unroutine

 oh. it's 00.28 as i begin writing this. i went to bed about an hour and a half ago, and i've been lying uncomfortably awake for the past half hour or so trying desperately to claw back the unconsciousness. my belly's been doing a thin all evening (again in the evening, again no idea what's triggered it), and my lower back's been doing a thing since i stopped sleeping, and my brain's been doing a thing since...

yesterday (saturday):

i wasn't very productive yesterday, mostly on purpose. i thoroughly enjoyed witnessing mr smear playing battlezone on the PSVR, and i tooled around most of the day arbitrarily, and i enjoyed a good afternoon nap.

in the late afternoon - around 4.30pm - my sister and i dragged mr smear out ("i don't want to go to the beach!") and we walked, in the not-too-unpleasant heat, down to the beachfront golda. after the ice cream break, we walked back up to the hilton beach, and enjoyed a lovely evening; unable to get mr smear out of the water, of course, and dragging his feet to leave the beach :P

after catching an outrageously packed bus home, and showering in turns, gd treated us to a great dinner and we all crashed.

today:

another reasonable night's sleep (only tonight breaks the streak). very reasonable, in fact. my sister left really early again (she went to tour the gaza envelope and see the nova site), mr smear slept in until around 11am and was annoyed that i'd bothered him (twice) because i think he should have some semblance of routine in spite of it being summer holidays.

i began my day on the balcony, then spent my work day in my office. the actual meaningful work i did was minimal, primarily because the people i need to approve my work are either on weekend time or enjoying the fact that nobody's work is properly monitored on sundays.

i burned a ridiculous amount of tokens improving dashboards and making an ai status tool look cleaner.

mr smear and i - and then gd - had a massive fight about music practice*, which eventually resulted in him actually practicing with a good attitude in spite of the emotional rollercoaster and having lost hours of screen time for being disrespectful.

* that he has to put his heart into it, not just get through it. and that he needs to treat it like a rage game.

we side-stepped the punishment by going upstairs to play settlers of catan, mr smear's first encounter with the game.

he enjoyed it!

aside from being vengeful (really just against me) and myself having a pretty rough game, we all had a good time and played pretty well. there was one incident which i still think is hilarious, but awkwardly so: big data's son got confused and thought that his dad had moved the robber to block him and mr smear, when it was actually me. but he was unshakeable, so i piled on against big data, at which point - in spite of my laughing - mr smear got caught up. this went on for a minute or two before i put a stop to it and admitted that it was me, which threw both the kids completely 😂

we got home at roughly the same time my sister did, and soon settled down for dinner. post-dinner i was becoming a bit frustrated with getting mr smear into the bedtime ritual, but i made good progress with the auto-doc project (i'm having a much better experience with codex than claude) and then read alice's adventures in wonderland to mr smear, which put me to sleep more than him.

the dinner party

i'm sitting on the balcony having just sprayed the edges with pidgeon repellent; it's not a bad smell, hopefully it'll work. our neighbor's just pumped up the volume on what, thankfully, isn't the worst music. it's another beautiful saturday morning on our little corner of the highway.

last night was really cool. dinner was at a beautiful rooftop apartment, with lots of interesting people. for the most part mr smear occupied himself with weird conversations with AI (i think i need to review them when he wakes up), but when there was social interaction he was cool and behaved appropriately. the food was great, but that's kind of cheating because gd was responsible for our dinner, and a lot of people seemed to really enjoy the challah-peño :)

i got stuck into multiple rounds of entertaining conversations and debates with a wide variety of people, beginning and ending the evening with real talk with our cousin who i haven't seen in ten years, but haven't spent real time with since i was a kid!

it was well after midnight by the time we left, and this happened while we waited for the taxi:

there were some emergency cleanups that took place once we got home, and then everything quickly and quietly went off to dreamland.

side quests

 i have got practically nothing done today! i accompanied my sister to her meeting with her friends, then returned home via the hardware store (for bird repellant), meeting up with gd and mr smear and doing a friday morning shopping run, which really is one of my least favorite things. it's been hot, i missed my second coffee, and i arrived home slow and tired and quite hungry. i helped gd make challah-peño to take with us tonight, started the process of locating the PSVR components because mr smear has been harassing me for a couple of days now to set it up.

then we left for the shuk, to meet up with my sister, and went up and down the market... mr smear and i feel very similarly about mall people, and shuk people are even worse. he held my hand and walked in lock-step behind me, and we came out relatively unscathed.

relatively, because our visit to the shuk began with him being pooped on by a bird 🙄

getting the bus home took more walking and time that anticipated, and i filed a complaint against the bus driver who almost injured us with his aggressive driving, but we came inside in good spirits and launched into uprising at full blast. then i set up my IDE to work with openai's codex, after which i spent the next while wiring up the PSVR.

and realizing that i, once again, had booked a car for no good reason and it was too late to cancel it without paying the full amount :(

i managed to get the PSVR set up, and mr smear got to play battlezone, and i called sailor for an hour long argument over what kind of "market research" is valid when you're trying to make a video game.

now it's evening, and we're getting ready to leave in an hour for dinner with our cousins.

bully birds

 i'm very upset right now. i just woke up after a long night; the first part was hours of being too tired to get up, but unable to sleep (restless mind) and being mildly uncomfortable, the second part - or last part, i should say, it was probably an hour or two - was sleeping soundly, feeling pretty good, and then waking up from a dream pissed off at my mother.

we went out to dinner together, and she ordered something called "dinner service". it arrived as a tiny serving for one of something that looked like noodles but with meaty-looking bits in it, with a price tag of R1500. when i asked her if it was as she'd intended, she nonchalantly said yes and took a bite of it. while i was being horrified by the cost, i learned that it was made of some kind of exotically cruel meat (kind of like foie gras), and i told her she'd be paying for it before waking up pissed off about the whole thing.

i got up, brushed my teeth, made myself a cup of coffee, picked up my laptop, and stepped onto the balcony to start my day, only to find a pigeon standing on our little table, having left a giant, wet turd on it as well as having had diarrhea in a couple of spots on the balcony floor. so i had to spend a couple of minutes cleaning all of that up, discovering that some bird had vandalized our glass railings by somehow pooping on it at an upwards angle. i was completely disgusted.

then i started writing this, and when i got to "we went out together" the damned pigeon returned, landing on the balcony railing right in front of me and not caring when i tried to shoo it away - i had to get up and chase it away properly.

fucker.

...

i didn't get any side-project work done yesterday morning, i mostly just went through my employer emails and found myself quite satisfied with the monthly newsletter i hadn't realized i'd been receiving 🙄

i had a good breakfast, went off to the office, and started the day with a particularly positive team daily. 

that was followed by a sad consult with the other contractor, whose reorg isn't going nearly as well as mine - his new manager's doing some messed up stuff and he doesn't know who's now in charge of his contract, and i advised him to immediately update his mentor and our team, let them know what's going on and find out who he's supposed to be reporting to. he's really nervous because he's convinced that our employer's having a hard time getting new contracts and he's worried about being fired... which is fair, but in my opinion if you're facing the same risk either way, it's better to be proactive and get ahead of it as much as you can. also, considering the last few weeks, i have a feeling he's less aligned with and more disconnected from our employer than i am, so if *i* haven't felt totally safe then i'm confident he's not feeling safe *at all*.

my workday was, like the rest of the them this week, flitting between my main project and my golang service side quest. with an uncomfortable half an hour being pulled in to an incident as a suspect, only to discover that my changes had nothing to do with it 😅

i've been working on this main project since the end of april, and it's been a massive (and long) rollercoaster, and yesterday i finally deployed the end-to-end code and was able to start testing it. while i found a couple of bugs at the end of the day, the project is essentially complete and ready for whenever they miraculously figure out the pixel matching component.

i also deployed the final fix to the golang service, so it's officially in good shape and actually maintainable by on-call people if anything goes awry.

for the company happy hour, i was treated to vegan nachos. as the only vegan around yesterday, i felt obligated to consume them, and for the second time had to deal with the weird childishness of a couple of people who made a show of being offended by the existence of vegan food. that aside, i enjoyed them, had a beer, and an exciting conversation with a new friendly who works with AI from another side of the org.

oh, i almost forgot. with all that, a good chunk of the day was spent debating with my friend and coworker. who, btw, has been putting some effort into my blockchain project, for which i'm very grateful. we've been discussing a lot of the current politics and philosophies of AI, and yesterday i (we?) had a really interesting revelation about the nature of consciousness which i'm planning to work through in an article.

...

i don't know what triggered it, but after the happy hour my stomach became extremely unhappy, painfully gassy. it was like that for the next few hours, and i ended up working much later than usual to finish up a report for my incoming and outgoing managers before heading out and doing a shopping mission on my way home. quite a roundabout shopping mission with mr smear, but a successful one and at least our time together was pleasant.

my sister got a bit lost on the way home from her day-trip, but we all arrived just in time for a really nice dinner (at that point my system had mostly calmed down). we talked a lot, and by the time we got up from the table it was quite late and pretty much bedtime for everyone.

...

it's friday morning, and gd's just joined me on the balcony, and my sister and mr smear appear to still be sleeping. i've just run through the plans for the day with gd, and now it's time to get started.

reception

 i'm sitting here on the balcony after a surprisingly good night's sleep, in spite of mr smear's incessant creaking through the night on his air mattress next to my side of the bed.

i spent a good couple of hours yesterday morning working on my auto-doc: i'm very happy with how it's going. i'm so relieved that the presentation went positively that i'm in "calm down" mode. i'm under immense pressure to include certain improvements, write out a one-pager for my team, and get it out the door. all at the same time.

...

i had my quarterly roadmap meeting with my mentor yesterday morning. the roadmap bit went very well, although there was an awkward moment or two when discussing my auto-doc because he suggested that i could have done it without AI generating the documentation. then the real awkwardness began, when he asked how i felt about the company and we got into it over me feeling disconnected and not seeing the bigger picture. it turns out a) linkedin's algorithm just doesn't put all the usual stuff in my feed (granted, i don't use linkedin very often) and b) that while i've been complaining about there not being a company newsletter, i've been receiving a company newsletter in my email - my gmail inboxes were configured by default to only show my primary inbox, and i've been (unconciously) ignoring everything else 🤦‍♂️

once the meeting was over, i flipped through my emails and discovered, to my immense gratitude, that i'd missed an urgent and important email that had a deadline of a couple of days: choosing a gift for rosh hashana. if my mentor and i hadn't gone down that rabbit hole i might've lost my opportunity to pick up a significant shopping voucher, which in our current financial situation makes a very big difference.

a couple of hours after my roadmap meeting, the thing that my mentor had suggested for my auto-doc popped into my head, and i remembered that just that morning i'd read an article on the topic. i reviewed a couple of well-known packages and sent them to him, and was surprised when he immediately called me. not only had he only learned about one of those very packages about half an hour before, but when i explained that it might very well be a good dependency to build in to what i've got i could almost hear the penny drop for him, and he seems to have suddenly understood what all the excitement for what i'm building is about ^_^

...

the rest of the work day was finally uncovering the root cause of the golang service crashes and fixing it, and it was REALLY satisfying seeing the memory usage flatline when i finally deployed ^_^

i also managed to make some progress with my primary project, and after months of shenanigans i'm at a point where i've pretty much finished everything end-to-end but now have no idea how i'm going to actually test it :P

...

i left the office about twenty minutes before we had to leave home to do the airport run, and called gd to make sure she and mr smear were ready to go. of course, that was when she had just decided that she needed to wash the floors in honor of my sister's arrival 🤦‍♂️

i'd left the office in the middle of getting code reviewed and deployed, so in the literal few minutes i was at home i continued, and on the train i continued, and at the airport while waiting for my sister to clear border control i continued. border control gave me a little more time than expected because they had to hunt down her entry in the population registration - she hasn't been here for thirty years, and she left her ID in london - but she got through it eventually and our reunion was fun, funny and emotional :)

we took the train home, and the girls decided that walking the few blocks from the station was fine, which it totally was. the rest of the afternoon / evening was setting up, catching up, a really nice sushi dinner, a long chat with my mom*, and mr smear enthusiastically trying out his present of a beautiful box set of acrylic pens, then everyone getting ready for and into bed really, really late.

* although a bit intimidating, as she brought up the fact that mr smear's barmitzvah is in two years' time and we're not members of a synagogue and celebrations are a big deal that cost quite a lot of money.

...

while getting ready for bed, i saw that the summer camp organizer had registered the refund, which is a big relief.

...

i've been up since before 6am when i heard the front door close as my sister headed out to join our cousins for a day trip to metzada, and i can't believe it's thursday already. it's been a big week. so far. i'm very excited about so many things! a bit anxious, too, but mostly excited.

higher resolution

 i finally got to bed about half an hour after posting, then woke up with a jolt forty five minutes later from a nightmare in which mr smear had "pranked" me by leaving a bunch of dead insects in my bed, and then ignored me completely and became super defiant while i did everything i could to avoid resorting to violence, which all took place outside a door out of which burst the crazy mom from mr smear's class who was ecstatic to have caught me being aggressive, and taunted me by dancing around and wiggling her bum. i woke up furious with mr smear and having to suppress the urge to rouse him from his slumber and give him a thumping.

when i told him the story in the morning - less than an hour later - he was thoroughly entertained :/

mr smear decided - unsurprisingly - that he's done with the summer camp. the organizer said she'd put in for a refund, which will be immensely helpful.

i worked hard on the auto-doc for the next hour or two, the AI taking so long on one of the activities that i ended up staying home for my daily meeting and only then heading out to the office.

i spent the next few hours manically working on all the things at once, and somehow managing to make good progress on the auto-doc, on my primary data pipeline project, and on the golang service i've been helping out with because it's giving me satisfaction to be doing housekeeping for something that carries quite a load and that's been horribly neglected for so long.

lunchtime with the team i used to be embedded with was cool, i shared my inspirations from yesterday's game dev conference and that triggered some very interesting conversations.

i thought my presentation was scheduled for 2pm, so when 1.50pm rolled around and i had just discovered something broken... that was quite intense and disappointing, but discovering the meeting was actually an hour later was a huge relief! i managed to be ready in time ^_^

i was properly nervous and wired for the presentation, but it went well and i got some decidedly positive and constructive feedback. at first it seemed like my team didn't really get what was happening, by the end they agreed that the value it brings is undeniable and i know what they want me to do to try to encourage adoption.

i had a very short post-presentation break to gather my thoughts, and then i jumped onto a call with my actual boss.

...

once upon a time, when i was in the army, i somehow developed "jeep driver's disease". nobody could think of how that developed, i wasn't able to get the recommended surgery done because my rights to a rehabilitation facility were denied as permanent forcers inexplicably give up their lone soldier status, and i was extremely fortunate that at some point it just went away. when i went to a surgeon to check me out, he put on a rubber glove, and i blurted out, twice, that i was feeling really uncomfortable with the examination.

the second time i said it, he lost his temper and yelled at me: "what, you think *I'M* comfortable with doing this?!!"

i thought about this story on my way to work this morning, and that perhaps i'd start my compensation conversation with my boss with it. in retrospect, i'm rather glad i didn't :P

i began the conversation awkwardly, but i managed to say what i needed to say and it was an enormous relief that he handled it very coolly and matter-of-factly. after explaining the industry situation (which i'm already well familiar with) he inquired as to mine, and he expressed understanding and assured me that he'd consider it. the impression he gave me was that he might acquiesce soon, or possibly in a few months during the annual reviews, either way it feels positive.

...

when i called my mom and gd afterwards to let them know how things had gone, i was shaking a little.

during the day i'd pushed an upgrade to the golang service to get better metrics and make their emission more efficient, and looking at the dashboards and reviewing with AI two things became apparent: the first, that the metrics gave much better insight into the constant crashing that this poor service has been undergoing for the past couple of years. the second, that i made the emission so efficient that the frequency of the crashing increased dramatically 😂🤦‍♂️

so i stayed a bit later than i'd have liked preparing the fix, and then i left the office, arguably in the best spirits i've been in a while.

gd sent mr smear to meet me on the way home and help me with a quick grocery run, and then he helped me take out the recycling, which turned out to include a side-quest of finding a bench to dump unused school books on, and then it was time for dinner. t'was a good dinner, and we resumed watching the simpsons (it's been a while, and the last time i mentioned it was a big, unpleasant day), and then it was shower and bedtime and read a bit of alice's adventures in wonderland to mr smear (i starting falling asleep reading about the dormirouse), and i was going to jump into bed but i just had to get all this down first.

looping, not sleeping

 i've been struggling to sleep for a few hours already. in addition to my mind feeling out the conversation with my (actual) boss, i've also found myself in a loop thinking about the year i lived with my brother in johannesburg. probably inspired by the chat with the ex-saffer from the meetup last week.

with him, i was free to smoke cigarettes and i learned very quickly to make like him and smoke anywhere and everywhere. i wouldn't go to the toilet without lighting up, or get in the bath without lighting up, so that was a thing.

but also, for a while i worked at the convenience store a couple of hundred meters from his house. i always say i felt protected from the lurkers when walking there and back because, working there, i had protection: i was the guy providing the cigarettes and the condoms, and you don't fuck with the guy who provides the cigarettes and the condoms. but in retrospect that doesn't make much sense. and my memories are hazy, how did i get that job in the first place? how long did i work there for? i remember having to figure out the cash register, and a lot of discussing their street fighter 2 machine with another guy who worked there, and excitedly not making a big deal of serving one of the m-net presenters (peter ndoro).

i could continue doing a mind-dump of that year for a while, but that's the thing that i've been looping. i'm tired, a little wired and brain-fogged, and i really need to get some sleep.

gameis 2026

 the gameis conference was nothing short of inspirational. up until a couple of weeks ago i was convinced that the israeli gaming industry was all about gambling; i arrived a little before the crowds, and i was really impressed by the local games set up to play; extremely high quality, both the studio and the indie games.

a guy i served with sat down next to me during the opening talks, and we were both - like most of the people in the room - made very uncomfortable by the fifteen minutes of "saying the quiet part out loud" explaining how to take advantage of "whales". judging by the audience reactions to that and the marketing talk that followed, and the antithesis in the more sentimental talks that poked fun at the first ones, we weren't alone. the only other uncomfortable talk was by a hardcore liberal american jew, whose thesis regarding making games meaningful was excellent, but who couldn't stop himself from putting his TDS and anti-musk sentiments on display.

lunch was surprisingly good, really decent vegan options.

the rest of the talks i sat in on were interesting, enlightening, and motivated me to want to Make Stuff. i've captured a whole bunch more game ideas, and as soon as i'm done with integrating my auto-doc into my client's systems i'm going to focus on some of them.

there were some awkward moments during the day, but i had an interesting phone call with sailor and a couple of positive interactions (one with an old university buddy who used to be a part of ze germans). in general, i feel much better about the lay of the land. and, considering my current situation - and my anxiety over tomorrow's attempt to renegotiate my salary possibly going awry - i'm wondering if i shouldn't try to move in that direction.

during the day i learned - fortunately from mr smear first - that mr smear and his "friend" had had an incident this morning. i told his friend's mother about the on/off bullying that mr smear's been experiencing the past couple of months, and i think as parents we're all aligned and hoping for the best... but either way he really doesn't want to go back, he's been really disappointed by the summer day camp in spite of a bunch of positive experiences.

i spoke to an organizer a bit earlier, and it looks like they'll refund us if he stops now (which is in spite of their terms and conditions), so we'll ask him in the morning and take it from there. it'll certainly put us under less financial pressure for this month, even if it doesn't really affect the next ones so much...

mr smear and i did a quick grocery shop and then sat down for dinner. gd made home-made hamburgers that were delicious, but none of us was hungry. i ate all my food anyway, because it was delicious and i felt uncomfortable leaving it on the plate, and i kind of regret doing that.

we finished watching chocolat, and we all loved it, which is awesome.

at mr smear's bedtime gd and i had a fight that was triggered by an argument over whether she could be a receptionist in tel aviv if her hebrew isn't great, and it took a lot to get to a point where we both heard each other...

now it's late, and i really don't have energy to work on the auto-doc, so i'm going to chill and go to bed soon and try to get as much done in the morning to be ready for the demonstration 🤞

nerve bump

i managed to get a surprising amount of work done yesterday, especially considering a couple of rounds of parenting drama revolving around my son being sneaky and dishonest about his screen time violations. dinner was nice - we're continuing with chocolat, and i was very pleased to hear mr smear commenting about what a great movie it is "even if it is really calm and slow" - and then we were invited upstairs for some fluxx.

a lot of the hour or so we were there was fun, but for two things: big data being mean to his youngest (he's really impatient with him), and mr smear being a really bad sport :(

i actually slept really well last night (i only had two coffees yesterday, and i forgot to take my magnesium supplement), but i was woken at 6am by mr smear's traumatizingly loud and aggressive alarm. which turned out to be a good thing, once my nerves calmed a little, because i have to go in a couple of minutes and i had a fair amount to do.

...

tahoma sent me a link to unfortunately, you need to know what the jevons paradox is yesterday, which i happen to have seen the day before. it's absolutely brilliant.

under the line

 the finances. oh, the finances. i got my payslip today, and looked at my account, and... it's going to be another tough month. i had a chat with my mom this morning, and i've just had a talk with my insurance broker who's going to see what we can reduce from that side of the equation, and i've very anxiously asked my boss for a meeting during which i'm going to ask him for the salary that i initially requested.

gods help us.

while very nervous with all that (and the accompanying nervous belly to go with it), the landlord's handyman and accomplice arrived to sort out the leaky air conditioner. it was messy and took a couple of hours, during which time they established, thoroughly, that our ledge is not like all the other ledges and does not have a drain 🤦‍♂️

of course it doesn't.

...

while i've been working - "orchestrating", i should say - i've been able to watch another disturbing video about AI dishonesty that's very unsettling. as in, in addition to the one i watched on thursday with a similar title.

big week ahead

 guardians of the galaxy vol. 3 was a mistake, and mr smear and i have agreed that we're not considering it canon. gd and i  watched it three years ago and apparently we weren't bothered by the hollywood tie-everything-up-neatly-with-a-bow drivel and the stream of character assassinations at the end. it kind of feels like the grease fan theory, perhaps rocket did die and the end was his ascension fantasy.

also, it manages to be a lot more gruesome than the others and mr smear - surprisingly - didn't enjoy that.

so that was a good chunk of yesterday. i also spent a few hours on my auto-doc side project, which feels like it's on its way to being ready for integration 🤞

mr smear and i put on our rollerblades relatively late in the evening, and headed out for some exercise. the first part was dramatically unpleasant (we keep having to talk about not being disrespectful, and yesterday evening's incident was on the heels of him lecturing me about how i should teach him and whether i was right to make him learn to ride a bike first), but we managed to get through it and enjoy the rest of the ride together. on the way back, we saw a jackal jump into the bushes a couple of blocks from our apartment and i had to explain to mr smear that - at his current speed - he wasn't going to be outrunning anything on four legs and might need to defend himself with his wrist pads if keeping away wasn't sufficient...

the evening was smooth, and included a visit from our upstairs friends. on their way out, big data informed me that our new fluxx packs have arrived, and that the delivery tax includes them playing with star fluxx before handing them over. they're not too interested in cthulu fluxx, though :P

i continued working on the auto-doc until midnight, by which time i was having trouble keeping my eyes open. due to hip flexor issues it took me a while to fall sleep, and i had to wake up and stretch again a couple of hours later, but otherwise i slept relatively well.

i began my day on the balcony enjoying the green and the breeze, invited mr smear over to explain palm tree growth and how deciduous trees' leaves are like tiny palms begging sunlight from the sky, only they wither and die as the tree curls up to hibernate for the winter.

now to start the new week, wondering if and when the war on iran resuming will affect us (especially with mr smear at his day camp for the next couple of week), and resuming the auto-doc work for the next hour or two before jumping on work-work (though the auto-doc is technically supposed to be that too) and trying to get as much done so i can take tomorrow off for the game dev conference with limited stress. oh, and planning for my sister's visit.