throttled

wednesday and thursday were full of technological failures, on friday morning i spent hours trying to get hold of telkom to sort out our internet and eventually lost patience and decided to shut down my service and move to a different provider. it was during this process that i learned that telkom had been sending sms warnings to our router that they were going to throttle our account.

a) not a helpful way to communicate.

b) i have no way of knowing *why* they're throttling us, and there's literally nobody to speak to - telkom's support lines were completely unavailable.

hopefully the throttling will be reset at midnight tonight as it's the beginning of a new month, and then we're hoping to get the new router and SIM by the end of next week. once we've established that works, then it'll be through telkom's hoops to cancel our account - i'm expecting a struggle.

i did get some work done on friday, albeit not very much. i was very glad to sign off at 5pm, have a drink and zone out for shabbat.

...

yesterday was my mother's birthday. the celebrations were fun, mr smear was really funny (can't keep a secret), and that's in spite of the fact that my mom and i went grocery shopping in the middle of the weekend, the best time to see crushes of useless people.

mr smear and i played a lot of lego: harry potter yesterday. he played about five hours today. i'd be concerned but i'll be damned if it's not teaching him to read, and his problem solving skills have been dramatically improving.

i watched a "live" steampunk production of a midsummer night's dream by an amateur english troupe last night. it wasn't actually live, it wasn't steampunk. some of the acting was alright. there were tech-fails aplenty. but overall, it was an inspirational attempt, even if most of the inspiration was generated by train-wreck moments.

also, all the power in the cbd went out last night with no warning. kinda worrying.

...

mr smear and i got up early this morning, he played lego: harry potter for the first five hours and then gd took him to the waterfront with my mom for his first proper outing since mid-march. i spent the entire day trying to solve the problem of integrating aws' cdk and sam tools for local development; if you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it, and i do *not* understand how to get all these things playing nicely together.

what i finally accomplished a short while ago is using a cdk-synthesized template to create tables on a docker-contained instance of dynamodb-local and providing a reasonable useful interface for recreating those tables on the fly. the next step is getting lambda functions to point to that container when invoked locally with sam while also performing correctly when deployed in the cloud.

now to get my head out of the cloud (had to) and do the regular school-night evening routine.