is it art?

 we were excited for the end-of-year exhibit, and mr smear was apparently excited too, as evidenced by him phoning us from the secretary's office ten minutes before it started to ask us where we were.

but once there, he wasn't interested in letting us go through the exhibit - which is what we did last time - he tried to rush us through and made it quite unpleasant. eventually, we got to the very, very, very last corner of it and found his works. his class had three pieces up, and mr smear only had two of his on the boards, and of those pieces one of them was upsetting to gd because it involved roblox horror with a rabbit being chopped up.

so... not the greatest morning we could have imagined.

we bussed home, then went out to do the weekend shopping. about halfway through i suddenly felt ill, most likely caused by nerve pressure in my neck. the rest of the expedition was unpleasant to say the least - i despise friday shopping on a good day.

we came home, i lay down for a while, and felt a bit better when i eventually got up again. good enough to try taking apartment the shower head holder that's been bothering gd since we moved in.

it was gross, badly rusted, and it took a while for me to get it off the wall. leaving this:

but is it art?

see that shiny eye? that's the sharp remains of a screw that's not coming out.

i then returned to the store with mr smear to pick up a sixpack of water that i'd been in too much of a rush for earlier, and gd called me, distressed, because she'd bought the wrong kind of rice flour for the dumplings she and mr smear have been desperate for. a bit later, there were yells from the kitchen, which rapidly made their way into the office - gd had figured out how to turn the rice flour into sweet / sticky rice flour on her own!

and there was much rejoicing.

it's now erev shabbat, and i'm not quite sure what i should be doing, nor what i want to do. but i will post this:

AI slop, AI slop of horrors, AI slop, AI slop of terror...

weekend vibes

sleep journal entry:

i had four coffees yesterday. prior to my third coffee, i was falling apart, foggy and tired and sleepy and having trouble concentrating, for at least forty five minutes.

i woke up this morning from a dream in which i was arguing with schwarzenegger's terminator over how to approach an accounting problem.

yesterday:

i had some stuff to do in the morning, but i ended up having a long chat with urchin instead. i feel bad, because i think i made her feel bad about her new corporate employer when i talked about the trust issues in our industry that i previously posted about...

...

on my way into the office i had an idea: i think a lot of what's wrong with western society comes down to having been raised to believe that we can be anything and we can do anything, which, when taken literally, ends up with people who cannot bring themselves to accept and deal with reality. it's a societal illness.

...

the team i sit with was off volunteering, to it was a quiet morning in the office. it was still kinda quiet after they came in, so it was mostly a relaxed end to the week and i seem to have gotten a handle on the current phase of my project.

i came home for lunch, ate a couple of lotus cookies and fired off a troll message to mr smear thanking him and implying that i ate them all. when school ended, i received the following response:

both hilarious and scary - on the one hand, it felt like a "we need to talk about kevin" moment, on the other i was highly amused by his emoji fluency 🤣

we discussed the upcoming exhibit, and he told me he was only missing one piece that got lost a couple of months ago, and i asked him to recreate it when he got home. as much for me and gd as for him.

a while later, i received a picture of his recreation, and it was brilliant ^_^

the office happy hour started less happy because i inadvertently raised the issue of them not having any vegan treats when i, personally, wasn't interested in the temptation. but my boss is also vegan (apparently), so the organizers were quite stressed about it.

i grabbed a beer, and approached one of the AI gurus about my openspec experience (which we'd briefly discussed a couple of months ago), and he offered to sit with me for a bit. we ended up spending most of an hour and a half in a flurry of installations and experiments, and i was pleased to see his enthusiasm when he finally grokked what it is i want to build. i learned a lot from the conversation in general.

i had an awkward interaction with my boss on my way out, he wanted to know my project timeline and i began explaining what i'd already explained to my manager, "assuming no more surprises, and every step along the way we've learned new and surprising things"... and he cut me off: "first the estimate, then the disclaimer" :P

i came home, mr smear and i strapped on our blades, and i took him for a round. he was really nervous and scared, but we got through it and he had some really good moments. we also had two encounters with really sweet dogs; the first, a puppy who was peeing himself constantly with excitement, the second a huge, fluffy, very nosey girl. i very much appreciate the additional positive vibe injection into mr smear's early experiences ^_^

just before we got home, he tried to roll a bit on a downhill and hurt himself as he fell. he was upset and started sulking away, and i caught him and told him he had to show himself he could do it - i'd been telling him the entire ride that his body's capable, it's his brain that needs to be aligned. surprisingly, for the state he was in, he went "fuck it", turned and rolled and t-stopped beautifully!

i was so proud of him, not just for the physical success but for the attitude, and for not ending the ride on a negative note.

we finished watching little shop of horrors over dinner, and got him into bed, and then i sat down with gd and we talked about something that she's always done when we watched tv or movies together that's really unpleasant*. it feels like we got to the bottom of it - it's more a communication thing than anything else - and it was a relief.

* she just fucks off, while we're waiting for her to continue. anyway, it's a little complicated.

i did nothing last night, and went to bed relatively early because my eyelids were feeling particularly heavy.

this morning so far:

i got up late, finished another chapter of watchmen, and finally replaced the UV light and purifier of the tami 4. something went egregiously wrong, though, and now we don't have a tami 4 for the weekend and a technician is (thankfully so quickly) coming in on sunday morning.

now that i've posted this, pausing to tear up at the opening sequence of darwish - desert adventure 2025 (quoting udi kagan's הלם קרב), we're about to leave for the school for the end of year exhibit, very excited to see what mr smear's been up to!

entangled

i posted something this morning, and i'm disappointed that it hasn't got much attention:

nobody's talking about something that's really important: regardless of whether you've been retrenched or not, how do you trust an employer that would throw your fellow employees under the bus for the promise of cost cutting AI? how do you return to working for a company that did that to you? where's the incentive to work hard and behave as if you and your employers have a shared stake in the future of your company?

the accepted behavior of our industry leaders is nothing short of psychopathic, and nobody is calling them to account.  we've all just accepted that this is what business looks like now, and it's hurting not just the human beings who do the work and have families to provide for, but also the businesses themselves, and also our economies.

...

the pharmacy run was stressful. after waiting about half an hour, listening to music and knowing there were another ten numbers to go, i was suddenly yanked out of my reverie as i registered that my number was suddenly, unexpectedly up. i rushed to the counter, struggling to turn the music off (the button just didn't work) and get my paperwork out, only to find myself standing there waiting for someone who turned out to be a technician and not a pharmacist.

he was trying to fix the queue number system.

what followed was chaos, with a couple of us keeping track of the numbers because nobody - including the pharmacists - understand what was happening. as my meeting time got closer, i was approached by a woman who was also in a hurry and wanted to trade numbers.

anyway, that wasn't the worst of it. the worst of it was my credit card being declined, and having to set up gd's on my phone wallet with her validating it from her phone while the pharmacist became impatient and a large crowd was suddenly behind me. i managed to get it done in record time, but not without a high level of stress.

i managed to catch a bus and get home and join the zoom call one minute late.

...

after the daily, i ate a quick breakfast and headed to the office. it was a complicated day, with me untangling a mess of work that needed to be reverted, then replayed. i thought i'd done a good job of it, but around 5pm i learned that one of the reverts broke the CI pipeline and nobody (least of all me) could figure out how 🤦‍♂️

at least my sync with my mentor went positively, although a bit later my fellow contractor paid me a visit, distressed, because everyone he's spoken to about the hackathon has given him a different answer and none of them seem fair or right to him. i gave him some advice, but i'm glad i'm not in that position.

during the day it crossed my mind that there's a huge difference between standing on the balcony of a top floor of a very tall tower, and seeing a photo from it, so i walked home, picked up mr smear and walked back to the office to give him a tour of the four corners of our floor. he was thrilled, and it became a powerful lesson in perspective ^_^

we sat down to dinner soon after getting home, and watched the second third of little shop of horrors, which to my delight he's thoroughly enjoying and is completely invested. i must admit, though, i'm finding it more and more amusing that he often pauses to describe what's happening as if he's just had some deep insight or epiphany; like, he's just stopped us to demonstrate, unwittingly, that he understood what just happened on the screen 🤣

 ...

mozambicans: suffered the highest recent casualties, with at least five citizens killed during violent mob attacks and arson in coastal towns, displacing nearly 600 people.

malawians: hundreds forced from their homes, seeking emergency refuge in community halls and mosques while awaiting state-sponsored evacuation.

ghanaians: hundreds voluntarily repatriating via state-chartered flights out of johannesburg due to severe harassment and safety fears.

zimbabweans: facing intense harassment, unlawful evictions, and workplace discrimination as one of the largest migrant populations.

nigerians: dozens requesting emergency flights home, prompting government airlifts and formal diplomatic interventions.

somalians: small business and shop owners facing widespread looting, vandalism, and economic displacement.

congolese: refugees and asylum seekers experiencing systematic exclusion from public healthcare and targeted harassment.

if this is what's happening to black africans right now, it's not going to be long before it starts happening to white africans. and in the current political climate, it's probably going to begin with the jews :(

...

after saying goodnight to my mom, i discussed my fears with gd, which led to a conversation about how she's been handling the years since october 7th and her relationship with the news. along with everything else, i'm glad she's starting to feel a bit of relief and see the light as other nations begin to wake up to what's been going on under their noses all this time.

sleep journal entry

last dream: track listings on the sides of containers, a shul service with someone i know who'd recently been released from prison (and who was clearly a traitor) being loudly disrespectful, and a container tramsporting a carnival covered in sheets and i could see ninjas (the irony) hiding all across it.

i slept through - minus successfully turning off my alarm - until i was woken up to say goodbye to mr smear. i don't know when last i managed to sleep like that.

gd's back is sprained, so instead of finally getting ready for the hackathon and a pressured day, i'm quickly drinking a coffee then heading off to the pharmacy...

delays

 i kinda feel like i'm in a pinball machine, being smacked around by flippers and bouncing off random objects and trying hard to avoid falling into the hole.

it took me too long to get out the house, so i stayed for my morning meeting and then went to the office, leading a lost stranger i encountered along the way to his destination.

in a nutshell, i basically wasted most of today on fixing up a repository in a way that the owners didn't like, and nobody cares enough to just finish the job. i think i handled the discussion at the end of the day appropriately professionally, though it was clearly awkward for both me and the guying reviewing my code.

in the afternoon, someone reached out to me to inform me that some of my earlier changes had broken something - eight days ago. fortunately, it was already a different kind of broken by someone else 🙄

fixing it was quick and easy, but then something in databricks went wrong and i had to manually reset it, which led to another issue with the other code i'd been working on... eeeeeverything is broken....

last week my rollerblading experience was disrupted because i'd consumed dairy, and i wanted to make up for it. i came home, for some reason stewing over something protoplasm and i had had to deal with in goa many years ago, and when i walked into our apartment my son jumped out and yelled namaste!, which he had no idea what it meant, and then when i'd calmed down a little and we went out for a quick walk before dinner, we encountered two indian women in beautiful traditional dress.

so that all happened.

we started watching little shop of horrors at dinner (mr smear grumbled about it being a musical, but calmed down quickly because it's good), then spoke to my mom, and then waited for mr smear to get ready for bed... by which stage i was running late for the rollerblading, and my stomach was doing a thing, and i decided that tonight's not the right kind of night.

so i've done very little of value, it's already late, i'm going to go to bed now. hopefully tomorrow will be more constructive.

homeschooling

 six day war... twelve day war... twelve hour war...

bizarrely, yesterday felt like a return to routine.

שמים את השיגורים בשיגרה 

we put the rocket launches in the routine

mr smear's biggest lesson for the day was helping gd clean the floors; the first half was a nightmare until i got involved, and once it was done we had to have a family meeting and discuss how we help others (mr smear) and how we handle provocations (gd). we then had a bit of a repeat episode when he was supposed to help her with the dishes before dinner prep, but for a different reason, and i found myself explaining to a ten year old techniques for getting off the toilet quickly 🙄

my workday was alright, and ultimately successful. i'm still really behind - way past deadline - but i'm making some progress and certainly learning things along the way. i don't really have a solid mental model for what i'm doing, though, not yet at least, but a big part of that is how uninvested i am personally.

i also "wrote" (AI) a bunch of bash scripts for a CI workflow, and now i'm thinking i really should rewrite them in python...

i got stuck waiting on others in the evening, and mr smear and i took our fluxx collection upstairs to play a couple of games with our upstairs friends. it was fun, but more than that it was intended to be an educational experience for the kids, and as many annoyances as there may have been, overall it went well.

mr smear and i came back downstairs for dinner and macgyver, and gd's mushroom-soup lemonade (she followed the mushroom soup recipe, it's a terrible recipe), and then a hilarious chat with my mom (cemeteries can be dramatic), and then a night of intentionally doing nothing of value.

this morning we woke up (myself a lot more slowly than everyone else), and sent mr smear off to school, and then i read a little bit (a mix of stranger in a strange land and watchmen), and now i've posted this while singing along to synthknot, and now i guess it's time to get moving and go to work.

...

i've been putting off a bunch of preparation work that i need to do for the upcoming hackathon, it's not feeling good. but having published my extension and the related articles, i feel like a weight has fallen off my shoulders.

return to routine

 more war. i mean, back to routine! shit, are we at *war* war or just the usual level? i mean, the kids are home but are adults going to the office today?

gods help us.

...

i got a bunch of admin stuff done yesterday morning, not least of which being registering and paying for mr smear's summer camp (is that even going to happen, now?) after realizing that i'd misunderstood the forms last time and stopped halfway.

UX matters, people :P

it took me a long time to get around to my actual work, but once i did i put in a good few hours and made some actual progress. one of my coworkers reached out for a half hour sync on maintaining dashboards in a healthy way, and i'm very pleased to see that the team is taking it seriously in spite of their initial skepticism!

i was a bit nervous about the "sync" that my manager invited me to - then learned why in a pre-sync meeting yesterday evening and was relieved to have been consulted before things get messy.

by the evening, i hadn't been out of my chair much all day, so i went to the library with mr smear for some exercise and fresh air (and to return a book, and pick up a few more interesting ones). it was a very pleasant excursion.

we watched macgyver over dinner, after which i made my extension look nicer and finished up the articles. then we learned that we're at war again...

... i spent the next hour or two trying to publish my articles (the medium website started throwing errors literally as i was publishing, and the emails were sent out with the articles in an incomplete state), then i played a little slay the spire 2, and then i finally went to bed.

[rocket attack incoming]

not the early bedtime

 after my previous post, i showered, and we sat down to dinner. we finished watching cool runnings, i totally didn't cry.

i was tired.

so i played a little slay the spire 2 while mr smear got ready for bed, said good night, and then made myself a last tea. i thought i'd read a little and then go to bed, but i happened upon an article about publishing vscode extensions, and thought i'd *just* set up my account in preparation.

TWO HOURS LATER...

i now have my extension published on both vscode and open vsx marketplaces! my articles are just about completed, so i was trying to get some good screenshots for them when i encountered a new feature in vscode (i believe it's "github.copilot.chat.copilotDebugCommand.enabled": true) that puts my little extension to shame :P

aaand now it's very late, and i've got a big day ahead of me tomorrow 🤦‍♂️

the rink

"omg you're making a face that looks like putin if he didn't have riz" - my son to me a little while ago, it made me want to die

...

we had a very pleasant evening, dinner and more cool runnings, then a visit from our upstairs friends, and then pure exhaustion and dropping into bed soon after they left.

this morning was chilled. i had a whole lot of stuff i wanted to do, but the thing i started with took hours. i did end up with the first part of a two-part article done and dusted, and i did quite a lot of it on the balcony on a lovely day (right until the sun started shining right on me, it was too hot).

then i got off screens for a while (i restarted reading watchmen again), and then i took mr smear our rollerblading. i was hoping to get to the roller rink at the sportek, but i did have any expectations. we made it though! and, in spite of his protests along the way, he did get on the rink and he did enjoy himself!

he had lots of little challenges to overcome, there and back, and we stopped for quite a lot of rests. at one point, we'd been sitting on a bench under some shady trees for longer than usual, and i suggested we move on; "no, dad, i'm enjoying this. we're very lucky to live here" 🌳 😍 🌳

so he's had a good time, and he's proud of himself, we've both had some exercise and rollerblading practice, and it's a fine end to a lovely day.

weekend incoming

 i still haven't fully recovered from tuesday and wednesday's dairy incident (i suspect my lactose intolerance has evolved into an actual allergy), so having a beer this afternoon has hit me surprisingly hard...

today got whole lots better. i was still a bit down in the dumps when gd and i left for the morning shopping run, but we found a nice little spot for coffee and relaxed and enjoyed ourselves, and the walk back to the shops and subsequent shopping trip were not unpleasant.

then we came home and had a nice, quiet, relaxing early afternoon as mr smear had gone to one of his friends (one of the two that he got physical with, the south tel aviv one). i was a bit nervous about picking him up and bringing him home on a friday afternoon, but the buses are running until relatively late now that it's summer.

the ride there was a bit stressful - some shitty kids for the first half, and lots of unwashed people for the second - and i was in a mode for the fifteen minute walk from the bus, partially because of the area (though it was fine, chilled, much less aggressive than the time i bladed through on a saturday) and partially because i was listening to slipknot.

i picked him up, and he appears to have been well-behaved and had a good time. we got to the bus stop in time, and everything was going just fine until halfway home he did something shitty and the entire week's issues with him came crashing home. we discussed it, we discussed my feelings and why i feel the way i do, but morale was pretty low for both of us by the time we returned home.

i dove into my AI "harness" - which, since yesterday morning's inspiration, has now been demoted to my MCP eavesdropper - and it's now feature complete and ready to be published. but not without some irritation: i blew through the rest of my github copilot credits and further into an additional budget i approved, and i didn't even have much to show for it.

i've parked the work for the day, and tomorrow i'll set about doing two things: the first, getting a local AI running again, and the second, publishing my extension. once that's done, i'll be more than ready to begin working on the actual harness i now have a design in mind for.

...

shabbat incoming. i feel almost surprised to have made it to this point in the week.

disappointment 2: the next level

 yesterday was fucking hard. i'm so over it right now, over everything to do with parenting and adulting and just getting through a friday fucking morning without having a breakdown.

yesterday continued to be shit. i didn't mention that i woke up yesterday feeling inspired, because i finally figured out the solution to a technical problem that's been causing me no end of consternation over the course of the past couple of weeks: i figured out what we need to gain visibility into our AI usage in general, not just eavesdropping on whatever our technological overlords haven't figured out how to block yet.

but that inspiration quickly faded with mr smear's friend's phone call*, and then i arrived at the office to discover that the previous day's incident was far from over. instead of working on my project - the one i'm past deadline for and drowning in - i spent all day (minus a break for lunch, thank god i took the opportunity to come home for a break) and until 10.30pm grasping at straws in the dark.

* later i'd get a phone call from his teacher, and learn that the situation is worse than we thought. so there's that.

at least i wasn't alone - and, in particular, at least the boss was involved. both because he had a lot of insights and provided a lot of useful guidance, and because he was a witness to why i wasn't working on my own stuff.

having said that, there i was, at night, in a dark client's office because the building's lights went off, instead of being with my family on a day that i really needed to be having a talk with my son. i'm a contractor, i shouldn't be effectively on-call, and i don't know how to navigate this professionally.

i almost sent a message to my mentor now, but i think it can wait until sunday.

as we left the building, the boss asked if i'd enjoyed the experience. the honest answer was that as much as i like the people, and i learned stuff, and i felt useful, and i'm grateful to have a job that pays me a salary, i also really, really don't want to be working long hours on meaningless stuff i don't give a shit about. he put me on the spot, though, and all i could come up with was "it's not all negative with you guys" and an awkward smile.

i arrived home exhausted and unhappy. i initially thought that my "liquid dinner" of a corona (that's the piss-water everyone else was drinking) would be enough, but then i found the sushi gd had left in the fridge.

my family was fast asleep, and i ate and showered and brushed my teeth feeling like a ghost in my own home.

i climbed into bed and fell asleep pretty quickly, and - for the nth day in a row - was woken at 6am by the god-awful sounds of my son spitting out toothpaste. so i woke up pissed off at him and the world in general, and try as i might (for more than an hour) i just couldn't get back to sleep.

we had our talk, albeit a short one, and sent him off to school. when i finally sat down at the computer to take care of what needs taking care of before we leave for the weekend shopping, i ended up having to troubleshoot the network issues again. i really, really shouldn't have returned the network device. when i finally got it all working again, i received an email reminding me that our physio insurance isn't ponying up, and now i'm pissed off and have sent an email to the brokers to ask if there are other companies we can use.

i'm so over these assholes making me work after i've paid them for a service.

...

i'm physically tired, and emotionally drained, and i don't know how i'm going to do the things i have to do today when i don't even have it in me to do the things i want to do.