still tired

 and sore. my neck's been giving me a lot of trouble these past few days. my sinuses are okay right as i type this, but my nose has been mostly stuffed or running the past few days. it's all exhausting.

yesterday:

i left the script running after posting yesterday morning, dragged myself out of bed three or four hours later feeling groggy and borderline hallucinating. i woke up to find that it had crashed just as soon as i'd locked the screen (intentionally leaving the machine open and running), and it would take hours of running the script and keeping an eye on it before i finally had the data we needed.

it was a sad, busy morning.

the data was ready by the time we needed to pick mr smear up from school, and my plan was to get him home, deliver the emails, then head out for lunch with the mongoose and fam.

my chain of command had other plans.

we met up with the mongoose and co, and almost immediately i had to abandon them to find a bench to work on. it took almost two and a half hours before we were sure we were doing the right thing, and my batteries (my laptop, my phone, and my body) were almost drained by the time i pushed the button. the first run was going swimmingly right until the credentials expired - the production single-sign-on settings are for a very limited amount of time and the number of emails that needed to go out have multiplied significantly since the original script. the second run seemed to be good, but my bosses identified at least one mistake.

there was nothing i could do but wait until i got home to investigate. i rejoined everyone, picked up a cup of coffee, and enjoyed a pleasant walk home with my family, even stopping for an ice-cream along the way.

i figured out a way to investigate the errors, and was mortified to discover that i'd sent out about 1500 emails that shouldn't have been delivered. then i began debugging the script, and by the time i was done i'd realized two important things: first, that out of 3500+ emails, only less than 20 had been sent incorrectly.

i cannot overstate what a huge relief this is.

second, that it was an absolute miracle that it was such a small number of errors. in order to determine what *should* have gone out i ended up doing a significant refactor of the script, and i can now quite confidently say that the following dangerous mistakes were made:

1. i was really tired and we're all under time pressure
2. the scripts that were built with a simple requirement have become increasingly sophisticated / complicated on the fly, each time at the last minute
3. no reviews

because... reasons.

anyway, we finally got some reprieve yesterday evening. i was told to leave off and enjoy shabbat dinner with my family. i was worried that they literally meant just dinner, but shabbat is already over and i haven't heard anything.

today:

today was a good day. it began with a serious and seriously good gaming session with mr smear. we checked out the demo for space explore, which was awesome, and then we dived into space crew: legendary edition. it's like ftl, but 3D, and while the controls were tough to learn it was thoroughly satisfying getting through the tutorial. even more satisfying was mr smear agreeing to do the entire tutorial himself, not only getting the hang of it but also the satisfaction of it.

and then we opened geometry wars 3: dimensions evolved.

it's brutal. aside from genuinely having a blast both literally and figuratively, i was extremely impressed that mr smear pushed through in spite of the difficulty. we played together, or took turns with the story mode, and it was awesome.

in the early afternoon we went to a birthday party for a kid in his class. it was at the ninja pro course on the other side of bavli, so we ended up renting a car2go. it was overall an enjoyable afternoon, in spite of a couple of minor incidents, and it really lent some perspective watching mr smear interacting with the other kids and the others kids interacting with each other. there's work to be done, but he's doing fine. not great, but fine.

after getting home, gd and i watched some of the second episode of power slap, which is thoroughly entertaining and completely impossible for me to take seriously as a "sport". mr smear and i played some more geometry wars after he finished showering, then i put two of the latest comic pages onto the public website before dinner. we continued watching adventure time, and then it was mr smear's bedtime, and i've been faffing around since. now it's my bedtime. hopefully it'll be a quiet night and hopefully i'll get some rest.