a tale of two incidents

 yesterday:

i did sleep, but only briefly, waking up an hour or so before our alarms to jump right back into AI cat wrangling. because my brain was on fire imagining all the cat wrangling i wanted to do.

so i began my day putting together a PR for my boss (not my client) which basically said "this is how it's done", and i was relieved to find it merged by this morning, so he obviously wasn't too offended :P

then i rushed off to the 24/7 to pick up mishloach manot for mr smear to take to school, and afterwards gd and i headed to the dentist for the first part of her two-part root canal, which i had to be there for because her dentist doesn't understand a word of english (or french).

[goddamn i love chocolate-covered pecans]

i dropped her off at home and continued on to the office, where i was completely manic and infected a data engineer and my client with my enthusiastic idea for an AI cat-wrangling IDE extension.

and then i ran a test that my cat-wrangling had produced, confident that it was ready and that i'd had good results from the dry runs.

...

i was pretty bored while waiting for missing user permissions to complete the tests we were running in production, so i took care of some other stuff while i waited.

while i was making myself a cup of coffee, an unknown employee began interrogating me as to why he didn't see me at the company purim party that i didn't go to. he obviously thought he was being funny, but at no point did he get the hint that it would be wise to drop it, and in front of HR staff brought it to a point where had i been so inclined, that could easily have earned him a warning for harassment.

then i was brought into a call with my client team for an incident i knew nothing about and had nothing to do with - let's call it incident B - only to be informed, as i was explaining to them that my coffee wasn't working yet, that it wasn't an issue for us.

at that point i realized that i was falling apart, so i finished my coffee and left for home.

on the way home i tried to pick up a frying pan from kikar ha'medina, but i couldn't find what i was looking for, all the while struggling to get hold of mr smear and then threatening him to get his ass home to assist me on a mission to dizengoff.

...

and then i got home, and learned that the test i'd run earlier in the day had led to an incident.

let's call it incident A.

it took me about ten minutes to figure out what was happening, and another five to realize it was my fault. another two minutes to decide how to fix it, at which point i saw that one of my teammates had already pushed a fix and i'd been typing into silence for five minutes.

over the next twenty minutes i was in contact with my teammate but had received nothing from our client team (who were presumed to be dealing with the incident), and nothing seemed to be happening so i rushed out with mr smear and a washing basket that needed returning to catch a bus to the center.

we were halfway there when my phone started buzzing again, and i'd left my computer at home 🤦‍♂️

the bus was packed, with non-compliant riders arguing with the conductors, and a stop too early i jumped off with mr smear and we raced through the crowded sidewalks, scrambled down to the store, where i had trouble finding a frying pan, eventually giving up and taking an expensive induction one.

we rushed through the center to catch another bus home, and when we returned it was to discover, to my absolute horror, that i'd taken our production services down completely by running a test that i had literally forgotten i hadn't reviewed yet.

i cannot believe i did something so utterly irresponsible, i was mortified and humiliated to post the list of things that had been unnecessarily affected, a danger that i would easily have spotted had i checked it beforehand.

while i scrambled to figure out what was happening - i was in a flat panic, and had no idea where to look for monitors or logs* - my bulgarian teammates were quietly working with AI chewing gum and duct-tape and getting things back online.

* in retrospect, nobody does. and there isn't a lot of monitoring or logging going on to begin with...

all i had to offer were my apologies and volunteering to write up the RCA.

i continued freaking out until my mentor called me (i'd messaged him), and he was very reassuring ("if somebody had lost their life, maybe i wouldn't have called you"). still very shaken, i went to bed early knowing that no good was going to come of me getting less sleep.

today:

surprisingly, i did get some rest.

mr smear gave us some trouble this morning - he's been doing the slow morning thing since we moved, and he's been talking back whenever he gets in trouble - but by the time he had to go to school we were all in a better place.

except for gd, who was pissed off at the new frying pan because it's not as non-stick as it says.

(alanis morissette) ironically, the technician for the stove was due to come this morning and the element was heating up fully. fortunately, they called to tell us he'd been delayed and so we rescheduled for monday, which gives us a chance to test if it's really working or not.

the appraiser for the household insurance came back, an elderly man (a biker, i should say) who was impressively professional and efficient.

finally, the technician from the internet company arrived to sort out internet in our in-home bomb-shelter (our bedroom).

it took a long time. it took a lot of assistance from us. at one point he left the apartment, and then returned but forgot to take his shoes off.

he took so long, that i had to stop following him around to join my morning post-incident meeting with my teammates, which was really important because i knew i had to be able to discuss my disastrous fuck-up while looking them in the eyes.

by the time he was done, i was extremely frustrated. firstly, because the wiring isn't what i thought he was going to install, it's simply a single, very long ethernet cable from one end of the apartment to the other, instead of two wall jacks. secondly, because the outlet in the bedroom doesn't fit properly, so it looks terrible and it was squashing the cable he'd just installed, and i had to explain this to him. thirdly, because as relieved as i am that the network appliance in our bedroom is now working well, the speeds we're getting are inconsistent and surprisingly low. finally, because goddamnit when i tell you you're damaging both my screwdriver and the screw by using the wrong bit, fucking stop.

jesus h. christ.

anyway, so gd and i washed the floor, and there's internet in the bedroom, and on that note i left for the office. it was lunch time already, so i had to skip lunch. on the way i caught up with my mother who'd just had an interesting conversation with the new head of the jewish agency in south africa.

i hope something positive comes out of it.

the first half hour at work was fighting with IT network issues.

the next two hours were a complete mess; trying to understand the impact of incident A as a step towards getting started on the RCA, strategizing with a data engineer, and, amongst other stuff, being dragged back into incident B.

i never did get started on that RCA - i spent five hours on incident B, and was somehow assigned to lead a task force and only walked out of the office a little before 9pm.

not only did i bear witness to a member of my client team - the only guy who legitimately knows what he's doing - threatening to quit, and being mollified by the team lead, but at every step of the way i learned more about the system architecture and was stunned by the absurdity of it all. it's shit, deep shit, all the way down.

also, the guy who just left the team last week? he'd convinced us all that the migration i took over was ready. tonight we discovered that it really wasn't.

oh, and i wasn't home to receive my son, who - in spite of a bit of a freak-out because he'd waited at the wrong bus stop on the way home - had managed to take the comics back to the comics library all by himself, by bus ^_^

my "dinner" was two slices of happy hour vegan pizza (it wasn't bad) and a beer, but when i got home i had gd's ramen (with bok choy and a yo egg) and dessert. after assuring gd that if i do lose my client over calling it quits for the weekend (with the rest of the task force backing me) it'll make him look bad, i immediately sat down to get all this down before i jump in the shower and probably climb straight into bed.

tomorrow's a big day, mostly in preparation for taking mr smear to a purim family trance party on saturday. we have no idea what's happening with iran - obviously if things go crazy we'll have to stay home - but whatever happens i'm mostly confident we'll be fine 🤞🙏

babysitting

 i'm starting this post at almost half past midnight, and i've just managed to resolve an issue i've been struggling with for hours on end, herding an AI cat to solving a problem that's entirely out of scope but very much interferes with what is in scope.

i've been thinking a lot about context, lately. it's my job, but it's also a new frontier with... ahem... many different ways to skin a cat. i've also been thinking a lot of the AI vampire, the death of the craftsman engineer, and why replacing developers with AI is going horribly wrong. while i've been neck-deep in context engineering rabbit holes and side quests, and pondering how much of this experience might shape my own concept for an IDE.

it took far too long for me to realize that i needed to hack the LLM loop and make it more robust, which i did by instructing it to document the state of the code, then document each attempt to fix it, and append lessons learned to the end of the document to be used for the following iteration.

from there, it took eight iterations, at the end of which i instructed it to add an epilogue to the documentation explaining why it took eight iterations after restarting with this technique. and that epilogue was the first part of the entire process that i was actually able to understand, because it had been looping over and investigating interactions between a bunch of "black boxes" interacting with each other, at one point even going so far as to dive into multi-dependency byte-code.

all of this wrangling, while running a whole bunch of other small code and configuration changes, each of which requiring its own AI babysitting.

i didn't have a headache when i finally got home, but my brain hurt. and i still wasn't done, and i was still bothered by the main obstacle, so i couldn't let it go.

...

ironically, all of the above was done because i didn't have the credentials to run the test scripts i wrote this morning (also using AI, because now there's no reason to write a simple test script when i can just specify sample generators, test scenario generators, test runners, validators and clean-up scripts that all work nicely together).

...

this morning was a big one for gd; she's had a really rough few days (after a rough few months, to say the least), but we got her to the examination having followed all the instructions and procedures, and afterwards i got her follow-up appointment booked (post-biopsy) and got her home safely.

in the evening, i left the apartment almost as soon as i arrived to go looking for a frying pan, because ours is warped and gd's not handling (especially not with everything else going on). that hunt turned out to be a) not fruitful and b) very, very far. so i got back not only with an exhausted mind, but also physically tired. and then i took the recycling out with mr smear, and received an intense (but justified) talking-to about using the neighboring building's recycling bin (because ours has been stolen, twice), which was embarrassing to say the least. and then, just as i got back upstairs, big data sent a photo of some serious harry potter gear for purim so i launched out the door again to walk to the other side of the neighborhood to pick up the bag of goodies.

and then we ate (dinner was delicious), and then i had way more dessert than i should have, and then it was shower and bedtime, and then it was the extra AI babysitting accompanied by loads of youtube videos.

i wonder if i'll sleep tonight?

scratched record

it's almost 1am, and the last 4 hours have been a thorough waste of an attempt to sleep. partially because of indigestion - i'm still feeling the laffa i ate for dinner - and partially because of my hips :/

is this also not the mattress for me?

...

the day began alright, i left one time to catch a different bus to ra'anana than the one i'd planned on, and i ended up arriving ten minutes early instead of a little late. which gave me the opportunity to sit down with the older devops guy i'd been teamed up with during the course a while back, which ended up being fascinating as his mode changed from laughing about tailscale and bash to unpacking his entire life story.

then we were all herded in to the presentation, and that's when my phone started buzzing. mr smear complaining about me not unlocking his phone for his art class. then proceeding to whining and begging, even though i was making it very clear that he was disturbing me "at work" and that he was going to get punished if he didn't back off. then incrementally punishing him until he lost all his privileges (again) until next week, and then shutting his whatsapp down.

after which he actually had the nerve to call me.

when we went out for a break, i called gd to tell her what had been happening and then sent her screenshots. i was livid.

the second half of the morning was a lecture about body language. it was interesting, but towards the end i was literally falling asleep and having a hard time ensuring that i wasn't snoring, or falling off my chair.

i rushed out to catch a bus back to my client's office, having to run the last fifty meters or so, and on the way back to tel aviv i spoke to gd who was just as irate as i was about the unfairness of encouraging kids to use their phones in art class. i wrote a message to his teacher to inquire, and tomorrow morning i'll be writing to the school counsellor.

i arrived at work in dire need of coffee. i spent most of the afternoon in a seemingly endless loop trying to resolve a devops issue with AI, and beginning a set of test scripts to determine whether the issue my teammate identified yesterday is real, and then gd - who's been on a "white diet" the past couple of days and had been on a proper "liquid diet" the whole day in preparation for her colonoscopy tomorrow - asked me if i could take mr smear for dinner.

mr smear, who'd called me after school to tell me that because i'd been so unfair with him, and blocked his phone for no reason, would be stone-walling me until 2027. that's kinda funny now, but omg i wanted to throttle him at the time!

i fast-walked home (mainly in response to the retard rat mix - oh! youtube music has a history page!) and we sat down for a family meeting that went pretty well, which i understand to mean that gd had had an effective talk with him when he got home. by the time we left the apartment my mood had already improved, and mr smear was cool, and we had a very pleasant dinner before skipping home in the light rain.

i tried and failed to find the skipping bit from some random comic where he talks about saving time. it's not michael mcintyre or demetri martin.

the bedtime ritual and getting everyone into bed went smoothly. but then... see the beginning of this post.

compressed

 today was weird. i don't know if it's related to me getting more sleep than usual, but i felt buzzed.

after seeing mr smear off to school, gd and i had a conversation about whether he really needed a new round of therapy or not. i checked in with his teacher, who assured me that he's participating a lot more in class, and communicating much better, even though academically he's not doing so well*. all things considered, i think the incidents from the beginning of the year can be attributed to him adjusting, i really don't believe anything's nearly as urgent as the school team thought.

* did i really need to tell her that if she lets me know where he's struggling, i can try to help him?

i lost my temper a little bit with the support agent who called to request further proof that the stove isn't working properly. as in, in addition to a photo of a quarter of an element clearly not heating up.

gd found my watch strap, but now we've lost the watch charger. she found the adapter for mr smear's keyboard, though! in addition to getting back into his music "homework", just before bedtime he was reading an illustrated harry potter book (the fifth one) and came running into the office to try playing the sheet music in one of the illustrations - and it was pretty good ^_^

i decided to start my work day by going past the hardware store (i picked up a shower head holder, but the other two items on the list were a no-go), arranged for a technician to install an internet point in our bedroom on thursday, then sat down* at a coffee shop for about an hour of work.

* i sat down after a disappointing service experience, being ignored for a while before i could order. then i sat down next to the coffee cup lid and sugar stand, which was close enough to smell the other patrons (one of whom i described to gd as "smelling like a heavy, sick fishy down-there infection", but fortunately out of line of sight of the large homeless guy who charged in demanding that someone buy him a coffee)

i downloaded gd's id thingy (sefach), then had it printed at the art supply store (all-round, it was cheaper than going to the ministry of the interior), then returned home to work a bit.

i snacked and ate too much today. surprisingly, my weight's been pretty stable lately, hovering around 77kg.

i wrestled both with and against my AI copilot today, and spent a lot of time thinking about the AI vampire article i read this morning.

i lost a half hour this afternoon to mr smear's allergy appointment being brought forward a week without anyone contacting me. and then, when i tried calling the clinic to resolve the issue, someone kept lifting the phone and putting it back down again 😡

i discovered that yesterday, when mr smear was in his room with the door closed, he'd been using the browser on his phone which gd has accidentally left unlocked :/

okay, look - it's not alright, but his reaction IS funny 😂

i took a bus to the clinic, had a funny altercation with the security guard (poor guy was only trying to help, but in a clumsy way), and managed to get gd's prescription and authorization sorted out relatively quickly before returning home.

more work, more of the same.

speaking to my mother after she received the email i forwarded her from yad l'olim, understandably and justifiably furious because they're continuing to mess her around, but making out like it's her own fault.

a "family talk" with mr smear, generally going well (explaining to him that integrity is doing the right thing when nobody is looking).

a very nice dinner.

chatting again with my mom, then reading more of the colour of magic to mr smear (he really enjoyed the gods playing dice with rincewind and twoflower), then showering (with the new showerhead holder), and now... getting ready for bed, i guess?

stopped

 we joined our upstairs friends for dinner last night (pot luck), and it was a lovely evening. my second drink of the day, and their couch was soooo... couch. we haven't had a couch in weeks, and i was - as the quebecois say - bean grease.

we all came downstairs and crashed hard.

...

i woke up late this morning, after a pretty full night's sleep. then i did random stuff - beginning with a painful attempt to upgrade the comics i made two weeks ago (needs a paid gemini subscription, and i couldn't find any easily-installable plugins for gimp to use AI), and then mr smear and i watched an episode of solo leveling on crunchyroll, and then i passed out for another hour and a half.

in the afternoon - aside from eating a lot - i began trying to set up paybox young for mr smear, which meant me signing up for an additional credit card of my own which i'm not happy about. but after doing the math, i discovered that just in terms of pocket money alone (plus doubling any unused for savings) he's already unwittingly earned enough money that the bank fees are covered by the compound interest, so it's worth it.

only... he has to install a different paybox app, and it can only be installed from the israeli app store, and our family account is still canadian and it's not possible to sign in to a different account on a managed phone.

*sigh*

after much digging - again - i learned that the only way to resolve this problem is to create a new family account from a different email, then migrate everyone on our family account. which isn't a huge problem, because we closed our canadian bank accounts last year so we don't really need to be on the canadian store any more, but it's really annoying because child accounts can only be transferred after a one-week waiting period. because reasons.

so i've done half the migration, and i guess we'll see how things go next week.

mr smear and i took a pleasant walk around our "backyard" park - park hayarkon - and after eventually extricating mr smear from the exercise machines we stumbled across what appeared to be a juggling school, which was quite fun to watch.

then we returned home, and i jumped on a call with protoplasm for our first catch-up in forever, and then it was dinner time, and getting mr smear into bed a half an hour late time, and then shower time, and now... i dunno, i'll probably go to bed soon.

the ex-coworker at the wedding

 my beard's just hit itchy phase. i'm tired. after sending mr smear off to school this morning, and making a tech support call for an issue with the new electric hob, i caught a bus to ace and traded in the thing gd didn't want after she assured me she wanted it for a perfectly-sized laundry basket, two more small trash cans and a welcome mat.

gd suggested that we leave one of the toilet brushes that come free with the bins behind the concrete block for whoever keeps pooping there.

i had just enough time for a coffee before leaving to pick up the car and drive north to the wedding.

there was a lot of traffic. i needed to pee pretty badly for the last twenty minutes.

the place was right next to kfar ha'ro'eh, where the yeshiva i lived in for four and a half months in 1996 is.

the wedding was really nice, the ceremony itself very sweet. while there were two *yecch* unavoidable hugs with people i don't like (the HR woman and one of the team leads that didn't want me on her team), and my relationship with my old boss is freaking weird, it was great seeing everyone and i'm glad i went.

the food was good, too, and i made an effort to drink responsibly (one drink, which i put down halfway through because i wasn't able to get out of a shot), and i'm pretty sure i was fine for the drive home.

i have since snacked too much.

aside from helping gd with the challah-peño, i've done very little of value. i think this is good.

what a day, what a week

 biphasic sleep ftw. i woke up feeling much better than i have in weeks.

the day began with big drama - a couple of weeks ago my mother's aliyah application was again complicated by a new document requirement she's never heard of. she managed to get everything done, and submitted all her documents, and they've just done it again.

i've sent another email to yad l'olim, posted more online, and i'm once again hunting for someone to platform this insane story...

from that drama, to seeing gd off to her blood tests, to a fourth day at work dealing with an overly-complicated data migration.

in addition to generally feeling better about the world (a bit of sleep will do that, i primarily occupied myself with my favorite thing - making things better.i also seem to be doing a decent job of convincing everyone to look at the giant turd we've all inherited as a fascinating adventure in black box land.

it was a long, long day, but with lots of positive stuff. our weekly status with my director went alright. i pitched a wild idea, and two people appreciated their versions of what they thought i was proposing (one of them fully understood), and both options are viable so 🤷‍♂️

i finished up a big piece of work just in time to have a drink with my client team, and then i came home to re-arrange mr smear's bedroom (now he can enjoy the best view in the house), have a great dinner, get mr smear into bed, and now, after writing a letter to a south african jewish publication and catching up on random stuff (windrose looks amazing), and now this post...

i'm just about ready for bed. i almost forgot i'm driving north for a wedding tomorrow (and taking mr smear to his friend in south tel aviv on shabbat) and i was prematurely celebrating my first properly calm weekend in what feels like months.

costume shopping rescue

did i sleep well? not really. but i definitely slept better. i'll take it.

today started with dubstep, setting up gd's sewing station / mr smear's keyboard station. i don't know where the power adapter for the synthesizer is 🤦

i had a positive service experience with the municipality regarding mr smear's school fees, and then an awful one with the car rental service - i still don't know if i was talking to an AI chatbot, or a really dumb human.

work today was difficult, in a different way. an entire workday spent shut up in a phone booth on a really, really boring call that i only occasionally had anything to contribute to. i would say my biggest contributions for the day included writing up a review of my previous explorer on glassdoor, and reading reviews on my current employer, and using AI to dig up some really worrying stuff in the codebase i'm working on.

i mean, in addition to the really worrying stuff that my team was finding along the way.

i feel bad for not joining the team at the farewell lunch for the guy whose last day today was - though my vegan presence would probably have complicated things for them - and i feel bad that the new guy who joined today seeing my help-i'm-trapped-in-a-cage face that i was incapable of taking off my face all day.

there was some stuff that i should have paid more attention to in our never-ending meeting, though, i regret not being present for the random gems.

i left early, and came home to pick up mr smear and head to dizengoff center to look for purim costume stuff. he wants to be harry potter - in addition to our love for the franchise, apparently some of the kids in his class call him that, between his glasses and his hair - and we were disappointed by what we found. i mean, mr smear was disappointed, because we found a proper set of robes but he didn't like that the gryffindor symbol didn't match the movie.

at least we both enjoyed onigiri on the way. and there's a new "retro gaming" store with a very expensive arcade cabinet with three thousand classic games...

he insisted that we go to azrieli to the harry potter pop-up store, so we hopped on a bus (and took a short walk) and arrived to discover that the store's been closed :/

but in any event i'd warned him that i wasn't going to spend stupid amounts of money on a purim costume.

fortunately, the shitty costume pop-up store at the center of the mall had a harry potter set! just a tie and fake round glasses (and a wand), but i took a dracula-style cape and mr smear was happy, so who cares?

(gd cares. she's not the one wearing the costume, but she's upset by the red collar and wants to cut it off. gods help me)

we then took a stupidly packed bus back to dizengoff, getting off a stop early because mr smear was suffering so much.

on a whim, i took him into "the fairy forest" and asked if they had any harry potter merch - they did. the young woman working in the "magic" store who hasn't read or watched any harry potter (!) unlocked a disorganized cabinet and we managed to find a "proper" gryffindor brooch, and we were done!

we went down to the vegan market (i'd intentionally gone with mr smear on a wednesday for this), and mr smear selected a bowl with surprisingly healthy home-cooked foods, along with two giant kubeh. the kubeh really weren't nice - too hard, and not very tasty - but we both tucked into the healthy stuff and enjoyed it immensely, even though it contained a few things mr smear usually despises :P

we did a little home center shopping, took a look at another new "game" store (gambling and claw machines), and then picked up a chocolate from vegantino. again (i picked up an egg last time, which was amazing). long story short: the chocolate is beyond decadent, it's expensive but absolutely worth every agurah, and omg mr smear and i were in dessert heaven and dessert hell at the same time, both trying desperately to make the exquisite experience last as long as possible.

our old landlords sent transfer confirmation of our deposit! ^_^

after all that, it was time to catch a bus home, shower, and get into bed. big data came downstairs to pick up something of his, and informed us that everyone's preparing to take shelter... we prepared our bedroom (shutting the steel window, readying our go-bag and a bottle of water), and then i crashed soon afterwards.

i woke up a couple of hours ago, and after watching some random videos and writing all this down, i think i'm almost ready to go back to bed.