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.

the disappointment

 as tired as i was last night, i dived back in to a refactor for one of my side projects that i'd begun yesterday morning (that's where my token budget went) and finally published the new package around 1.30am.

i slept alright, if not enough.

just after mr smear left the apartment this morning, i received a message from his best friend's mother. during yesterday's incident, he attacked him as well. the gentlest kid you can imagine. during our conversation, i learned more about how messed up my child is than from anyone else, and we're fucking distraught.

not according to plan

 so! i have an explanation for yesterday evening, last night, and this morning. also, today, and still now to a degree.

i didn't mention that when i took mr smear out yesterday, my belly was doing a bit of aching. i didn't really think much on it, but in retrospect that was the warning sign. then last night's feeling horrible, and this morning still feeling horrible, primarily with a low-intensity headache and an unusual dizziness.

i was still in post-rollerblade "recovery" mode, and i grabbed a petit beurre from the jar on my way to my desk. i'd had a few yesterday; they don't always have them, but every now and again i help myself to a couple when they do. but yesterday, and today, it tasted a bit different... richer... and while i managed to put that aside yesterday, the way i was feeling today made me suddenly paranoid. enough to go back and look again, more carefully, and realize that unlike the standard petit beurre in israel (osem), this was a different brand. so i looked up the brand's ingredients.

dairy.

in the "vegan"-labelled cookie jar, looking almost identical to the osem one which is legitimately vegan.

so i had my answer - the tale of last night, in its entirety, was me eating a handful of dairy biscuits yesterday afternoon, and then feeling extremely heavy effects all through the night and most of the morning. then there was an hour or so's reprieve, before this morning's biscuit kicked in and set off a pounding headache.

a coworker gave me a couple of headache tablets, which eventually took the edge off but never quite managed to lift the fog.

...

with that all happening, i had some important project work to do today. it took me a while to get into it properly - i had to deal with a few bureaucratic distractions, and i wasn't exactly operating at peak performance - and by the time i got started i was fortunate to realize that some else had overwritten my work yesterday before i triggered a mistake i might not have been able to take back.

i got in touch, and coached him through merge my changes into his (it's quite frustrating to have to guide experienced, intelligent developers through basic git manipulations because they refuse to use graph visualizations), and eventually we managed to get everything in sync.

but by that stage, i'd already been dragged into an investigation for an incident that had begun the night before and hadn't rung any alarm bells. suddenly, me the contractor who's working on a high-pressured over-deadline damage control project, had to take charge of the situation and lead the team through hours of resolution and troubleshooting.

so much for wednesday.

it looks like we did it in the end, and relatively well (i argued for combining mitigation with some elementary protections for the next set of surprises), and while monitoring the fixes not only fixed up the dashboards, but exported them to a versioned repo and demonstrated the advantage (apparently convincingly) to the others.

...

i left the office really late, stopped at the shops to pick up a couple of things, including soy milk for gd. you see, we found out months ago that she's probably celiac, and had some amazing success with her going gluten-free, but recently some of the symptoms have been creeping back. turns out, she's been drinking oat milk this whole time, thinking that it was gluten-free 🙄

...

dinner was excellent - gd made another large round of sushi and we ate the lot - and we watched some more of cool runnings. the evening was feeling like it was going great, so it was a rather undigestible surprise when the mother of one of mr smear's "friends" called to discuss him getting violent with her boy.

gd had suspected something had happened when he'd come home this afternoon, and he'd brushed her off, and it took a lot for us to extract even a little bit of the story from him. when i called the mother back to talk about it, it turned out that there was more to the story, but mr smear swears blind that that was everything. gd and i are extremely concerned, and we're both having trouble dealing with this.

...

oh, yeah - and this morning's AI usage, which was really basic, blew through more than half of my monthly budget. well, i've been complaining about the AI providers putting on the squeeze for a while now...

so all-in-all it's been a bit of a shit day, with only the slightest sprinkling of glitter over the incident resolution and the few minutes where i got to enjoy dinner with my family before everything fell apart for real.

i'm - fucking - tired.

sleep journal entry

i was somewhat uncomfortable and restless all night, possibly a combination of feeling faint from the rollerblading and still having some caffeine in me.

i have stuff to do before heading to work, so of course, here i am doing a complete overhaul of my encryption tool in response to some security alerts... it's in *these* moments that i'm grateful for the AI assist :P

revolving

 i ended up getting to bed pretty late, which i largely attribute to slay the spire 2.

mr smear's early alarm woke me up, and i had difficulty getting back to sleep. i woke up feeling zombified.

my day began with stranger in a strange land. i really wasn't into it at the beginning, and some of it feels really dated, but i pushed through that to discover that it's by design - as in it's at least somewhat satirical - and that considering the decade it was published in it shows such remarkable cleverness, both in its imagination and in its incredible ability to rewrite human experience from an outsider's point of view. it's also got a really dark feel to it. slow, ponderous, heavy, like watching a film through tv snow.

i had to force myself to put the book down and start my day.

adulting is stressful, especially unnecessary adulting. if i'm paying for additional medical insurance, i shouldn't have to work harder than them to get back money that's supposedly guaranteed.

[my previous ingrowing toenail from ages back is hurting again, suddenly]

i got to work, and found myself blocked waiting for the data team. during the four hours or so that i waited for them to get back to me, i continued to suffer in an infinite AI failure loop, which i tried to utilize as a test for my skill evolution. but when one of the data guys finally got around to me, he didn't agree with my approach and demoralization struck when i realized i might have gone through all that suffering for nothing (i mean, aside from the skill improvement).

...

at this point i received a call from the paybox retention team, who wanted to know why i ditched them and what they could do to make things right. i stood on the balcony, angrily describing their lies and how they've burned any trust i might have had in them, and by the time he heard me out he miserably acknowledged that he couldn't really make things right. then i hung up and went back inside, wondering if the people working near the balcony door had heard me... because i know that they heard me talking to mr smear earlier about why i'm not getting him a spotify subscription, as somebody came up and closed the door and i was quite embarrassed...

...

as we worked through the problem, though, we ended up hitting a wall that could only be resolved with the approach i'd been taking. so that was a relief. and then we ran into another wall, and the two of us split up to investigate alternate options.

i learned something today about connecting databricks to github, i figured out an undocumented way to use both APIs in way they didn't design for and it felt VERY good to see it actually work! it took a while to explain to the data guy how it worked, at which point he agreed that it's clearly the simplest and most correct solution for our use case, and that felt especially good after thursday's talks when i was so out of my depth that i could barely understand their questions, let alone answer them.

...

i came home in fantastic spirits. mr smear argued with me about discussing summer day camp because he already knew what he wanted, at least until he saw what the make camp is offering. we were sad to hear that he and his friend who's going aren't getting along so well - apparently his friend isn't friending much better than before they made up after their fight...

i slugged a 4th coffee in preparation for the night blade, then mr smear and i put on our rollerblades and went to the park and back. firstly, he's getting the hang of tying his laces intellectually, though his fingers are struggling. secondly, it was back to square one, he was very nervous at first, but we got there eventually and the way back was fine.

we came back to find gd with a sharp knife (always scary, and she was right nervous as well) and a delicious sushi dinner, which we ended by dipping unripe apricots into wasabi soy sauce with astoundingly positive results 🤯

i said goodnight to mr smear, then headed out to join the rollerblading group. just before leaving the apartment my neck twinged, and it caused me trouble the whole time i was out. i was already sore halfway to the meetup point, which was kinda sad, and i had to split halfway because i'd been feeling faint for a while.

most of my ride was fun, though it would have been more fun if i hadn't let myself get sucked into a really ugly political argument.

i came home almost in pieces, watched a crazy update from farzad about the coming robotic revolution while eating a second dinner, showered, and now i'm just trying to settle before climbing into bed.