getting out the house

 it's almost 1am as i begin writing this, and i'm sitting here with my usual sore lower back  / bum, and indigestion. i guess this is the price to pay for trying to go to bed earlier. or just for being me.

...

we had a quiet night last night; the day was full of attacks, but it was a quiet night last night. i started the day sitting on our couch with a cup of coffee and the first volume of dragon ball. and arguing with gd over which side of the living room the couch or projector or future television need to be. my primary concern is not being able to look out a window from the couch, and my eyes have been strained and my vision blurry for the last couple of days so that's kinda front of mind (just like my eyes).

...

if there's something that set the tone of the day, though, it was putting together a whole lot of my old jokes and scripts ideas just before we had to shelter from a strike, and while we waited out the attack i used notebooklm and gemini to put together a two-panel comic that came out really well!

...

my client / boss invited a few of us to the office for lunch and beers, and i decided it was worth it. gd packed me a sandwich and some salad, which turned out to be a good idea as the guys ordered vietnamese with zero vegan options on the menu, and i managed to get to and from the office without any alerts (i was a bit nervous crossing the massive bridge over the highway).

it was nice to be in an office with my coworkers, it was a good vibe and in theory it was more comfortable to work than from my home "office". but in practice, the moment i left the apartment i felt weird, a bit dizzy and "off", and my stomach was uncomfortable the entire time i was there. by the time i left, i was nursing a pretty serious headache and i needed to lie down.

while i lay down, my sister sent us messages informing us that she's finally got permanent residence in the UK! this is great news; even though she's nervous about what a shit-hole britain has become, it's a much better class of shit-hole than south africa.

we spoke for a bit until there was another attack; i'm beginning to lose my mind, because the last week or so there's been a problem with our shelter wifi. then i saw a message about the state of our garbage bins, and realized that a large part of it was from the couch guys yesterday... so i headed downstairs and literally got my hands dirty, so much so that i needed to jump in the shower immediately after returning to our apartment.

i had a chat with my mother, and then gd ordered dinner and i sat down with mr smear to help him through another level of human resource machine.

getting him to think through problems out loud, and guiding him without giving him answers, is tough. but i'm extremely pleased to report that he's doing it!

over rainbow burger dinner, we watched another couple of episodes of strip search, then it was shower time for mr smear, after which there was some drama (gd called the shower "condemned").

and then suddenly it was 10pm, and we apparently agreed that that was a valid pesach holiday bedtime for mr smear, so i read some more of the colour of magic from my bed (his bed has been next to mine for the last while) and then we both fell asleep.

...

i'm listening to the latest tousi tv report, the news is completely insane. i played a bit of balatro last night before going to bed, perhaps i'll do something similarly braindead now.

terror storm

ever since i was a child i've loved electric storms, and found lightning and thunder comforting. but last night's lightning strikes were so close that every single one sounded like an iranian attack had caught us by surprise and that there'd been another impact nearby.

thanks a bunch, mother nature.

so, ironically, during a night with no actual attacks i got a whole lot less sleep and a whole lot more anxiety. fuck you, headless chicken that remains of the IRGC.

 ...

so i was a bit rough around the edges today. in spite of that, i feel like i got *some* good work done, and i helped mr smear through his programming "homework" (human resource machine), and he did (with a little bit of shouted encouragement) do a reasonable amount of music practice, and we continued to use in-shelter time-outs to learn zoology with ze frank, and while we didn't train this evening, we did do some serious stretching.

we received two deliveries today: a small care package from my client, and a slightly bigger couch. we're happy with the care package, but we're particularly happy about the couch.

the post office saga was embarrassing, the guy who i'd sent it to had to go twice to the store to pick it up, and i'd had to have a real fight with the representative who eventually ended the call because she was upset that i was upset and taking it out on her. specifically, because she started saying "the next time you use our services" which i immediately cut off with a tirade of why i would never (voluntarily) be using their services again.

what's it called, when you pay for a service and they don't provide it to you? it's on the tip of my tongue...

slightly more reasonable snacking levels today, but a big, late leftover lunch after the couch was delivered, and gd made latkes for dinner (for the flax), and mr smear and i had vegan nutella on the last of the marshmallows.

we watched another strip search elimination, unfortunately mr smear loved the sex-adventure comic and "sass" a little too much and it was an ordeal to get him to not repeat it all to my mother 🤦‍♂️

omg it's really late again. we keep eating late, and mr smear's been going to bed really late, and it kind of throws off my clock.

when life gives you a permeable shower curtain...

 ... double up. as i begin this post mr smear is taking a turn after me, after we put in another one of the same on top of the one from yesterday. so far so good, and i'm enjoying him singing to himself and having a good time 🤞

today began with a boom - a building or three a few blocks away got hit with a missile, a few cars got hit as well, and the next hour or so was an orchestra of emergency service vehicles. but, miraculously, the building in question was evacuated a while ago for reconstruction or renovation, so while there was a lot of damage, there weren't any serious injuries 🙏

not-so-small mercies.

so the morning went straight in and hard on social media and news.

my work day was far better than yesterday, even if it ended on a droopy note with me listening to a recording of someone who mumbles monotonically with a difficult accent.

three call-outs for the day: losing the spider we weren't sure was venomous (we don't think it is now, but we weren't sure), and way too much snacking, and trying to find out where our new couch is, and losing my temper after learning that the package i paid to have delivered to a specific address in ramle was delivered to a store nearby and they want the addressee to pick it up.

from a mr smear point of view, the first day of holidays went quite well. i cancelled his matific subscription - he hasn't used it in months, and it's a great practice tool but not very good for learning - and his "homework" for today was to play human resource machine. (on gog, so i'll link that edition too).

[the shower experience was good and didn't wet the floor! score!]

i was so proud of him! especially of him being proud of himself whenever he figured stuff out ^_^

the evening training was mostly really good - checking and roundhouse kicks - but the biggest challenge was him not responding when told to stop responding. i honestly couldn't tell if he was trolling me, or literally couldn't control himself, but he eventually got a hold of himself and we had a constructive conversation about it while stretching.

overall, he's doing really well.

dinner was delicious. dinner was interrupted by an attack. dinner was extended to include an extra episode of strip search, and more of panda's dubai-style chocolate with vegan marshmallows. it's kinda like peanut butter and marshmallows, but even better!

i'm not making any plans for tonight, but i'm tired and sleepy and i think i might go lie down soon.

life is like a permeable shower curtain

 aren't shower curtains supposed to be impermeable? why can we not find plastic shower curtains anywhere?

1. getting up early was rough - i was still in dream-fugue for a while after our alarms sounded - but getting mr smear out of bed was even rougher. at least, after the initial shock and resentment, things were okay.

2. accompanying gd to the dentist for the second part of her root canal, and taking mr smear for breakfast. i tried to get some work done while he read. the vegan breakfast looked great, but was mediocre at best. i mean, at least he ate the "eggs", which were more curry than eggs, and he doesn't really like curry. but we both had too much of the pickled garlic. a tiny amount was too much, and haunted us both for quite a while after.

pg's folks walked in while i was in the middle of my team's daily, and didn't get the hint that i was in a meeting and couldn't say hi, which was amusingly awkward both for me and my teammates. i had a very nice chat with them afterwards, though.

then gd joined us, met pg's introduced herself to pg's parents. gd had walked into the coffee shop carrying a broom, and pg's mom asked her where she was flying 🤣

3. we caught a bus home, getting off early and paying the hardware store a visit. we picked up a shower curtain. then we stopped by a nature store, and mr smear found a bag of panda's dubai-style vegan chocolate. which i've been wanting to try for a while. i also needed something to calm the garlic-ness.

it was great. i wouldn't pay huge sums of money for it, but it was great.

4. mr smear joined his last two online classes until the end of the pesach break, i tried to work. "tried to work" is the theme of the day, because i - was - a - wreck. i was tired, unmotivated, and everything was a struggle.

also, physically uncomfortable. and i snacked constantly.

i did finish reading ghost in the shell during a lunch break. it's fascinating. it's very clever. it's got 80's israel and mossad references that are as amusing as they are darkly disquieting.

i made mr smear outline a map of israel and hunt down major cities. he did a disappointingly half-assed job of it.

5. after mr smear completed his chores - he's been helping gd a lot lately - we took out the recycling and took a short walk to see if we could find a bath mat. correction - we took a short skip. i introduced mr smear to sheng wang's bit about skipping a while back and he's taken it to heart. also, it's hard not to smile as i let him drag me into it, because otherwise he gets too far ahead of me >D

we first discovered that gd had somehow missed an entire row of frozen vegan dumplings at the store. then we went to a supermarket and found the garbage bags gd and i like (this is how we know we're getting older). mr smear and i tired and failed to find the watermelon ice-creams we love so much, even at a weird new commercial ice-cream store. i mean, an entire store devotes to the ice creams that are sold at various kiosks.

finally, we went in to a container store. i didn't have much in the way of expectations, but we found a nice bath mat!

6. we came back home just in time for dinner. we watched strip search's fifth elimination, and then mr smear decided that we should try having the dubai-style chocolate with marshmallow. i thought that sounded ridiculous, but i decided to give it a try anyway. i didn't want to overpower the chocolate, so i took a bite of chocolate and then nibbled the marshmallow until the proportions were right.

a short while later i came back to reality. i'm glad i gave it a chance.

7. i used the "new" shower first. i preferred the overall experience - it's more comfortable than the bath in the awkwardly triangular master bathroom - but the water pressure's not as good. then mr smear got in the shower.

just before he was done, i checked in on him and found a large puddle of water outside the shower. immediately panicking, i checked the sides and i checked above, and i couldn't see the source of all the water! and then it hit me - literally - the water was spraying straight through the polyester shower curtain.

gd called it - we now know precisely how the bottom of the wooden doorway rotted.

8. after gd and i had a chat with my mom* - lots of drama surrounding my sister and nephew and my niece - gd and i had a chat about gd's friend, who's life-long battle with reality has left him suicidal. gd's really upset, and i explained to her that she's not doing him any favors by pretending that she's okay with what he's doing or planning on doing.

* i'd called her earlier, and my godmother was with her. i was waving to my mom, and then suddenly she was in the frame, and i think we were both equally uncomfortable. thank god gd wasn't with me.

it's not early by any stretch of the imagination, but i'm just finishing up a cup of tea and then going to bed, with a feeling like it's early.

these are strange days. the politics of this war and the noises from all sides of the media are distracting, confusing, and messy. we're doing really well, considering, and we're doing much better than a lot of people here, but my gods these days are taking a psychological toll in a middle different ways.

a power day

 well, the next part of the day was pretty rough - but in a fun way, i guess? it certainly was an experience. 

firstly, mr smear is now full-on into counter-strike, and it's nice to see him not giving up and getting excited by his successes. so it was a cool tone to set before we head out to his regular allergist checkup.

but we headed out right in the heaviest part of a massive thunderstorm. fortunately, we both had our big-enough rain boots on, the water levels were high everywhere and my waterproof shoes would have been flooded from the top. and we had a time avoiding cars spraying water onto the sidewalks, and we got pelleted with hail (his first time outside in hail), and the walk from the bus to the hospital was just ridiculous - a real urban jungle adventure - and of course, the sun came out just as we arrived at our destination.

from that point on it became impossible to close my umbrella...

there was a bit of confusion (which was to be expected) at the reception, but we made it through the bureaucratic gauntlet and went upstairs to the allergy clinic. it was war-time very quiet and there were only two other kids there, surprisingly calm and extremely cute children, so off the bat it was a much less stressful time with mr smear. at that point my tiredness and lack of caffeine began catching up with me, but the allergist and her nurse were efficient and mr smear managed to distract himself from the prick-test itching with games on his phone, and pretty soon we were discussing the results.

it seems like, sadly, his allergy level is stabilizing rather than going away, we'll know better in the next year or two. but even so, the level it's stabilizing at is far less dramatic than before, so while he'll still need an epipen and to be careful not to consume dairy, we don't need to be so scared of accidental contact.

it's / it should be fine.

we went through the hospital mall, where i picked up an emergency coffee just as the attack warning sounded. considering the fact that the roof is made of glass, i get why the safe area was three floors below ground... there was nowhere comfortable to sit, so the two of us walked around the parking lot full of people occupying themselves on their phones and amused ourselves playing word association games.

then we returned to pick up a couple of things at the supermarket, and a couple of bottles of sublingual b12 at the pharmacy (while waiting in the uncomfortably crowded aisle for the self-service checkout, gd called twice while i was holding an umbrella that refused to stay closed, a cup of coffee, and two bottles of b12. i was not in my happy place.

mr smear and i took a bus home - to his chagrin, he always wants to walk these days to get some exercise - and he signed on to his remote classes while i finally got wednesday's code review approved and got started on the follow-up improvement. gd has managed to schedule me a haircut, so a short while late i headed out to catch a bus to sheinkin.

i had some time to spare, so i got a little more work done and drank a coffee that i must assume was soy milk (because they said so, and i honestly can't tell). i arrived just on time for my haircut appointment, and another attack warning. everyone headed across the road to a hotel shelter (the same hotel my cousin threw his farewell party in on mr smear's birthday), which was an interesting experience, and then we returned to get into it. i thought the coffee would keep me from nodding in the chair, but...

... i'm really happy with the haircut. gd's happy with it too. i'm very enthusiastically grateful that i'm no longer sporting my jew-fro / isro :P

it took a long time to get home (i shouldn't have gotten off the bus when i did), and while i waited for the connection mr smear had an accident while helping gd and the two of them had to deal with a smashed plate. so that happened.

the evening was me completing the work and studying a bit (data engineering), and mr smear playing more counter-strike, and then a pretty intensive training in which mr smear admirably demonstrated that he not only could STFU when being given instructions, but that he could redirect his anger and frustration energy into the drill we were doing (a liver shot combo) (even if he did feel the need to tell me that he was imagining that he was hitting me), into continuing the work through discomfort, into stepping into his first impact training (feather-light touch from me, but a big deal for him), into pushing himself through difficult post-training exercises (like planking, diamond push-ups, crunches and burpees), into taekwondo-style stretching.

all the while holding himself in check, even when it was clear he was emotionally at the edge. when we were done, his pride was quiet but visible, and he didn't argue with me the first couple of times i told him how proud i was (he did a bit later, though :P).

a great dinner (double yo-egg, both types as a very successful pre-pesach experiment), and everyone into the merch episode of strip search with lots of pausing to discuss. shower-time and tooth-brushing time were very positive (gd and i were loving him singing along to my playlist at the top of his voice), and his bedtime was earlier than it's been for a while and much more peaceful.

after saying good night, i went on a hunt for vitamin d resources that someone asked me for regarding testing / screening and dosage:

there're a lot of studies that discuss the unreliability of testing - this one's pretty clear - check out the "sources cited" button beneath this video (it's really worth watching). 

see also the "accuracy of screening tests" section of the US preventive services task force report.

and then i watched a whole lot of youtube videos (war news interspersed with random shit), and now this, and then... maybe i'll go to bed soon.

[attack warning]

the roughness

 i got a bit of sleep last night... between flare ups of the "usual" pain i've been suffering the past couple of years. i don't think it's my mattress - or, at least, i don't think my mattress is making it worse this time - but i do think it's might be related to exercising properly and then skipping a couple of days.

...

my news feed is filled with "europe finally understanding that israel and the US were right all along". better late than never? at least we didn't wait for them before doing the necessary.

making a molehill out of a mountain

i woke up around 10am this morning having slept a fair amount, and i woke up feeling a bit shocked and confused as a result.

today was a lot less nice than it should have been. it involved playing tekken 3 and counterstrike 1.6 with mr smear (no other versions run on the windows machine, and no versions run on a mac), and there were some glorious moments. but there were also lots of shitty emotions that came out - some borne of miscommunication, some of mr smear exhibiting a shitty attitude and me taking it more personally than i should have), and as a result the day was not full of joy.

on a different note, i spent a *lot* of time today - mostly between other things - finishing the work i started yesterday on my telephony side project.

i guess i feel a bit more productive, at least more than i've felt all week.

in war news, it was a pretty quiet day today, gd's stomach seems to be feeling a bit better than it has in months, and we had a massive electric storm this afternoon.

emulation

i wrestled quite a bit more with my side project before dinner (pausing to help out with the kitchen and the baking), and then it was dinner. which was delicious, and would have been far more pleasant if mr smear hadn't done a thing about the eggplant and his salad. kind brought the vibe down, but whatever...

after eventually getting him showered and into bed, and then myself showered - i was anticipating a cool shower, but it was plenty hot - i've spent the last couple of hours buggering about with retroarch and duckstation. i can play sunset riders! and i have tekken 3 set up!

there was a lot of irritating effort that went into that, but i'm quite happy with things right now. i should probably go to bed.

the rod of shower-destiny

 gods, i feel tired and worn out. we all slept late this morning, but although it was definitely better sleep than the past while, it wasn't good sleep. i feel like i'm going to fall apart at any moment.

i napped for an hour this afternoon, but even that wasn't comfortable and i had to get up eventually.

aside from trying to catch up on the world via youtube, and doing a lot of dealing with utterly retarded AI models that are kind of helping me with my telephony side project but also kind of getting in my way a lot, my biggest achievement today was going out with mr smear and acquiring a shower curtain rod and the very specific shape of metal required to put it up on an angled wall.

trying to explain what i needed to the poor guys working at the hardware store was impossible. i tried in a variety of ways, and they felt bad that they didn't "get" it. but *i* "got" it, and i got it, and we now have a shower rod that sits nicely 💪

priorities reversal

 today was all wrong. the hospital visit went no more awry than expected, and they were kind and understanding and unofficially rescheduled us for sunday morning, so that's good.

we caught the bus home, and the rest of the day was spent struggling very hard to be in any way productive. at some point it got so hard, that when disrupted by a siren i hid myself under a blanket and napped for about an hour.

but that didn't really help a lot. i woke up thinking i might be coming down with something. god, please don't. please, not now.

at the same time as i wasn't managing my own work, i seem to have done a pretty good job of managing mr smear's - i got him to do "geography homework" (mapping out the middle east countries), and i got him to come up with and draw a very cool little comic strip (inspiring him with a few samples of the far side).

then we watched *the* elimination episode of strip search, followed by a chat with my mom during which she informed us that the shower smell is most likely caused by us not using the shower (water in the u-bend prevents smells from coming out the pipes) and made a suggestion about putting mr smear's mattress in our bedroom now that there's space, which we did, and i think tonight's going to be easier for it.

he's certainly happy about it. but he also got to read until 11pm...

once he was (technically) in bed, i played with trivy for a while, which led to replacing mocha tests with jest in one of my projects, and eventually ended up cleaning up my phone control project's new interface, and now i'm very much in need of some rest.

rough edges

 rough night. still better than with the previous beds, but having mr smear in the bed with us is just uncomfortable enough to make the sleep... not good. there were only two or three attacks last night, but there's no way to know whether it's worth sending him back to his bed or not because we can't tell when the next attack is coming.

and what sleep i did get was filled with disturbing dreams. i can't describe them better than "commando prostitute". and from that i woke up to a message asking for donations for two families from mr smear's school who live near it, and lost their homes in one of the attacks during the first first week of the war.

i haven't sipped my coffee yet, but i just spent way too long moving my mouse around, patiently and sadly, waiting for my computer to wake up - but it wasn't plugged in yet.

in addition to everything else, mr smear and i had to get up early this morning because i'm taking him for the allergy test. i had the presence of mind to ask gd if he'd had any antihistamines these past few days, even if i hadn't had the presence of mind to set reminders for him not to take any.

he had one yesterday.

so now we're going to the hospital to meet with the doctor anyway, but we can't do any tests.

...

at least yesterday evening went well. we had a good mma / taekwondo session, and we both felt sufficiently exercised by the end of it. we enjoyed another episode of strip search, and when mr smear "went to bed" (reading) gd and i shared a local beer (a bit too blonde for my tastes, but not bad flavor) and i watched a really comedy set that i've seen before (it's kellen erksine, it must have been republished), and then went straight to bed.

destabilized

 i did go to bed, but i barely got much sleep. certainly nothing restful. mr smear stayed in our bed until morning, and then we all got up early ("in solidarity" according to gd), although i ended up lying down for an additional hour afterwards.

the day started off alright, though. i sat down with mr smear and my coffee and introduced him to mad magazine - issue #295, back to the future part ii - and it was really cool. i had to explain a whole lot of stuff to him, which led to some interesting moments. i think i blew his mind describing the difference by how we all dealt with the CFC / ozone hole crisis as a species, but allowed the oil and animal agriculture industries to divide us all on global warming.

i don't know how much "work" i got done today, certainly nothing significant. in addition to my brain feeling wrecked, gd was on a cleaning spree and discovered (what then became unavoidable) a sewer smell coming from the office bathroom next to my desk which we have no explanation for.

between meetings, mr smear and i walked to the hardware store to pick up draino, and did some tea shopping on the way back home. we sat down for a "salad pita" lunch while out, which was nice, and explored a local toy store's lego selection realizing that we never got mr smear a birthday present.

it's been a year. or two, or three.

i just got off a long call with horseman, most of it discussion the terrifying state of AI-fueled propaganda and the last fifty years building up to the west collapsing in on itself because its people have all been brainwashed to love their enemies more than themselves.

now to drag mr smear away from spore and get some exercise.

crackles and booms

 two people were just killed very close by after a cluster bomb (and all its parts) landed right around us.  it looks like one of the buildings in our old neighborhood is on fire after another struck there.

meanwhile, i was working on a side project in our shelter while my family slept behind me.

now to try to go to bed myself while emergency vehicle sirens blast all around us.

no offset

 last night was disruptive again. less than the night before, enough to make today a bit messy.

we all got up late again.

coffee and ghost in the shell - currently in the chapter which the central action of the movie is based on - and then most of the work day spent fighting an IDE not playing nicely with AI agents whose wheels are spinning but aren't going anywhere fast.

meanwhile, gd had a productive day unpacking and moving things around, and our apartment is starting to make a bit more sense. i mean, i still don't know what kind of furniture we'll need or how things will fit together, but it's definitely easier to begin using our imaginations.

zero exercise today, unless taking recycling downstairs counts. and now, after showering and brushing my teeth and making myself a cup of tea, i remember that i put a box of not-trash outside where the trash goes, and i probably need to go out and take it somewhere more likely to be enjoyed by random passers-by...

i had a short chat with one of our cousins earlier, it looks like we're not the only ones lacking confidence that a normal pesach seder is going to happen this year. my mom's re-booked her flights for next month, which i'm guessing will be more-or-less back to (a new) normal.

i feel... kind empty this evening. like i just don't have mental capacity to feel. but there's stuff i wanna do and it's bothering me that i'm not doing it, and that it's been days of not doing it...

the counter-routine

 another attack, second time this evening. it's late, and mr smear was just going to sleep... we have an agreement that we're going to start getting up early in the mornings to reestablish our routines.

...

today was a - i want to say a weird day, but every day in wartime is weird. i know i had weird dreams again last night, though i don't remember anything, and while it was a quieter night than before it was still quite disrupted.

i was pretty relaxed about work today, spending a fair amount of time on tangential stuff that i hope ends up shaving enough time off our CI that we can get a lot more of the real work done.

i surprised myself by participating more in today's (employer's) meeting than i would have expected considering i was mostly focused on the aforementioned tangential work, but i had a good idea about AI and game development and the others seemed to like it, so 🤷‍♂️

gd did a lot of cleaning and sorting today - i helped by moving a heavy piece of furniture - and our apartment feels considerably more together. so that's nice.

mr smear was mostly well-behaved today, somewhat helpful and contributed a bit to gd's efforts, and we had a really good mma session before dinner. daddy is very proud of his little boy's liver punches, and he kinda got the idea of a kickboxing roundhouse eventually.

i feel like the exercise we're getting is at least offsetting some of the excessive snacking that's been going on during the days.

we've gotten into the beginning of the strip search drama snowball. everyone's invested.

every day is (almost) exactly the same

 last night was rough. i wasn't woken up as much by the bombings because i had my phone off, so putting a stop to the horrible noises was exclusively gd's problem, but mr smear ended up sleeping most of the night in our bed and it's a bit crowded for my tastes.

i did have some mighty weird dreams, though. cthuloid ones, where creepy little humanoids were trying to eat my inexplicably long beard, and i got into a fight with the owner of the establishment who i somehow knew, and then had to escape some weird military-industrial warehouse, ending up climbing nets that had to be rearranged because whoever had put them up had done a really shit job.

an early meeting with my new coworker to introduce him to a new tool triggered a couple of hours putting together an article on it. i tried to get it published with my employer, but i've just withdrawn that application and applied to a publication with real reach, and where it's okay to make some money off it.

i had to "hold the fort" while gd rested this afternoon - she was having a rough day - and when one of his teachers was a no-show i managed to convince him to hook up the MIDI controller to garageband, which he really enjoyed. i don't know what he was doing, because at one point i had to put on headphones to block out the noise, but he seemed quite proud of himself.

in the evening i took a rather long walk (no sirens!) to stretch my legs and by a piece of equipment (a particular configuration of USB hub) that i discovered, on my return home, that i already owned.

i think i have a viable use for two of them, though.

i did another MMA session with mr smear, and every day we do this i feel better both physically and mentally. not only am i getting a little real exercise in, but i'm seeing my son develop the mindset and get comfortable not only in his body, but in his place in the world.

i've been trying on and off to do this since he was tiny, but better late than never. i guess he had to come to it on his own terms.

after reading him some more of the colour of magic at bedtime, and allegedly doing a breathing exercise to help him relax, he refused once again to go to sleep. gd let him read until almost 11pm, god knows what tomorrow morning's going to be like.

in the meanwhile, i went on a side quest with work stuff, and at the stroke of midnight sent a proposal to my team because the current CI configuration's driving me crazy with unnecessary wait times.

...

i have a feeling scrapper doesn't really want to talk politics with me, which is frustrating, but 🤷‍♂️

breathing easy

gd's making dinner (late, kind of as usual these days), but mr smear and i have already showered and i've managed to establish that the recent spate of wet floors was due to his showering and drying technique, not some plumbing issue.

while i wait, he's reading harry potter and i'm trying to convince AI agents to implement a new auth system i came up with this afternoon. and listening to drugs bunny on the sound bar i've set up at my feet.

i even napped today for a bit, after putting together a pretty cool fruit basket system we bought just when we moved in a month and a half ago.

...

i spoke to my mom at some point, and we agreed that it's not worth the trouble / potential trouble to try and force her way here for pesach. hopefully she'll be able to make it here a month or so later instead.

the world according to my son

1. i should be a personal trainer. he was very happy with this morning's training, in spite of the fact that there were tears and feelings along the way.

2. i've just been informed that i'm going to heaven. this is in response to me (AI-assisted) figuring out why his modrinth mod kept crashing and fixing it.

so i guess i've dadded well. today.

which reminds me of two things that were said between thursday and yesterday that i want to record for posterity:

• what do you call a postal worker who's tasked with removing envelopes from letters? a mail stripper.
• gd was being an asshole. i was trying to teach my son a word, and she cut me off with a new one that means "to do something in a sticky, spready way": syruptitiously.

where's the supreme leader?

what a time to be alive! where a random idea i had while falling asleep meets AI 👌👌 

less than minor disruptions

 so far today we've had two warnings of incoming attacks, one attack with a siren, and one without. but we got to go to south tel aviv, visit some furniture stores and find a couch we're excited about, order it, and learn that it *should* be here in time for pesach.

hopefully my mom will be too 🤞

gd wasn't feeling so good - it was pretty impressive that she managed to make the mission at all - so mr smear and i dropped her off at home, stopping for a siren warning and breakfast (we were both very hungry by that stage), and then took the (delayed due the war like all of them) bus to the apple store, where there regretfully informed me that gd's ipad is too old and too scratched to be worth much in trade :(

so i guess it's hail-mary time, we'll try to back it up and completely reset it in the hopes that we can ugrade its OS...

we had a very pleasant walk home, picking up liquor, running into an old colleague friend and his dog (abahd - a boy and his dog, referencing the movie he introduced me to when he learned i'm a fallout fan), and picking up a sorry-we're-at-war gift from my employer of half a kilo of ice cream for (theoretical) dinner tonight.

then, as promised - after a cup of coffee, of course - mr smear and i went into MMA mode and i taught him taekwondo side kicks. which he did surprisingly well for a first time!

he's also - in fits and bursts - getting used to the idea of discipline, shutting the fuck up and taking instructions whether he agrees with them or has something to say or not. and it's really help that the motivation to do the work is coming from him because he's fixated on losing weight and we don't want him dieting...

i'm developing a karate kid fantasy of teaching him to a point where i can take him to my old master and see him holding his own :)

we took turns showering, and then there was an unannounced attack - lots of booms but no sirens - and now we're busy making dinner plans. it seems like the challah-peño's going to be good tonight ^_^

and i'm listening to moby - for the nostalgia - and figuring out what to do with my brain.

less useless

 yesterday was - especially during this war - very strange.

i got up early* after a normal amount of disruptions**, and immediately set to writing a follow-up article on psychosis and trauma, and then jumped on a bus to the post office with my network appliance under my arm.

* a little later than normal alarm time when there's normal school

** it felt weird messaging mr smear's friend's parents to ask if they were all okay

i had to wait a while. half that time i spent scrolling on my phone, the other half trying to stare as far away as i could to relax my eyes. i got called up to the counter, got the package sent, and then caught the bus back home.

i was in a meeting when mr smear came home from his night out, and was distracted by him immediately fighting with gd because he felt like he desperately needed a shower when he was already late for class. it turned out that he and his friend had had a particularly late night, they'd watched duck soup and half of iron man 2, and he'd had a really unpleasant experience in their mamak because there'd been an attack and he'd had to lie down on a dirty mattress and cover himself with a dirty blanket and he was sure that he could feel things crawling all over him...

... i don't know how much of that was real, or imagined, but i know my little princess...

anyway, all reports were that he was very polite and well-behaved, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

my work day was more productive than the previous couple, though i did struggle with my back hurting from sitting down for too long. at least i felt like i contributed during a couple of our meetings, and i pushed a couple of code changes, and i fixed a couple of pipeline things...

in the evening mr smear and i accompanied gd to the pharmacy, and then we did a little snack shopping while she waited, and then rejoined her for moral support.

i don't know what's been going on with my stomach the past couple of weeks, but i think it's general anxiety and a less stable diet than usual. while we were out, i felt painfully bloated.

oh, and i've had a weird lump on the back of my neck the past couple of days. i hope it's nothing interesting... google says it's probably cancer.

my mother messaged me last night to inform me that her flight's been cancelled. she's scrambling to find another way to get here for pesach, if she can't this is going to be a real bummer :(

scrapper and i exchanged messages last night, and it looks like he's succumbed to the anti-israel / anti-trump narratives. i hope we get a chance to talk it out soon.

last night was a parenting-fail fight storm sandwiched between a good dinner and watching an episode of strip search, and hanging out in mr smear's room having a serious but often funny discussion about our abusive parents and his dealing with schoolyard bullying in his previous schools.

i went to bed right after saying good night to mr smear, emotionally exhausted more than anything else.

...

this morning we got up at our leisure, after a full night's sleep with no attacks. i started my day reading some more of ghost in the shell - now i *get* the intro sequence and why it's even more interesting after reading its parallel. there's a certain amount of fan service that's over-the-top, but i kinda get it in terms of a commentary on society... is in inappropriate for mr smear? i guess i'm on the fence.

useless

 today was rough, psychologically more than anything else. i was literally incapable of doing my "one job" task, every time i sat down (after pumping myself up with random distractions) i found myself doing anything but.

including paying our upstairs friends a visit to borrow a drill, and managing to find a guy from the post office to help me book the return for tomorrow, and taking mr smear to his friend's place where they're having a sleepover right now.

oh! and this morning i published the article i was working on until 1.30am.

last night was full of attacks, so i turned my phone off and the three of us slept in the locked mamad, and we were fine 🙏

this evening was a "date night" for me and gd, and we ordered a very expensive dinner, which was only partially disrupted by a potential attack. but it didn't matter, because as much as the side dishes were fantastic, the main course was just unpleasant, so it's not like the terrorists ruined the experience.

after dinner, i finally settled down and acted on the HUGE RELIEF NEWS from the afternoon (the money i transferred yesterday landed where it was supposed to), and for the first time in my life i picked a few stocks and EFTs and put money down on them

here's hoping i didn't make bad calls, but knowing what i know - having studied economics and investment theory as part of my undergrad - you can't do too badly when you bet on the market, and right now it looks like betting on the US and israel long-term is the safest move available.

*I* has the dumb

 well, today happened.

the dumbest part of today was sending a whole lot of money to an investment app without doing a test send first. i literally can't believe i did that. that's the second unforgivably stupid thing i've done in less than two weeks. now i'm nervous that - although i followed the instructions and everything "should" be fine - i might have made an extremely costly mistake.

...

yesterday i received the network appliance i'd ordered - and tried to cancel - and today i tried to figure out how to return it. but the post office. and war. i have no idea how to return it 🤦

work today was messy, i'm not sure if i got the job done in a way that my clients are satisfied, though, and by the end of the day my head was spinning. leaning on AI to understands codebases and system interactions can be a beautiful thing, but if you can't rely on the AI to get it perfectly right then it's all a giant waste of time. after three long and complicated iterations, i realized that i'm going to need to go in hard tomorrow to verify that it didn't miss anything, and that it didn't misidentify anything, which is basically the same thing as doing it all myself, but with extra steps.

mr smear had a LOT of screen time today, and that's in addition to his online classes. but it was mostly him figuring out how to use modrinth... when he complained that it was a waste of time and he wishes he'd never learned what he did, i offered to delete it. "you know what? pretend i never said anything."

with pleasure :D

...

i'm not bothering to link to news any more. earlier i went hunting through my old posts for something and i clicked a link, and then another, and they're all broken :(

we had a few attacks today, and then in the news we got confirmation that we haven't been imagining the increasingly scary number of booms at a time. and now they're threatening to lay mines at sea. what a time to be alive.

also, my mom's supposed to be arriving in ten days' time. we're all hoping nothing stops that from happening 🤞

...

while i've slept relatively well the past couple of nights, i've been snacking a hell of a lot more than usual. and i've got this "fried-brain feeling". and overall, i'm feeling decidedly distracted, irritable, demoralized. it could be the war, sure. being cooped up and all. or maybe it's just a general malaise, because it's been months of - how do i put this? - some really awesome things have happened, but most of my life has been feeling like death by a thousand paper cuts. the shoelace.

...

mr smear just woke up to blow his nose really hard, which always worries me because every now and then he blows his nose so hard he ends up with a nosebleed, and that goes on for days. so i explained to him what i just learned about the erectile tissue in our nostrils*, after this very evening we decided to introduce him to ze frank and had to explain "red rockets" to him 🤣

* which will from now on make suffering from a fully stuffed nose "nasal erectile dysfunction". you're welcome.

online meeting inappropriateness

 two incidents today: 

the first, my coworkers asking me if i'd gotten any sleep because i had serious bed-head in my first meeting. i've essentially given up on my hair at this point.

the second, not realizing that mr smear was in a zoom waiting room with my in the camera's view while i peed, and then suddenly i was looking (in the mirror in front of me) at his teacher's face.

...

i got a surprisingly good amount of sleep last night after the last attack, and woke up this morning to start reading ghost in the shell - the artwork is amazing, the story is great, but i swear there are entire pages where i have literally no clue what's actually happening.

i borrowed some more cables from big data this morning, and was able to put up the living room router in a way that i'm very pleased with!

i think my work-day was relatively decent. even the memento-themed lecture on AI memory during which i was mostly focused on fighting with sonarqube.

mr smear's online classes were okay, except at one point i cringed from embarrassment because his science teacher asked if the kids had questions about the material and he raised his hand to ask how to change his avatar to what the other kids were using 🤦

the two of us ventured out today to get double-sided tape for the bedroom router (which the guy at the hardware store convinced me was a mistake), and buy vegan dumplings with the plate full of loose changes we'd accumulated (thank god i thought to bring a spare couple of shekels, because it cost exactly two shekels more than we thought), and withdraw money for gd (which i totally forgot to do). we also had a very good training session this evening, working on checking, slips, and a combo including both.

i'm more about training his focus and training attitude than the actual martial arts, but it doesn't mean i'm not excited and proud to see him starting to become excited and proud of his achievements ^_^

finally, while he showered i figured out how to use modrinth to set up minecraft mods for him, and jogged to the closest ATM for the cash i'd forgotten earlier...

sense of accomplishment

 today was pretty solid. it started off with me finally closing the PR i opened on january 4th because i'd gotten to a point where i had an enormous number of changes by AI that i knew i couldn't trust, and in addition to feeling like the project is ready to proceed in an orderly fashion, i also think i've leveled up in my agent orchestration skills.

i managed to get mr smear set up for his remote classes today - he had four of them - and for the most part he participated. gd took over when it came to his phys-ed class, and apparently worked him a lot harder than his teacher ever manages to 🤣

i feel like i got in a good day's work, though it's kinda hard to tell these days.

i'm still feeling dumbfounded by the fact that my network issues were primarily about a bad cable connection. i ordered a network bridge to replace my router, at big data's suggestion, but when i spoke to the technician this evening he convinced me that that's not such a hot idea.

i had to book a ticket to the comics library, pandemic-style, and i had an oddly emotional moment when mr smear started listing the books he wanted and i asked him to send me an email. and, gosh darn it, he did. he figured it out by himself, and then proudly came over to my desk to see what it looked like on the receiving end :)

after a bus ride and a walk - which i realized halfway i'd been watching random shit on my phone instead of appreciating being outside - i arrived there just in time for an attack. one week into the war and i'm already spoiled, because ten minutes with no network connection was hard.

i was amused to learn that while all the books mr smear wanted aren't available, they're all on order already because he asked for them. i picked up a few that looked interesting, and then i walked to the second-hand bookstore in the hospital complex.

now that i know it's a second-hand bookstore, it's selection and vibe make so much more sense! i picked up my copy of my name is asher lev, and then found myself purchasing a hebrew translation of a new mike maihack spider-man comic (we loved the first two) and then i waited for a bus for too long before walking off and being passed by no less than five of them all at once.

so i walked home, and became thoroughly engrossed in completing my wife's phone swap before beginning my son's phone swap. it's a lot of effort - primarily when it comes to not signing up for stuff we don't want - but eventually i got to the point where i could set up paybox young for mr smear. it's an awful UX, everything about the program is to trap kids and parents alike, and i was extremely frustrated and irritable by dinner time. but after dinner - after boring my mom so much with the money stuff that she had to excuse herself from the conversation - i finally managed to get his money into his savings account, and i think there's a way to make it work without costing me an arm and a leg.

there was stress at shower and bedtime - mainly about mr smear moving too slowly, as usual - but i read to him and it was a markedly improved experience from last night. now i've sent him an email - to the other email address that he won't have access to until he's much older - and posted this, and i think i'm pretty close to being ready for bed.

wired

 the rest of the evening didn't go as smoothly as it should have. 

on the one hand, we managed to get mr smear into bed at a reasonable time, and then i read some more of the colour of magic to him, which was nice. but he wouldn't let me get away when it was time to say good night, and that ended up in an impromptu jiujitsu-style tussle where - as i wouldn't cheat or use force that might injure him - he totally locked me down. so i was proud, and a bit nervous, and concerned that he wasn't going to be calming down soon.

as i managed to get away, we got the pre-alert, then the siren, and he came into our room and refused to sleep. once the event was over, we returned him to his room, but he refused to sleep, and the last i heard from him he was creeping through the apartment looking for trouble.

aside from that, i've been chipping away at one of my side-projects and i think i'm making good progress. the AI assistance is costing me a considerable amount in tokens, but i've got mocking and testing up on things that are decidedly complicated to mock and test and i'm really feeling the impact.

it's approaching midnight and i'm glad to not be as tired as usual, but i'm on edge (because of all the things) and worried that i'm going to be paying for this in the morning.

inside

 everyone had a rough night last night, but in our case it was having mr smear in our bed for much too long and plenty of siren disruptions.

the day began well, i managed to get a lot of my ideas down and read through some of what i needed to read through, and mr smear and i came up with another game design.

big data and his daughter came down for a visit; mr smear was being antisocial, but big data and i ran through a whole bunch of possibilities for the network disruptions and he found the bug: a bad ethernet cable 🤯

so now we have great network all throughout the apartment. i guess i'm going to be asking for a refund of the new network device.

i spent most of the rest of the day working on side projects, and then did another deal with mr smear (kick boxing for screen time). it went well! again!

we decided to watch strip search with mr smear tonight. i hope we don't regret this :P

...

here's a pretty good playlist of funk AI covers by conhuir. we were disappointed by most of the slipknot covers, but the metallica ones are awesome!

outside

 last night was unnecessarily rough, because we could have booted mr smear out of our bed after the first siren and i would have had a much better night's sleep.

today was a bit weird.

i invested quite a lot of time in getting stuff to work on my home machine that i already had working on my work machine, stuff that - as usual - really shouldn't be that complicated.

gd had a phone appointment with our doctor, which resulted in me calling multiple clinics because ours was closed only to continue to run into dead ends. then we all went on a pharmacy mission, and a bit of a grocery mission on the way back home, and then we dropped everything at home and jumped on a bus to dizengoff center, with a little bit more of a walk than planned.

which was good. we've all been pretty cooped up for a week.

i couldn't find what i was looking for, but gd got sorted and i was inspired to upgrade her phone (she's been unhappy for a long time) and hopefully the new model will be a better experience. and then mr smear inherits her old one, and that gives us a way to manage his "banking".

we had a great hummus lunch, which i think was pretty brave considering nobody had any idea when the next attack would be, but we managed to make it home before the sirens.

mr smear convinced me to take the windows machine off facebook marketplace and reinstate it as "his" machine, and that led to me spending a good chunk of the evening (and our shelter time) on getting it set up, enthusiastically testing out shutup10++ and being pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to clean up the windows experience.

i'm also pleasantly surprised by the fact that i managed to get mr smear to do another training session with me this evening, and although the main focus was on boxing drills, i think the most important lesson was in shutting the fuck up and following instructions.

we had a bit on an incident with kevin, our little eight-legged boarder, who's been insisting on hanging out in our bed. i tried to get him out of our room, and i may have accidentally injured him :(

then he decided to scoot off into mr smear's room, so mr smear was very nervous about checking his bed thoroughly before going to sleep. but then he couldn't sleep, because he was feeling so bad for how unfairly poor kevin had been treated...

kiddush and dinner with my mom were nice, and the food was great, even though it was really late.

mr smear got siren'ed out of a shower - so much for canishower.com showing 11% - after that was bedtime and then my shower time, and now i've watched lots of politics and other garbage and i think i'm ready for bed.

...

if you want to understand what's going on with the war, and what its all about, this tom nash report is eye-opening.

everything on mainstream media - CNN in particular - is unhinged propaganda. seeing so much AI-generated slop of destruction in tel aviv is pathetic. who believes this shit?

two for two

 i'm now two for two with the canishower.com app, i'm in.

i'm also two for two getting mr smear into short, but real, martial arts training sessions by rewarding him with screen time. my, how the mighty have fallen... but he did pretty well in yesterday's boxing drills, and was very pleased with himself in today's taekwondo drills. if this is what it takes...

also, mr smear and i made a fun little rage game during an attack today, capture the fly, sticklight's surprisingly good at what it does!

...

yesterday:

in a nutshell, yesterday was all about network disruptions; mainly due to misconfigurations, but also dealing with a lot of intermittent VPN disconnections that i've been experiencing ever since i got my company laptop.

it was extremely frustrating, and while i'm finally dealing with the provider's support directly... after an entire day of back-and-forth troubleshooting over email, i'm starting to suspect that their support team is a bunch of AI agents dressed in a trench coat 😕

who ever thought that the trickiest part of the turing test would be that humans can be so unexpectedly dumb?

the frustration of hearing a door buzzing just before a siren and hoping i didn't miss the delivery of the new network device...

gd cleaned the apartment yesterday, with mr smear and i helping occasionally. it's a big apartment, compared to what we're used to.

our early dinner, more like a very late lunch, was followed by me teaching mr smear boxing fundamentals, and then me continuing to work on the RCA that i was finally finished around 9pm, during another attack.

mr smear went to bed really late last night, and i read to him anyway, then crashed. and then half the night was spent with him in our bed after attacks.

i had a weird dream about him and his previous class, but they were much younger and in danger of falling out of these weird little cots.

today:

we all got up late, and i spent at least an hour tweaking the network until i had it good enough that it felt like maybe? we don't need the new network device. but after a day spent moving back and forth between the office, the bedroom and the living room, i'm pretty sure we need it to sit in the middle of the two wired points.

i struggled in a rush to get mr smear's account set up for his online classes, and then spent the work day feeling pretty useless and entirely unmotivated.

between yesterday and today, i got my first real taste of using MCPs. they can be extremely helpful, especially when it comes to understanding badly produced logs.

we received a very welcome voucher from my employer for a tub of ice cream. gd found a decent vegan salmon replacement (thank god), and brewer's yeast, that we could have delivered. and there was much rejoicing.

it's okay

i went straight to bed after posting last night. we only had two interruptions with attacks, but that meant about half the night with mr smear sleeping in our bed, which isn't terrible, but it's considerably less comfortable than him not.

another warning about an impending attack this morning, when i needed the toilet. so i held it in, and then suddenly it was a half hour later and no sirens...

i finally got up a short while ago, from a dream in which i returned to uniform with nystire: on our way into the base, nystire got bumped by a car driving out. it clearly hurt him, but when i wanted to stop the car and get him checked out he angrily yelled "i'm FINE!". then there was a large group of soldiers who'd just been sent off to a row of buses, and a whole lot of them had left behind bags and satellite phones. and then, finally, i was being briefed by a guy who - i only realized while he was literally climbing around on his desk - had no legs, and there i was, having been complaining about my boots not fitting (not to him, fortunately). after amusing him with a physiotherapy story, he told me about an experimental procedure he'd been denied because his operational capability wasn't impaired enough "by one point on the evaluation", and i woke up from the two of us laughing hysterically while he danced around his seat showing me how ridiculous that was.

now i'm back in reality, gd's sleeping, mr smear's reading (and trying not-very-subtly* to get to play oxygen not included like he did yesterday, in spite of his screen time punishment because of the extenuating war circumstances), and i'm having coffee and wondering how to approach my work day today.

* why is that always such a difficult word to spell?!

"professional" is being professional when you really don't feel like it and nobody's watching.

the time cluster bomb

 today was weird. the deployment didn't go smoothly, but was ultimately successfully.

a religious family came downstairs to present us with mishloach manot, which i explained was very much appreciated, but as we've got a dairy allergy and we're vegan we simply can't accept. an hour or so later they knocked again, with a whole different arrangement, including baked goods with the ingredients handwritten.

so now i feel bad that we haven't reciprocated - we had no way - and we've had way too many sweets today.

also, mr smear's molar fell out.

he spent most of the day dressed up as harry potter, he did his own scar amazingly well, and was very disappointed that it wasn't a school day and there was no one to show his costume to but us :(

we literally walked around the block twice today for exercise.

i eventually managed to complete my investigation into whether my screw-up last week had any undetected impact, and spent an hour talking to a new coworker - both at my employer, and my client - about both of them and giving him the details i wish i'd had. i then followed that up with a complaint to the woman who brought us both in because he was also supposed to start both jobs on the same day, like i did, and that's messed up.

my most productive time today was spent on my phone control solution, which i've gotten to a point that i can start playing with the more interesting ideas.

thanks to AI.

the war goes on. it looks like however the next couple of weeks play out, we've essentially already won: the IRGC is effectively finished, the middle east has realigned itself. the attacks today were fewer and further between, but louder and scarier.

mr smear was a bit difficult today, on occasion, but also a lot easier to get through to (eventually). on the one hand, he's been cooped up, but on the other, he's refusing to leave the apartment to do anything social, and gd's sick and unavailable and i'm working and unavailable.

i'm tired. but also antsy. i barely have bandwidth for the stuff that needs brain, but distractions? i don't even register time passing.

the purim decree

 today is tuesday? yesterday was monday. it is purim today, i read (the translation of) megilat esther last night and mr smear is dressed up - wildly successfully, especially the scar which he did himself - for a day in which we are following mordechai's edict to the letter, destroying our enemies before they can destroy us.

sunday night was a lot quieter than saturday night or sunday (i'm obviously not speaking on behalf of those who've been affected, an ex-coworker of mine lives next to a building that was struck, and another missile landed next to mr smear's school, and iran is using cluster bombs again, which is a real war crime), and i got up yesterday somewhat in shock at having rested. it was mostly a work day, which was weird, but i did manage - between attacks - to get to the store and buy a "mickey mouse" cable so that i could set up a mesh network because switching from wifi to wifi was driving me nuts.

unfortunately, the speed of my now-stable network is disappointingly low :(

i got mr smear to come upstairs to our friends, where he and their daughter got on well but the younger son was having a very emotional evening... us adults had a reasonably good time, though. and gd stayed downstairs and got a bit of a break.

oh, yeah - the technician arrived yesterday morning to look at the electric hob, which was playing nicely, of course. he fiddled with the triple-phase outlet, hopefully it'll remain stable.

i'm going to be diving into work soon. i'm very disappointed about the state of my hair, which was supposed to be cut on sunday evening. i'm sporting harry potter vibes of my own :P

purim ii

thousands of years later, in the same week of the hebrew calendar as the original purim, we turned the tables on a modern-day haman: khamenei is dead. and with him, his family, and his generals. the antisemitic anti-west coalition has begun to unravel.

so this purim we tell the story, and we live the story, and we will celebrate in the streets and drink too much, and possibly come up with a new baked good like "ayatollah's beard" (or "ayatollah's glasses"), and possibly add an appendix to the original megillah.

but, hive mind, i have to ask you: in this retelling, who is mordechai, and who is esther? trump is achashverosh, clearly, but is bibi our esther?

...

 holy shit. last night's sleep was heavily interrupted by missile attacks, and mr smear had to stay with us, so it was even more interrupted in between the interruptions. and then it was morning, and between attacks we tried to be functional, and i somehow managed to get some work done, and everything was really just a mess.

all my coworkers, israeli and non-israeli, are being very sweet.

i educated horseman and his girlfriend on middle east politics and anti-west propaganda today; it's one heck of a way to introduce oneself to new people :P

the most exercise mr smear and i got was a walk around the block to take down recycling. he was bored today. but also antisocial. and i could barely keep it together, and went down a savings / investment rabbit hole...

gd, in addition to everything else, is really struggling. if her situation worsens, we're going to have to head to the nurses tomorrow.

at least the groceries got through.

the latest attacks have been particularly intense, and it looks like they're using cluster bombs. as i just told my brother: we need to be grateful, as we need to be for every single war since 1948, that our enemies are so ideologically blinded that they’re incapable of discipline. imagine how much harder this war would be if iran hadn’t attacked ALL its neighbors!

really tough fighters get in the ring. pathetic fighters bully non-fighters.

ding dong!

 khamenei is dead.

it's been a looong day in and out of the shelter (our bedroom, thankfully), and exhausting. we had just enough time between attacks to clean up the kitchen and sort out dinner, and get mr smear showered, and then soon after bedtime we were back into it.

my back started hurting just after mr smear moved into our bed. we had some big hits earlier, and one woman is been killed :(

the combination of my back, and finally being able to transfer mr smear's google account to the "new" family so we're all on israeli accounts, is what got me out of bed. now i'm sitting here, stretching and watching news (real news from tousi tv, i tried a few other channels during the day and it's complete dogshit out there), and hopefully we'll get some sleep tonight.

we're off to a good start. hopefully the iranian revolution will be completed in short order 🙏

...

we watched half of flow today, the "camera" made me uncomfortable but it's gorgeous. a little too slow for my family, though. then we watched the second episode of solo leveling, which was unexpectedly hardcore violence and we all needed a bit of a recovery afterwards.

the siren

after a lovely dinner and a relaxed bedtime routine, i passed out just after putting mr smear to bed.

then i woke up around 1am, and spent the next few hours playing around with retroarch, and writing up a new article putting all my recent AI thoughts together, and watching random shite.

then i went back to bed, only to be woken up with a jump-start to the air raid sirens, being used to alert everyone to the fact that we'd begun - finally! - attacking the IRGC.

may this be the final round, and may we soon see an IRGC-free middle east 🙏

today so far: jumping in and out of our bedroom (mr smear's settled in with a harry potter book, gd and i are all over the place between messaging apps and other nonsense), and i'm trying and failing to be even slightly productive or mentally healthy.

meditation marathon

thoughts for the day: everyone in the media is getting paid to keep everyone on edge, including themselves. i don't need to think about war with iran until it's actually happening. nobody does. STFU.

also, the global economy is full of shit, everything's being run by people who have as much understanding of how things work as small children. there aren't many adults around.

if i'm right, what's coming is AI weaning us off management bloat and enabling people to find and operate in tiny niches. kind of like pre-industrial societies.

...

 today began with disappointment, but it was less disappointing than if it had come tomorrow: mr smear woke up and decided that he didn't want to go to the trance party, he'd rather just stay home and read all weekend ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i've been reading richard currier's unbound: how eight technologies made us human and brought our world to the brink, and while it's taken me forever to get into it, it's fascinating stuff.

mr smear had been waiting for the bus for a while before we realized that it was the tel aviv marathon today...

gd and i had a quiet morning, napping, mostly, and then we headed out to return the frying pan and find a solution for the ugly cables that were just installed. but, the marathon. so we walked around trying to get on a bus, then got on the bus which literally went in a circle and took us back one stop, and then we split up because i realized i'd have to walk all the way to the center and back.

returning the frying pan would have been less emotional had the woman not decided to try 'splain to me how the non-stick pan wasn't non-sticking properly because i was obviously cooking wrong 😠

at least i found cable hole covers. i'll try them sometime, i guess.

i finally found a decent-looking replacement frying pan on sale at a different store, i hope it's good. then i picked up garbage bags, and then i began my trek home.

picking up a coffee along the way, and syncing with sailor for a bit.

i had issues getting mr smear home today, again, and i realized (after we had a fight about it) that he and his friends are using whatsapp as social media. so there goes whatsapp - i've blocked it and he's down to actual phone calls and sms'es now.

at least he didn't lose more privileges this week - i mean, his screen time privileges have been pushed back another week now, but we were both excited about him getting his reading privileges back this evening.

i never in my life thought i would ever write a sentence like the above, but here we are. you gotta do what you gotta do.

i spent most of the afternoon upgrading my encryption package and updating my website, and then had a long chat with urchin, and now i've showered, and taken the garbage out, and shabbat has started, and gd's cooking a delicious dinner, and for a moment the world is just fine.

limping

 i completely forget, until i walk around the apartment barefoot - something's happened under the heel of my right foot, and putting my weight on it hurts.

also, my hands (fingers, specifically) are still messed up from a combination of the grueling move and months of dry skin.

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?