashes and fixing it, and it was REALLY satisfying seeing the memory usage flatline when i finally deployed ^_^

i also managed to make some progress with my primary project, and after months of shenanigans i'm at a point where i've pretty much finished everything end-to-end but now have no idea how i'm going to actually test it :P

...

i left the office about twenty minutes before we had to leave home to do the airport run, and called gd to make sure she and mr smear were ready to go. of course, that was when she had just decided that she needed to wash the floors in honor of my sister's arrival 🤦‍♂️

i'd left the office in the middle of getting code reviewed and deployed, so in the literal few minutes i was at home i continued, and on the train i continued, and at the airport while waiting for my sister to clear border control i continued. border control gave me a little more time than expected because they had to hunt down her entry in the population registration - she hasn't been here for thirty years, and she left her ID in london - but she got through it eventually and our reunion was fun, funny and emotional :)

we took the train home, and the girls decided that walking the few blocks from the station was fine, which it totally was. the rest of the afternoon / evening was setting up, catching up, a really nice sushi dinner, a long chat with my mom*, and mr smear enthusiastically trying out his present of a beautiful box set of acrylic pens, then everyone getting ready for and into bed really, really late.

* although a bit intimidating, as she brought up the fact that mr smear's barmitzvah is in two years' time and we're not members of a synagogue and celebrations are a big deal that cost quite a lot of money.

...

while getting ready for bed, i saw that the summer camp organizer had registered the refund, which is a big relief.

...

i've been up since before 6am when i heard the front door close as my sister headed out to join our cousins for a day trip to metzada, and i can't believe it's thursday already. it's been a big week. so far. i'm very excited about so many things! a bit anxious, too, but mostly excited.