things that bother me in the middle of the night

 dawn is breaking, i've been up since about 4am (gd claims 4.30) and while some of it was because of gd struggling to clear her lungs (thank god we got her prescription sorted out yesterday!) a fair amount was due to a combination of worrying about how my teammates are supposed to deal with their kids when the other parents aren't on board, and how mr smear's friend's mother - who's a psychologist, if i recall correctly - sent me an article about peter gray, who may have a sound theory regarding self-directed play but who is clearly very, very wrong about how that applies to the internet and gaming (especially roblox), and AI, and also schooling.

and then i made the mistake of updating my browser, and learned that the weird anomaly that happened at work a couple of weeks ago is a known bug in helium (or chromium in general?), and i got signed out of *all* of my accounts and had to reinstall and reconnect *all* of my extensions. that's not what i wanted to be doing when i sat down at my desk in the middle of the night.

...

i slept awfully "last" night (wednesday night), i was struggling with my sinuses / post-nasal drip / sore throat, and i needed a lot of caffeine to get me through the day. lots of green tea punctuating my coffees. i managed to clear a bunch of things off my desk, though, although that did include discovering that we're going to need to borrow money to pay rent this month again. hopefully my bonus will come in with my next salary. hopefully it'll be at least half as much as the stated amount 🙏

my drip & cough got worse as the day wore on, then magically cleared up around the second half of the afternoon. this is the general pattern of this week. aside from the clear advantage of not being in a office with other people while going through it, i had access to the really hot jalapeño kettle fries (which helped clear me up, temporarily) and got to taste gd's first marzipan, which came out really well!

the majority of my work-from-home day was spent in meetings, i learned a lot and i encountered some of the trickier logic this company has to deal with, which really isn't easy to wrap my head around. my biggest stress was troubleshooting my dev environment, which mysteriously broke down on wednesday, but by the time i had my last meeting (a very friendly and positive 1:1 with my manager) i'd managed to get everything green ^_^

during one of my meetings, i heard a yell from the kitchen: gd managed to slice herself cleaning the "mandolin" 🤦‍♂️

when i was done with my day, the three of us walked across the bridge into ramat gan, paying a visit to the hardware store and the stationery store, and, after a confusing talk with the knick-knacks guy next door, to the pharmacy after learning that cloth diapers really can be used as a stand-in for cheese cloth.

we watched the first episode of small prophets over dinner last night, and after (eventually) getting mr smear to bed i sat on the couch reading medium articles until i passed out.

drips, some slow some fast

we started watching the fall and rise of reggie dinkins over dinner last night, it's legitimately good. after getting mr smear into bed, i continued with my diff tool.

i finished reading one of the ant-man comics we borrowed from the library, it wasn't bad, it was entertaining, but it definitely wasn't the kind of writing i get excited about.

i spoke with my mentor today, who made me feel really silly: why not take something that has many users like kdiff3, and write a plugin for it? it's worth looking into, though kdiff3's last update appears to be over a decade old... [EDIT: brave search gave me the old kdiff3, there's a new one that's actively maintained]

i ran into another guy from my officer's course platoon this morning, it was pleasant catching up :)

i was asked for an opinion on one of the team's not proposing to his long-term girlfriend, it sounds like the team primarily comprising married moms has a very specific vibe. amusingly, them working on the first guy convinced the guy who sits next to him to get engaged last month 😂

i managed to keep my mouth shut during the lunchtime discussion about sleep training, but later - and i honestly don't remember what triggered it, i think someone in the team was talking about "eating healthy"  [EDIT: it was a conversation about healthy snacks]- i laid down some of my opinions, the most harsh regarding fish and seafood and children's cognitive development. i was pleasantly surprised that it became just another calm conversation, and then it was over and we went back to work.

at least a couple of my teammates seem to be excited about the tools i shared today. i started diving into my first task with my "buddy", and i think i have a pretty good handle on it. unfortunately, it was a day full of distractions and by the time i sat down to look at the code i discovered that my dev environment's completely buggered, even worse than before i managed to get everything working yesterday 🙄

on our way out the building, i found myself facing into a crowded elevator across from someone from my previous client, which was awkward. then i thought i saw the guy from yesterday ducking round the corner with a cigarette in hand, and i walked all the way up to him before realizing it was someone else. there was no one else around.

i stopped by the hardware store and picked up a "mandolin" slicer and and knife sharpener, then i came home and was greeted by mr smear trying to show me what he's decided he's ready to put together for a youtube channel. i'm very excited about the comic book he picked up for me at the library today: judgement on gotham!

i tasted gd's new chocolate chickpea fudge, which... i don't know how i feel about it. it's not bad, it's very moreish, but i think i prefer my fudge either chocolate, or chickpea, but not both.

gd and i finished watching the witness after putting mr smear to bed, it still holds up.

my busy sinuses / post-nasal drip / sore throat was worse today than yesterday. it's really late and i'm worried about not sleeping tonight.

...

the "naza" documentary: anyone who's served here or knows anyone who's served knows that this is a massive pack of lies, but for whoever isn't sure, here's a rabbit-hole to go down. this is not a case of freedom of expression, this is a case of malicious disinformation being used to support our enemies during wartime.

just one more fix

 the nose and throat thing got serious overnight, although when i did sleep - i eventually slipped into bed around 1.30am, just one more teeny tiny little fix - i slept pretty well. vivid dreams and all that. i woke up way earlier than i would have liked, had a bit of a rough morning stomach and throat-wise, and then caught a bus with mr smear to the clinic.

in spite of how bad a state i was in, my system pulled through for the duration of the acupuncture and i left feeling pretty good. that lasted all of about two minutes, because as i was crossing the road a woman slammed on the gas to get around a car that had stopped for me and damned near ran me over. my automatic response to her doing that neatly pulled my back out of alignment, and my back had actually been fine the whole time up until that point.

so then i was doubly pissed, and i've spent the remainder of the day needing constant readjustments.

i had to do an online grocery shopping with gd and ended up leaving late when i was supposed to be meeting up with my old officer's course friend - between me arriving late and both of us being confused about which floor we were meeting on, we ended up with barely a few minutes to chat, but it was nice nonetheless and i guess we'll have to do lunch one of these days :)

the first thing i did when i got in was clear the air about the game dev i'd been up to over the weekend, with videos to back it up :P

most of my work day was spent getting my personal environment(s) set up, and using AI to build power tools to simplify the process. my first meeting with my team lead was rough - peak sore throat and coughing - and from there i joined my teammates for lunch, and then after that my system seemed to calm down and while i do still have a bit of scratchiness, it's nothing like it was this morning.

after lunch i had a very intense and animated conversation with the other parents in the team about kids, gaming and parental controls, and i feel like a lot of the things i was saying landed. later, one of the mothers told a story from her kid's class (he's a couple of years younger) that was absolutely horrifying, legitimately worse than the shit mr smear went through :(

i had two more meetings, both on balconies because all the rooms were taken, and the rest of the afternoon was spent getting everything working and impressing my teammates with the helper tools i built along the way ^_^

i came home much later than i'd expected, mr smear having just sat down to do his homework after his new friend left, and now i'm writing this while occasionally authorizing the agent to continue and frequently having the app i'm building suddenly pop up with a flurry of simulated activity, which is actually pretty cool.

...

i have to say this whole "one shot" hype train for astra is ridiculous. yes, you can do amazing things off a single prompt, but just like any other model you're still going to have to do a lot of QA, bug-fixing and re-speccing once it gets through the initial generation. as always, if you're asking for something new and innovative, it's not going to get it right first time.

paro-day

 i definitely have a nose/throat thing going on, not serious, but uncomfortable enough.

during my team daily i shared what i worked on over the weekend, and - painfully aware of this in real time - failed to communicate just why the games i made were even remotely fun or interesting. i felt so awkward 😬 

this morning gd decided to keep mr smear home and take him to the doctor, but then she suddenly wasn't feeling well enough to take him so i had to bail on two meetings (that were specifically for me) in order to take him myself.

the doctor didn't find anything interesting, and recommended sending him to school next time unless he's feeling unwell or has a fever. after stopping by the pharmacy, i took a number for the receptionist and then found myself in an uncomfortable race with an older woman who was trying to jump the line; when the receptionist noticed her hovering behind me she asked "are you with him?" to which she responded "i wish" 🤢

from there were went to the children's hospital to book a couple of follow-up appointments, after which we caught a bus home, and i pointed out a guy with frighteningly long toenails to mr smear who was horrified.

we arrived home to find gd had made a baked polenta with jalapeño dish, which turned out to be surprisingly more-ish and quite spicy.

i made slow but steady progress with my client's work, then joined my employer group's discussion about worktrees and our post-AI futures as plumbers and locksmiths.

between that meeting and leaving for my feldenkrais appointment, i reached out to one of the team and he helped me out quite a bit. then i walked to the clinic, and went through another awkward session. i truly don't know how i feel about this stuff, because the exercise she gave me seems to be a useful one, but half the things she did made me feel like it's the kind of stuff that only works if you truly believe in it, and the other half is suspicious but oddly convincing. for example, she had her fingers on each side of my neck, but on the side that's always giving me trouble the skin sensation was muted even though i could feel her fingers on both sides. whatever annoyingly gentle manipulations she did, after a while the sensations did become more balanced, so 🤷‍♂️

after dinner and another relevant episode of the wonder years*, and then i embarked** on a project inspired by one of my coworkers (in my employer group) saying that he can't work with something he needs to because the old-school tool he uses doesn't support it. that made me realize that it's cheaper for me to set the AI to work building me my own diff tool that answers all my needs that to pay for a license for any of the good ones that all only do some parts of the job well.

* the walk out: the americans lost the vietnam war primarily because their own population had succumbed to communist propaganda, and it's the same enemies with the same playbook turning the world against israel now.

** remember this picture, it taught me about derived works being under copyright. i had to drop the left one, which was perfect, and generate the one on the right instead.

we had a huge fight around shower time, with my queen of hearts decreeing "off with his head (lice)!" and me finally letting go in spite of the fact that as far as i can tell we clearly don't have head lice. so we wasted (in my opinion) an expensive treatment that for all intents and purposes seems to be repackaged margarine, which gd would never, ever put into her hair 🙄

anyway, it went smoother (and more buttery) than it could have, and the rest of the evening has been kinda okay. while i'm typing this, the app my agent is building keeps flickering onto the screen and disappearing while i runs tests, and the flashes i've seen so far are quite exciting.

gaming in the new year

friday evening was lovely. the kids were all fine, although they didn't eat anything and between gd and big data's wife there was waaaaaaay too much food. i... i ate too much. so much that i was very uncomfortable and needed to keep myself upright for a couple of hours after we got home to ensure i wouldn't have indigestion :/

both yesterday and today were essentially spent either making games, or playing games. cascadia was a great success. the mini-games i've been experimenting with have been a great success. i spent a good hour or so with horseman discussing game dev and vibe coding, and then blockchain dev, which was cool.

mr smear and i played settlers of catan with our upstairs neighbors this afternoon, which was mostly good except for a) big data getting upset with his youngest - as usual, but his youngest just continued doing the things that he kept asking him to stop doing and it got so bad mr smear joined in, and i had to stop him - and b) mr smear "jokingly" calling big data "asshole" because he did something that stopped his plans. at the end of the game we managed to make it worse when i told him to apologize and he repeated the word while apologizing 🙄

we watched more spider-noir, we watched more the wonder years, we watched the first half of the new masters of the universe which is a tragically funny parody of the original series, but with too much violence and swearing to be appropriate for kids. the casting for evil-lyn was spot on 😂

what else? i don't know. i guess i should record that my throat's been scratchy for the last couple of hours, which i definitely don't need, and mr smear's cough hasn't fully let up yet. oh, and gd made pretty good chickpea fudge today. and my main thing these past two days has been the games i've been working on. it turns out making nostalgia-flavored edutainment mini-games can actually be fun, to make and to play!

happy 5787!

 our puzzle and board game mission was successful, gd and i picked up a gorgeous zozoville puzzle and a copy of cascadia, which hopefully will be interesting for all three of us 🤞

on the way home we did a last-minute grocery shopping for some items we missed yesterday, and then we returned home.

i upgraded my codex subscription in order to experiment with astra, and the experience of generating my trauma game has been pretty good so far - i initialized it with astra, and have been using terra and luna for the tweaking.

really good news: the work i've been doing on my boss's pet project was accepted this afternoon, with a recommendation to open an upstream PR for it as well 🙌

[pauses to help gd in the kitchen. i've now made two round challot, one choc-chip and the other chilli-choc-chip, and prepared the vegan meatballs]

there was a bit of drama in the kitchen earlier (mr smear wasn't helping gd in a particularly helpful way), but we're just about ready to head upstairs.

shana tova and chag sameach! hopefully this next year will be calmer and more reasonable 🙏

unexpected things

i jump-started my day yesterday by taking the rosh hashana cards mr smear forgot to deliver on tuesday to the school.

on the way, our bus was stalled by a homeless guy who literally stood in front of the bus, smoking a cigarette and trying to goad the driver into a fight. the driver kept edging towards him, with his fucking bus. the homeless guy didn't give a fuck. then, suddenly, another bus pulled in front of us and the homeless guy ran into it with his lit cigarette to go and terrorize the poor people on it :/

i stopped at the pharmacy on my way home to pick up gd's meds (a long wait, but less long that usual), then came home for breakfast and to begin working.

...

it was my first group meeting with my client, and i was unpleasantly surprised to be asking to introduce myself to the group immediately after the manager had given me a pretty robust introduction. in retrospect i should have probably focused on the personal aspects of my life rather than the professional 🙄

regardless, two people reached out to me privately as a result of my introduction: the first, a fellow contractor who i didn't realize was in the same group. the second? a guy from the officer's course i haven't seen in almost sixteen years, who i happened to be thinking about on wednesday because we were last together at the same place our company status was held!

...

the work-from-home day went alright, but for two things:

the first, that i had a real snacking problem yesterday, and by "snacking" i mean "i ate a few more actual meals than i should have". so it's not that the quality of the food was questionable, but the quantity was out of control.

the second, that at the beginning of my meeting with my lead he asked me to pause the recording, and after a congenial personal sync during which he wanted to know how i was feeling about things, i asked him for feedback and learned that there is a point regarding my progress on which he's disappointed.

i spent the rest of the day heavily focused on resolving that, and i believe i finished the day having made good progress.

...

gd had a big day yesterday: she finally got the haircut she's been longing for for months (she had to postpone her appointment until we were sure we were through the lice incident, and the incident caused her to cut her own hair in a way that bothered her), and she finally got it cut short which i've been suggesting for years. so we're both happier now :)

in the afternoon we went to two stores to do the grocery shopping, and by the second we found what we needed for the long weekend and, specifically, her experimental kebab dinner.

...

while i didn't enjoy the experimental kebabs, the episode of spider-noir we watched along with it was great (i *love* the cameo musical phrase appearances borrowed from all the other spider-man movies). after dinner / showering and brushing teeth, we sat down to watch the second half of judge dredd. overall: it's a bit childish, standard 90s action fare with one-dimensional characters and some heavy character assassination by wedged in "romance", but the concept of megacity one, and the ABC warbot and mean machine, was great and we all had fun.

two puffs before bed (my lower back and hip flexors were doing their thing), and it helped.

...

i woke up this morning to a coffee on the balcony (no comics, no computer) while thinking about my tarot game (i'm feeling quite lost, actually, when it comes to the actual game mechanics), and i've since spent the past few hours working through my open work in my auto-doc project and my employer's spec project. i'm done with the former and just about (i think) done with the latter, and now gd and i are leaving our heavily coughing mr smear at home to go to the mall and find a board game that she's interested in playing.

cheat day

 i did *not* lose weight today.

mr smear woke up worse than he was yesterday, so he stayed home. i began my day on the balcony, cleaning up someone's cigarette ash (apparently it's the woman above us, she's promised to be more careful) and trying to read knights of sidonia, which seems cool but i struggled to make sense of what was going on, or care.

i've just read through some reviews, and i'm not interested in giving it more of a chance than i already have.

i hopped on a bus to herzeliyah, walked through my mom's favorite mall (most of the stores were closed, but in general it looks very much the same as it always did), then past the country club and the school i once re-took linear algebra in (and still failed to understand very much), and then to the company status.

"breakfast" was pretty good, pizza and a too-hot grilled chilli and a bunch of nice salads. heavy discussions about south africa, the state of the industry, and then my previous employer.

then we were given a motivational talk by omri rozenblit, which was really powerful, and then we had our status, which was... unsurprising, which is more than desirable. it's comforting to know and have known what's going on, and we got some clarity into how we're adapting to the rapidly-changing market situation.

i returned home, after waiting for a while in the sun, herzeliyah style, and stopped for a hearty leftover lunch. then i got mr smear to draw on two stickers for my work laptop, then i walked to the office.

my first meeting was with the guy who wanted to hire me at the beginning of last year, and it was pleasant, though i did make it a little awkward. the second meeting was with my line manager, and aside from it being a fun talk, i caught him off-guard when i spoke about conway's law and i enjoyed seeing his gears start turning.

aside from those talks, i had two meetings with a couple of my teammates, both of which gave me insight into what we're doing and one of which gave me some really cool ideas of how we could operate financial analysis in a similar way to how we write code.

i didn't need to snack so much in between all of those...

the end of the day was packing up our work stations for next week's move, my manager needed to remind me that this weekend is rosh hashana and that we won't be seeing each other in person until tuesday :P

i rushed home - stressed about tomorrow's acupuncture session in my calendar that turned out to be non-existent - to get onto a webinar about the metro works that are going to be starting in the next few months. it was a looooooong talk (i played a lot of minesweeper games) but with a lot of encouraging aspects, not least of which being how clearly the people responsible for public transport in this region understand their mission.

i coerced mr smear into giving star fluxx a chance, and we had fun, and then we started watching an episode of the wonder years which involved animal cruelty so we had to stop halfway, and mr smear and i watched an excellent talk on the history of sumeria while i not only cleared my very large plate of food, but also the rest of the bag of liquorice allsorts along with a few blocks of chocolate 🙄

...

dark matter upsets me. phenomenal writing, great concept, but i just can't deal with that level of darkness right now.