shut-in

 after posting i lay back on the couch for twenty minutes, then was jolted awake by a call from the plumber, who was on his way. he completely replaced the pipes under the sink, and he did it at no additional cost, which was generous even though he had left it in a worse state than he found it yesterday.

overall, i was very happy to give him a solid rating; what a pleasure it is working with a professional.

what followed was a few hours - i exaggerate not - burning through tokens and becoming more and more infuriated by the fact that i couldn't get the table in my game to render with depth. it was only after a number of times giving up and then coming back to it that i eventually understood that the whole time, the camera had been at the precise angle that would never see the side of it 🤦‍♂️

during that time, gd and mr smear had some followup drama to the lice - gd had to give him a proper haircut today, and the two of them were not vibing...

with everything else that's been happening, i'd completely forgotten that we were going south with nystire for some camping/stargazing! between all the goings-on and the outbreak since the night before, it just wasn't happening and we're still bummed out about it :(

instead, this afternoon took an uncomfortably quiet turn. after taking a little break, mr smear and i finally got to work on his game idea, which has led to some interesting arguments and some architectural decisions that are as exciting to me as the actual game is to him. i realized, while we were talking, that blue prince has provided great inspiration for his horror hotel and also, unconsciously, the level system for my tarot game!

now i've kneaded the challah-peño and mr smear and i are going to do some quick, last-minute shopping as an excuse to say we got some exercise today :P

much thursday

 yesterday began with reading more of my favorite thing is monsters (volume 1 of 2, i just learned), which i just completed now.

it's sublime. between the phenomenal artwork, the gut-wrenching stories, and the real-ness of the characters, this is an absolute masterpiece.

the big story from yesterday morning was having the plumber - clearly a devout muslim, making his jewish blessings contrast starkly with his kneeling to bless his cup of water - do a great job of replacing the cistern and a not-so-great job of turning a small leaky faucet into an unusable one. now i've got to get him to come back for the latter before the weekend...

the work day was unusually calm. i had a big, healthy side-dish lunch from the shuwarma place that i picked up on the way to the office, i'd been feeling faint and weak again and i'm becoming increasingly concerned about possibly being anaemic. i got the backfill started, and it went pretty smoothly, and over the course of the afternoon i got the action plan worked out for the work my client team and i have been discussing, all using opus and all far cheaper than using sonnet.

let's pretend that makes sense.

by the time i went upstairs to join everyone for happy hour - a farewell pizzas-and-drinks for the AI team lead - i was ready to trigger the implementation and i left the agent with an instruction to document every step of it and make best guesses that didn't conflict with the established plan.

when i got back to my desk more than half an hour later, it was still running. after about an hour, it was done, and while i haven't evaluated the results yet - i was just waiting for it to finish so that i could go home - on the surface it looks good and i was shocked by how little it cost relative to what i've been spending on tokens since they introduced the budget a couple of weeks ago.

anthropic + bedrock = scam.

i dropped my bag off at home and took mr smear for a walk, a lot of which was spent discussing his game design ideas. i've agreed to help him in a bit, when his first screen time kicks in, to start building his game with him.

what a time to be alive.

gd's chili took a lot longer to be ready than she'd expected, but it was delicious. we watched another episode of the wonder years, and then i worked on my tarot game until i couldn't keep my eyes open any more and went to bed.

...

over dinner, mr smear discovered that he was having another outbreak around his eye. it's been quite a while, and considering the fact that i'd been considering taking him to the pool soon i'm grateful it happened before that, and that we didn't once again worry that the pool was causing it...

i didn't sleep very well, so i'm tired still, but that's just par for the course these days 🤷‍♂️

nodding

 i guess the advantage of having a nerve pinched in the middle of my back is that it seems to be blocking my hip flexor discomfort. "conditioned pain modulation", huh? i'll take it.

i got up with my alarm, remembered (thanks to gd's note) not to drink anything but water, and walked to the lab, arriving early enough on a quiet day to be out of there within minutes. i went past my clinic on the way back, picked up my "not sleep" meds (i still haven't bothered to see what they are) at the pharmacy, went looking for mugs at the mall, didn't find any, and hopped on a bus home.

i was just getting off the bus when gd realized where i'd gone and called me to ask me to pick up her prescription 🙄

[i've seen the bloodwork results already, it looks like i might well be anaemic]

i had a quick breakfast, got in touch with another plumber, then headed to the office.

over the course of the day, the plumber and i exchanged messages and it looks like he's coming to install a much cheaper cistern than the other guy was interested in arranging. now the other guy's upset that we're going with the cheaper option. either way, we can't get a solution quickly enough, as the leak has escalated...

funny story: the plumber coming tomorrow is an arab who keeps saying "baruch hashem" and "be'ezrat hashem", and i don't know what to make of it :P

two things happened when i arrived at the office: the first, i agreed to schedule a meeting with the new potential client tomorrow evening, and was subsequently informed that it was to be this evening. the second, i had a chat with a doctor from the complementary medicine section at our clinic which resulted in appointments being scheduled for acupuncture and feldenkreis.

the morning was a bit messy, but included my client putting me on a claude subscription instead of the pay-as-you-go plan. i got a chance to burn through some tokens in the evening, and i used opus for some real planning, and i've gotten the feeling that not using opus might have been my biggest mistake since optimization for it a week or two ago 🤷‍♂️

my manager and i had agreed that they'd make an announcement about my contract ending tomorrow, and that i'd let dx know before the formal announcement, so after the two of us talked with the other contractor (who seems to be in a less certain situation than me) i asked him to join me on the balcony and i broke the news to him.

initially he was devastated, which was really heartbreaking, but we managed to put some positive spin on things and by the time we returned he seemed to be in better spirits. while he was talking, he happened to drop an interesting piece of information, and that was how i discovered that the interview i had scheduled for the evening was with his previous employer!

then i came inside and received an update from my manager that they'll make an announcement about me leaving some time next week.

i went home for lunch, then caught a bus to the office, surprised to discover that since they completed the work by sha'ul hamelech there's now a simple line switch instead of a ten minute walk in the heat 🤘

my interview simulation was comfortable and useful, after which i went to work on a design / planning session for my client team (we've all agreed on a set of compromises that seem to be coherent). by the time i decided that i wanted to do the introduction interview from home it was already deep rush hour, so i made myself a cup of tea and found myself a quiet space.

the interview went smoothly, rather well, in fact. the group lead called me afterwards to advise me against it on grounds that it seems boring, but in my estimation the real challenge will be leading / guiding them in process hygiene and AI adoption. she agreed that it was work a second interview, at least.

as i've said before, and i'll say it again, i'm extremely passionate about having food on the table and a roof over my head :P

i bussed home, marveled sadly at my son's new haircut, talked to gd, fired off a message to the guy who used to be the head of my study program, had an encouraging text chat with one of the educators i spoke to on monday night, then headed out with mr smear for a walk to the park. we stopped along the way to watch a worker throwing building debris out a third-story window, discussing all manner of things, and when we were almost home mr smear said something random that gave me some inspiration for my tarot game.

i described it to gd, and we got into the weeds a little bit, and i think it's the first time my wife has been as legitimately excited about an idea of mine as i am ^_^

we watched another couple of episodes of the wonder years over dinner, spoke to my mom between them, got ready for bed, completed a run of slay the spire 2 i've been doing in stages over the course of about a week now, rested a little, posted this, and now, i think, i'm just about ready to sleep.

low drama

 apparently mr smear's friend left us a gift... gd's currently cutting his hair in the bathtub because he's got an active lice infestation that a treatment earlier had no effect on. mr smear's been growing his hair for a long time and it just grew out long enough to be really cool.

but the treatments are seriously expensive, and we can't house lice, so...

i need a fucking break. gd, too, judging by the cursing that's been going on.

...

getting to work means walking across the bridge, and in this heat that's become a thing. i spent $0 of AI tokens at work today, but that's because i wasn't able to log in for most of the day and i ended up using my personal account for the little bit of work i did. and then, when i finally asked for a code review, one of the guys asked a question that made me realize that i probably didn't need to do this work after all 🤦‍♂️

i did learn how to do the backfill cost exercise, though.

my 1-on-1 with my manager was pleasant, but they're being really weird about not announcing to the teams that i'm leaving, even though i understand that quite a few people already know. it makes it especially awkward for dx, whose lead has quit and is leaving on thursday and now i'm on my way out as well...

...

the highlight of our day was dinner, and introducing mr smear to the wonder years. not only is it a wonderful series, but it's aged so well and it's so perfectly age-appropriate for an 11 year old!

alright, i'm fasting for tomorrow morning's bloodwork, it's late, i've slayed some spire while the drama's* been going on in the other rooms and now i'm going to bed.

at least we gave the guitar hero guitars away.

* oh, yes. and there's more plumbing drama too. the landlord doesn't want to spend any money and gd found a different leak in another bathroom 🙄

live demonstration

 it wasn't a presentation, it was a live demonstration. i spent the rest of my morning running through all the steps and trying to make sure it would go smoothly.

i was feeling a bit faint again, but also nervous, and particularly nervous about eating anything that might cause me any kind of gastric distress. so in the office, i avoided any snacks, even nuts, except for two pieces of fruit, and of those two pieces the banana tasted suspicious.

it was a weird few hours in the client's offices, i just found out one of the guys i'm sitting with is leaving at the end of the week and everyone thought i already knew. mixing-and-matching AI agents is awkward, dealing with surprise bad data is frustrating, and nobody knows how anything affects token usage.

then i shifted to my employer's office. on the light rail, an apparent dance troupe boarded our car to film a jubilant celebration, which felt a bit forced and incongruous with my reverie but i appreciated it nonetheless.

it was a huge relief to learn that my demo wasn't the only thing we were doing yesterday. also, that i'd arrived half an hour early and i needed about twenty minutes and help from an IT guy to get my laptop hooked up to the audio visual system.

that gave me ten minutes to have an exciting chat with one of the game jam (potential) participants.

then we stopped for hamburgers. i got five small, pretty good vegan burgers, which meant a few to take home to my son and his new friend :P

the live demo went pretty well, but there was a loooooong time waiting for an AI initialization that was quite awkward. overall, i got some great feedback and engagement, though, which was very encouraging!

on my way out, i spoke to one of our group leads who informed me that a company has already shown interest in me for my next contract. on the one hand, that's a big relief. on the other, it's working with a tech stack i really don't care for... the same one i'm working on currently :P

i came home, dropped off my back and the burgers, then caught a bus to herzeliya, refreshing disturbed's the sickness album in preparation for meeting david draiman (fanboy gush).

the evening was really interesting and satisfying. i had a bunch of conversations, with a bunch of inspirations, and made some good connections. at the very end i got to exchange a few words with david himself - i was awkward, but he was cool - and then it was time to return home.

the last bus arrived ten minutes late and was marked as being out of service, but at least it got me home at a reasonable hour (and reasonable expense). i gobbled down leftovers, showered, and managed to put my back out leaning over to pick up the laundry.

then i slept. i slept pretty well, but i woke up with sciatica firing on all cylinders and even with help from gd and a lot of stretching, i'm still not in good shape...

regardless, i started the day reading more of my favorite thing is monsters, and now that i'm reading anka's story it's clearly not appropriate for mr smear at all. possibly not for gd, either. i was so thoroughly engrossed and traumatized that i didn't realize where i was nor what time it was, so now that i've quickly eaten breakfast and written this down, i'm running late for work...

game/sleep journal entry

 i slept surprisingly well last night, having gone to bed around midnight (after slaying some of the spire) and waking up a little before 6am. then i sat outside, enjoying my coffee and completely oblivious to the world around me while being sucked into the drama of my favorite thing is monsters. i feel like it's inappropriate for mr smear for a number of reasons, but also not, and the artwork is incredible.

now it's time to work on my presentation, so i decided to screen record my game menu so far and post it to the very quiet async game jam group. i'm very proud of how this is going.

 

the leak

 i found it! i hope? i can hear the dripping from the guest toilet cistern, which has a tap that can't be closed because it's too old and the washer is worn. tomorrow's a really busy day for me, i still haven't done anything about putting a presentation together (although i've spent the past hour or two putting all the last week's changes through their paces), and now it looks like it's going to include a plumber as well.

perhaps this is the reason our water bill's always so high? who knows?!

otherwise, gd's in bed already but mr smear's up drawing [he just interrupted me, i don't know why but he came looking for a hug], and i'm starting to feel like i need to be winding down...

[interrupted by a call from the plumber, followed by a chat with mr smear explaining to him that if he wants to make real money then being a plumber or electrician is the way to go]

*sigh*

token cheat

 i slept alright last night, though i got up for bit and then tried to sleep in after, and was woken at 7.17am by an enthusiastic city worker to be informed that they'd cleared the dead rat from the sidewalk that i reported yesterday.

they honestly didn't need to call :/

my first hour or two were spent putting together a summary of my last six months for my recruiter, while simultaneously continuing the auto-doc work i'd begun yesterday afternoon (an endless back-and-forth gen-eval loop between opencode's bigpickle and codex luna) which literally took the entire day to complete.

[takes a moment to do that just-one-more-thing]

to be honest, i have only the vaguest notion of what was being done all day. there were a couple of points where i had to get involved and clarify some principles, but by and large it was a lot of uninteresting crap and a lot of breaking one thing while fixing another...

budget AI is, well, budget.

once i got the summary sent off, i took mr smear with me to the pharmacy to pick up gd's prescription. he read while keeping an eye on the queue numbers, i did a bit of shopping, completely forgetting the mug mission we'd been on on friday, until we were already home :P

we must have been there an hour or so, and i was feeling worryingly faint. not sure if sick, or just sleep deprived. i just had to look up the term sleep deprived.

once we returned home, i finally started looking at client work. i spent a few hours trying to establish a baseline cost estimate for the backfill i'm supposed to be starting this week, which took forever and ended with me encountering bad source data and having to make my jobs more tolerant. i feel like i cheated, because i used the databricks AI for the real work and my own tokens just to validate it.

the inexplicable cost jump from last week reared its ugly head, and led me to dive deep to try and figure out what was going on... which led me to the not-exactly-verifiable conclusion that mlflow tracing was the prime culprit. removing its artifacts seemed to make my later verification efforts vastly cheaper, but in any event i'm no longer even trying to use the company AI to get any actual work done.

during one of mr smear's downtimes, i set him to cleaning our standing fans. i had to guide him a bit at first, but the second one he did all by himself and he really did do a good job 🙌

another win was getting him to use another of his downtimes to practice drawing backgrounds, and he appears to be quite excited by the results, though i cannot verify what he's been up to because he's being unusually secretive.

yet another win was getting him to come with me for a walk once i was *done* with my work day, he was happy to join me and we had a good time discussing all sorts of interesting things ^_^

[exhales]

dinner time.

it's not supposed to be work

 last night was great! dinner was delicious (and quick), although once again the challah-peño was too hot for poor mr smear... mr smear and i sampled the individual mochi (the vanilla one was good, but neither was worth the expense compared to regular ice cream), gd packed up the gift mochi and i headed out to hail a taxi. over the past couple of years tahoma's husband has been using their bomb shelter time to develop a whole lot of cocktails, and over the course of the evening i had two of them, and the two of them were sufficient to do a real number on me.

otherwise, it was a lovely couple of hours spent with them and nystire and a guy i haven't seen since a pride march around 2008 / 2009 :)

aside from a half an hour or so of lower back pain waking me up in the middle, i slept pretty soundly.

i woke up pretty early, considering, and i spent most of the morning and early afternoon feeling pretty tired. i read a bit of my favorite thing is monsters, which is phenomenal, and cleaned the balcony, and eventually managed to get myself motivated enough to spend a few hours investigating alternative AI harness and model options, while simultaneously testing them on my auto-doc project and the tarot game.

i'm still going, though i've had some success it overall feels tragically like real work, stressful, frustrating and not at all fun. heavy limitations on AI usage take something that's painful enough as it is - working with an idiot that needs a lot of babysitting to not fuck up your shit - and making it essentially impossible. in addition to that, i'm no longer in the least bit interested in doing the coding work manually like a peasant, and none of the tools (specifically codex and opencode, i've given up on pi for now) have any of the plugins, workflows or options that i need to operate effectively.

everything is broken.

i took a break to play uno with gd, which was great fun for us but left a bitter taste after mr smear had not only refused, but ended up being rude enough to lose rather a lot of screen time :/

after that, we went out on our rollerblades. he complained for a while about his ankle hurting, but i think i sorted it out by tightening the straps... also, by incentivizing him with a drink, because we went back up and through the park on the way home and he was doing fine.

along the way we encountered the horrible homeless woman, who's very aggressive and started walking towards us while calling us names. i discussed how we were handling it with mr smear, avoiding her and trying not to provoke her, but in retrospect i think i should have called the police - i think it was a week ago that she was doing the same to gd, and i'm quite over the stress of whether or not i'm going to have to get physical with this unpredictable maniac in order to protect my family.

mr smear and i both had cold* showers, and i got stuck in to an hour of troubleshooting a ridiculous unity license issue (the AI broke it trying to run tests in sandbox mode, and it took a lot of experimentation and grilling gemini to give me a useful answer), then i stopped for dinner.

* cold-ish, in this weather the coldest water is more cool than cold

dinner was great, after which we had another discussion about gaming, and why we need to compromise, and gd - in a show of great magnanimity - chose to play fluxx in spite of the fact that she doesn't like it.

well.

mr smear, oblivious to gd's rising anger, enjoyed himself in spite of his protests, and did really well. gd, on the other hand... i've told her it's up to her to find a game that she wants to play.

after wishing mr smear a good night, i jumped back into to the game dev, with a little auto-doc on the side, and i've managed to catch the menu system vibe i wanted, which is pretty exciting.

and i've only used ten percent of my weekly limit...

i think i'm about ready for bed, now. tomorrow's gonna be an interesting week 🤷‍♂️

boding

 omg i'm soooo tired, and as soon as i've eaten i'm heading out to tahoma's to celebrate his birthday. maybe i should caffeine up. [caffeines up. oh, great, organic soya drink full of cream-colored bits]

after i posted yesterday, we had dinner. mr smear ate so much - we split our meals, his "egg" salad sandwich was enormous, and i think we both agreed that my "shuwarma" was too delicious to pass up - that he didn't have space for dessert.

then the two of us played a whole lot of among us together, working together sometimes, and me backstabbing him a bunch of others, but in all cases we both were having fun and laughing at the ridiculous situations we found ourselves in / made for ourselves.

after he went to bed, i played out acts 3 and the ending of inscryption. mr smear occasionally poked his head around the door because he was having trouble sleeping, and that went on until very late, and then i ended up going to bed around midnight.

i had a couple of wakings during the night, but nothing major 🤷‍♂️

i don't recall too many specifics from this morning, but it did involve checking our finances and moving mr smear's pocket money around. if we can keep it together, we might actually be okay this month. *if* 🤞

i managed to leave at a reasonable time to go pick up our cleaning materials, which turned out to be considerably heavier than i'd anticipated. i lugged them to the sarona market, with a plan to pick up speciality halva as a gift, but the halva store was closed (hey, if you don't want to make money, don't open your store during your official hours) and i ended up picking up a few things at the asian market. the girl on duty was very sweet, and managed to find me a sealable bag with some ice in it to transport the frozen goods home.

i bussed home, had breakfast, then coffee, then a very serious nap, eventually taking mr smear out on a mission to find mugs and wine. we didn't find mugs, but we did get a lot of steps in.

it was pretty hot today.

i had a third coffee when we got home, mr smear got some screen time, and then we had a big fight because he wasn't ready to help me clean the floors. we got through it, but not without unpleasantness.

at least the floors are clean, i guess.

then it was shower time for both of us, and i tried to get some more work done with the auto-doc, but i'm just become more and more demoralized about AI output quality and costs and at the same time i don't - i mean i really, really don't - want to do any of the work manually :/

so that's the vibe that's been haunting me this whole week, and i made a conscious decision in the shower to turn it off, at least for the rest of the day. so i've read some more of inside moebius part 1, which includes some pretty disturbing sequences (in addition to being quite an inspiration in general), and tried to nap (didn't happen, even though i'm falling apart), and i guess...

... i guess i just need to chill. i'm looking forward to tonight, but i'm a bit sad about the fact that i need  a fourth coffee to even get out the door. come to think of it, i needed a fourth cup yesterday as well...