outside

 last night was unnecessarily rough, because we could have booted mr smear out of our bed after the first siren and i would have had a much better night's sleep.

today was a bit weird.

i invested quite a lot of time in getting stuff to work on my home machine that i already had working on my work machine, stuff that - as usual - really shouldn't be that complicated.

gd had a phone appointment with our doctor, which resulted in me calling multiple clinics because ours was closed only to continue to run into dead ends. then we all went on a pharmacy mission, and a bit of a grocery mission on the way back home, and then we dropped everything at home and jumped on a bus to dizengoff center, with a little bit more of a walk than planned.

which was good. we've all been pretty cooped up for a week.

i couldn't find what i was looking for, but gd got sorted and i was inspired to upgrade her phone (she's been unhappy for a long time) and hopefully the new model will be a better experience. and then mr smear inherits her old one, and that gives us a way to manage his "banking".

we had a great hummus lunch, which i think was pretty brave considering nobody had any idea when the next attack would be, but we managed to make it home before the sirens.

mr smear convinced me to take the windows machine off facebook marketplace and reinstate it as "his" machine, and that led to me spending a good chunk of the evening (and our shelter time) on getting it set up, enthusiastically testing out shutup10++ and being pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to clean up the windows experience.

i'm also pleasantly surprised by the fact that i managed to get mr smear to do another training session with me this evening, and although the main focus was on boxing drills, i think the most important lesson was in shutting the fuck up and following instructions.

we had a bit on an incident with kevin, our little eight-legged boarder, who's been insisting on hanging out in our bed. i tried to get him out of our room, and i may have accidentally injured him :(

then he decided to scoot off into mr smear's room, so mr smear was very nervous about checking his bed thoroughly before going to sleep. but then he couldn't sleep, because he was feeling so bad for how unfairly poor kevin had been treated...

kiddush and dinner with my mom were nice, and the food was great, even though it was really late.

mr smear got siren'ed out of a shower - so much for canishower.com showing 11% - after that was bedtime and then my shower time, and now i've watched lots of politics and other garbage and i think i'm ready for bed.

...

if you want to understand what's going on with the war, and what its all about, this tom nash report is eye-opening.

everything on mainstream media - CNN in particular - is unhinged propaganda. seeing so much AI-generated slop of destruction in tel aviv is pathetic. who believes this shit?

two for two

 i'm now two for two with the canishower.com app, i'm in.

i'm also two for two getting mr smear into short, but real, martial arts training sessions by rewarding him with screen time. my, how the mighty have fallen... but he did pretty well in yesterday's boxing drills, and was very pleased with himself in today's taekwondo drills. if this is what it takes...

also, mr smear and i made a fun little rage game during an attack today, capture the fly, sticklight's surprisingly good at what it does!

...

yesterday:

in a nutshell, yesterday was all about network disruptions; mainly due to misconfigurations, but also dealing with a lot of intermittent VPN disconnections that i've been experiencing ever since i got my company laptop.

it was extremely frustrating, and while i'm finally dealing with the provider's support directly... after an entire day of back-and-forth troubleshooting over email, i'm starting to suspect that their support team is a bunch of AI agents dressed in a trench coat 😕

who ever thought that the trickiest part of the turing test would be that humans can be so unexpectedly dumb?

the frustration of hearing a door buzzing just before a siren and hoping i didn't miss the delivery of the new network device...

gd cleaned the apartment yesterday, with mr smear and i helping occasionally. it's a big apartment, compared to what we're used to.

our early dinner, more like a very late lunch, was followed by me teaching mr smear boxing fundamentals, and then me continuing to work on the RCA that i was finally finished around 9pm, during another attack.

mr smear went to bed really late last night, and i read to him anyway, then crashed. and then half the night was spent with him in our bed after attacks.

i had a weird dream about him and his previous class, but they were much younger and in danger of falling out of these weird little cots.

today:

we all got up late, and i spent at least an hour tweaking the network until i had it good enough that it felt like maybe? we don't need the new network device. but after a day spent moving back and forth between the office, the bedroom and the living room, i'm pretty sure we need it to sit in the middle of the two wired points.

i struggled in a rush to get mr smear's account set up for his online classes, and then spent the work day feeling pretty useless and entirely unmotivated.

between yesterday and today, i got my first real taste of using MCPs. they can be extremely helpful, especially when it comes to understanding badly produced logs.

we received a very welcome voucher from my employer for a tub of ice cream. gd found a decent vegan salmon replacement (thank god), and brewer's yeast, that we could have delivered. and there was much rejoicing.

it's okay

i went straight to bed after posting last night. we only had two interruptions with attacks, but that meant about half the night with mr smear sleeping in our bed, which isn't terrible, but it's considerably less comfortable than him not.

another warning about an impending attack this morning, when i needed the toilet. so i held it in, and then suddenly it was a half hour later and no sirens...

i finally got up a short while ago, from a dream in which i returned to uniform with nystire: on our way into the base, nystire got bumped by a car driving out. it clearly hurt him, but when i wanted to stop the car and get him checked out he angrily yelled "i'm FINE!". then there was a large group of soldiers who'd just been sent off to a row of buses, and a whole lot of them had left behind bags and satellite phones. and then, finally, i was being briefed by a guy who - i only realized while he was literally climbing around on his desk - had no legs, and there i was, having been complaining about my boots not fitting (not to him, fortunately). after amusing him with a physiotherapy story, he told me about an experimental procedure he'd been denied because his operational capability wasn't impaired enough "by one point on the evaluation", and i woke up from the two of us laughing hysterically while he danced around his seat showing me how ridiculous that was.

now i'm back in reality, gd's sleeping, mr smear's reading (and trying not-very-subtly* to get to play oxygen not included like he did yesterday, in spite of his screen time punishment because of the extenuating war circumstances), and i'm having coffee and wondering how to approach my work day today.

* why is that always such a difficult word to spell?!

"professional" is being professional when you really don't feel like it and nobody's watching.

the time cluster bomb

 today was weird. the deployment didn't go smoothly, but was ultimately successfully.

a religious family came downstairs to present us with mishloach manot, which i explained was very much appreciated, but as we've got a dairy allergy and we're vegan we simply can't accept. an hour or so later they knocked again, with a whole different arrangement, including baked goods with the ingredients handwritten.

so now i feel bad that we haven't reciprocated - we had no way - and we've had way too many sweets today.

also, mr smear's molar fell out.

he spent most of the day dressed up as harry potter, he did his own scar amazingly well, and was very disappointed that it wasn't a school day and there was no one to show his costume to but us :(

we literally walked around the block twice today for exercise.

i eventually managed to complete my investigation into whether my screw-up last week had any undetected impact, and spent an hour talking to a new coworker - both at my employer, and my client - about both of them and giving him the details i wish i'd had. i then followed that up with a complaint to the woman who brought us both in because he was also supposed to start both jobs on the same day, like i did, and that's messed up.

my most productive time today was spent on my phone control solution, which i've gotten to a point that i can start playing with the more interesting ideas.

thanks to AI.

the war goes on. it looks like however the next couple of weeks play out, we've essentially already won: the IRGC is effectively finished, the middle east has realigned itself. the attacks today were fewer and further between, but louder and scarier.

mr smear was a bit difficult today, on occasion, but also a lot easier to get through to (eventually). on the one hand, he's been cooped up, but on the other, he's refusing to leave the apartment to do anything social, and gd's sick and unavailable and i'm working and unavailable.

i'm tired. but also antsy. i barely have bandwidth for the stuff that needs brain, but distractions? i don't even register time passing.

the purim decree

 today is tuesday? yesterday was monday. it is purim today, i read (the translation of) megilat esther last night and mr smear is dressed up - wildly successfully, especially the scar which he did himself - for a day in which we are following mordechai's edict to the letter, destroying our enemies before they can destroy us.

sunday night was a lot quieter than saturday night or sunday (i'm obviously not speaking on behalf of those who've been affected, an ex-coworker of mine lives next to a building that was struck, and another missile landed next to mr smear's school, and iran is using cluster bombs again, which is a real war crime), and i got up yesterday somewhat in shock at having rested. it was mostly a work day, which was weird, but i did manage - between attacks - to get to the store and buy a "mickey mouse" cable so that i could set up a mesh network because switching from wifi to wifi was driving me nuts.

unfortunately, the speed of my now-stable network is disappointingly low :(

i got mr smear to come upstairs to our friends, where he and their daughter got on well but the younger son was having a very emotional evening... us adults had a reasonably good time, though. and gd stayed downstairs and got a bit of a break.

oh, yeah - the technician arrived yesterday morning to look at the electric hob, which was playing nicely, of course. he fiddled with the triple-phase outlet, hopefully it'll remain stable.

i'm going to be diving into work soon. i'm very disappointed about the state of my hair, which was supposed to be cut on sunday evening. i'm sporting harry potter vibes of my own :P

purim ii

thousands of years later, in the same week of the hebrew calendar as the original purim, we turned the tables on a modern-day haman: khamenei is dead. and with him, his family, and his generals. the antisemitic anti-west coalition has begun to unravel.

so this purim we tell the story, and we live the story, and we will celebrate in the streets and drink too much, and possibly come up with a new baked good like "ayatollah's beard" (or "ayatollah's glasses"), and possibly add an appendix to the original megillah.

but, hive mind, i have to ask you: in this retelling, who is mordechai, and who is esther? trump is achashverosh, clearly, but is bibi our esther?

...

 holy shit. last night's sleep was heavily interrupted by missile attacks, and mr smear had to stay with us, so it was even more interrupted in between the interruptions. and then it was morning, and between attacks we tried to be functional, and i somehow managed to get some work done, and everything was really just a mess.

all my coworkers, israeli and non-israeli, are being very sweet.

i educated horseman and his girlfriend on middle east politics and anti-west propaganda today; it's one heck of a way to introduce oneself to new people :P

the most exercise mr smear and i got was a walk around the block to take down recycling. he was bored today. but also antisocial. and i could barely keep it together, and went down a savings / investment rabbit hole...

gd, in addition to everything else, is really struggling. if her situation worsens, we're going to have to head to the nurses tomorrow.

at least the groceries got through.

the latest attacks have been particularly intense, and it looks like they're using cluster bombs. as i just told my brother: we need to be grateful, as we need to be for every single war since 1948, that our enemies are so ideologically blinded that they’re incapable of discipline. imagine how much harder this war would be if iran hadn’t attacked ALL its neighbors!

really tough fighters get in the ring. pathetic fighters bully non-fighters.

ding dong!

 khamenei is dead.

it's been a looong day in and out of the shelter (our bedroom, thankfully), and exhausting. we had just enough time between attacks to clean up the kitchen and sort out dinner, and get mr smear showered, and then soon after bedtime we were back into it.

my back started hurting just after mr smear moved into our bed. we had some big hits earlier, and one woman is been killed :(

the combination of my back, and finally being able to transfer mr smear's google account to the "new" family so we're all on israeli accounts, is what got me out of bed. now i'm sitting here, stretching and watching news (real news from tousi tv, i tried a few other channels during the day and it's complete dogshit out there), and hopefully we'll get some sleep tonight.

we're off to a good start. hopefully the iranian revolution will be completed in short order 🙏

...

we watched half of flow today, the "camera" made me uncomfortable but it's gorgeous. a little too slow for my family, though. then we watched the second episode of solo leveling, which was unexpectedly hardcore violence and we all needed a bit of a recovery afterwards.

the siren

after a lovely dinner and a relaxed bedtime routine, i passed out just after putting mr smear to bed.

then i woke up around 1am, and spent the next few hours playing around with retroarch, and writing up a new article putting all my recent AI thoughts together, and watching random shite.

then i went back to bed, only to be woken up with a jump-start to the air raid sirens, being used to alert everyone to the fact that we'd begun - finally! - attacking the IRGC.

may this be the final round, and may we soon see an IRGC-free middle east 🙏

today so far: jumping in and out of our bedroom (mr smear's settled in with a harry potter book, gd and i are all over the place between messaging apps and other nonsense), and i'm trying and failing to be even slightly productive or mentally healthy.

meditation marathon

thoughts for the day: everyone in the media is getting paid to keep everyone on edge, including themselves. i don't need to think about war with iran until it's actually happening. nobody does. STFU.

also, the global economy is full of shit, everything's being run by people who have as much understanding of how things work as small children. there aren't many adults around.

if i'm right, what's coming is AI weaning us off management bloat and enabling people to find and operate in tiny niches. kind of like pre-industrial societies.

...

 today began with disappointment, but it was less disappointing than if it had come tomorrow: mr smear woke up and decided that he didn't want to go to the trance party, he'd rather just stay home and read all weekend ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i've been reading richard currier's unbound: how eight technologies made us human and brought our world to the brink, and while it's taken me forever to get into it, it's fascinating stuff.

mr smear had been waiting for the bus for a while before we realized that it was the tel aviv marathon today...

gd and i had a quiet morning, napping, mostly, and then we headed out to return the frying pan and find a solution for the ugly cables that were just installed. but, the marathon. so we walked around trying to get on a bus, then got on the bus which literally went in a circle and took us back one stop, and then we split up because i realized i'd have to walk all the way to the center and back.

returning the frying pan would have been less emotional had the woman not decided to try 'splain to me how the non-stick pan wasn't non-sticking properly because i was obviously cooking wrong 😠

at least i found cable hole covers. i'll try them sometime, i guess.

i finally found a decent-looking replacement frying pan on sale at a different store, i hope it's good. then i picked up garbage bags, and then i began my trek home.

picking up a coffee along the way, and syncing with sailor for a bit.

i had issues getting mr smear home today, again, and i realized (after we had a fight about it) that he and his friends are using whatsapp as social media. so there goes whatsapp - i've blocked it and he's down to actual phone calls and sms'es now.

at least he didn't lose more privileges this week - i mean, his screen time privileges have been pushed back another week now, but we were both excited about him getting his reading privileges back this evening.

i never in my life thought i would ever write a sentence like the above, but here we are. you gotta do what you gotta do.

i spent most of the afternoon upgrading my encryption package and updating my website, and then had a long chat with urchin, and now i've showered, and taken the garbage out, and shabbat has started, and gd's cooking a delicious dinner, and for a moment the world is just fine.