cross-ay-eyed

mr smear took the graphic novels back to the comics library yesterday, and i couldn't figure out what i wanted to read before my screen time and then... oh, yes, i wrote up my previous day's adventures, and got not-a-lot done before heading out (back) to the office.

i did not focus on my primary task today. i mean, i made some progress, but for the most part i was heavily invested in the distracting work of resurrecting a retired dependency so that i could fix a bug in it that i need to make the project i resurrected yesterday work properly.

and we had two important meetings yesterday. the first was an engineering all-hands that sounded eerily familiar, with zero irony. i had a little trouble with feeling sleepy, but i woke up to ask a question and had the VP come bouncing up to where i was sitting with the mic, and then very much not like my question about how metrics for velocity conflict with demanding accountability in terms of quality.

at least i managed to catch him for a positive chat immediately afterwards :P

i had a meeting in a fridge phone booth a few minutes later, and i realized just as i signed in that i couldn't find my hoodie. so, on the call but muted, i rushed around the office trying to find it, eventually guessing that it had fallen behind the stands where i'd been sitting, and managing (with enormous relief) to snatch it up and find a booth in time to follow everything.

my new manager is cool - i've worked with him before - but it's not clear how aligned we are on the mission so i had to be really careful to raise all my points in a way that didn't feel confrontational. i think i did alright, but i've now told everyone very clearly that i'm hoping to be able to start experimenting with integrating my hackathon solution by next week; both because it gives me a deadline i have to stick to, and because i'm nervously in a race against time to get *my* opinionated solution in before somebody comes and up with something irresponsible instead :P

when i left the office, i called gd back and we got into it about whether or not we can afford a dog, or will ever be able to afford a dog. that had to be put on hold while i travelled to my employer's office by light rail. there was a lot of tension, but we managed to move through it and had a heavy but important conversation about the challenges gd's been facing with language, community and work over the past few years, and how to approach them.

the meetup at the office was pretty good. not only were the talks not boring (i learned a few things about agentic ai and agentic memory), but i made small talk with a guy who turned out to be another ex-saffer (he went to school with one of my cousins' kids) and the conversation ended up going off the rails in our unique saffer way. it made the eavesdroppers (and there were a couple) a little happier about the hardships they're forced to endure :P

i had a good chat with the head of our group afterwards, though i said something in a clumsy way - i'm sure she doesn't remember, but it's bugging me - and then i bussed home just in time to say goodnight to mr smear and have a bit of a chat before he went to sleep, and watch most of another episode of ludwig with gd, and now...

... i dunno. i think i'm too tired to do anything productive, but also not tired enough to go to bed and actually sleep 🤷‍♂️

positive feedback

 i've realized that i don't suffer from very mild narcolepsy, there are just three specific situations which tell my brain it's safe to turn off and it's really, really hard for me to fight them. the hairdresser's chair, the dentist's chair, and meetings. those are my shutdown buttons. some people count sheep. i count shears, drills and droning.

...

yesterday morning began with a serious effort on my autodoc side project. mr smear left late and under tense circumstances.

most of the day revolved around the broken deployments, which became extra-specially sensitive the moment i realized that the running instances where last deployed several years ago and the "successful" manual deployments i'd seen had never actually done anything 🤦‍♂️

later, i learned from a couple of the more experienced engineers that this kind of thing is actually quite normal.

lunch with the lunch group was fun, although it began with me opening my soup in a way that sprayed it across the table and across one of the guys, which was quite embarrassing.

the big division meeting: i spent about two thirds of the meeting struggling to keep my eyes open, and praying every time i nodded off that i hadn't snored or something. i was very grateful to have come out of the stupor by the time we got to the big announcements, and it's now pretty clear what my new role is and how all the pieces fit.

i like (the idea of) my new role. a lot.

...

then i had a call with my mentor. he gave me some good advice regarding how i communicate with my manager: "i've run into <x>, it's going to cause a delay, i'm taking care of it" is a solid formula that i've used a lot, but i still find it interesting to think of it as a formal structure.

i told him about my role change, and how it fits in with my roadmap, and about my autodoc project. he was very excited about all of it, and offered me some very good advice about when and how i write about it.

and then he informed me that he has feedback for me, both from my client and from my employer: apparently everyone's quite happy with me. this is a huge relief, and it feels good.

long may it last.

...

the last part of the day was all about finalizing the deployment fixes, pushing them and monitoring them. by sheer luck, i saw from the git graph that someone else was working on the repo at the same time, so i got in touch with them directly to inform them of what i was doing and why. aside from blowing their minds, i managed to get them excited about dashboards-as-code and i had them on hand to approve my PRs, so when i left the office it was after making sure that the service is actually serviceable and nothing seems broken.

[quickly stops to flip open the work laptop and double-check that the image tags really were updated]

so i walked out of the office in pretty good spirits ^_^

...

my afternoon and evening were exceptionally gassy. i have no idea what i ate or when, but it went on for hours and was very uncomfortable. you know how "every 'no' brings you closer to a 'yes'"? well, my spin on it is "every fart brings you closer to a shart". fortunately that didn't happen yesterday, but it probably could have.

anyway, i dropped my bag off at home and took mr smear with me to the mall to pick up his second pair of shoes. notable moments: witnessing a bunch of hormone-drunk teenagers harassing a sex-shop worker, buying socks, and a fight over mr smear reporting a clean bus for being dirty. otherwise, we had a pretty good time. and talked a lot, some of which about the LARPiness (or lack thereof) of his summer camp.

we had a very nice dinner while watching a lot more of guardians of the galaxy, and after mr smear was in bed gd and i finished another episode of ludwig. then i went straight to bed, for most of a night's sleep.

the king of the upside-down

 it's monday evening, just about two days have passed and it's been wild.

saturday night:

i spent the following few hours working on my hackathon project, troubleshooting github actions and eventually getting to the point where i'm ready to give the first iteration a try. then i went to bed, and caught a few (about three) hours sleep.

yesterday:

i woke up feeling less than stellar. but i got up, and had a coffee, and then accompanied mr smear to his first day of summer day camp. the first time was a bit complicated, but he managed just fine by himself this morning, so 👍

from the bus to the school we were accompanied by one of his buddies, and it was interested shadowing them and hearing them discussing how much happier they both are at the new school ^_^

i lurked a bit while mr smear registered himself, then made myself scarce and headed back home. the camp is a version of "the academy", the post-apocalyptic survival LARP, and i think that's pretty cool :)

i paid the municipality fees yesterday morning, which are still on the landlord's account. quite frankly, i'd rather they remained that way because he gets a significant discount, and at this point i really don't want to go through the ridiculous circus of recreating our contract and pretending to be moving in...

my first meeting was long, and tough. the guys amicable enough, but my gods he makes me uncomfortable. he's clearly very knowledgeable, but we seem to have a communication problem and he doesn't solve problems quite the way i do. also i was very tired. i was quite amused when we finally came to the conclusion that whether he likes my approach or not, it's the only viable one considering the state of the data.

either way, it was a massive relief when the meeting was over.

i spent quite a lot of time poring over documents my client had sent me over the weekend, which led me to read welcome to gas town, which is completely unhinged.

i managed to complete the morning meeting's change by the time mr smear got home, at which point we sat down and had a serious conversation about his first day; he's bored, he says, because although a couple of the things they did were fun, there was a lot of physical activity that just isn't what he's there for...

either way, he urgently needed sports shoes, so we all went to the mall for what is arguably our least favorite family pastime. the first place we went to - a department store - had very expensive options we weren't thrilled by. the second only had the most expensive shoes, great quality but not for a growing boy. the third... had what we were looking for. aside from a little bit of i've-had-enough drama on mr smear's part, we walked out with a solid pair of shoes and an order for an identical pair one size up at a heavily-reduced price.

there was a little more shopping to be done, then we caught a bus home. gd and i dropped off the shoes, the groceries and the child, and then went across the road to do some more grocery shopping. it was poor timing, lots of customers, one cashier and one self-service, and it took sooo long to get out of there...

over dinner, we started watching guardians of the galaxy. the rest of the evening was a blur. i think i went to bed relatively soon after putting mr smear to bed.

today:

i actually got a good night's sleep last night. my back's still really sore, though.

...

there were a couple of odd threads to pull at work today, the main one being as follows:

a couple of months ago i worked on a small service that nobody else understands. it's written in golang, and nobody in the company works with golang (they fired the team that owner the service), and it hadn't been maintained for a very long time. so i upgraded it to the latest version, and made the changes that needed to be made, and merged them... but nothing happened. i didn't break anything - which i was very grateful for - but what i thought i'd fixed still wasn't fixed, and i had to cut and move on to the big project.

on thursday i had some spare time, and i returned to the service and made an important fix (a serious memory leak). this morning i got permission to push it. i pushed it.

nothing happened.

the AI i used to investigate the dashboards and the logs came to the conclusion that i totally fixed the bug. it repeated this a couple of times, even though the dashboards didn't seem different at all, and so i carried on trying to figure out what was going on.

eventually, i realized that not only were my changes not in production, but neither were my previous ones, nor those of the couple of people who also touched this service in between. that the CI workflow  entitled "build - test - deploy" that ran successfully only builds and tests, but does not deploy.

the CI/CD workflows have never been CD, the deployments have only ever been manual, and nobody responsible for this service knows this.

you can't make this shit up.

...

oh! and the other consultant working with my client came by my desk after putting some pieces of data together and determining that there are people being fired by our employer for not being able to find clients. it calls the "i have job security" thesis into question, it doesn't feel so good.

...

in the afternoon, i travelled to my employer's office for a group meeting. i got called up, unprepared, to tell a story about failures at scale, and told the story of me returning to work after paternity leave and having to rewrite the project from scratch, getting to the deadline with everything working beautiful and discovering a bug during the demo that the managers saw and terminating the project.

the barbecue wasn't my thing, but they'd brought in a serious quantity of good hummus and falafel so i was sorted. i made myself a few pitot, and bounced from vegan conversation to vegan conversation - most of them initiated by somebody overhearing the tail end of the previous one and inquiring. all of it was amicable and i think i got some people to think a bit differently about it.

...

i caught a bus to the mall to meet up with gd and mr smear, who'd been forced to wait in a freezing reception for more than three hours for the eye specialist. tomorrow we're going to start hunting for a new one, and then call up the fat-fuck receptionist and tell her we're cancelling because she's a selfish piece of trash (gd described to me in detail how disrespectful she was towards everyone, and that she wasn't the only one to beg her to raise the temperature).

apparently mr smear's eyesight has improved? hmm...

we bussed home, gd prepared a gluten-free vegan pesto and avo pizza (which was delicious), and we discussed mr smear's day camp experience and explained that there's no refunds and he's just going to have to make the most of it. fortunately, as much as he's disappointed that there's so much physical activity, it overall seems like a pretty good place for him to be. he's learning interesting things (just not as much of the day as he'd like), including woodwork (which he is enjoying), and apparently the kids are generally pretty cool.

i'm tired. i really, really hope i get some sleep tonight again.

preoccupation

 the rest of my afternoon: my sister called, and we had quite a long chat about her plans for her visit, along with some distressing news that during the course of their divorce, her most recent ex-husband made a point of separating her from a bunch of old videos from her childhood.

i managed to get mr smear to play another session of math fluxx, and he was a lot more compliant and we had a lot more fun.

over lots-of-sushi dinner we watched infinity train, and between dinner and bedtime i was a *little* bit constructive vis-à-vis my autodoc side project.

i read some more alice's adventures in wonderland to mr smear, and then put myself to bed soon after.

...

now it's about two hours later, and i've gotten up after lying awake for a while developing indigestion.

good grief.

eleven

happy fourth of july! another wedding anniversary with us still going strong in spite of ourselves.

...

 i did sleep better last night, but that's (as usual) off a low bar and my back's really sore right now.

i haven't done anything "constructive" today. first coffee with gd on the balcony, me continuing to very slowly make my way through the footnotes of the thrilling adventures of lovelace and babbage,

it took us a little too long to get out the house this morning, but mr smear and i went on a rollerblading journey, with a couple of fun stops in the park, a couple of attempts to encourage nervous dogs to befriend humans on wheels, and a coffee and orange juice stop along the way.

then it was cold showers and mix-and-match lunch and gaming and massage tool and napping.

i'm soooo tired, and my back's sore, but so far it's been a pretty good day nonetheless.

myths and fables

 my bum still hurts - gd dug her elbow in and i've used bengay, but the tightness isn't going away and i'm nervous about going to bed...

it's probably not helped by my spending the last hour or so sitting down at my computer.

i began the day trying to figure out why my external monitor was flickering, and it resolved without me getting an answer. apparently it's a known macbook thing. nice.

i then spent the next three hours putting fable through its paces. i sent the following to horseman:

bro, i’ve been using fable for the past couple of hours. it’s… 

it’s…

it’s an AI model 😂

it does seem like a significant improvement so far, but god damn the hype is so detached from the reality - as usual. also, holy shit it’s expensive.

we walked to our favorite vegan coffee spot to meet up with my aunt and her family - we haven't seen my cousins in years! i spent most of our time talking shop with the younger brother, and then tgtbt stayed with us when everyone else left and we talked and talked until mr smear had long had enough :P

the afternoon / evening was going great, mr smear and i agreed to a compromise between video games and fluxx, and i think that's the first time i've held my own in spiderheck. a lot of our math fluxx experience was good - meaning both of us were enjoying it - but then he got in a mode after deciding that the game should have been over (when it wasn't) and made a whole thing... which i kinda the whole thing gd and i have been charged with getting him to learn how to handle. so we entered shabbat with a bit of a shit vibe.

kiddush and dinner were nice once we got over that initial hurdle, and then it was shower and bedtime for mr smear, and then i passed out for a while, and woke up with my hip flexors doing their thing, and for the last while i've been playing slay the spire 2 while occasionally checking in on fable because i forgot to set --dangerously-skip-permissions which are far more nuisance than any real safety they provide.

so far i've apparently used $45 worth of fable tokens, and i've yet to see evidence that the effort is any better than sonnet. perhaps i'm wrong? i guess i'll find out in the morning, but i'm beginning to believe the rumors that LLMs have peaked and the next evolutionary jump is going to have to come from some other idea. and that the magic really is in the harness, and that off-the-shelf harnesses are just not where it's at.

subversion

 i've just gotten up after a night with almost no sleep, my usual hip flexor discomfort has been amplified severely and i was unable to stretch it out.

the first thing i saw on my phone was a notification to say that my shared ride has started, and as frustrating (and expensive for no reason) as it is to realize that i forgot to cancel my booking for this evening, it's even more frustrating to learn that my booking was captured incorrectly. now i have to wait an hour to call them and try to get them to cancel it without charge...

yesterday was bizarre. i arrived at the office, walked around setting the air conditioners to a reasonable temperature, and then found a phone booth for my meeting with the guy who'd stood me up the previous afternoon. we spent the following two hours together tweaking things and running things, and my very clear takeaway was that anyone who wants to touch their systems needs to do a full team onboarding.

also, i was totally freezing in the phone booth, and it wasn't until i returned to my seat that i remembered that i'd brought a sweater to work 🤦‍♂️

my meeting with the client: before i went up, i commented to the guy next to me that i might well be on my way out. that was the vibe i felt when i sat down across from the client, and it lasted a couple of sentences. and then everything was on its head, as he explained to me what the past half a year has been about from a leadership / business perspective and how me and my team fit in, and what changes are incoming, and how perfectly aligned my team's new mandate is with my personal roadmap.

then we closed out with a pleasant, interesting conversation about the misaligned between architecture and organizational structure and what we could or should be doing.

then i walked out with the strange sensation that either we're exceptionally well-aligned, or i'm being pranked.

i went out to pick up lunch, and ate with the guy who sits next to me, and then grabbed another booth to have a meeting with my manager. it was a different conversation, but not that different. whereas the client had been unsurprised by some of my suggestions, some of them clearly caught my manager off-guard and that was validating.

as much as i hated having to put together and deliver monday's presentation, i learned a whole lot of really important stuff while doing so and it's completely changed the trajectory of my week and how i think about things.

i spent some more time trying to make an AI agent implement metrics responsibly, then came home. i took mr smear out for a short walk, and to draw cash and pick up beers for the evening. on the way i told him all about my day, and when i got to the end he let me know that he hadn't been paying attention and had no idea what i'd said to him. then he told me a story, and when he was done i asked him to repeat it because i hadn't been paying attention. i don't know if he really cared enough to get the message :/

i walked over to my ride's apartment, and away we went to hod hasharon.

half the evening was lovely, half of it was awkward. i had some really interesting, some even productive, conversations. i met some fascinating people. the vegan food only arrived at around 10.30pm, by which stage i didn't care any more. i went deep discussing the second lebanon war, i encountered an older soldier whose sister reminded me that my bnei akiva shevet was emunah. i didn't bother a couple of celebrity heroes of mine, though i did truly want to.

on the way back, i grilled my ride for his aliyah story and was blown away by how different it was from all the other mixed couple stories i've heard. i guess the law doesn't apply equally when you're rich and influential...

i showered, had a cup of tea, wound down and went to bed. i've just got my rental charges cancelled - thankfully - and i've finished my first coffee, and i'm not sure what this morning's going to bring. i'm feeling particularly proud of myself for having thought to shut mr smear's blinds when i got in last night; it's mighty peaceful this morning :P

trepidation

prior to leaving the apartment, we wanted to record a video for my freshly octogenarian cousin. this ended up in drama because mr smear and i had had a misunderstanding about screentime...

...

my mentor didn't get back to me until the evening, and i couldn't not say anything. after getting to the office, i spent an hour or so preparing a message for my client and manager, and ran it past my mother as a sanity check, and fired it off.

it wasn't until the middle of the night that i got a response, which was my client politely thanking me for my input and scheduling a face-to-face. so today's gonna be interesting.

because i'm generally bored, i got a phone call from my wife to inform me that my son, at the public toilets at the mall, had managed to drop his phone into the urinal. and because that wasn't enough, he'd decided to wash it thoroughly with soap and water 🤦‍♂️

then later she called again to inform me that she'd shorted the kitchen circuit by trying to "fix" the toaster while it was still plugged in. FML

for my afternoon meeting, i sat down in the phone booth and waited a few minutes for the guy to show up... he didn't. but while i was there anyway, and i didn't have a heck of a lot of productive stuff to do anyway, i randomly revisited a project i worked on a couple of months ago and got to work fixing memory leaks. i was so excited about doing something constructive that i ended up leaving the office much later than i'd planned...

during that time - after i'd returned to my desk, at least - two weird things happened. i missed the beginning of the first, so i have no idea if this literally happened or if everyone was in on some big joke: apparently one of the guys i've been working with pooped himself? and had to pick it up off the floor? or maybe they were kidding and a dog had left him a present? i don't know. it was very strange, and after i asked (and was told it actually was him) i felt really stupid for asking.

the second, i heard that another guy i've been working closely with just got fired. i hope that's not true.

the third, my client paying our section a visit. after my message. at no point did he attempt to converse with me, but he wasn't unfriendly when i walked past him and said hi, so 🤷‍♂️

...

mr smear was an asshole to me when i got home, which on top of everything else really sucked.

i spoke to my mentor, who used much more colorful language than me when i described the level of idiocy i'm dealing with.

over dinner, we watched half of fern gully, which is good, but upsetting to gd...

after mr smear's shower we had a massive fight over him being rude, but we did have a good conversation afterwards and bedtime was pleasant enough.

i went to bed a little earlier than usual, and i slept alright.

mr smear and i both woke up too early this morning. after reading and resting and stretching, i hunted down the old phones and began the friction-filled process of switching him back to his previous phone. also, learned that rescuing a phone with rice is an absolutely useless old wives' tale.

...

i'm trying to solve a big organizational problem in my head before my meeting with my client. my world is mad.

squaring up

 well, i managed to join the rollerblading group last night! my neck and shoulder were in trouble - still are - but i was able to keep it together.

it was officially "social", and a bunch of people brought there kids, which was really cool. i was taking it easy, and overall had a good time, but towards the end we skated very close to home so i bailed early.

it took me quite a while to cool down, and after showering i made myself a cup of tea and played slay the spire 2 until about 1am, then finally went to bed.

i slept pretty well.

...

regarding the thrilling adventures of lovelace and babbage: i haven't decided yet how i feel about the comics themselves - so far, fun - but the preface and the footnotes are fantastic.

my body's making it very clear that it understands that i exercised last night (everything's responding slower than i expect, and i have that good soreness). my neck and shoulder are threatening me, but i seem to be okay. i've paid the rent, and the water bill, and the building fees, and i'm now getting ready to go to work and have some very difficult conversations.

politely backwards

 today was f***ed. it began alright - i slept okay, had a peaceful morning, and got to the office in good spirits in spite of my trepidation regarding the weirdness i experienced yesterday before leaving.

i spent some time arranging to go to a game dev convention in a couple of weeks, which i'm excited about, and then dived back in to troubleshooting. then i received a concerning message from one of the data guys, and i headed over for what turned into a kind of intervention.

...

i've been talking with these guys about what i'm working on for over a month now. i asked them for help, they basically told me to get on with it. i've worked hard - the heaviest lifting being constant fighting to make sense of how everything works, with AI helping but also hindering at the same time - and it's been rough. demoralizing. and i've been under big pressure.

but hey, i've gotten the work done. i've sent them tons of code to review, and they've (allegedly) reviewed it, and were satisfied enough with it to merge it. now they're saying that everything about my approach has been wrong from the get-go, and that these are highly sensitive systems, and that outsiders really shouldn't be working on them directly.

setting aside the surreal moment wherein the second guy made it all about "blame" and "shaming"*, i'm stunned by just how farcical it all is. to their credit, they both made an effort to behave professionally and tactfully after having thoroughly screwed me over.

* i seem to have successfully diffused the situation by explaining that if anyone was being shamed it was me.

then the third guy came in, and informed me that the reprieve i've been enjoying due to their unresolved issues might be turning into something else entirely. at this point i'm not sure whether this means that my work has been rendered irrelevant, or whether that speeds up my time-to-extended-deadline right into the past...

...

i kept my cool, but immediately left to come home for lunch, with a deep desire to yell my frustrations at the sky. i tried discussing what had happened with my mom on the way, and we both ended up irritated because she couldn't hear me and i didn't know she couldn't hear me. i arrived home to find my son standing at the entrance on his phone, having just arrived from the early ending of the last day of school.

he welcomed me home and informed me that he and "everyone else" had literally thrown all their books into the trash, which distracted me from my own nonsense and drove me totally nuts in a different way. i was gobsmacked.

we went over his end of year report while i ate lunch, and it was relatively good. the fact that he didn't get kicked out of the school, and that he appears to be welcome to continue in the next year, is simply amazing to us and we're very grateful.

omg he's going to be turning eleven soon.

i delayed returning to the office, going so far as to shave my beard before i went, and once there i spent the following two hours writing up reports of what had transpired and compiling a timeline, interspersed with strolling around the office and staring out windows or at the views from the balconies.

i came home, helped unpack the first round of groceries, then took mr smear for a short walk. then i did not-a-hell-of-a-lot until dinner. we had a nice dinner, finished watching zootopia 2 (we were entertained, but i don't like it), spoke to my mom, and mr smear has just convinced me to let him have screen time before late summer holidays bed time.

fine.