the calling

t'was a strange day.

the guy who was at the same client with me asked me if i was coming to the office, he meant my now ex-client's office :P

i spoke to the sales guy, after about ten minutes the conversation went in a way i didn't know how to end, eventually i just kind of extended my hand for a handshake and then fucked off.

i'm convinced the awkward guy from the game meetup is autistic, because i spoke to him today and when we were done talking, he just stared at me for far too long until i unintentionally continued the conversation, and then we had another long silence before i said "cool" in a way that finally made him go "i should get back to work"...

but they're interesting conversations, and i'm learning a lot from him, so i guess if that's the price i have to pay 🤷‍♂️

i spoke to my boss, who was cool about my work and my contributions to his project, which was cool.

i had lunch with a new guy and an old guy, and we had a really long and interesting argument about team management that ended with "it's hard to argue when everyone's right".

i had a talk with our insurance broker, we managed to reduce my payments by a little and i hope not in a way that'll end up hurting us.

i got some work done on my auto-doc project, and at the same time on my tarot game, though the latter took on/off work until just a few minutes ago to finally get right, and i'm still not quite sure what the problem was. regardless, every small achievement makes me feel like i'm finding my calling in life.

am i missing anything up until this point? i don't think i am.

i went past osher ad on the way home, and picked up a cheap set of pots, and then walked a ways to run to get on a crowded bus to get home, drop off my stuff, and walk to the clinic for my first feldenkrais session. it was a bit weird, not least because my right shoulder started hurting intensely while she was working on my left, and we weren't able to trigger it again.

i'm not quite sure how i feel about this stuff just yet, but it's intriguing.

on my way into the treatment / examination, i received a message from my new client informing me that they expect me in the office tomorrow. cool.

mr smear was quite annoying this evening, but overall we had a good one. we watched the third episode of fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood and ate a huge dinner, and mr smear got into bed not unreasonably late. between sessions of arguing with the ai about my game, i watched fascinating videos about falling down and watchmen, the former being compelling and the latter completely blowing my mind, especially in light of me having just re-read it.

it's late. i'm going to try to get some sleep now.

...

another mashup the world needs: she's got the look / hold on to my fur. i can't help but hear similarities both in the non-chorus versus and in the "na na na na na" "nya nya nya nya nya nya" 😁

false start

yesterday was NOT the big day i was anticipating! it was a super weird day, to be honest. when i finally got up (i originally woke up feeling totally broken, so i slept on the couch for a while), i discovered that my new client had sent me a message the night before informing me that i wouldn't be able to go into the office.

later i learned that this is because they forgot to send me an NDA in time. so now that everyone's signed off on it, apparently i'll be able to go into the client's office tomorrow. maybe.

in the meanwhile, i submitted my spec repo article to my employer's publication and sent the whole company an email, realizing immediately after the window to "undo" the send that the subject of the email made it seem like i was challenging the project our boss has been championing... oops.

that set the ball in motion for two things: first, establishing that i'd be spending my work day trying to get on board with the boss's project, and second, that i would go into our office to try and catch the boss for a face-to-face to assure him that my project supports his rather than undermines it.

i jumped on a bus, listening to transformed - it's got a lot to offer, but i think i'd have benefitted just as much from skimming one of the many product operating model web pages - and eventually arrived at the office to find it empty and locked.

fuck.

so i immediately caught another bus home, and said goodbye to that hour and a half of my life.

i spent the afternoon jumping between the boss's project and mr smear's horror game, eventually getting ahead with both, and then took mr smear to the supermarket to try and spend as much of my lunch allowance as possible before it resets at the end of the month.

otherwise, we opened cthulhu fluxx and enjoyed a fun game before dinner, we watched the second episode of fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood, and the rest of the evening was quite boring. we all went to bed relatively early, although mr smear didn't actually fall asleep until something like 1am.

i woke up this morning after a relatively good night's sleep, looked out into a world that didn't make sense - it was cloudy and rainy in tel aviv on this last day of august - was reminded by gd that i have a kindle (i had to explain squatting to mr smear so that i could call him a squatter) and read some more of stranger in a strange land, and was very excited to receive vocal support for my spec repo initiative from my boss and for them to have accepted my article into our publication.

now i've explained to mr smear that today is get-ready-for-the-first-day-of-school day, and i'm about to have breakfast, and then head to our office to see what the day brings.

just the good stuff

 it's been an hour or two and i have no idea why i'm not sleeping, so... here i am 🤷‍♂️

...

on friday night, we watched the first wallace & gromit, which was great, but gd and i were both falling asleep by the end of it. we all went to bed, and i slept well.

after starting my morning on the balcony - having cleaned a whole lot of bird droppings and re-sprayed the bird repellent, and then being harassed by a bumblebee - i then moved to my office and finished writing up my article about my new spec repo.

that felt good.

...

i then spent the next few hours working on my tarot game, which involved website scraping, establishing the rules for the basic game, and implementing a deck being shuffled and dropped in to the game, which worked out *really* well! i mean, like, so well that i got high fives from both gd and mr smear, and not just myself :D

in addition to that, mr smear joined me and we worked on his game for a while, figuring out the design needed to do the first real experiment of "is it fun?" while he regaled me with descriptions of the enemies he's invented. which, by the way, are genuinely disturbing and make me continue to question whether i should be assisting him with this or not...

by the time we got the design worked out, and my initial experience implemented, we were down to 1% of the five-hour window's tokens remaining!

...

we strapped on our blades, a little worried about the weather app warning that it apparently felt like 36℃ degrees outside, and went out for a while. as we headed out i warned mr smear not to whine about how far we were going to go or about going home, and to his credit he didn't - we went all the way to the park lake, and he was great! he did excellently, we had a good time there and back, i managed to get him to drink from a water fountain without too much drama, and when some kids kicked a soccer ball right into his path and he fell, he landed really well. score!

...

after getting home and showering, we re-watched the first episode of fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood over dinner, then received a package from our upstairs friends who had just returned home: cthulhu fluxx and star fluxx! i'm very much looking forward to playing them ^_^

...

i got into judge dredd comics when i was a kid - my first tattoo was inspired by the world of megacity one, and chopper in particular - and when i saw the stallone movie i was at the same time overjoyed to see so much of the world brought to life, and upset that dredd removed his helmet and rico wasn't rico. i've been carrying that with me for over three decades now (say what?!), but this week i decided that it's time to put my big-boy pants on and introduce my son to the franchise via the movie and then let him discover the magic of the comics if he wants to.

we watched the first half of the movie tonight. mr smear is definitely enjoying it, and i let go of the minor grievances and enjoyed it far more than i did in the theatre :)

...

i really hope i can get back to sleep soon, today's a big day!

achievements unlocked

 alright! we had fun last night, yohay sponder's show was brilliant (even though it was very different to the one i went to with the same name), gd had a good time, we both laughed hysterically many times, and then we returned home to find mr smear also in good spirits, having spent the previous couple of hours playing video games without his parents to bother him :P

i don't recall what i did between getting home and getting into bed (aside from showering, brushing my teeth and spending half an hour on the spec library i've been working on for the last few days), but i ended up going to bed around midnight after taking a puff.

i slept pretty well.

i woke up earlier than i would have liked this morning, started my day with my morning ritual which included reading more of doomsday clock on the balcony, but relatively quickly arriving at the conclusion that i really don't want to read any more of it.

i really want to like this. the artwork is superb, and there's clearly a will to do something interesting, but the result is an incoherent mess and i just cared less and less as the panels wore on. this feels stuck somewhere between a cash-grab and an attempt to recreate something that was truly groundbreaking but without offering anything new.

instead, i spent the next couple of hours working on the spec library, then we all walked to the book / stationery store to buy what mr smear was missing for next week, and to the cobbler to pick up my sandals (expensive, but he did a great job), and then we took a bus to fox to learn that nobody stocks shorts in my size this late in the season (it's still mid-summer), and then another to dizengoff center, stopping along the way to eat really good hummus.

most of that story took place under a bit of a cloud because mr smear was being shitty, but by the time we sat down to eat things were fine. so lunch was great (except for the bit where i unwittingly dipped pita bread into gd's hummus, completely forgetting her need for sterile gluten-free environments, and then had to scrape out anything that might've made contact and hope for the best... so far, she seems fine.

*phew*

we found no shorts in my size at the mall, or nothing that i'd be interested in wearing, at any rate, but we did pick up mr smear's new glasses, so it wasn't a waste of time.

we came home, immediately began preparing the challahpeño, and i dived back into the spec library. within the three hours that i spent on it before leaving for shul, i achieved the following:

1. completing the main work, and figuring out how to interact with it.

2. testing it out on my other game project, very successfully!

3. writing up most of the article that i'll publish along with it.

i fired off some screenshots to dx, and he's excited too ^_^

i took mr smear to shul. this evening's service was weirdly short because a lot of stuff was left out, but that was because it was dedicated to the kids going back to school and (apparently) a conversion class graduating. mr smear was generally cool, he handled the babies well, and i was fascinated by the child-like mentally handicapped guy in front of me who's extremely muscle-y, but was so freaking cute as he kept jumping up and down whenever there was singing and his mother had a really hard time explaining to him that he was too big to join the little kids for their little ceremonies.

...

well, here we are, getting ready for kiddush at the end of the summer holidays, the shabbat between having finished strong at my previous client and looking forward to a new client with interesting potential, having completed the exciting work i embarked on at the beginning of the week...

shehecheyanu vekiyimanu vehigiyanu la'zman hazeh

finishing strong

 now i'm not so sure that walking to acupuncture and back was much better than taking a bus, because by the time i got home my hip was hurting... but the acupuncture itself was another good experience.

i stretched hard when i got home, and ate breakfast, and then all of a sudden i was running late for my last day with my current client.

the work day went as follows: i managed to figure out the final issue from yesterday's testing, and it turned out to have nothing to do with the data or the code. there was much rejoicing! i then proceeded to spend the rest of the day preparing the handover documentation, discovering an issue that required a backfill that sharpened the procedure documentation significantly. i had lunch with my client team, which turned out to be a really good idea because happy hour ended up being cancelled. and i managed to say a proper goodbye to pretty much all the people i have relationships with.

and then... and then i was done. i left my computer and my keycard on the IT guy's desk, and i packed my bag (with the headphones they gave me, i asked my manager the kit-bag question and he assured me i could take them), and i sent a farewell and thank you message to the boss and my managers, and then i left.

it's been eight months, some of it rough, all of it educational, and to finish on a good note with a delivered project on my unexpectedly last day feels amazing.

i came home, picked up mr smear and took him for a walk, which was going great until we had an argument about drinking water in the park, followed by a much heavier fight about him being an asshole about other people's music, which pissed me right off and made me want to throttle him.

we managed to get past the bad vibe about halfway home from there, and arrived in time for dinner and the simpsons.

now we're getting ready to go out, and gd's just informed me that she's going in spite of the fact that her stomach's doing a thing again today 🙄

hopefully it'll be a fun evening.

rituals

 it's just after 6.30am, i'm sitting on the balcony with a clay-colored mug full of turkish coffee, having just woken up and performed the ritual brush gum guard - brush teeth - open windows - wipe down chairs and table, it's a beautiful morning and in about an hour i'm going to be off to my second acupuncture session.

i had a puff last night, which helped, but it didn't stop me from waking up almost an hour ago and being unable to get back to sleep. i'm still feeling a bit tired, but overall not bad, and i think the biggest thing i'm conscious of right now is how i hold my left shoulder. years ago (back in south africa) i realized that my left shoulder's always lower than my right, and when i remember and i make an effort to bring it forward my neck hurts less. but holding it forward is conscious effort, and if i get too comfortable and forget then i go right back to where i started...

i noticed last night that my mattress dips deeply in the middle. i don't know if this is good for me or not.

...

huh, i just noticed: someone put the word ritual in spirituality.

...

i started yesterday with doomsday clock, which so far isn't bad, but... it's not watchmen. and it's weird, in a not-good way. it's not bad, though, as i said, so i'm going to keep going and hope to not be disappointed.

i've been listening to marty cagan's transformed, at high speed and with skipping, and it's got enough interesting stuff in it to make it worthwhile. i think i'd prefer a summary, though. i mean, a book on this stuff seems a bit much.

the work day involved a lot of waiting (PR frustration on my second-to-last day!) but the results were worth it - five months down the line, a ridiculous number of lessons learned, and the "new" analytics data is being delivered and rendered almost exactly like the "old" data, but via a completely different technology stack. it's arguably better, definitely cheaper, and i've managed to overcome insane obstacles (mostly self-inflicted by the organization) and deliver just before my last day.

there is absolutely no way i'd have been able to do this without AI. this was a massive up-skill with big lessons in corporate engineering bureaucracy, and i'm really, really glad that i'm delivering the solution with a repo full of handover documentation and useful scripts for testing and generating reports. working with a project repo turned out to be one of the most important things i did.

...

on my way out the building, i chatted with two of the guys about a sensitive topic: the guy who disappeared almost two months ago (though it feels like only a few weeks) was fired mere days after his wedding. which reminded me of an incident a couple of years ago when a coworker was fired right after his wedding, and though i can't find my post about the actual layoffs (which is weird) i made sure to talk about my feelings on the matter.

i only realized that i'd essentially bad-mouthed my client after i'd described the behavior as cruel, and impossible not to take personally whether it's personal or not 😫

having walked, rollerbladed and then barely slept the night before, i was too tired to do anything physical when i got home. in any event, i came home right in time for a big sushi dinner and the wonder years, and after the bedtime ritual we sat down to finish crocodile dundee.

*SPOILERS* we were all upset by sue's shenanigans, but also puzzled by the question of "why in hell would either of them think that taking mick to new york would be a good idea?". we see him being led through the city and put on display in the rudest, most disrespectful way... but then i had a revelation: it's the australians who've made the movie, which means that the movie is actually as case of the australians treating the americans like weird creatures in a zoo, and our mick's as much the curious visitor as he is the curiosity. *END SPOILERS*

and then it was bedtime. now i'm off to my acupuncture appointment, and then it's on to my very last day with the client i've been working with for the past eight months.

shifts

 i've just got out of a cold shower after cooling down enough to get into it in the first place, having just said good night to mr smear having come in from the rollerblading group around midnight to find gd fast asleep and him still awake reading...

i feel like i barely survived the route tonight; it was *not* a "social" route, and more than the first hour was predominantly uphills. the wet bulb temperature is around 24°, and i don't know if that's why but when we stopped for a short break i was sweating so much that i felt like my eyes had flooded with seawater and i couldn't open them for a few minutes.

...

i had a somewhat productive morning this morning, planning out my repository, and i continued earlier before i left and i think it's looking good. the implementation has caused me to hit my 5-hour token limit for the first time since i signed up for codex, usually i'm only really focused on my weekly limit.

...

work was alright, though i am in scrambling mode while also trying to say goodbye without bumming anyone out. one good thing that's come out of this week so far is that one of their engineers needed to make a fix in the golang project i worked with a while back, and because i modernized it he was able to get the work done pretty painlessly and we were able to determine that the work was good pretty quickly.

...

around lunchtime, i jumped on a call with the teacher and her friend that we scheduled a week or so ago, and it was *not* the kind of call i expected. it looks like there's serious potential for something big here, and i've been left with a fair amount of homework to do.

also, i had to (metaphorically) sit my wife down and have a real-talk moment with her about what the implications are. she's got serious trust issues that i'm going to have to work around, but she assures me that she'll have my back and put her big-girl panties on for this.

i don't know what the chances of any of this becoming real are, but if they do it's going to be one hell of a ride.

...

we watched a particularly cringy episode of the wonder years ("steady as she goes"), which upset mr smear so much that he stormed off halfway through 😂

before i left, we watched a video on nuts and i learned that my regular handfuls of brazil nuts at the office might well have been messing with me! those things oughta have warning signs...

official

 i didn't take a puff on sunday night, but i slept pretty well nonetheless. i started my day completing my favorite thing is monsters volume ii.

the artwork is no less phenomenal than the first volume, but overall it just isn't as satisfying, none of the elements that were "wrapped up" make much sense, and there are a bunch of events that were more focused on being anachronistically inclusive and less on the actual characters and story.

it's full of wonderful creations and interesting moments, though, and ultimately I enjoyed it a lot.

...

a significant chunk of my morning and evening were spent worrying about finances. we're barely scraping through this month, and as a result of gd's panic (and her refusal to use cheap, effective but gross solutions) we've spent an enormous amount of next month's money on lice treatments that may or may not work.

it's not clear right now if we're done with this super-lice saga yet. we've established a protocol that we're going to stick to, wartime or peacetime, and we're going to hope for the best.

...

i started listening to the audible* audiobook of marty cagan's transformed yesterday on my way to the office, at 1.5x speed and trying to skip as much fluff as possible. so far, my biggest takeaways are that transformations are whole-org things that require buy-in from everyone, and that *gasp* small, frequent release cycles and CI/CD need to happen together or they're meaningless.

* i think audible should consider selling lifetime memberships and then charging a small amount per audiobook, rather than huge amounts per audiobook on top of expensive memberships.

...

a truck just drove past and made a sound like a quiet sneeze.

...

my first encounter in the office was dx, and when i shared my thoughts on the map generator lessons from sunday night and what i thought might be the next step, he told me something encouraging: "i wouldn't be surprised if that's what everybody's doing in a few months from now". so now i'm motivating to figure out a good way to make a spec library so that i can tell my agents to insert a <pattern> in whatever project i'm working on and have it pre-loaded with everything it needs to ask instead of having to describe what i want from scratch.

...

i was sitting with my new manager, and we were discussing how we were both taken by surprise by yesterday's news that this is my last week, when my previous manager from bulgaria suddenly walked up and joined us - i've never met him in real life before! so that was cool.

the work day was mostly scrambling, because that's what this week is all about, to close up everything. and a break for an employer's group meeting. and another break to talk to one of the data guys after learning that a bunch of them have just been retrenched*. and, towards the evening, buying tickets to gd's and my first date night since my mom visited last year.

* i referenced the town hall here, but couldn't easily find my immediate thoughts on it, which were all around gratitude that this is my client and not my employer, because i would not have felt in the least bit safe.

i got home relatively late, and we watched the wonder years over gd's second delicious attempt at daal, and after catching up with and saying good night to my mom we did the shower and lice protocol thing and then settled down to watch about half of crocodile dundee together.

i was tired, which usually meant going to bed early and then waking up for hours in the middle of the night, so i took a puff, and actually slept well until morning.

shorter notice

 t'was a weird day. first and foremost, because i received a kickoff email from my employer informing me that i'll be starting work at my new client in a week, when on thursday my current client assured me that we still have a month together. i inquired, but i haven't yet got a response.

i reached out to my new client, who quickly responded positively and said that i have an advantage if i like shuwarma. i asked if vegan shuwarma counts, and i got silence... for just over an hour... before he responded with a "lol" followed by a "no" 😅

i struggled today with tiredness, motivation, and caffeine efficacy. and snacks. i've been putting on weight again. in spite of all that, i managed to put together two strategies for one of the projects i've been working on, and ran an investigation to confirm my troubling findings from thursday, and took the next step in the big project i've been working on for months and now need to bring to a close even faster than i thought.

once i was done with work, mr smear packed his borrowed books into his bag and we walked to the library, along the way stopping to marvel at all the glass skyscrapers that are effectively being built on sand. my favorite part of our walk was having to assure him that although his hormones will make him think and do stupid things when he hits puberty, all he has to do is be aware of them and try not to make things worse than they need to be :P

i did a little more work on the map generation for mr smear's project, then we had a good couple of math fluxx games before dinner, and then we watched a couple of episodes of the simpsons, and then - post shower and toothbrush time - i invested more time in the map generation.

i'm just now discovering just how much of a waste of time a generic map generator might prove to be, as i'm struggling to make it make sense for both mr smear's horror game and my tarot game. this might just be one of those expensive lessons i've heard so much about...

first and second blood

 i've been distracting myself all morning, now that i need to get to work i just realized i haven't posted anything and i'd like to "clear my desk" before i get started, so:

yesterday we watched the first two rambo movies (first blood, and first blood part ii). which were both enjoyed immensely, and both discussed heavily.

additionally, i took mr smear out on our rollerblades and he's improved dramatically, which was great fun to see.

otherwise, i spent a whole bunch of hours working on and writing up my map seed generator algorithm, and fixing a bunch of incidental bugs, so i feel like we made some progress on mr smear's game and that i have something to show for the past couple of weeks of being all over the place.

i took a puff last night, and i slept well, in spite of the fact that i went to bed with hurting hip flexors and i'm also struggling with them now.

this morning began with now-routine comics and coffee on the balcony, then i accompanied gd to her new dentist and did some work while i waited. she had a good experience, it looks like we've found our new clinic.

aaaand scene.