saturday morning eye of the storm

 i just sent scrapper an overshare response to "how are things on your end" and i feel it's worth recording for myself:

from my side, i guess these are the times the chinese always threatened us with (“may you live in interesting times”)…

mr smear managed to close out his first year in the arts school without getting kicked out (though he managed to come close on a number of occasions), and in general he’s been maturing in front of our eyes and he’s doing infinitely better than this time last year. he just started learning to rollerblade this past couple of months, and he’s enjoying our rides much more than he was on a bike which is awesome. also, he’s joined one of his friends at a keitana which turned out to be a survivalist school-themed LARP where they learn how to construct and use weapons and have lectures on pyrotechnics 😛 

gd’s been having a rough time, we discovered recently that she’s either been celiac or has had a really intense reactions to gluten* for a long time and it just got much worse the past year or so. the good news is that a couple of months gluten free and her mind and body are in a much better place than they’ve been in years.

* this is obvious karma for us describing ourselves as “allergic to gluten free” for most of the last decade 😅

as for me, 2026 so far has been pretty wild. i’ve been getting deeper and deeper into AI both at work and in my side projects, and i can tell you that the entire industry has completely lost its mind. the tools are at the same time amazing and utter garbage, everything is hype and we’re watching tech leaders making the most ridiculously foolish plays right in front of our eyes. it’s mass psychosis and it’s disturbing as all hell. 

aside from that, i’ve been struggling on and off to figure out how to print my comics and i'm becoming more and more frustrated that none of the indie comic creators in israel seem to be interested in banding together and making it easier for everyone…

otherwise, the financial strain of living hand-to-mouth in tel aviv is “business as usual” stress, and so far the summer weather has been relatively kind, and i’m sitting on a balcony in a cool breeze and life is, somehow, pretty damned good.

...

last night was rough. emotionally and psychologically, gd and i had an argument about how we each see the world (when it comes to defining "normal" behavior in other people after the very upsetting start to season 3 of infinity train) which resulted in the always-uncomfortable "agree to disagree". that was followed by a particularly rough night, first with the hip flexors and then with indigestion that forced me upright when i desperately needed to be horizontal and took about two hours to calm down enough to let me get back to sleep. then it was morning, and after about half an hour trying to sleep in i gave up and got up to make myself coffee and sit on the balcony and make peace with my life.

...

rough night or no, rough times or no, in this moment right here and now i feel particularly blessed. the weather is beautiful and calm, the birds are singing, and our highway intersection and its surroundings are full of greens (and bright yellows), and interesting tall glass architecture (which i love because it almost makes the buildings camouflaged against the sky), and in spite of all my anxieties i seem to doing okay right now.

friday mall stress

the good parts of the day:

finishing up the baseline functionality of the auto-doc project, and it seems pretty solid! i've also written up most of the first article. the sun has already set, so i've effectively stopped for the day. that all took quite a lot of hours.

watching guardians of the galaxy vol. 2 together, even if i did fall asleep for a bit of it.

the not-so-good parts of the day:

the shopping mission... both parts. between not finding the stuff we wanted, and mr smear being a bit sick (snuffly, but he seems fine now), and occasionally quite disrespectful. and mall people, i was irritable as hell. also, gd and i having a fight over something (one of those relationship-long fights), and i've just learned it's still not done.

nervous juggling

 i already forgot how i slept on wednesday night, but i can say that last night wasn't bad. the last hour and a half in bed trying and failing to sleep was a bit of a drag, but overall it was alright.

yesterday was a really, really long work day. and i was manic - i guess i've been manic for a couple of days now - and doing a lot of nervous juggling while being bombarded with interesting information by the guy next to me (dx).

i spent two hours in the morning on my autodoc project before going to the office. for our team daily, i spent a lot of it trying to nudge my new manager without being imposing. then i spent the day trying to understand the existing ai infrastructure, and pitching my agentic skills (in zip format) to the vp tech, and reviving and reconstructing old golang services (everyone's too scared to touch them), and finally (finally!) getting most of my data to land that i've been working on for so many weeks now...

... and pitching my vision to random strangers (and getting buy-in ^_^), and discovering that my blockchain hackathon idea from 2021 (which i've subsequently tried to pitch to a number of people) has dx so excited that he's decided it's his "fable project" for the weekend - it would be so cool if he managed to pull it off!

between getting home and dinner, i gave mr smear the choice of rollerblading or walking. i was disappointed that he didn't want to get on his wheels, but i was surprised that he decided he wanted to walk all the way to the comics library (without any intention of actually going into the library). so off we went, for a very pleasant walk, discussing some horror game ideas he's had which are actually pretty damned good.

we got home and sat down for dinner, and finished watching guardians of the galaxy. what a brilliant movie. drax definitely gets some of the greatest lines.

after getting mr smear into bed, and in spite of the creeping tiredness, i continued working on my autodoc project for another two hours, before finally crawling into bed just before midnight.

...

now to dive back in until we all go out for the friday morning shopping.

cross-ay-eyed

mr smear took the graphic novels back to the comics library yesterday, and i couldn't figure out what i wanted to read before my screen time and then... oh, yes, i wrote up my previous day's adventures, and got not-a-lot done before heading out (back) to the office.

i did not focus on my primary task today. i mean, i made some progress, but for the most part i was heavily invested in the distracting work of resurrecting a retired dependency so that i could fix a bug in it that i need to make the project i resurrected yesterday work properly.

and we had two important meetings yesterday. the first was an engineering all-hands that sounded eerily familiar, with zero irony. i had a little trouble with feeling sleepy, but i woke up to ask a question and had the VP come bouncing up to where i was sitting with the mic, and then very much not like my question about how metrics for velocity conflict with demanding accountability in terms of quality.

at least i managed to catch him for a positive chat immediately afterwards :P

i had a meeting in a fridge phone booth a few minutes later, and i realized just as i signed in that i couldn't find my hoodie. so, on the call but muted, i rushed around the office trying to find it, eventually guessing that it had fallen behind the stands where i'd been sitting, and managing (with enormous relief) to snatch it up and find a booth in time to follow everything.

my new manager is cool - i've worked with him before - but it's not clear how aligned we are on the mission so i had to be really careful to raise all my points in a way that didn't feel confrontational. i think i did alright, but i've now told everyone very clearly that i'm hoping to be able to start experimenting with integrating my hackathon solution by next week; both because it gives me a deadline i have to stick to, and because i'm nervously in a race against time to get *my* opinionated solution in before somebody comes and up with something irresponsible instead :P

when i left the office, i called gd back and we got into it about whether or not we can afford a dog, or will ever be able to afford a dog. that had to be put on hold while i travelled to my employer's office by light rail. there was a lot of tension, but we managed to move through it and had a heavy but important conversation about the challenges gd's been facing with language, community and work over the past few years, and how to approach them.

the meetup at the office was pretty good. not only were the talks not boring (i learned a few things about agentic ai and agentic memory), but i made small talk with a guy who turned out to be another ex-saffer (he went to school with one of my cousins' kids) and the conversation ended up going off the rails in our unique saffer way. it made the eavesdroppers (and there were a couple) a little happier about the hardships they're forced to endure :P

i had a good chat with the head of our group afterwards, though i said something in a clumsy way - i'm sure she doesn't remember, but it's bugging me - and then i bussed home just in time to say goodnight to mr smear and have a bit of a chat before he went to sleep, and watch most of another episode of ludwig with gd, and now...

... i dunno. i think i'm too tired to do anything productive, but also not tired enough to go to bed and actually sleep 🤷‍♂️

positive feedback

 i've realized that i don't suffer from very mild narcolepsy, there are just three specific situations which tell my brain it's safe to turn off and it's really, really hard for me to fight them. the hairdresser's chair, the dentist's chair, and meetings. those are my shutdown buttons. some people count sheep. i count shears, drills and droning.

...

yesterday morning began with a serious effort on my autodoc side project. mr smear left late and under tense circumstances.

most of the day revolved around the broken deployments, which became extra-specially sensitive the moment i realized that the running instances where last deployed several years ago and the "successful" manual deployments i'd seen had never actually done anything 🤦‍♂️

later, i learned from a couple of the more experienced engineers that this kind of thing is actually quite normal.

lunch with the lunch group was fun, although it began with me opening my soup in a way that sprayed it across the table and across one of the guys, which was quite embarrassing.

the big division meeting: i spent about two thirds of the meeting struggling to keep my eyes open, and praying every time i nodded off that i hadn't snored or something. i was very grateful to have come out of the stupor by the time we got to the big announcements, and it's now pretty clear what my new role is and how all the pieces fit.

i like (the idea of) my new role. a lot.

...

then i had a call with my mentor. he gave me some good advice regarding how i communicate with my manager: "i've run into <x>, it's going to cause a delay, i'm taking care of it" is a solid formula that i've used a lot, but i still find it interesting to think of it as a formal structure.

i told him about my role change, and how it fits in with my roadmap, and about my autodoc project. he was very excited about all of it, and offered me some very good advice about when and how i write about it.

and then he informed me that he has feedback for me, both from my client and from my employer: apparently everyone's quite happy with me. this is a huge relief, and it feels good.

long may it last.

...

the last part of the day was all about finalizing the deployment fixes, pushing them and monitoring them. by sheer luck, i saw from the git graph that someone else was working on the repo at the same time, so i got in touch with them directly to inform them of what i was doing and why. aside from blowing their minds, i managed to get them excited about dashboards-as-code and i had them on hand to approve my PRs, so when i left the office it was after making sure that the service is actually serviceable and nothing seems broken.

[quickly stops to flip open the work laptop and double-check that the image tags really were updated]

so i walked out of the office in pretty good spirits ^_^

...

my afternoon and evening were exceptionally gassy. i have no idea what i ate or when, but it went on for hours and was very uncomfortable. you know how "every 'no' brings you closer to a 'yes'"? well, my spin on it is "every fart brings you closer to a shart". fortunately that didn't happen yesterday, but it probably could have.

anyway, i dropped my bag off at home and took mr smear with me to the mall to pick up his second pair of shoes. notable moments: witnessing a bunch of hormone-drunk teenagers harassing a sex-shop worker, buying socks, and a fight over mr smear reporting a clean bus for being dirty. otherwise, we had a pretty good time. and talked a lot, some of which about the LARPiness (or lack thereof) of his summer camp.

we had a very nice dinner while watching a lot more of guardians of the galaxy, and after mr smear was in bed gd and i finished another episode of ludwig. then i went straight to bed, for most of a night's sleep.

the king of the upside-down

 it's monday evening, just about two days have passed and it's been wild.

saturday night:

i spent the following few hours working on my hackathon project, troubleshooting github actions and eventually getting to the point where i'm ready to give the first iteration a try. then i went to bed, and caught a few (about three) hours sleep.

yesterday:

i woke up feeling less than stellar. but i got up, and had a coffee, and then accompanied mr smear to his first day of summer day camp. the first time was a bit complicated, but he managed just fine by himself this morning, so 👍

from the bus to the school we were accompanied by one of his buddies, and it was interested shadowing them and hearing them discussing how much happier they both are at the new school ^_^

i lurked a bit while mr smear registered himself, then made myself scarce and headed back home. the camp is a version of "the academy", the post-apocalyptic survival LARP, and i think that's pretty cool :)

i paid the municipality fees yesterday morning, which are still on the landlord's account. quite frankly, i'd rather they remained that way because he gets a significant discount, and at this point i really don't want to go through the ridiculous circus of recreating our contract and pretending to be moving in...

my first meeting was long, and tough. the guys amicable enough, but my gods he makes me uncomfortable. he's clearly very knowledgeable, but we seem to have a communication problem and he doesn't solve problems quite the way i do. also i was very tired. i was quite amused when we finally came to the conclusion that whether he likes my approach or not, it's the only viable one considering the state of the data.

either way, it was a massive relief when the meeting was over.

i spent quite a lot of time poring over documents my client had sent me over the weekend, which led me to read welcome to gas town, which is completely unhinged.

i managed to complete the morning meeting's change by the time mr smear got home, at which point we sat down and had a serious conversation about his first day; he's bored, he says, because although a couple of the things they did were fun, there was a lot of physical activity that just isn't what he's there for...

either way, he urgently needed sports shoes, so we all went to the mall for what is arguably our least favorite family pastime. the first place we went to - a department store - had very expensive options we weren't thrilled by. the second only had the most expensive shoes, great quality but not for a growing boy. the third... had what we were looking for. aside from a little bit of i've-had-enough drama on mr smear's part, we walked out with a solid pair of shoes and an order for an identical pair one size up at a heavily-reduced price.

there was a little more shopping to be done, then we caught a bus home. gd and i dropped off the shoes, the groceries and the child, and then went across the road to do some more grocery shopping. it was poor timing, lots of customers, one cashier and one self-service, and it took sooo long to get out of there...

over dinner, we started watching guardians of the galaxy. the rest of the evening was a blur. i think i went to bed relatively soon after putting mr smear to bed.

today:

i actually got a good night's sleep last night. my back's still really sore, though.

...

there were a couple of odd threads to pull at work today, the main one being as follows:

a couple of months ago i worked on a small service that nobody else understands. it's written in golang, and nobody in the company works with golang (they fired the team that owner the service), and it hadn't been maintained for a very long time. so i upgraded it to the latest version, and made the changes that needed to be made, and merged them... but nothing happened. i didn't break anything - which i was very grateful for - but what i thought i'd fixed still wasn't fixed, and i had to cut and move on to the big project.

on thursday i had some spare time, and i returned to the service and made an important fix (a serious memory leak). this morning i got permission to push it. i pushed it.

nothing happened.

the AI i used to investigate the dashboards and the logs came to the conclusion that i totally fixed the bug. it repeated this a couple of times, even though the dashboards didn't seem different at all, and so i carried on trying to figure out what was going on.

eventually, i realized that not only were my changes not in production, but neither were my previous ones, nor those of the couple of people who also touched this service in between. that the CI workflow  entitled "build - test - deploy" that ran successfully only builds and tests, but does not deploy.

the CI/CD workflows have never been CD, the deployments have only ever been manual, and nobody responsible for this service knows this.

you can't make this shit up.

...

oh! and the other consultant working with my client came by my desk after putting some pieces of data together and determining that there are people being fired by our employer for not being able to find clients. it calls the "i have job security" thesis into question, it doesn't feel so good.

...

in the afternoon, i travelled to my employer's office for a group meeting. i got called up, unprepared, to tell a story about failures at scale, and told the story of me returning to work after paternity leave and having to rewrite the project from scratch, getting to the deadline with everything working beautiful and discovering a bug during the demo that the managers saw and terminating the project.

the barbecue wasn't my thing, but they'd brought in a serious quantity of good hummus and falafel so i was sorted. i made myself a few pitot, and bounced from vegan conversation to vegan conversation - most of them initiated by somebody overhearing the tail end of the previous one and inquiring. all of it was amicable and i think i got some people to think a bit differently about it.

...

i caught a bus to the mall to meet up with gd and mr smear, who'd been forced to wait in a freezing reception for more than three hours for the eye specialist. tomorrow we're going to start hunting for a new one, and then call up the fat-fuck receptionist and tell her we're cancelling because she's a selfish piece of trash (gd described to me in detail how disrespectful she was towards everyone, and that she wasn't the only one to beg her to raise the temperature).

apparently mr smear's eyesight has improved? hmm...

we bussed home, gd prepared a gluten-free vegan pesto and avo pizza (which was delicious), and we discussed mr smear's day camp experience and explained that there's no refunds and he's just going to have to make the most of it. fortunately, as much as he's disappointed that there's so much physical activity, it overall seems like a pretty good place for him to be. he's learning interesting things (just not as much of the day as he'd like), including woodwork (which he is enjoying), and apparently the kids are generally pretty cool.

i'm tired. i really, really hope i get some sleep tonight again.

preoccupation

 the rest of my afternoon: my sister called, and we had quite a long chat about her plans for her visit, along with some distressing news that during the course of their divorce, her most recent ex-husband made a point of separating her from a bunch of old videos from her childhood.

i managed to get mr smear to play another session of math fluxx, and he was a lot more compliant and we had a lot more fun.

over lots-of-sushi dinner we watched infinity train, and between dinner and bedtime i was a *little* bit constructive vis-à-vis my autodoc side project.

i read some more alice's adventures in wonderland to mr smear, and then put myself to bed soon after.

...

now it's about two hours later, and i've gotten up after lying awake for a while developing indigestion.

good grief.

eleven

happy fourth of july! another wedding anniversary with us still going strong in spite of ourselves.

...

 i did sleep better last night, but that's (as usual) off a low bar and my back's really sore right now.

i haven't done anything "constructive" today. first coffee with gd on the balcony, me continuing to very slowly make my way through the footnotes of the thrilling adventures of lovelace and babbage,

it took us a little too long to get out the house this morning, but mr smear and i went on a rollerblading journey, with a couple of fun stops in the park, a couple of attempts to encourage nervous dogs to befriend humans on wheels, and a coffee and orange juice stop along the way.

then it was cold showers and mix-and-match lunch and gaming and massage tool and napping.

i'm soooo tired, and my back's sore, but so far it's been a pretty good day nonetheless.

myths and fables

 my bum still hurts - gd dug her elbow in and i've used bengay, but the tightness isn't going away and i'm nervous about going to bed...

it's probably not helped by my spending the last hour or so sitting down at my computer.

i began the day trying to figure out why my external monitor was flickering, and it resolved without me getting an answer. apparently it's a known macbook thing. nice.

i then spent the next three hours putting fable through its paces. i sent the following to horseman:

bro, i’ve been using fable for the past couple of hours. it’s… 

it’s…

it’s an AI model 😂

it does seem like a significant improvement so far, but god damn the hype is so detached from the reality - as usual. also, holy shit it’s expensive.

we walked to our favorite vegan coffee spot to meet up with my aunt and her family - we haven't seen my cousins in years! i spent most of our time talking shop with the younger brother, and then tgtbt stayed with us when everyone else left and we talked and talked until mr smear had long had enough :P

the afternoon / evening was going great, mr smear and i agreed to a compromise between video games and fluxx, and i think that's the first time i've held my own in spiderheck. a lot of our math fluxx experience was good - meaning both of us were enjoying it - but then he got in a mode after deciding that the game should have been over (when it wasn't) and made a whole thing... which i kinda the whole thing gd and i have been charged with getting him to learn how to handle. so we entered shabbat with a bit of a shit vibe.

kiddush and dinner were nice once we got over that initial hurdle, and then it was shower and bedtime for mr smear, and then i passed out for a while, and woke up with my hip flexors doing their thing, and for the last while i've been playing slay the spire 2 while occasionally checking in on fable because i forgot to set --dangerously-skip-permissions which are far more nuisance than any real safety they provide.

so far i've apparently used $45 worth of fable tokens, and i've yet to see evidence that the effort is any better than sonnet. perhaps i'm wrong? i guess i'll find out in the morning, but i'm beginning to believe the rumors that LLMs have peaked and the next evolutionary jump is going to have to come from some other idea. and that the magic really is in the harness, and that off-the-shelf harnesses are just not where it's at.

subversion

 i've just gotten up after a night with almost no sleep, my usual hip flexor discomfort has been amplified severely and i was unable to stretch it out.

the first thing i saw on my phone was a notification to say that my shared ride has started, and as frustrating (and expensive for no reason) as it is to realize that i forgot to cancel my booking for this evening, it's even more frustrating to learn that my booking was captured incorrectly. now i have to wait an hour to call them and try to get them to cancel it without charge...

yesterday was bizarre. i arrived at the office, walked around setting the air conditioners to a reasonable temperature, and then found a phone booth for my meeting with the guy who'd stood me up the previous afternoon. we spent the following two hours together tweaking things and running things, and my very clear takeaway was that anyone who wants to touch their systems needs to do a full team onboarding.

also, i was totally freezing in the phone booth, and it wasn't until i returned to my seat that i remembered that i'd brought a sweater to work 🤦‍♂️

my meeting with the client: before i went up, i commented to the guy next to me that i might well be on my way out. that was the vibe i felt when i sat down across from the client, and it lasted a couple of sentences. and then everything was on its head, as he explained to me what the past half a year has been about from a leadership / business perspective and how me and my team fit in, and what changes are incoming, and how perfectly aligned my team's new mandate is with my personal roadmap.

then we closed out with a pleasant, interesting conversation about the misaligned between architecture and organizational structure and what we could or should be doing.

then i walked out with the strange sensation that either we're exceptionally well-aligned, or i'm being pranked.

i went out to pick up lunch, and ate with the guy who sits next to me, and then grabbed another booth to have a meeting with my manager. it was a different conversation, but not that different. whereas the client had been unsurprised by some of my suggestions, some of them clearly caught my manager off-guard and that was validating.

as much as i hated having to put together and deliver monday's presentation, i learned a whole lot of really important stuff while doing so and it's completely changed the trajectory of my week and how i think about things.

i spent some more time trying to make an AI agent implement metrics responsibly, then came home. i took mr smear out for a short walk, and to draw cash and pick up beers for the evening. on the way i told him all about my day, and when i got to the end he let me know that he hadn't been paying attention and had no idea what i'd said to him. then he told me a story, and when he was done i asked him to repeat it because i hadn't been paying attention. i don't know if he really cared enough to get the message :/

i walked over to my ride's apartment, and away we went to hod hasharon.

half the evening was lovely, half of it was awkward. i had some really interesting, some even productive, conversations. i met some fascinating people. the vegan food only arrived at around 10.30pm, by which stage i didn't care any more. i went deep discussing the second lebanon war, i encountered an older soldier whose sister reminded me that my bnei akiva shevet was emunah. i didn't bother a couple of celebrity heroes of mine, though i did truly want to.

on the way back, i grilled my ride for his aliyah story and was blown away by how different it was from all the other mixed couple stories i've heard. i guess the law doesn't apply equally when you're rich and influential...

i showered, had a cup of tea, wound down and went to bed. i've just got my rental charges cancelled - thankfully - and i've finished my first coffee, and i'm not sure what this morning's going to bring. i'm feeling particularly proud of myself for having thought to shut mr smear's blinds when i got in last night; it's mighty peaceful this morning :P

trepidation

prior to leaving the apartment, we wanted to record a video for my freshly octogenarian cousin. this ended up in drama because mr smear and i had had a misunderstanding about screentime...

...

my mentor didn't get back to me until the evening, and i couldn't not say anything. after getting to the office, i spent an hour or so preparing a message for my client and manager, and ran it past my mother as a sanity check, and fired it off.

it wasn't until the middle of the night that i got a response, which was my client politely thanking me for my input and scheduling a face-to-face. so today's gonna be interesting.

because i'm generally bored, i got a phone call from my wife to inform me that my son, at the public toilets at the mall, had managed to drop his phone into the urinal. and because that wasn't enough, he'd decided to wash it thoroughly with soap and water 🤦‍♂️

then later she called again to inform me that she'd shorted the kitchen circuit by trying to "fix" the toaster while it was still plugged in. FML

for my afternoon meeting, i sat down in the phone booth and waited a few minutes for the guy to show up... he didn't. but while i was there anyway, and i didn't have a heck of a lot of productive stuff to do anyway, i randomly revisited a project i worked on a couple of months ago and got to work fixing memory leaks. i was so excited about doing something constructive that i ended up leaving the office much later than i'd planned...

during that time - after i'd returned to my desk, at least - two weird things happened. i missed the beginning of the first, so i have no idea if this literally happened or if everyone was in on some big joke: apparently one of the guys i've been working with pooped himself? and had to pick it up off the floor? or maybe they were kidding and a dog had left him a present? i don't know. it was very strange, and after i asked (and was told it actually was him) i felt really stupid for asking.

the second, i heard that another guy i've been working closely with just got fired. i hope that's not true.

the third, my client paying our section a visit. after my message. at no point did he attempt to converse with me, but he wasn't unfriendly when i walked past him and said hi, so 🤷‍♂️

...

mr smear was an asshole to me when i got home, which on top of everything else really sucked.

i spoke to my mentor, who used much more colorful language than me when i described the level of idiocy i'm dealing with.

over dinner, we watched half of fern gully, which is good, but upsetting to gd...

after mr smear's shower we had a massive fight over him being rude, but we did have a good conversation afterwards and bedtime was pleasant enough.

i went to bed a little earlier than usual, and i slept alright.

mr smear and i both woke up too early this morning. after reading and resting and stretching, i hunted down the old phones and began the friction-filled process of switching him back to his previous phone. also, learned that rescuing a phone with rice is an absolutely useless old wives' tale.

...

i'm trying to solve a big organizational problem in my head before my meeting with my client. my world is mad.

squaring up

 well, i managed to join the rollerblading group last night! my neck and shoulder were in trouble - still are - but i was able to keep it together.

it was officially "social", and a bunch of people brought there kids, which was really cool. i was taking it easy, and overall had a good time, but towards the end we skated very close to home so i bailed early.

it took me quite a while to cool down, and after showering i made myself a cup of tea and played slay the spire 2 until about 1am, then finally went to bed.

i slept pretty well.

...

regarding the thrilling adventures of lovelace and babbage: i haven't decided yet how i feel about the comics themselves - so far, fun - but the preface and the footnotes are fantastic.

my body's making it very clear that it understands that i exercised last night (everything's responding slower than i expect, and i have that good soreness). my neck and shoulder are threatening me, but i seem to be okay. i've paid the rent, and the water bill, and the building fees, and i'm now getting ready to go to work and have some very difficult conversations.

politely backwards

 today was f***ed. it began alright - i slept okay, had a peaceful morning, and got to the office in good spirits in spite of my trepidation regarding the weirdness i experienced yesterday before leaving.

i spent some time arranging to go to a game dev convention in a couple of weeks, which i'm excited about, and then dived back in to troubleshooting. then i received a concerning message from one of the data guys, and i headed over for what turned into a kind of intervention.

...

i've been talking with these guys about what i'm working on for over a month now. i asked them for help, they basically told me to get on with it. i've worked hard - the heaviest lifting being constant fighting to make sense of how everything works, with AI helping but also hindering at the same time - and it's been rough. demoralizing. and i've been under big pressure.

but hey, i've gotten the work done. i've sent them tons of code to review, and they've (allegedly) reviewed it, and were satisfied enough with it to merge it. now they're saying that everything about my approach has been wrong from the get-go, and that these are highly sensitive systems, and that outsiders really shouldn't be working on them directly.

setting aside the surreal moment wherein the second guy made it all about "blame" and "shaming"*, i'm stunned by just how farcical it all is. to their credit, they both made an effort to behave professionally and tactfully after having thoroughly screwed me over.

* i seem to have successfully diffused the situation by explaining that if anyone was being shamed it was me.

then the third guy came in, and informed me that the reprieve i've been enjoying due to their unresolved issues might be turning into something else entirely. at this point i'm not sure whether this means that my work has been rendered irrelevant, or whether that speeds up my time-to-extended-deadline right into the past...

...

i kept my cool, but immediately left to come home for lunch, with a deep desire to yell my frustrations at the sky. i tried discussing what had happened with my mom on the way, and we both ended up irritated because she couldn't hear me and i didn't know she couldn't hear me. i arrived home to find my son standing at the entrance on his phone, having just arrived from the early ending of the last day of school.

he welcomed me home and informed me that he and "everyone else" had literally thrown all their books into the trash, which distracted me from my own nonsense and drove me totally nuts in a different way. i was gobsmacked.

we went over his end of year report while i ate lunch, and it was relatively good. the fact that he didn't get kicked out of the school, and that he appears to be welcome to continue in the next year, is simply amazing to us and we're very grateful.

omg he's going to be turning eleven soon.

i delayed returning to the office, going so far as to shave my beard before i went, and once there i spent the following two hours writing up reports of what had transpired and compiling a timeline, interspersed with strolling around the office and staring out windows or at the views from the balconies.

i came home, helped unpack the first round of groceries, then took mr smear for a short walk. then i did not-a-hell-of-a-lot until dinner. we had a nice dinner, finished watching zootopia 2 (we were entertained, but i don't like it), spoke to my mom, and mr smear has just convinced me to let him have screen time before late summer holidays bed time.

fine.

getting it over with

a lot more presentation work, and then lunch with the AI guys relating all the things i've been learning about to my client's systems. very interesting stuff.

then a couple of hours trying to make sense of my project work, but ten minutes to presentation and discovering a glaring issue with my slides.

getting through the presentation by waffling poorly for the first half, only picking up steam towards the second. i feel bad for everyone i was talking to.

leaving the office late on a bit of a low note, as i was stuck on stuff that really doesn't make sense.

i ate a lot of dinner in spite of arriving home without much appetite. zootopia 2 is awful writing, but the jokes are excellent.

drama at bedtime: gd struggling to make her peace that we might not be able to afford a dog.

most of an episode of ludwig, absent-mindedly watching and playing for a while, now considering going to bed soon.

(trying to) be prepared

 what a bizarre start to my day: i slept alright (i had trouble in the middle of the night again, but i got up immediately and stretched hard), woke up a little before my alarm, and began my day by completing judge dredd: the small house (brilliant) and reading a little bit further into the thrilling adventures of lovelace and babbage which i started on friday evening.

i'm not sure how i feel about the fiction aspects of it*, which i guess is the whole point, but the non-fiction intro is really interesting.

* mr smear hates it

someone i work with just gave me a voucher for a game dev conference happening in a couple of weeks, and it turned out to be for the full amount! i wouldn't have been able to go otherwise, and now i'm trying to make sure that i can get there from an admin/client point of view.

yesterday:

the morning actually began with a visit from the building's plumber. did i mention my neck and shoulder have been giving me trouble since friday? well, i got plenty of exercise filling water buckets and cleaning the floors... the guy managed to clear the blockage though; turns out my mom called it when she was here (i don't remember this at all) - one of the inhabitants of the planter, long before our time, sent its roots all the way down to ground floor.

i spent about four hours yesterday - most of my work day - preparing my presentation for this afternoon. along the way i found my company handbook (my mentor directed me) and still couldn't get access to the presentation templates. i subsequently learned that nobody likes the platform, and nobody's maintaining it. lovely. fortunately, someone a while back made an AI-powered presentation builder, and it works really well so i'm sticking with that.

i really want to fix the platform though. i *despise* bad onboarding experiences.

i did do a little client work yesterday, but i'm kinda stuck waiting on a PR review, and in any event the research for my presentation has turned up a couple of interesting threads to pull for them as well - not least being how conway's law applies to a company post-reorg.

in the evening, i went out for a walk and to draw some money to pay mr smear's school book fine, and i was panicked about our financial situation the entire way there and back. when i returned, i sat down and did something i should've done ages ago - i revived an old budget spreadsheet and reconfigured it for our current lifestyle.

in theory, we should have some spare change every month. in practice, i think i'm missing something important. i was surprised to see how much insurance i'm paying each month once all the numbers are consolidated... according to my mom it's reasonable for it to be around 6-10% of one's gross salary, which if true means i'm actually paying less than could be expected *raised eyebrows*

i've also realized that i have to amortize big costs like summer day camps and spectacles if i'm to make sense of things.

we started watching zootopia 2 last night, the jokes are really good but i'm *so* over cash grabs and the writing is incoherent :(

...

hi ho, hi ho...

movie rink

i spent most of my weekend recuperating. playing slay the spire 2 and avoiding any mental heavy lifting.

i got up late yesterday, managing to salvage some actual rest. the meaningful stuff from yesterday is as follows:

1. watching a good length of blade runner. mr smear got a bit lost in the plot at some point, so we stopped for now (perhaps he'll be ready for it in another couple of years)

2. watching a good length of avatar: the way of water. i think we all got bored, the writing is atrocious.

3. taking mr smear rollerblading, spending some time at the rink. overall we had a good time, and he's making really good progress ^_^

we finished watching splash over dinner, it's a strange movie to say has aged well, but there you go.

gd and i watched some more of ludwig and then i crashed, going to bed early. the penance for which was spending most of the night suffering from lower back and hip flexor discomfort, too tired to get up but too uncomfortable to sleep.

i got up this morning, made myself a coffee and sat reading judge dredd: the small house on the balcony until mr smear left for school. now i have a lot of work to do.

trapped in the nothing

 i passed out watching ludwig, then dragged myself into bed. i didn't sleep well, though, oh no - i woke up in the middle of the night with my neck having seized in a way that triggered a massive headache, and even though i managed to massage it enough to get it to settle down, it's still hurting and causing flashes of intense pain every so often.

did i mention that i had a lot of stuff to do today? i'm so freaking dysfunctional right now. i have bandwidth for bullshit, nothing more. gd and i did a shopping run, big data came down to give our balcony a colonoscopy (his endoscope works well enough, but wasn't able to thread it anywhere too interesting), he and his way hung around for a little while, and now...

... now i'm feeling broken and useless and idon'twanna.

oh, i finished the alice in borderland book this morning, it's pretty good.

banana drama llama karma farmer trauma

 today was a better day, even though that's obviously off a pretty low bar. i actually slept through to my alarm this morning, and began my day reading some more alice in borderland - it's good, but the main reason i'm getting through it is because mr smear's read it already and i'm not sure if there's anything problematic in it :P

i prepared a message for the office manager regarding the whole vegan options debacle, but gd and my mother both agreed that it was a terrible idea, and that next time there's an upcoming event i should just tell her not to bother.

just after i arrived at the office and joined my team daily, i saw that i'd missed a bunch of messages from early in the morning - an incident, with me as the primary suspect. fortunately, it didn't take long to figure out what had happened, and while i was the trigger for the issue, neither the action itself nor its resolution were on me.

i proceeded to spend all day fighting with AI to figure out what i was supposed to be doing. the model i used cost a lot more money than usual*, and i'm not convinced the results were significantly better...

* i've seen the company "leaderboard", today, and the top four spenders are my two teammates, and two of the guys i work next to :P

gd packed me a sushi and pancake lunch, which i ate on the balcony, kind of admiring the view while listening to interesting youtube videos. very social.

in the afternoon, while waiting for an AI investigation, i saw an email come in from someone claiming to be a university grad. i had to verify their identity because i initially thought it was one of the usual phishing attacks i received, but it seems like a researcher is legitimately interested in my comic adaptation and wants to ask me about it!

my two primary intentions behind the project are to get the sonnets into the mainstream via teenagers and young adults, and to manipulate the ivory tower of academia to engage with my interpretation. so this has potential to be an important beginning!!

my client's happy hour was far superior to my employer's, the vegan food was so delicious i had to double check the ingredients :P

i came home, picked up mr smear and the book we bought unnecessarily on tuesday evening, and we walked back to book store, experiencing the titular banana drama llama karma farmer trauma that my BDLKF son generates.  on the way we ran into the dad of one his previous classmates, and in our smalltalk i found myself joking that "we can use a few rocket attacks just to give us a sense of stability" and making us both uncomfortable :P

we couldn't get a refund, but we could exchange it. they didn't have any english books for kids or young adults, they didn't have drawing equipment we were interested in, their toys and games selection was pretty shitty, but eventually i found something - a book for gd entitled the mammoth book of bizarre crimes.

...

we paid, left the store, and i decided to take a short detour to look for supermarket / pharmacy underwear (it's the best value for money IMO). while waiting at a red light, an arab wolt driver rammed into the guy standing next to us, then immediately yelled at him to get out of the way. the american oleh immediately prepared to throw down by removing his shirt*, then pointed and laughed out loud when he realized that the delivery box on the back of the wolt driver's electric bike had a his number on it, which he immediately started memorized as the driver tried to get away.

* which i later explained to my son was an enormous tactical error - if he'd done that to intimidate me i would have knocked him out while he was struggling to get it over his head 🤦‍♂️

while we were exchanging details so that i could bear witness, the driver came back and threatened him with a large plank of wood with a nail in it. this big american dude kicked off his flip flops and ran towards him*, and i started recording. when the two of them disappeared around the corner, i felt sure that the guy was going to get murdered.

* yet another terrible tactic, as i explained to mr smear

when i realized they were moving further away*, i followed and told mr smear (who'd been following me) to wait for me. just then the driver started throwing rocks - massive rocks, double-fist sized, one of which whizzed past me and another broke just in front of me and a piece skipped towards mr smear.

* at this point, the american yelled the phrase "yesh li mispar shelcha, dickhead!", which is a simply wonderful catchphrase 🤣

he chased the mad wolt driver away, and another witness (also an olah) came to exchange details and help him call the police*. he asked me to wait a bit for his girlfriend to arrive, he needed someone else to tell her he hadn't started it :P

* some old guy came past and tried to convince him to "let it go", which pisses me right off. 

mr smear and i came back home, discussing everything that took place, with him telling me the story from his perspective and including some particularly funny takes. the first he saw of the incident was the guy taking his shirt off, and then he noticed that he'd removed his shoes, and he immediately thought to himself "what, are you gonna take off your shorts as well?"

later, he quipped: "he has balls of steel. and a brain made of the same material" 🤭

...

we had dinner watching more of splash, though we had to turn it off to get mr smear to actually eat. then he told the story to my mom, and the shower and bedtime routine went relatively smoothly. now that i've got all of this down, gd and i are going to watch some ludwig. ludwig is good.

blown fuse

 today was fucking miserable. i spent most of the company hackathon just wanting to be anywhere else, questioning my life choices and feeling very, very shit about myself and the situation i found myself in.

yesterday:

after significantly more effort, i managed to push monday's changes, and then follow that up with more changes. sitting next to the AI experts has become a legitimate challenge, because we have really interesting conversations all the time, and i need to keep awkwardly bowing out to get some actual work done.

i came home for lunch yesterday, gd made me more sushi, and it was a great escape from the office. just as i was preparing to head back, she received a phone call from a very worried mr smear - he admitted that he'd drawn IN MARKER all over the book we'd had to re-purchase for him a couple of months ago. the day before they had to return all the books.

fortunately, we had plenty of time to coordinate our responses, so we could keep on him on edge while figuring out an appropriate punishment that's harsh enough for his being on edge to be warranted, and for him to learn the lesson, of course, while still being fair enough to reward his being honest and upfront about it.

when i was finally able to get home from the office, i dropped my bag and immediately took him to the bookstore to purchase another copy. the walk there and back was long enough to have a bunch of conversations, including follow-up talks about what to do if he gets lost again, and the rest of the evening was another sushi dinner (and starting splash), and random mindless shit until climbing into bed.

today:

i woke up late, which was already a terrible start to the day. and my stomach was doing a thing. i left with mr smear, saying goodbye to him halfway to the school and walking to my office from there. i arrived having not had a cup of coffee yet, so i made one, immediately remembering how much i dislike their coffee options.

there was a large spread for breakfast, but i didn't see any vegan options so i found my team's station and started trying to get set up. of course encountering lots of weird issues that i hadn't had before.

the office manager told me to stop being a nerd (it was her expression for the day) and go eat, so i got up and asked her if there were vegan options. "of course there are", she said, and aimed me at one of the caterers. he walked me around, showing me that a) he didn't understand what "vegan" means and b) that the only options that seemed trustworthy were all buried in cheese. no, i didn't want him to wash them for me. that whole ordeal was worse - more insulting - than them just admitting that there weren't any options.

having started my day thoroughly on the wrong foot, i then began to meet my teammates. two of them were very clear about not wanting to be there, three of them arrived late, apologized, and then promptly fucked off for the rest of the day. that left five of us altogether, with exactly one guy being enthusiastic and two in total being productive (not including myself).

to be fair, though, the lack of productivity in the two guys who weren't interested in the first place was largely due to my lack of planning. it wasn't until a short while before demo time that we had the general architecture locked in, and at that point i learned that i was supposed to have been putting together the presentation and presenting our efforts to ~100 people.

this was a rock bottom moment for me.

there was nothing i felt right about presenting, everything was utter dogshit, after a lousy, miserable day that included navigating some pretty shitty attitudes. i was so stressed that i - only half in jest - tried to get anyone else in the team to take charge, and eventually one of the more experienced guys suggested that i ask the organizers to skip our team.

which they did, but then everyone seemed disappointed, the enthusiastic team member especially so.

most of the demos were really good, but i couldn't enjoy them properly because i was so nervous that they'd forget they agreed to skip us and call me up anyway. by the time i left, i felt absolutely disgusted with myself and with the day, completely demoralized, and full of bitterness.

i called gd and let her know how i was feeling, then i called my mom, and then i tried to get my head into a better place while on the bus home but to no avail. one of our upstairs friends walked into the building with me and made the mistake of asking "how are you?", and then i automatically responded with the truth and immediately felt bad for doing so. i sent her an apology a little while later.

our landlord and his handyman had been sending me voice messages all day, which i detest, and they became more and more confusing and annoying until eventually we spoke (just after i put mr smear to bed), and i went downstairs and discovered that the aircon has been on, and isn't dripping. he said some stuff that confused me, which i'm too tired to care about, and now that gd and i have finished the first episode of ludwig (which is really fun) and i've posted this, i'm going to try to wind down and fuck off into dreamland.

slop machines

 the highlight of my work day was coming home for lunch and being present for the transit company reps to evaluate the state of our external-facing windows and doors. it looks like they're going to replace them (or subsidize the replacement), and they were very pleasant about it all. apparently, the construction (whenever it takes place) is expected to last about six months, and shouldn't be noisy at night 🤞

[we're still suffering trauma from 2017]

i moved desks twice, i'm now sitting with the AI specialists - it's nice, but also distracting :P

i spent all day babysitting AIs and PRs. the thing i did that made me feel the most productive was this:

slop machines

oh, yes - and i had to suffer through yet another team presentation that was put together with AI (zero shame about admitting it), from a guy that's going to be in my hackathon team on wednesday. i would feel haughty, but just as i asked him a question my phone rang with an unknown number, and i was on video, and i was so worried about it being urgent that i asked my question, muted myself and answered the phone, and only afterwards registered just how rude that was :/

[i just figured out what the call was about - they finally fixed the uncloseable tap i complained about when we went to the rink]

when i finally did manage to extricate myself from the office, i rushed home and got mr smear onto his rollerblades, and we went out for a spin. HUGE improvement, really exciting stuff! and until he feel in the park we'd both forgotten that he was supposed to be keeping his arm safe... fortunately he landed on his other arm :P

we had a great sushi dinner, watching infinity train, i read some more of alice's adventures in wonderland and then settled down to try and be productive. my intention had been to be productive on my AI harness efforts, but instead i spent about two hours alternating between random shit (and spire-slaying) and babysitting that damned PR.

i really hope i'm done with it for this round. i'm also becoming increasingly aware of the fact that i'm not completely confident that i understand more than just the gist of it, so i guess i'm going to need to address that in the morning. i think i'd be less uncomfortable about the way we're working if we didn't have an entirely artificial deadline looming that management's taking very seriously.

sleep journal entry

sleep journal entry: i had some difficulty falling asleep initially, then suffered a combination of hip flexor distress and general insomnia that lasted most of the night. i was awake when mr smear  came sneaking into our room to take the kindle, i considered shooting out a hand to scare him but he was making such a good effort at trying to be stealthy that i let him think he'd succeeded.

i just finished reading watchmen, it's so full of genius, wit and wisdom and taste and cunning, it truly is a masterpiece.

now i'm free and have just over two weeks remaining to read the graphic novels we borrowed from the library about two weeks ago...

it pours

i'm so freaking tired.

it was another rough day, tweaking AI skills and configurations and my PRs, and going around in the inevitable circles.

i went out in the evening for a short walk (the excuse was to buy another double-adapter, but i really did need real movement and my hip flexors had been agitated all day), and went i got home i was surprised to find that mr smear hadn't arrived yet - he'd missed his stop, and gotten off when he was almost at the next city.

my son learned some navigation skills today, and hopefully a little common sense. i went to retrieve him, and he made me lose my temper while i was trying to locate him by not only not answering my questions, but by telling me what i *should* have asked him when those answers wouldn't have helped me in the slightest 🤦‍♂️

when we finally met up, his lip began to tremble and i thought he was going to laugh, which made me giggle, but then he burst into tears instead - he'd been legitimately afraid. it wasn't until we finally got home that i realized *just* how lucky we'd been: when we came inside, his phone battery was at 1%. without family link's location service and a whole lot of phone time, i might have been able to guess which general direction he'd gone in but i have no idea how we would even have begun searching for him 🤯

so that happened.

on our way into the building we bumped into big data, who subsequently came down and managed to clear the cement at the entrance to the drain. then he had a beer and we chatted, and then it was our dinner time. we watched some of the first episode of the highlander series, and then it was bedtime for mr smear...

... and then, after i read to him for a bit and had had a shower myself, i saw that big data and another upstairs neighbor had done another experiment, and i saw that there was some water pooling above the drain. also, it turns out our A/C drips and had been doing damage downstairs.

FFS.

i had stuff i wanted to do tonight, but i'm so damned over it. i'm going to try going to bed now and i'm praying for a reasonable night's sleep.

pre-work work

 okay, i seem to have gotten a relatively good night's sleep, even though i could have used a heck of a lot more. i drank coffee and read some more watchmen (i'm nearing the end), said good bye to mr smear, and then dived right in to fighting with the municipality and the car rental company, which so far seems like an expensive, losing battle.

then i climbed over the balcony divider and discovered that our end of the blockage from last night is rock-solid.

then i paid the electricity bill.

then i had a tiff with my wife over my enthusiasm for the news that the EU has voted to deport illegals and terrorists. then she left for her first sewing lesson in about a year 🤞

now i've had breakfast, and i've posted this, and i'm about to switch machines and hopefully finish up the work i've been trying to push since wednesday 🙄

forced pause

 this weekend has been a trip.

yesterday:

yesterday morning began with us sending mr smear off to school, and me (after reading a bit of watchmen) settling down to get a whole lot of work done because it's been piling up and the deadlines are looming.

so, of course, i received an urgent phone call from mr smear's paediatrician to say that according to the radiologist there *is* a crack in mr smear's wrist, and she sent us a referral to immediately return to the hospital. gd and i rushed to get out the door to pick him up from the school, upset that the doctors would release him and upset that they could make such a dramatic error, then took him to the children's hospital, where we fortunately were immediately ushered into the ER and seen to very quickly.

it didn't take long for their trauma specialist to study the x-rays and inform us that the orthopaedic surgeon that had seen him the night before was right, that the radiologist had misread the images, and that our morning had been thoroughly disrupted for no good reason. and mr smear was bummed out because he was explicitly instructed not to use his phone or kindle or play games with his right hand, which he's been struggling to comply with...

during the course of the running around, i'd contacted my teammate for help, having figured out a piece of my project that could be easily delegated. i was very pleased and grateful to see that by the afternoon he'd managed to make some progress!

once we got home, i spent the rest of the day doing research and preparation for a lecture, and putting together and publishing a tool for migrating MCP configurations between AI harnesses, and watching a good chunk of monty python and the holy grail (mr smear got bored, but he's still quoting some of it anyway) and the gamers (the director's cut) which he found hilarious ^_^

oh, yes, and we took a walk in the evening to the special recycling facility and then to pick up some snacks.

dinner was great, and we finished watching grease, but the enjoyment was significantly diminished by some drama - mr smear, apparently unintentionally, was quite disrespectful to gd and it took some time for the situation to calm down.

today:

i woke up relatively late, after a pretty reasonable night's sleep. after a little more watchmen reading and cleaning the balcony, we put on the golden child which both gd and i remembered fondly. mr smear walked out the room halfway through, i passed out for bits of it, and overall gd and i were both saddened by how disappointing the experience was.

i'd spent some time the night before writing an article arguing the necessity of introducing our kids to the pop culture we grew up with, and this afternoon i sat outside and finished it. i said a lot of things i'm quite proud of, but only after publishing did i realized that the title's all wrong and it's too late to do much about it.

getting gemini to produce coherent images for the article was hard.

our second movie today (because of mr smear's arm, you see) was gremlins 2, which we watched beginning to end and all thoroughly enjoyed :)

i took mr smear for an exercise walk in the park, after which i had a long chat with my sister who's struggling with a whole bunch of difficult stuff right now. that's the sad stuff. the good stuff is that it looks like there's a good chance she'll be able to pay us a visit in the coming months! i didn't realize that we haven't seen her for almost half of mr smear's life, in my head we sent her off just a few years ago 🤯

i said goodbye thinking we were about to have dinner, but that plan was derailed by a sudden flood of water on our balcony threatening to come into our apartment. we set up a barrier, sent photos and requests to our neighbors to please stop whatever they were doing, and big data came downstairs to lend us a hand (or do the lion's share of the work) in trying to clear the blockage. it's a good thing i could lend him my proper galoshes, it was messy work and it was late by the time we stopped and agreed to resume in the morning.

i started on my dinner while while mr smear and his daughter (who'd brought some stuff down) finished theirs, and then it was time for getting mr smear ready and into bed. i'm sure i've left out some important stuff, but tomorrow's a big day (as is every day in the upcoming week or two) and i think i'm done for now.

not broken, well-fed

 i feel like i'm just about to fall apart.

this morning began with me getting out of bed a bit late, reading more of watchmen, making a bit of progress in a new side project before heading off to work.

work was mostly about migrating to claude - i'm still experiencing a lot of weirdness - and then we stopped for a small lunch (a tiny, oddly nice onion and raisin bagel) in preparation for the group outing, and then before i had a chance to grab a coffee and do something productive i received a phone call from the school: mr smear, in tears, believing that his arm might be broken.

i rushed out to make my way there - i tried to catch a cab, but the guy who accepted my fare was still busy with another one - and the fastest way to go was to walk quite a ways and jump on a bus. in retrospect, there was a better light rail option, but i was rushed 🤷‍♂️

in a nutshell: my son has decided that he's a claustrophile, so during a free class he decided to stand behind the classroom door. one of the kids in the class - one who's been quite aggressive and mildly violent with him all year - saw him and smashed the door into him. apparently the kid didn't expect to cause as much harm as he did, according to mr smear he seemed sincerely remorseful and apologized profusely.

i arrived to find him seemingly alright, although when we did get a chance to stop moving at the light rail, his arm did look a bit bent. off we went to the clinic to show his doctor, which was a walk, and she was very impressed with his newfound ability to communicate what happened in hebrew (although i had to reign him in a little). she gave us urgent referrals for imaging, so we went to the next clinic, which was another walk, for an up-and-down set of x-rays, bandaging and receiving a referral for the hospital because all the doctors had left already, and then picking up the x-ray disc. then it was another walk to the hospital (all this because the clinics and hospital are relatively close to each other, but the bus routes between them are complicated) where gd met us and took over.

the group had left for the outing more than an hour before, so i rushed to catch a couple of buses to get the office, pick up my bag, then catch the light rail and walk (another significant walk) to meet up with them.

i missed the food tour part of it, and i was starting late with the drinking part of it, but i made it just in time for the eating part, and omg it was amazing food, and there was a lot, and i ate and drank so much (i guess that's relative, two light drinks and three shots, but i usually don't drink at all), and the atmosphere was excellent and we all had a lot of fun. like, really, a lot of fun.

i was interrupted twice by phone calls: the first, the mother of the kid who hurt mr smear; i wasn't quite cold, but not exactly warm either (i don't really like her, she's interesting to talk to but immensely disrespectful), and learned that her son wanted to contact mr smear but hadn't told her why. so i told her why, and then sent her mr smear's number, and she's assured me (sure) that it won't happen again.

the second call was from gd to say that his arm looks fine. which is an enormous relief for a whole bunch of reasons.

half the group continued on to a bar, a few of us walked together to the light rail, and then i switched to the bus home, and arrived just in time to take the last few bits of mr smear's dinner laffa, and start winding down for the night. after putting him to bed, i put an hour into the side project, and now i've written this, and i think i just might go to bed.

girl drama claude drama

 hoooo boy, it's been a couple of days. i'm going to be rushing through stuff i don't want to rush through...

yesterday:

arriving in the office just in time for my meeting, then spending a good half hour trying to get my computer connected to the network. nobody knows why my vpn connection keeps dropping, and i lost a significant amount of ephemeral context - not just work time - resolving it.

i spent a good chunk of my day running test jobs to enable me to finish working on one of the changes, and then i had to leave early to pick up mr smear, grab a bite to eat (and a cup of coffee), and head south to his class end-of-year pool party at a country club.

not only did we have quite a time getting there, between bus line switches and an unhelpful transit app, and some drugged out guy aggressively harassing innocent bystanders (he came too close for comfort while mr smear was fiddling with his sandals, but i think he ducked when he picked up my vibe).

while we were trying to get there, gd had managed to get herself lost on the way to the dentist, and there was much drama as i tried to troubleshoot remotely for her...

the pool party was really cool. the kids in this school are a different culture completely, much less cynical, and there were a few "performances", a couple of nice speeches, and then into the water. only a couple of parents went in with the kids - myself being one of them - and i had a good chat with the mom of one of mr smear's friends. and then some fun with mr smear before getting out (he was disappointed, but he was having a good time with his friends) into a chilly post-water 28 degrees.

i sat with a couple of other parents and we really got in to politics, ai, economics and ideologies, it was an exhilarating rabbit-hole dive and i think we all enjoyed it. when we were thinking about leaving, the mom offered me and mr smear a ride home, which i gratefully accepted.

suddenly, mr smear came out the pool and declared that he was "bored" and ready to go, but i could tell by his expression that something was up. i walked with him a little and managed to get it out of him - one of the kids had told his class nemesis that he liked one of the girls, they all were chanting it loudly, and the girl in question heard and apparently seemed to quite enjoy the idea of mr smear liking her.

he was mortified, dying inside, and i gave him some calming advice... but also, when i asked him what her name was, had to inform him that we were going to be going home with them in the car!

both the kids were a bit distracted on the way to the vehicle, but she saved mr smear from the scenario he was particularly dreading by jumping into the front seat. but then, as we pulled out, mr smear let one rip - i don't think anyone else heard it, but he opened that window really quickly 🤣

the ride home was much less awkward, the little girl's very sweet, and he made it home in one piece :)

it was pretty late, we had an amazing dumpling-y dinner that gd's concocted, and a good conversation about relationships and responding to teasing at bedtime.

today:

i didn't sleep so well last night, i spent at least a couple of miserably hours lying in bed, not quite awake but certainly not asleep.

i received some good news this morning, and some not-so-good news: gd's physio treatments are finally being covered - half the amount, but considerably better than nothing - and my request to have the parking fine cancelled was rejected.

the main thing this morning before heading to work was switching my copilot subscription for a claude code one. i figured it made the most sense, not just because it seems better from a value-for-money point of view, but also because my client is switching everyone over to it and i have to learn how to work with it anyway.

so that was pretty much the story of my day: trying to get real work done while simultaneously trying to get claude code to work the way i want it to. it's not a trivial migration at all, and claude code does a bunch of things in an utterly infuriating way (and i'm not the only one in our area to feel this). that stretched the day into a particularly long and emotionally draining one - lots of "i REALLY hate claude" moments - and i got stuck on something at the end of the work day that made it take longer to get out of the office than i could handle.

i picked up some healthy snacks from the supermarket on the way home. i wanted to take mr smear rollerblading, but he was doing hebrew homework and i walked in just in time to go over it with him. we both learned some stuff, but overall i'm very pleased with how he's doing.

we watched some more grease at dinner, which is initiating quite a few interesting conversations, and after dinner we had a lengthy and heated discussion about an incident with the crazy mom's manipulative daughter at school today; i'm so grateful that he voluntarily let us know immediately after school came out, because that gave me an opportunity to text his teacher before the madwoman poisons things.

i managed to do a little bit of productive stuff since putting him to bed, but i had to stop to write this and now it's feeling like bedtime.

sleep journal entry

i slept relatively well, but i think the past few days of not sleeping well are catching up to me.  i just got up off the couch after more than an hour "sleeping in". when sending mr smear off to school, i informed him that we're going to the class pool party this afternoon. he's looking forward to it, but disappointed that we probably won't go rollerblading today.

i really hope this sticks!

train of thought

i missed my sleep journal entry this morning:

3rd coffee 15.23

23.54 bed

6.36 up, not great sleep

that's because although the day started just fine*, my alarm went off at 8am to warn me that i had to be on the far side of kfar saba by 9.30, for a company (my employer) volunteering effort. i dropped everything, got dressed, rushed out to the bus stop, and travelled to my destination, which took a bit more than an hour and a bus switch along the way.

* fine, aside from gd being furious about the "deal" that trump ostensibly signed, which i later understood was yet more meaningless bullshit (it's essentially an agreement to extend the bullshit negotiations)

i arrived a little early, but the address wasn't precise. i asked the office manager / organizer to clarify, and that's when she called to drop the bombshell that the effort had been cancelled. and everyone had been informed of the cancellation except me, because she hadn't noticed that i'd registered (i'd registered during the initial sign-up).

what a fuck-up. so i bussed all the way back, having lost of couple of hours of my life that i really could have used. i quickly ate breakfast, then continued on to the office for a very long, busy day full of a mix of continuing to assist the previous client team with continuous incidents (two coincidences together, today) and making a bit of headway into understanding my own project.

also, a group meeting that was supposed to be a talk, but the speaker wasn't available so my mentor volunteered me to share what i've been up to. fortunately, that went well and turned into an entertaining and constructive conversation.

oh, and there was a small dog in the office bullying the big dog. that made me dislike him, but then he peed next to my shoe (on my shoelace!) so now i dislike him even more.

i left the office an hour and a half later than intended, arriving home with less than ten minutes to spare before another meeting that i'd forgotten about. that one went on for about an hour and half, but it was very interesting and, i hope, productive.

i had a quick dinner and we said good night to my mom, then gd and i did the grocery shopping, then i made myself a tea and played slay the spire 2, and then i was about to go to bed when i realized that i hadn't recorded by journal entry for the day, and now it's tomorrow so it's too late so i wrote this instead.

and now i can go to bed.

electric pukaloo

 our pre-hackathon talk was interesting, i was grateful that my wife had come home in time to keep me supplied with coffee and for our beanbags which served as both seat and stand.

in the background i was installing local llm models, one of which initialized and was so heavy it killed my computer and it took so long to shut it down (everything was unresponsive, and the audio was jittering) that i had to rejoin the meeting from my personal laptop...

over lunch, gd and i watched the first bit of the ludwig pilot, and it starts off really strong!

i struggled to "wake up", as i mentioned before, and by the time i was (relatively) ready to dive into my work i received a call from one of the juniors - the same jobs had died once again. i found what seemed to be a smoking gun, connected some dots, and it looked like a broken infrastructure upgrade, but later on (after finally wrapping my head around what i'm supposed to be doing) i got another call back to say it wasn't that, but rather a legitimate bug in the code. we hunted it down, and although it did eventually turn out to be the bug, i was mighty suspicious as it's a code path that hasn't been touched since the project inception and the likelihood of it "suddenly" becoming a problem is extremely low.

anyway, i helped out, essentially taking charge, and along with another of his teammates we managed to get it resolved. the boss / my client called me for an update, and once i'd made sure that the junior had it handled i was able to join my family for dinner.

i didn't mention that i'd taken a break earlier to go pick up some stuff from the shops - i made mr smear come out with me on his blades, though i was walking, and he was not in the mood. with that in mind, i think we were both pleasantly surprised by the end of it; not only was i very happy with his progress, but so was he, and he straight-up told me that he was wrong and that i was welcome to lord it over him, and that compared to the hell that is bicycles, rollerblading is heavenly.

so that happened ^_^

i was late to join mr smear and gd for dinner, and i ate arguably more than i needed to, and then mr smear and i ate the oranges i'd picked up earlier. everything was fine until we saw two highly active fruit fly larvae wriggling around the remains of his orange.

he's always had a thing about worms, creepy crawlies in general but worms in particular, and what followed was some serious high drama. and lots of googling to be able to assure him he'd be fine, and then i started feeling uncomfortable so i decided to try and throw up.

any time i successfully throw up "on command" it blows my mind.

anyway, the rest of the evening post emotional-rollercoaster was fine, i read a bit of alice's adventures in wonderland to him at bedtime, and have been slowly gearing down and preparing myself to try and get some sleep since.

jumpy

 in spite of my stress and my lower back (which has been griefing me for quite a few days now in spite of my consistency regarding iron and magnesium supplements), i managed to sleep last night.

i started the day reading more watchmen* (my favorite chapter, where rorschach is caught, also omg my son just read this stuff and i'd forgotten what it included), then sat down at my desk to get productive and realized that my son had left for school having forgotten his sports class shoes. so i jumped to get dressed, caught a bus (traffic lights and bus timing perfect), and dropped off his shoes and grabbed his sandals with literally two minutes to go until the bell rang.

* oh, i totally forgot - on friday evening i discovered a massive collection of books and comics i'd bought over the years from humble bundle, so i've read a couple of battlestar galactica comics (specifically one about time warping into parallel universes) and watched part of a video about the original series, and it's really shed new light on the reboot. i love how it's all canon, while all very different.

i came home and have been struggling to get shit done, though i did managed to put in a claim and complaint for gd's physio sessions.

the tami4 technician arrived, wore his shoes into the kitchen, reconnected the machine and pushed the button. water flowed nicely. it was apparently an "air bubble", and we could have had a slightly easier weekend after all.

i washed the entrance and kitchen floors, and i've made myself a coffee, and in half an hour i have a pre-hackathon meeting. i'm really having trouble getting my head in the game, i hope i "wake up" soon...

numbers games

 i was having a fine evening, and getting stuff done, right until i decided to look at my bank account about ten minutes ago. now i'm enjoying a mild anxiety attack. i feel like i last checked just a few days ago, and a whole bunch of those expenses weren't showing up... i know that a significant chunk of it is for the summer day camp, but still...

...

the rollerblading was fine, mostly positive, but the first, say, fifteen minutes saw me practicing patience in a very deliberate way. once we got to the park, mr smear opened up a bit and we both had a good time.

we started watching grease over leftover dinner, with lots of pausing to provide context 🙄

i think i need to find a way to relax, last night's sleeplessness was bad enough :/

detour

 there was a lot of kitchen stress last night, and some very serious (positive) conversations with mr smear about life in general in its wake. gd had ridiculous trouble with the gluten-free dumpling recipe, but the ultimate result was much better than the store-bought frozen ones...

i did nothing of value between late dinner and climbing into bed a bit after midnight. then i woke up, restless and sore, and for about two hours lay in bed, distressed but too tired to give up on trying to fall back to sleep. eventually i got up for a couple of hours of mindlessness, then finally returned to sleep for a couple more hours.

i didn't feel great this morning. i read some watchmen, i napped a little, and then i was going to start getting into the things i'd been intending to do today* when my alarm reminded me that i was going to one of ze germans' daughter's bat mitzvah...

* i'd intended - like most people - to put down money for claude in order to have access to the fable model to do some experimentation. i woke up to the news that that wasn't on the cards any more.

i had a long chat with horseman about AI and middle east politics before and on my walk there, broken only to get dressed and make coffee, and when running into our old neighbors and learning that there're a lot of kids in the building now and they've managed to force the building management to renovate the bomb shelter. too late for us, but i'm very relieved for them!

the bat mitzvah was really simple and tastefully done, all i consumed was liquids (only one alcoholic drink, though) and a little bit of the fruit salad, and i had a good time chatting with ze other germans (irish/swedish + austrian).  i got a ride home, realizing only at that point just how late in the day it was.

i'm now having a late coffee, mr smear's just completed a second hour of "productive" screen time (making animations) and is now having a bite to eat, and then we're going to head out for a bit more rollerblading.

is it art?

 we were excited for the end-of-year exhibit, and mr smear was apparently excited too, as evidenced by him phoning us from the secretary's office ten minutes before it started to ask us where we were.

but once there, he wasn't interested in letting us go through the exhibit - which is what we did last time - he tried to rush us through and made it quite unpleasant. eventually, we got to the very, very, very last corner of it and found his works. his class had three pieces up, and mr smear only had two of his on the boards, and of those pieces one of them was upsetting to gd because it involved roblox horror with a rabbit being chopped up.

so... not the greatest morning we could have imagined.

we bussed home, then went out to do the weekend shopping. about halfway through i suddenly felt ill, most likely caused by nerve pressure in my neck. the rest of the expedition was unpleasant to say the least - i despise friday shopping on a good day.

we came home, i lay down for a while, and felt a bit better when i eventually got up again. good enough to try taking apartment the shower head holder that's been bothering gd since we moved in.

it was gross, badly rusted, and it took a while for me to get it off the wall. leaving this:

but is it art?

see that shiny eye? that's the sharp remains of a screw that's not coming out.

i then returned to the store with mr smear to pick up a sixpack of water that i'd been in too much of a rush for earlier, and gd called me, distressed, because she'd bought the wrong kind of rice flour for the dumplings she and mr smear have been desperate for. a bit later, there were yells from the kitchen, which rapidly made their way into the office - gd had figured out how to turn the rice flour into sweet / sticky rice flour on her own!

and there was much rejoicing.

it's now erev shabbat, and i'm not quite sure what i should be doing, nor what i want to do. but i will post this:

AI slop, AI slop of horrors, AI slop, AI slop of terror...

weekend vibes

sleep journal entry:

i had four coffees yesterday. prior to my third coffee, i was falling apart, foggy and tired and sleepy and having trouble concentrating, for at least forty five minutes.

i woke up this morning from a dream in which i was arguing with schwarzenegger's terminator over how to approach an accounting problem.

yesterday:

i had some stuff to do in the morning, but i ended up having a long chat with urchin instead. i feel bad, because i think i made her feel bad about her new corporate employer when i talked about the trust issues in our industry that i previously posted about...

...

on my way into the office i had an idea: i think a lot of what's wrong with western society comes down to having been raised to believe that we can be anything and we can do anything, which, when taken literally, ends up with people who cannot bring themselves to accept and deal with reality. it's a societal illness.

...

the team i sit with was off volunteering, to it was a quiet morning in the office. it was still kinda quiet after they came in, so it was mostly a relaxed end to the week and i seem to have gotten a handle on the current phase of my project.

i came home for lunch, ate a couple of lotus cookies and fired off a troll message to mr smear thanking him and implying that i ate them all. when school ended, i received the following response:

both hilarious and scary - on the one hand, it felt like a "we need to talk about kevin" moment, on the other i was highly amused by his emoji fluency 🤣

we discussed the upcoming exhibit, and he told me he was only missing one piece that got lost a couple of months ago, and i asked him to recreate it when he got home. as much for me and gd as for him.

a while later, i received a picture of his recreation, and it was brilliant ^_^

the office happy hour started less happy because i inadvertently raised the issue of them not having any vegan treats when i, personally, wasn't interested in the temptation. but my boss is also vegan (apparently), so the organizers were quite stressed about it.

i grabbed a beer, and approached one of the AI gurus about my openspec experience (which we'd briefly discussed a couple of months ago), and he offered to sit with me for a bit. we ended up spending most of an hour and a half in a flurry of installations and experiments, and i was pleased to see his enthusiasm when he finally grokked what it is i want to build. i learned a lot from the conversation in general.

i had an awkward interaction with my boss on my way out, he wanted to know my project timeline and i began explaining what i'd already explained to my manager, "assuming no more surprises, and every step along the way we've learned new and surprising things"... and he cut me off: "first the estimate, then the disclaimer" :P

i came home, mr smear and i strapped on our blades, and i took him for a round. he was really nervous and scared, but we got through it and he had some really good moments. we also had two encounters with really sweet dogs; the first, a puppy who was peeing himself constantly with excitement, the second a huge, fluffy, very nosey girl. i very much appreciate the additional positive vibe injection into mr smear's early experiences ^_^

just before we got home, he tried to roll a bit on a downhill and hurt himself as he fell. he was upset and started sulking away, and i caught him and told him he had to show himself he could do it - i'd been telling him the entire ride that his body's capable, it's his brain that needs to be aligned. surprisingly, for the state he was in, he went "fuck it", turned and rolled and t-stopped beautifully!

i was so proud of him, not just for the physical success but for the attitude, and for not ending the ride on a negative note.

we finished watching little shop of horrors over dinner, and got him into bed, and then i sat down with gd and we talked about something that she's always done when we watched tv or movies together that's really unpleasant*. it feels like we got to the bottom of it - it's more a communication thing than anything else - and it was a relief.

* she just fucks off, while we're waiting for her to continue. anyway, it's a little complicated.

i did nothing last night, and went to bed relatively early because my eyelids were feeling particularly heavy.

this morning so far:

i got up late, finished another chapter of watchmen, and finally replaced the UV light and purifier of the tami 4. something went egregiously wrong, though, and now we don't have a tami 4 for the weekend and a technician is (thankfully so quickly) coming in on sunday morning.

now that i've posted this, pausing to tear up at the opening sequence of darwish - desert adventure 2025 (quoting udi kagan's הלם קרב), we're about to leave for the school for the end of year exhibit, very excited to see what mr smear's been up to!

entangled

i posted something this morning, and i'm disappointed that it hasn't got much attention:

nobody's talking about something that's really important: regardless of whether you've been retrenched or not, how do you trust an employer that would throw your fellow employees under the bus for the promise of cost cutting AI? how do you return to working for a company that did that to you? where's the incentive to work hard and behave as if you and your employers have a shared stake in the future of your company?

the accepted behavior of our industry leaders is nothing short of psychopathic, and nobody is calling them to account.  we've all just accepted that this is what business looks like now, and it's hurting not just the human beings who do the work and have families to provide for, but also the businesses themselves, and also our economies.

...

the pharmacy run was stressful. after waiting about half an hour, listening to music and knowing there were another ten numbers to go, i was suddenly yanked out of my reverie as i registered that my number was suddenly, unexpectedly up. i rushed to the counter, struggling to turn the music off (the button just didn't work) and get my paperwork out, only to find myself standing there waiting for someone who turned out to be a technician and not a pharmacist.

he was trying to fix the queue number system.

what followed was chaos, with a couple of us keeping track of the numbers because nobody - including the pharmacists - understand what was happening. as my meeting time got closer, i was approached by a woman who was also in a hurry and wanted to trade numbers.

anyway, that wasn't the worst of it. the worst of it was my credit card being declined, and having to set up gd's on my phone wallet with her validating it from her phone while the pharmacist became impatient and a large crowd was suddenly behind me. i managed to get it done in record time, but not without a high level of stress.

i managed to catch a bus and get home and join the zoom call one minute late.

...

after the daily, i ate a quick breakfast and headed to the office. it was a complicated day, with me untangling a mess of work that needed to be reverted, then replayed. i thought i'd done a good job of it, but around 5pm i learned that one of the reverts broke the CI pipeline and nobody (least of all me) could figure out how 🤦‍♂️

at least my sync with my mentor went positively, although a bit later my fellow contractor paid me a visit, distressed, because everyone he's spoken to about the hackathon has given him a different answer and none of them seem fair or right to him. i gave him some advice, but i'm glad i'm not in that position.

during the day it crossed my mind that there's a huge difference between standing on the balcony of a top floor of a very tall tower, and seeing a photo from it, so i walked home, picked up mr smear and walked back to the office to give him a tour of the four corners of our floor. he was thrilled, and it became a powerful lesson in perspective ^_^

we sat down to dinner soon after getting home, and watched the second third of little shop of horrors, which to my delight he's thoroughly enjoying and is completely invested. i must admit, though, i'm finding it more and more amusing that he often pauses to describe what's happening as if he's just had some deep insight or epiphany; like, he's just stopped us to demonstrate, unwittingly, that he understood what just happened on the screen 🤣

 ...

mozambicans: suffered the highest recent casualties, with at least five citizens killed during violent mob attacks and arson in coastal towns, displacing nearly 600 people.

malawians: hundreds forced from their homes, seeking emergency refuge in community halls and mosques while awaiting state-sponsored evacuation.

ghanaians: hundreds voluntarily repatriating via state-chartered flights out of johannesburg due to severe harassment and safety fears.

zimbabweans: facing intense harassment, unlawful evictions, and workplace discrimination as one of the largest migrant populations.

nigerians: dozens requesting emergency flights home, prompting government airlifts and formal diplomatic interventions.

somalians: small business and shop owners facing widespread looting, vandalism, and economic displacement.

congolese: refugees and asylum seekers experiencing systematic exclusion from public healthcare and targeted harassment.

if this is what's happening to black africans right now, it's not going to be long before it starts happening to white africans. and in the current political climate, it's probably going to begin with the jews :(

...

after saying goodnight to my mom, i discussed my fears with gd, which led to a conversation about how she's been handling the years since october 7th and her relationship with the news. along with everything else, i'm glad she's starting to feel a bit of relief and see the light as other nations begin to wake up to what's been going on under their noses all this time.