the news, continued

my response to a friend wondering if the global caliphate might not somehow be a possible stepping stone to a utopian future:

islamic rule is not a "it gets worse before it gets better" kind of thing, if you look at the death and destruction and erasure of history in the countries around israel, and in north africa, and in the rewriting of history that's taking place in the west, the only way forward for humanity is to either stop the advance of the anti-west bloc (islam + communism) or escape the planet entirely.

i don't believe any of the sci-fi visions of a united future are realistic, or plausible, or possible - every vision of utopia is by definition dystopia, because you can't have a perfectly cooperative and non-violent society without killing a few million people. humans just aren't like that. we thrive on competition, on drama, and on conflict. we need identities, morals and principles to defend, and we need armies and borders to defend them with.

if the west does lose to the red/green alliance, every single one of us who dreams of a better future is either going to be murdered or driven underground, pretending to cooperate while trying to hold on to fragments of knowledge and art and living in constant fear of discovery.

that's not the sci-fi dystopia *i* want. i'll take cyberpunk corporate rule over that any day.

be careful what you wish for

good morning! just reporting that it was a god-awful experience. not only was i wired up extremely uncomfortably and very restricted in movement, that has got to be the lumpiest, most unpleasant mattress i've ever tried to sleep on. army and camping mattresses are luxury compared to that torture device. 

i was worried that they'd send me home after learning that i'd eaten two rows of dark chocolate after dinner, forgetting that that's the equivalent of a cup of tea / a third of a cup of instant coffee (about 25mg). but caffeine before bedtime was not the problem.

i spent all night unsuccessfully trying to find a position that wasn't actively hurting me, both my neck and my lower back. occasionally i'd turn in a way that made me sure i'd ripped out a cable or something. the things up my nose made it impossible to sneeze or blow my nose, and the air-con made sure i was dried out by morning even though i *needed* it because i was wearing the deep-winter jammies gd made for me.

there was no reading. no playing sudoku until my eyes drooped. i know that i did actually fall asleep once or twice, but for the most part it was just a waking nightmare right before another stressful day at work (i'm trying to finish up the PR from yesterday on my work computer and i'm still having trouble) followed by a wedding.

good grief.

unfocus

 today has been *really* long, and i'm still battling with the PR cycle at work 🙄

only mr smear is playing hungarian dance in a funny keyboard mode so the mood is lighter than it could be.

some really big stuff happened today, all while i haven't been able to consume caffeine since 11am. first, the guy i worked with at my previous client reached out to let me know he's been sacked. so that was a shock. then i was invited to a company status meeting, where we were informed that he wasn't alone - we're essentially pivoting (we've talked about some of the changes for months), and everyone who hasn't been moving in the desired direction has been let go.

so that's been a shocker, and i'm still processing and feeling horrible for the people who were let go, and massively relieved for myself. this is scary stuff :(

later, my day was interrupted by an hour long "panel" of experts discussing general approaches towards our new roles as AI whisperers slash architects slash product managers. they had lots of valuable stuff to say, but why did it have to be now? (i'm just being tetchy, our group meetings are usually on monday afternoons)

but there was some more potentially good news today (in addition to the sleep lab booking) - i received a message from the tax return people: if they're not mistaken, then i'm due a heck of a lot more money than i expected. a lot more than the bonus my employer awarded me (which got taxed to shreds). even with their 15% (+tax) fee, that gives us a significant runway for me to get my side-project and salary shit together.

so that's BIG 🤞🙏

[stopped writing to respond to team lead, realizing that i didn't respond to his message yesterday and forgot to do what he asked - now scrambling to get it done before dinner :/]

so i'm doing a bit of juggling right now, full of anxiety, partially for completing my workday in at least a neutral way and partly because i'm nervous about finally going to a sleep lab and them finding nothing wrong... for once i hope i sleep poorly "as usual", because the past couple of weeks i've been mysteriously okay.

[the team lead's request took me a literal couple of minutes and uncovered something very wrong, i really dropped the ball on this one]

the news

 i just got bumped up for a sleep lab - TONIGHT! as opposed to february. this is exciting!

things on my mind i need to dump before i can start my day:

1. the death of france is a playbook that i guarantee is currently playing out in the UK, the US, and australia. it's not just that the trojan horse has been welcomed into the city, it's that the city was neglecting its own people and turning them away in the first place.

2. squishy toys are dangerous.

there was other nonsense in the news, but i don't have energy for any of it. and this morning i learned that mr smear is becoming addicted to ASMR videos by sitting next to kids watching them before school starts...

blank yawn

i'm feeling pretty dysfunctional after a pretty long day. i got nothing of value done this evening - save for translating a video about why the squishy trend is a shit one - after a day that wasn't particularly tough, but felt remarkably long nonetheless.

i vaguely remember this morning being an admin morning. the two highlights of my work day (ignoring the request from my team lead that i only saw when on my way home this evening) were a meeting with the devex guy, and my sub-team; the first went pretty well, i think, and i managed to convey the issue i uncovered as an afterthought, and the second saw me convince my sub-team to try an experiment of using a shared "memory" repo to keep track of open questions and decisions.

that latter meeting was awkward, because they hadn't prepared and neither had i, and the entire purpose of it was to discuss the AI's findings which i hadn't been able to make heads or tails of. but all's well that ends well 🤷‍♂️

i went to the office in my winter shoes, which are great if it's wet, but the promised rain didn't fall so my feet were uncomfortable all day for nothing. at least mr smear didn't get wet, he left this morning in sneakers and without an umbrella because we'd all forgotten to look at the weather app :P

apparently his tanach test didn't go so well, because we studied in english and he didn't pay attention in class in hebrew. we're going to have to fix that somehow.

my evening class was alright, i guess, but i got stuck on setup and found myself far behind the class on the exercise. i eventually caught up - mostly - but i'm not sure how much i gained from the experience.

i did come up with a couple of interesting game ideas on the way home, though.

having snacked rather a lot, i sampled gd's not-sushi rolls, biting my tongue to her amusement, and then biting my lip while complaining about her laughing at me biting my tongue :/

mr smear's keyboard-playing before bed was impressive. i love that he's into classical music and "making it his own".

jump

 well, mr smear eventually got through the homework, though it took him almost until dinner time. big data joined us for gin & tonics, then dinner, and aside from a moment where i unwittingly embarrassed gd it was a pretty relaxed evening. otherwise, i spent most of my time before and after working on my payments setup and a couple of minor games.

i slept pretty well last night.

today was predominantly about preparing mr smear for his tanach exam tomorrow (the book of joshua, which got him interested in the tanach in general) and the class meetup at sky jump for a corrective experience, which was great for him and in which i had some positive encounters with other parents (including, bizarrely, the crazy mom who i initially suspected had forgotten who i was 🤪). we'd walked there, but on the way home we could hear the thunderstorm approaching and rushed to catch the sababus (mr smear asked if that doesn't imply the existence of a savtabus) and when the skies opened over us and the rain came bucketing down, we were closed to a building entrance a couple of minutes away to take shelter until it calmed down enough for us to skedaddle home.

the most important part of the day was just before dinner, though. things had been going really well all day, but then they went quickly south (over screen time, of course) and they got worse before they got better. some interesting things came out of that, though, which we're hoping was a breakthrough and won't soon be forgotten.

a lot of the time i feel like have deep, meaningful conversations with mr smear is like chatting with an AI, clearing the context, and then starting fresh...

the rest of the evening was smooth, and now... it's already pretty late, i think i should probably hit the hay soon.

positive hair story

 i love the fact that i can play sudoku on my mobile until i pass out, without ads, no payment required (it's donation-based) ^_^

mr smear woke me up this morning, pretty gently, and he was cautious enough that i only just realized while typing this that he needed me awake to authorize him doing some "constructive screen time" making minecraft skins 😂

i woke up to the sound of ambulance sirens (we live on a highway), which inspired this:

MOOL-TEE-PASS!

we didn't have the easiest morning with / send-off for mr smear, these are not easy times...

with a little coaxing and guilting, gd accompanied me to the barber shop to bear witness. which worked out really well, because not only did the barber do a legitimately good job, but she has much to say about his approach and his attitude. we don't often have positive news stories, but this is one of them ^_^

we walked down dizengoff to teva castle, on the way picking up a jerusalem bagel. in my defense, i was becoming hangry at the time, but in retrospect it was a lot more breakfast than i should have had. i even tried offering it to a homeless guy i saw scrabbling in the trash, but i appear to have startled him and he rushed off - i didn't mean to embarrass him :(

overall, we made a good morning of it. on the way home, we got off at the nature and grocery stores and picked up a more few more things, and arrived home at precisely the same time as mr smear.

he's spent most of the afternoon catching up on homework, while i've spent it working on my payments system, and dabbling with a previous attempt at a balatro type of game i started building in early april...

* apparently. i keep doing spot checks and i haven't really caught him out yet

the weather is weird but it does feel like winter is finally on its way. i've been listening to my properly-shuffled playlist all afternoon, and it's so freaking cool!

slowdown

we just discovered that mr smear has found a way to install games on his phone, even though we've blocked it. now we suspect that he's been approving things from our phones, so we have to figure out whether that's the case without letting on in case that's not how he's doing it, because we don't want to give him any ideas.

well, isn't that a thing 🙄

...

today was a weird day. work-wise, i basically wasted most of it (and a heck of a lot of tokens) on work that seemed like a safe, quick win but turned out to be against company policy. i think i learned some stuff? but it was a bad call.

i went to the sleep clinic and spoke the same doctor i did last time.

"i walked out of there an hour later feeling pretty confident that the doctor had performed a thorough investigation into every relevant aspect of my potential narcolepsy (and potential rls, and possible anemia) and i felt very well understood" - from the last time

this time, i felt like i was talking to an AI with a polluted context. he couldn't move his focus past the rls, he couldn't keep the timelines straight, and i even switched to english and made a huge effort to be so clear and accurate that he couldn't possibly not understand... i'm not sure he understands. he did, however, do what he should have done last time, which is recommend that i do an actual sleep lab.

so far, this story has already taken more than a year... and the closest appointment is in another half a year. but hey, sleep is important, so what's another half a year after it's already been about sixteen?

gd's pissed off because i told him about my cannabis experiment, and he told me "the jury's out" over whether cannabis actually helps people sleep 🤦‍♂️

i think i'd have done better with an actual LLM.

by the time i got back home and had breakfast it was 3pm already. i spent an hour with my buddy testing her contributions, then switched to a long overdue 1:1 with my team lead. we began with doing a little digging into where we met tahoma - not only did we serve in the same unit, at roughly the same time, but were both inducted in the same year, and from the sounds of it he and i were probably on a lot of the same buses on our weekends when i used to stay on the kibbutz!

after discussing my ridiculous discoveries during the week (yesterday in particular), he gave me very encouraging feedback, after which we discussed the less positive feedback. overall, i left the call with a good feeling and i hope it's as clear to him that we're aligned.

i had no time at all to say goodbye to my family before rushing out to catch a bus to my evening class, and i arrived a few minutes late but just in time to not miss anything. i drove our office manager crazy (remotely) because i couldn't find my "gift" from the company status meeting which i'd forgotten to pick up (a very nice picnic kit), and then i couldn't find any non-barista milk alternatives because it was a in a closed delivery bag in the fridge :P

on the way out, sfs and i picked up another member for the asynchronous game jam ^_^

i spoke to my mom on the way home, we talked about my sleep clinic experience and about her selling her apartment, and then i got home for dinner, syncing with mr smear, and a relatively smooth evening. it's almost 11pm and i'm actually pretty tired, i think i'm going to try going to bed soon.

rules vs skills

i don't know where to begin this post, so i'll start with the ridiculous: today i learned that the company harness that everyone's forced to use with claude includes a rule that actively interferes with writing tests. and their automated code reviewer is a real stickler for good tests. this essentially leads to everyone (already confirmed with my onboarding buddy and my fellow contractor) being forced to run an absurd number of review cycles for each change, which is extremely expensive both in time and tokens and patience.

i'm confident that i found the cause because - with my custom harness wrapping their harness - i was able to disable the conflicting rule and i've had three code reviews since where the test coverage wasn't an issue.

this is literally insane.

it's now half-past midnight as i write this, and i only just finished writing up an article after / while putting my "fix" through its paces, excitedly watching my agent actually being thorough with purpose ^_^

i'm still laughing at my fellow contractor - her team won the company AI hackathon a few months ago - being absolutely delighted to hear that she's not the only one who's been struggling with this nonsense, and it was super-cool that someone who has a lot of real experience on the AI frontier praising my system (both my skills library and my harness).

this was all really cool.

...

the day got off to a rocky start over a frying pan, which both gd and i navigated and eventually (pretty quickly) understood why it was such a big deal and how to proceed. from there the day went pretty well.

oh... no. wait. both gd and i had nightmares last night. hers was pretty intense (everyone missing hands), but also kinda cool. mine was deeply disturbing, morbidly pornographic (really gross people we know), and i'll be fucked if i know how that specific shade of darkness got into my head :/

anyway, aside from all that the day started off pretty well. i resumed the telephony project work and completed it, so now i can conference call with confidence that the calls end when i want them to. i also made a little more progress on my website payment integration.

i made it to noon without eating breakfast, which for a day spent working at home is quite an achievement.

at some point both the public transport authority and our landlord reached out to me, it looks like they've discussed the plans for soundproofing the road side of our apartment, and should be signing off on them tomorrow. that's a huge relief!

the work day went pretty well, i think. a lot of wasted time, but that resulted in the discovery and i still can't quite believe how big it is. i'm going to have a hell of a time explaining it to their devex guy on sunday, especially considering that he's the guy who introduced the rule in the first place 🙄

i took a break to make what we hope with be the last monthly withdrawal (now that gd's prescription has been increased), and mr smear's homework *seems* to be done so i took him along with me for the walk, along the way teaching him about skills and rules :P

(i mean, i did teach him about context the other day, so...)

dinner was a very interesting (and delicious) peanut butter and mushroom noodle thing (not pad thai, but kinda similar), and we had a long chat with my mom, and mr smear played our conversation out with a piece on the piano he's been practicing, and i read a bit more of the light fantastic to him at bedtime.

it's really late, i kinda can't believe i knocked out that article so quickly, and i also was caught by surprise when it auto-published to my employer's publication when i'm not *quite* certain that they'll be happy with me telling a client horror story that hasn't been fully resolved yet... 🤷‍♂️

right, i'm tired, my wrist is hurting, i believe it's bedtime.

brain pain train

 it's been two days of mr smear fucking with everyone and making things shit. this is really, really hard.

i swear to god everything is testing me and my patience today. it's an everything is broken kind of day.

yesterday:

our family meeting yesterday took a long time, and had some rough moments. then i left to meet up with firefighter, it was pretty early but already dark.

firefighter and i had a great catch-up, with a lot of surprising things coming out and connecting with our often-overlapping philosophies. kind of similar to my earlier meeting with arnavot. life is weird.

while mr smear was getting ready for bed, i took gd aside to discuss something troubling she'd said to mr smear during our family meeting. she did not take it well.

i don't recall much more of the night, but i did go to bed relatively early, and i guess i slept alright.

today:

back to work. i started my day setting up my paypal business account, then went to the office. i'd say it was a pretty good day, but mr smear's call in the morning was the start of a series of shit moves, and it set a nasty tone both because i suspected he was up to no good and because i told him so in rather crude terms before i realized that i was on speaker with the head of his arts program :/

aside from trying to help my buddy work through a couple of gotchas (one surprise in how java handles floats, and that floats were used in a system that deals with large quantities of money, and one surprise in how a database index was built in a way that renders it unusable), i managed to push through a fix that unblocked me for testing and begin the next piece of work. i had to leave the office early to join gd and meet mr smear's new therapist, but between the bus rides and after we got home, i managed to run a successful test and establish that the second one wouldn't be worthwhile.

the therapist seems nice, though i don't know if the two of us made such a good impression. i think she knows everything she needs.

coming home turned sour because gd insisted that we stop somewhere to pick up hummus, and we explored multiple blocks and then sarona, and there was no hummus (none open, at least). eventually, once i was thoroughly pissed off, we settled on getting the fuck home and ordering hummus via wolt.

fuck.

dinner would have been great if it wasn't for mr smear pushing buttons non-stop. that wasn't good for the vibe, but then while i was getting out of the shower i suddenly remembered what gd had told me he'd done in the afternoon - i warned him if i catch him or hear of him taking his phone into the bathroom again (he was pretending to use the toilet to sit on his phone and avoid doing his homework) i will fuck him up.

i don't know if the threat will work or not, but holy shit, that kid seems to be in dire need of some good ol' capital punishment.

it's been an hour or so, and i guess i'm still sitting with that shit on my chest. i've been upgrading my telephony project, and as soon as i'm done with the current phase i think i'm going to try to get some sleep.

charging cycles

 these "two days off" are surprisingly good, and destabilizing, at the same time. and they're only really "off" from my client work...

...

yesterday started with some very positive, encouraging news: sfs sent me a video demonstration of what he's been working on, and it's really cool! it's also pushed him to do all the kinds of things that our employer wants us to be doing, and then to top it all off he informed me that he's not only excited about that, but about his kid (who's mr smear's age) being late for school because he was so invested in putting in the work on the game he's developing ^_^

...

yesterday was heavy on the extension effort, while at the same time involving a fair amount of admin. mostly healthcare stuff, like making an appointment for a consultation for the surgical removal of something that i think i was supposed to book half a year ago, and that i could only get a booking for february for...

i did take a serious, half-hour nap yesterday morning. that was nice.

at one point i took a cup of coffee and my laptop to the park for half an hour of working on a bench in a pleasant, green space. i was visited by a crow, and i was amused by a very sweet toddler learning to walk and play with a ball at the same time.

i had a short overlap at home with mr smear, and i explained to him that gd needed his help even more than usual so he needed to be more cooperative and proactive than usual. unfortunately, that fell on deaf ears and i understand that gd had to lose her temper and threaten him with punishments to get him to do his chores...

our class yesterday evening was good, although i was upset by two women sitting on either side of me who had coughs that clearly deserved to stay home and join over zoom :/

one of them walked to the train station with sfs and me [posting interrupted for a long call with mr smear's teacher, his behavior is making all our heads spin but i think the trajectory is okay] and i was embarrassed when she mentioned her kids and i realized i'd been so busy talking about mine that it never occurred to me to ask :P

i got home, ate, read some more of the light fantastic to mr smear, then sat down to explore payment integrations. this is my life now 🙄

today so far:

i slept relatively well, and woke up to my wife freaking out about the "monstrous" field cricket on our balcony. poor think didn't move very fast, so i wonder if it was poisoned or something. my main focus this morning was revising my AWS / CDK skills after an agent dropped the ball on an architecture design, and i don't quite recall what else i did before i headed out to the museum to meet up with arnavot (a play on the name of an old friend scr and i worked with at the university), and we ended up talking for two hours before i realized i had stuff that needed doing. it was really interesting, and we're very much aligned on all sorts of big topics.

i picked up the second books of akira and kick-ass from the comics library, feeling silly for forgetting to return stuff, and then stopped by the pharmacy to awkward cut the queue to find out if gd would be able to pick up next month's prescription early (no). then i walked past a homeless guy deliberately lying across the entire sidewalk to catch a bus home, and on the way we got stuck in traffic and the girl driving alongside us was literally doomscrolling while driving. guess which one of those two i consider the bigger asshole.

my employer posted today about my AI specs library on their linkedin page, i'm feeling quite flattered ^_^

mr smear's hand-drawing is out of control. the teacher sent me a photo, i told her to explain to him that just like with the daily record, there will be consequences for not listening to his teachers. and then, against my better judgement but with gd's encouragement, i added "it does look pretty cool, though" 😂

i had a large lunch, i've made a little progress on my payment integration (in spite of the phone call and constant sirens and honking from the highway), and am now gearing up for mr smear's arrival (family meeting time) and then catching up with firefighter a bit later.

trick and treat

 there was no housekeeping done yesterday. i did break from the music extension work to watch three episodes of evangelion with mr smear, but i think i passed out for quite a significant amount of them :P

otherwise, i tried to coach him and encourage him to work on his rube goldberg machine (homework), which was rather demanding on my patience (but my patience prevailed).

and i learned something fascinating about calf muscles and exercising them that i think everyone should know.

i walked mr smear to his friend's place at around 4pm - it didn't occur to me that there might be a bus - with him dressed for trick-or-treating. some teenager on a scooter whizzed past and as he clocked mr smear we heard him loudly "what - the - fuck?!" which had us in hysterics 😂

it turned out 4pm was the time for the kids to meet up, 6pm to go trick-or-treating. so i caught a bus home, got some more stuff done while stuffing myself on leftovers, and then bussed back to accompany the three friends as mr smear's shadow pack-animal.

first, let me just say that the number of kids participating, the effort invested in their costumes and treat stations, was heartwarming. it was so much fun!

second, five minutes before arriving to accompany the kids, i was struck with sudden bloating and gas that lasted a little over an hour, rendering me decidedly uncomfortable during the hour-long mission.

on the one hand, following them was an interesting experience and generally positive, particularly because of all the other kids and parents and the general atmosphere was great. on the other, there were a couple of behaviors that made the hour drag considerably.

first and foremost, mr smear's wrong-side-of-the-tracks friend, whose constant swearing and use of combative language is jarring and embarrassing, even at a distance. then there were his greedy attempts (often successful) to grab all the candy, sometimes its containers as well. mr smear told him off a number of times, and even yelled "my friend's a thief" when he managed to grab an entire pumpkin-shaped candy container...

second, mr smear didn't understand the concept of me being a shadow, and he kept trying to make sure that i wasn't going to lose them... which was sweet, but really took him out of the experience and separated him from his friends on multiple occasions :(

when we returned to his friend's place, they wanted to watch a horror movie. the other two were asking for movies that are really inappropriate, and i took the opportunity to explain why watching great movies before you're ready for them is a mistake - that you can only ever watch a great movie for the first time once, and it's a shame if you're not old enough / experienced enough to fully appreciate what makes it great or shocking.

"you know we're going to forget this whole conversation in, like, five minutes, right?"

fuckin' A.

i also took my turn trying to teach his friend how to blow his nose. how the fuck does a kid grow up not knowing how to blow his fucking nose?

mr smear's friend's mom gave mr smear a full bowl of mushroom krupnik soup, which was delicious. it was also the last of their soup. his first few spoons were enthusiastic (he said it reminds him of fry's mushroom pies), but his next few were less so and then he did what he always does... "garbage bin dad?" 🤦‍♂️

to make it worse, he told him friend that "it started off tasting really good, and then it stopped tasting good". his friend told him he shouldn't insult his mom's cooking, and his response was "yeah, but..."

FML.

anyway, after a bit more awkwardness i managed to extricate us from the dinner and we caught a bus home, with him informing me along the way that he's not sure he wants to do this again because he's so self-conscious. i really don't understand this kid :(

while he showered, i caught gd up on the evening's shenanigans while sipping on the "drink me - penis reducer" parting gift from tahoma's (i don't know what was in it, but it was delicious). after putting mr smear to bed, i spent some more time tweaking the extension, and eventually went to bed.

i guess i slept pretty well. i'm trying to make the most of these two "recharge" days, which started with gd upset over our neighbor's treatment of their dog and now has her cancelling her physio appointment and sewing class because something just twinged in her neck and she's unable to leave the house :(

...

alright, one crisis at a time, one admin item at a time. i can do this.

into the looking glass

 well, it was less of a looking glass and more of a few shots of particularly interesting cocktails, plus a fair amount of freeze-dried passion fruit and strawberries mixed with good ol' fashioned fizzers. nystire's wife called it taffy, which i'd never considered before.

the one person i didn't expect to bump into was my team lead! turns out we served in the same unit :P

all-in-all, it was a fun gathering, gd had a good time without any incidents (in spite of herself, she insisted on trying things without checking ingredients 🙄), and the night sky on our way home was pretty spectacular.

...

it was after midnight when i called mr smear to check in on him, and he feigned shock that it was so late :P

when nyah nyah and her husband dropped us off at home (after 1am) he wasn't asleep yet, and we had a bit of a bad vibe because he'd turned on the air conditioner again without talking to me, and he did everything precisely against the mold prevention instructions 🤦‍♂️

...

i woke up with a bit of a hangover, but plenty of water and coffee and hellsing and a heavy challah-peño with peanut butter and vegan nutella breakfast seem to have settled it well. now to try and wrap up yesterday's efforts on my music player and then do a little housekeeping.

haphazard

 my tongue hurts, because i bit it. like, i managed to bite myself in the center of my tongue, somehow. it hurts.

i'm so tired, that i just crashed on the couch for ten / fifteen minutes. after having had a fourth cup of coffee earlier.

my wife - who's dressed up as a dark elf - just posted about how i called her the fairy fart-mother, i don't know whether to be proud or embarrassed.

mr smear and i played through a fair amount of day of the tentacle before dinner. good times.

i read through quite a bit of hellsing this morning. i'm enjoying it, but i kinda get why gd got bored.

sfs contacted me this morning, after our recent interactions he's finally started diving into game development and he's doing something so crazy that i don't have a clue what his descriptions mean... but it looks like he's about to embark on one heck of a journey and i'm really glad to have been able to get him to take the first steps ^_^

i let him play a bit of moon sweepers, after i gave it a try this morning. i can see the attraction (nystire gifted me a copy, i think he's trying to test my resolve on my side projects :P), but i wanna get stuff done. later i watched my son take it in a whole other direction by drawing in the moon sand instead of clearing it.

i spent a lot of time make improvements to my chrome extension, but went down a re-architecture rabbit-hole with codex's terra model that astra has spent the past 1.5+ hours digging me out of. i feel like we're all learning stuff together. at least, i hope that's what's happening.

i had a chat with my mom earlier (we weren't able to connect properly at kiddush time because she and krybabie's mother were out for a walk on the mouille point promenade), she broke down what happened at her apartment building's AGM last night after she's been working her ass off for the past half a year to a year to extricate herself from the board: the majority of apartment owners are idiots according to carlo cipolla’s behavioral matrix.

they voted off the three guys who've been doing good work because "they're too controlling", and between them and my mom's efforts over the years the apartments are currently valued pretty highly. i suggested to my mother that now seems like a good time to bail, and was both surprised and relieved to learn that she agreed.

if she sells, that's going to remove what is possibly the largest obstacle to her picking up sticks and joining us over here.

we're about to head off to tahoma's for their annual halloween party, for which i don't have anything to wear. we're leaving mr smear home alone, after having checked with our upstairs friends that they're okay with being leaned on in an emergency, and i think he's as excited for the home alone time as we are for the adults-only time :)

not-so-free will

i think i slept alright. the eczema seems to be calming down. i started my day reading a bit of hellsing on the balcony.

then i jumped into work, right after realizing that today was the last day i can use my monthly food allowance and we hadn't spent any of it yet.

i ran the test, it went well. i needed help from my buddy, and only understood - after being quite a nudnik - that i'd missed her message to the team earlier in the morning to say that her daughter was sick and she didn't have much bandwidth 🤦‍♂️

i felt awful, and i apologized profusely...

i spent the next few hours re-evaluating the work i'd planned... or that my AI agents had planned... by the time i'd figured out my next steps, it was time to do a grocery run with gd to use up as much of the allowance as we could, on stuff we actually need. i honestly felt a bit sick, and tired, about halfway through the shopping experience. it could have been worse, i guess, but i just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

i got home, had two carrots with some hummus, and was about to do the thing i'd told my team lead i was going to do when an upstairs neighbor began heavy drilling. i had less than an hour to go until my meeting with my mentor, and if i'd done the thing the team lead wanted i'd have been stuck at home with construction site noises, which left me no choice.

i sent a message to the neighbor group, explaining how some of us work from home and doing any kind of construction without prior warning is inconsiderate (how do people still not understand this?!), then packed my bags and rushed out to catch a bus to my employer's office.

i had a little bit of time to spare to Do The Thing, and my mentor ended up being five minutes late, so i managed to pull the trigger before our meeting got started. of course, i ran into yet another surprising bug...

the roadmap meeting with my mentor was very positive. the feedback from him, and from my current client, was the same as my self-diagnosis two weeks ago: ironically, he informed me that while it's critical to focus and effectively communicate how focused i am at work, he believes that my lack of focus is one of the reasons why i'm doing as well as i am in so many different ways.

can those two things be true at the same time?

when he got to the point of asking me which technologies i wanted to focus on, i immediately thought of what i need to get my number one main personal side project i'm now working on to succeed, networking and security, but even as i said the words i was nervous about biting off more than i can chew. which, if i think about it, is kind of the point of this whole roadmap exercise, so...

i had some time before my evening course class began to do some more investigating, report to the team lead and work on a solution, all the while talking to coworkers / async game jammers, and a dutch coworker, and two guys who are essentially using our offices as a coworking space.

the class was full of useful information, but it started so slowly and with such basic material that by the time the good stuff came up i'd already checked out. i spent most of the class evolving my agentic skills, understanding that i've been dealing with a wild array of conflicting guidance, and a lot of the skill cleanup was being done by conflicting skills that weren't aligned with what i'd just corrected... so i had to figure out a solution for that, too.

i walked out with sfs and another guy who seems interested in joining our asynchronous game jam, and then split from them to go to the supermarket and try to spend the remaining hundred shekels. i got to the self checkout with a heavy load that i'd estimated would just about reach the limit, only to discover, after passing everything through that there were a couple of significant discounts! fortunately, the place was practically empty so i rushed to the dried fruits area and picked up some healthy snacks, which did the trick.

i waited a few minutes at the bus stop, and there were a few of us frantically trying to wave the next bus down as he skipped our stop entirely. i reported the fucker. at least the second bus stopped, and in retrospect it was actually a better route for me :P

i got home to a delicious meal - gd has outdone herself with her salads, and whatever it is she's doing with the potatoes - and we had a chat with my mom before putting mr smear to bed. mr smear didn't have such a great school day today; nothing dramatic, but his behavior wasn't good enough to earn him screen time. we talked a little about it at bedtime, and then about the girls in his class doing tiktok videos 🙄, and then i said goodnight and hit the shower.

he'd already gone to bed, so i had to keep my anger over his gouging the soap and leaving me with practically nothing to myself :/

i sat down at my work machine and continued with the skill evolution, which took me until almost midnight to get through... but i think i'm happy with it, and i'm hoping it's going to make a real difference to both my work environments ✌️

i'm so fucking tired now. i can't believe it's the weekend. even less that it's a long weekend, because my client gives everyone a mandatory two days off every quarter. that's pretty cool.

unscheduled

 i just extricated myself from a 1.5 hour async game jam call with horseman, my coworker and his brother, and that's only because aside from the fact that i'm getting really tired (and the brother's online ninja game made me a little motion sick) but because i need to write this up before i hit the sack.

[yawns and makes one last cup of tea]

[ahhh, chamomile and honey]

i got up, sat outside on the balcony with my coffee, and couldn't figure out what i wanted to do with myself. mr smear, after having badgered me for a while (and a few days, really), was allowed to watch the youtube playlist i curated for him, which included an inappropriate ze frank video about cuttlefish procreation, and i went inside and watched with him until he left for school.

i did a little "desk" clearing, with my new playlist extension working so well that gd came and parked herself on a beanbag next to me, with both of us overjoyed and shocked by the songs we haven't heard in years! unfortunately, the desk clearing got a little rabbit-holey with overcomplicated government websites, and gd never having earned a payslip in israel...

eventually i managed to make some proper time to prepare for my work day, trying to understand what had gone wrong on monday evening and what needed to be done to fix it. when i finally felt ready to respond, i noticed that i'd kinda misread my team lead's last sentence and that it wasn't as heavy as i'd thought.

i walked to the office, discussed the solution with my buddy before our daily, and after our daily got into it. it - would - take - me - until - around - 4pm - to - be - ready - to - merge. gods, it was a long day. however! by the end of it, i believe i'd finally solved the real issue with my tests taking so long.

i mean, i hope 🤞

i had a couple of employer meetings this afternoon, one of them with my mentor, who seems to think i'm doing alright.

the most frustrating part of it all was that as soon as i was ready, the entire company's build system went offline.

...

during the time that it was offline, a crane broke in the construction site next door and i went to investigate the drama. i saw lots of emergency vehicles, and then a bunch of first responders around a body they were performing chest compressions on. it looks like the poor guy didn't make it, and i regretted my curiosity.

...

my buddy came into the office with veggie crisps, saying something about the taste. i love veggie crisps, so i took a handful and tried one, and it tasted somehow wrong. instinctively, i reached for the packet and looked at the allergen listing, and saw that it contains dairy. it's fucking veggie crisps, the packaging is almost identical to the vegan crisps, and it has no mention of dairy anywhere visible. and everyone in the office agreed that the milk powder didn't taste good.

WTAF is wrong with people?!

...

when i finally came back online, it took so long to get my PR green, merged, and the build completed that the company's no-deployments-past-5pm rule was in force. i literally clicked the button when the clock said 17:00. i secured special permission from the team lead for an emergency deployment, and we let it run.

i came home past suspiciously heavy traffic (though i didn't think much of it at the time), straight into an hour of monitoring and troubleshooting. eventually, my buddy agreed that something was wrong with the deployment pipeline, and that it wasn't my code (which had deployed successfully into a region we can't test with), and i sent off a kit-bag question / update to the team lead.

fortunately, by the time we finished dinner and i saw his response, it was to say that we're stopping for the night.

we finished watching evan almighty at dinner, then talked to my mom, then noticed for the first time that something big was going on in our intersection - some kind of roadworks - and traffic was gridlocked and emergency service vehicles were getting trapped. the honking and the sirens and the angry yelling went on until just a short while ago, it was pretty intense.

[a few more sirens and some honking]

after getting mr smear into bed, my evening turned into an unexpected combination of vibe coding (mr smear gave me a good idea for monetization!) and pitching game ideas and playtesting. now i've written this, i think i'm ready to crash.

waiting for the results

 it's late, and my focus is whizzing all about like a deflating balloon.

i guess the most important thing today was voting. so we voted. i'm sitting and listening to the interim election results and analysis and i think, i hope, that my optimism isn't misplaced. in my opinion, all we really need is to not have shas in the government if we want the ultra-orthodox to serve, and if they serve then a part of the army's mandate is to integrate them into society.

if we can get that right, a lot of our other serious issues begin falling away.

🤞🙏

...

of all the things i could have and should have been doing today, i've sunk hours into building an chrome extension that i'm extremely excited about, not least because i've finally got a real solution to a problem with music playlists that i've been bothered by and complaining about for many years.

it can be argued that i'm not using my time appropriately. it is being argued by a voice in the back of my mind 🙄

...

it was a bit of a mission getting to herzeliyah and back for the election day barbecue with ze germans, but we had a good time, and ate well.

i guess it's kind of comforting that we're not the only ones struggling these days, and it's certainly good to be able to have big conversations (and little conversations) with all these people and feel connected.

...

it's my doppelganger cousin's birthday today, but his nephew is gone. i couldn't exactly wish him a "happy birthday"... i ended up writing "i want to wish you a happy birthday, but also..."

jesus.

gd and i had a possibly-not-quite-age-appropriate talk with mr smear after dinner, before switching gears and watching some evan almighty before bedtime. i hope he understands what we said, i hope it lands, i hope he remembers when things get tough. may they never get quite that tough.

with what i have

 after watching bruce almighty this evening, now i just feel like god's taunting me.

first, today was pretty stressful - i'm behind on my project, which was particularly ambitious of them to assign to me from the get-go, and every step of the way i've encountered unpleasant surprises, obstacles, and it's a system that's remarkably complex by any measure. sprinkle on that a couple of misunderstandings - my team lead seems to think i'm investing time in things that aren't on the critical path, when i've literally done nothing but ask agents to take care of them on the side, but i've also been asked to do things that don't really make sense without more context and i only understood this evening (when it was already very late) that i could have done what he asked much earlier in the day... and then when i did finally do it, it was mostly good but buggy.

this is a really, really shit feeling. hopefully we'll be able to clear the air on wednesday.

...

otherwise, i began my day with coffee and kick-ass, and then sat down to spec out the first part of the networking system that i need to test if the game networking package i came across and the mental model i'm building in my head are actually viable. whatever happens, imma learn some shit.

i think i ate too much today. the rest of the leftover gnocci in particular.

gd and i had a follow-up conversation to what we discussed yesterday, and she's going back to sewing lessons. i really hope this works out✌️

...

in the middle of the workday crescendo - around 6pm - i rushed out and literally had to sprint to catch a bus to the pick-up point for the vacuum filters we ordered. i arrived at the place (a really impressive little-bit-of-everything store) pretty quickly, but found their service less than stellar. it took me a couple of tries to figure out where the postal pick-up area is, but nobody was there. i asked a worker close by if someone was there, and after a couple of non-responses he said yes. i went into the package area, i called around, no answer. then i went back to the unhelpful cashier at the front of the store, who assured me that someone was there, but under a lot of pressure.

up until that point i'd been the only one trying to pick up a parcel, but now there was a queue forming. i went behind the "obstacles" again, called out a few more times, and then, as i walked back out, the guy from before who'd said that someone was there showed up, and it turned out he was that someone.

asshole.

fortunately, i made it out of there with my package and got to the bus stop just in time to catch a ride back home.

...

that was went i engaged in the evening's finale, with spectacularly disappointing results. fortunately, my "buddy" was available to help me find and understand the logs, and i got a breakdown from claude that... seems confident. the last words from the team lead felt heavy, he wants me to explain the bug to him on wednesday.

i feel like a thunder cloud is over my head right now.

...

while i was out, i received a message from an ex-coworker, a wedding invitation. considering our financial situation, i wasn't sure that it was a good idea to go, but i discussed it with gd and then my mom, and we thought it'd be a good idea and a fun thing to do. then, just after we finished watching the movie and i said goodnight to mr smear, i sat down and opened the invitation, and discovered that it's limited to one person with no plus one.

that kinda sucks. but i'm also sure that none of the other coworkers' partners were invited either. so now i'm damned if i ask him to invite gd and damned if i don't :/

...

i'm so freaking tired of things not working out, or working out badly. and on top of everything else i'm not entirely convinced the cream for the eczema is working properly, which is just another layer of discomfort on top of everything else.

gratitude, right? i should be practicing gratitude.

proper gander

i didn't sleep well last night, i'm dealing with eczema again, it's off and on... i booked appointments with my doctor and a dermatologist, the earliest for the latter being in january :/

the time shifted in the night, giving us an extra hour of not sleeping... whatever. i started my day with reading kick-ass, which is legitimately good and absolutely not appropriate for mr smear. neither is hellsing, which gd just got bored with.

the work day was frustrating; my team lead wants me doing things that i don't have authorization to do, and nobody can tell me how to obtain the authorization, with IT and devops being bureaucratically obstructive. at the same time, i keep surfacing weird things, and today i understood that there's a team - much like my previous team at my previous client - who's supposed to be supporting my current team but is doing work they need in unexpected ways and without communicating and documenting as they go 🤦‍♂️

i'm also a little frustrated that the very sweet guy who was volunteered to test my tooling before the team lead allows me to pitch it to everyone else is... a bit slow? i don't know if it's a capability thing, or an attitude thing (i'm inclined towards believing the latter).

we're not supposed to talk politics in the office, but there were only three of us in and the team lead wasn't there so we ended up really getting into it. there was significant tension in the room, and anxiety, and i hope i didn't unmake friends (even though in general we're all politically aligned, some of the stuff i was saying about democracy, national identity and the judicial reform really didn't land well).

i caught the light rail to the other office, and the class went pretty well. i caught a ride to the train station afterwards, and got into the weeds of south african crime when i probably shouldn't have. it was just that sort of a day, i guess 🤷‍♂️

i got home to a huge platter of sushi, and i had shoveled a whole lot into my mouth (one after the other) before realizing that i had no reason to be eating it all so quickly, nor any real desire to, and that aside from being unhealthy i also wasn't really enjoying my food nearly as much as i could have.

i had a strange idea about our financial situation which i discussed with my mom on the way to the office, and by the time we put mr smear to bed i'd figured out how to approach gd with a strategy. we're already on the edge, so playing it safe isn't much of an option, and if she can pull in some money with her sewing skills that would definitely be something.

well, i managed to put together the comics that i generated for the preacher video, so i'm pleased about that. and i spent some time "cleaning up" large files on google drive, some of them videos i moved to youtube.

it's just turned midnight, i think i'm ready for bed.

a painful end to the weekend

 i don't think i did anything particularly constructive this afternoon, and for my sins i had to deal with a classic mr smear regression: getting him to come rollerblading became very unpleasant, and he refused to stop escalating, and he didn't climb down off the hill until we'd already made it to the port, and he'd already lost a few hours of screen time and three days of access to the youtube music app.

this was me being conservative with the punishments, and it was really hard to keep him moving forward and coerce him to stop being so damned obstructive.

once we got to the port, or to the main stretch of it, at least, we stopped for a moment outside the outdoors club which was playing some pretty solid beats... music soothes even the savage beast. the rest of the route (which was essentially the way home from there) was smooth sailing, with positive vibes and for the most part good conversation.

...

we got home, showered, and sat down to gd's vegan sushi. it was a good dinner. then we spoke to my mom, who dropped a bombshell - one of our american cousins' kids committed suicide yesterday. i don't have words.

we (myself and gd) tried to explain how disastrous the current situation is for teenagers, with social media and online bullying and AI chatbots assisting kids in offing themselves and malicious anti-west propaganda confusing them and making them ashamed to be normal, decent people.

we're fucked in general, and as family, devastated.

...

after that, it's been a weird evening. i read some more of the light fantastic to mr smear, lost myself in youtube and sudoku for a while, then did some research into online multiplayer game development. now it's almost midnight, though in a couple of hours it'll only have been almost 11pm (i can't believe the democrats in the US are so dumb as to fight trump on cancelling daylight savings time), and i'm going to bed a bit nervous about how i'm not feeling like i'm handling my missed deadline very well.

jackals and mechs

yesterday:

we got up early, with gd having had another (as usual) rough night and being too out of it to join us. i've had a week or two of reasonably good nights - the caffeine trouble on sunday night notwithstanding - and i'm honestly finding it a little disorientating.

i had an amazing idea for a game while drinking my coffee [which i really should have been working on today].

we left at 7.30, walked to the supermarket, and found what we needed for the class picnic on our first try, so we headed straight from there to the park. with most of an hour and a half to spare, we walked instead of taking the bus, so i got in most of my day's steps in by the time we arrived, half an hour early.

firstly, my body didn't take that well and i was tired and sore by the time we arrived.

but secondly, the walk gave us plenty of time to have a real conversation, which was a fun dive into evolution and epigenetics, triggered by the sudden enthusiasm for darwin awards, probably precipitated by dumb ways to die.

before we arrived, we passed a jackal just chilling by the side of the path, minding its own business and unconcerned about ours. after a little while we walked up to some fields to watch the sprinklers and marvel at the architecture of one of the tall buildings nearby, and another (i assume) jackal trotted past and flopped down in the shade of a tree.

as we walked off the large patch of grass we'd been standing on, the sprinklers turned on and we narrowly avoided getting soaked!

there was some awkwardness at the picnic. mr smear's lice friend is sporting a short haircut, which i assume is related. i chatted with some parents i have no relationship with about not much, but at least a few of the others and i had things in common to discuss so it wasn't all bad.

with one of mr smear's friends' parents, i gave a scary recommendation to watch rick & morty so that they know what kinds of talk to have with their son... on the other side, though, i told the dad about what i'm trying to do, and described the game idea i'd come up with earlier, and a bit later he caught me to say that (after giving it some thought) it really was a great idea ^_^

mr smear made himself two rolls, and we snuck a cup from another class table (because none of us had brought any) so we could have a little to drink, we did a round to see school activities (some of the kids were dancing, some were playing really good music), and then we crossed the road to catch a bus home.

i made myself an iced coffee, and then the three of us headed to our new favorite supermarket for the weekend groceries. i was sooooo tired...

[stops to make another coffee, just writing about this is exhausting]

during the remainder of the afternoon, mr smear and i watched three more episodes of evangelion, and then i put quite a lot of time into generating images for a video for my spoken word piece, preacher. preacher is a piece that i have a very powerful memory of from performing it - it was getting a decent response (this was at divan orange sometime in 2013) and i was very proud of it, but about halfway through something special happened: one of the audience members got so caught up in it they literally yelled "YEEEEAHH!!!" and that's one of those magical moments when you feel you've elicited the response you wanted, even if there's delicious irony in the part that got the response being something that the poem is essentially ridiculing.

[goddamn, the lemon pie soya yoghurt is delicious]

we then made kiddush and had dinner while video-chatting with my mom, gd made an amazing sauce for the gnocci and the challah-peño not only came out great, but complimented it really well. in addition to the kiddush wine, i'd had a cherry beer that's 8% alcohol, and i was tipsy. the rest of the evening was basically me briefly passing out on the couch, then getting up to do a half-assed job of wrapping the remaining challah and brushing my teeth and dragging myself into bed.

today:

i slept alright. i began my day with evangelion - honestly, the manga is better than the series, but it's a shame to experience them as an either/or - and then i dived back in to the preacher video. omg that took a lot of work, and after pouring quite a lot of energy into it i gave up trying to improve the audio quality. i used audacity, but really, all the non-professional tools with non-professional experience just suck.

once i was done, mr smear and i watched another three episodes, and now i'm getting this all down and potentially doing something constructive before taking mr smear outside.

apparently this is the last week of summery weather for a while?

the week is over

 today was pretty exhausting, and i'm probably going to go to bed soon. the work day was slow, and a part of it was due to the same cause i noticed yesterday... my AI agents were running full regression tests for practically everything, and i had to go through multiple iterations of instructions and skill tweaking to get it to stop.

i didn't feel good about the day of client's work went. not for the quality of the work, not for the quantity of the work.

...

i started the day with more evangelion (book 2), and i'm excited to see the episodes again. i took care of some admin, mostly paying bills, and then it was work, work, work until it was time to leave for my evening class.

i already know a lot of the stuff from the course i did at the end of last year, but there are interesting things i've picked up nonetheless. and it was an opportunity to play-test the daily challenges i've added to my sudoku. and i had an important couple of conversations with my coworker who's working two (or more) jobs...

mr smear had a good day, meaning that he enjoyed it and also that he behaved well enough to earn screen time. also, his "homework" involved shading techniques that turned out amazing. *and* he used a whole lot more of the page than he usually does ^_^

right, the only thing of real value i've done tonight has been building a scraper and a wrapper website for the darwin awards to make it navigable so that i can read them to mr smear :P

negative, i am a meat proxy

 i guess today wasn't great? from a work perspective, at least. i mean, i'm learning a lot and things are moving, but i missed my deadline and that doesn't feel good :/

i read some more evangelion this morning, asuka and shinji fighting together was really fun :)

i made some design progress on the game i'm working on, and put the finishing touches on daily challenges in my sudoku game. i'm really pleased with how it's feeling, and i've made design choices i'm proud of, some of which i think are leveling me up all-round.

as i arrived at the office, i received a phone call from someone from the transport authority, who assured me that we haven't fallen through the cracks and agreed that if we can get power of attorney from our landlord they'll have no problem interfacing with us instead. so that's a huge relief.

after lunch (which was preceded by a too-long group meeting followed by a rush on the toilets), i spoke to the coordinator for the arts track. over the course of the next twenty minutes, i managed to walk her through mr smear's story, why his behavior is understandable, and how we all need to deal with the situation. she was understanding and appears to be on board. immediately after we finished talking, she sent me an update from today's art class teacher who reported a dramatic improvement since he faced an actual consequence yesterday, and it was an enormous, validating relief.

i made the mistake of eating a "go" vegan yoghurt, and i'm now convinced that it upsets my stomach. i have to check its ingredients to see if i can figure out what, but i'm definitely not eating it again.

i applied for the license renewal on monday, and it was authorized and sent today! i'm still in delighted shock, that's another weight off our shoulders (and money in our pockets).

ironically, the money we save will go directly to paying the next person who contacted me. in may, we were asked to reach out to an psychology clinic to manage mr smear's inappropriate behaviors. in june, i asked for intervention by the school councillor because they weren't reachable. just over a month ago they finally contacted me and asked us to fill out forms. this evening they called to get a description, and direct us to one of their therapists. so i guess things are actually moving now...

i took mr smear to the park to play frisbee, though it was a bit dark and less fun. on the way home we had a serious talk about the stuff that's been going on, and i explained to him that our main focus right now is teaching him discipline, and that him doing stuff he doesn't want to is really the whole point of the exercises we're going to be giving him (specifically in art and music).

dinner and a weird episode of the fall and rise of reggie dinkins, and then getting mr smear into bed (still reading the light fantastic), and then having a long conversation with my sister, who i think might be struggling more than we are...

it's too late and i'm too tired to do anything functional, so i'm going to just chill a little and go to bed and try to get stuff done in the morning.

all in all, today was a pretty good day.

...

stupid thoughts for the day:

marching to the beat of someone else's drum

 i slept pretty well. i got up and sat outside (wearing a shirt, it's getting colder) with my coffee and starting to read the second evangelion book, a harsh reminder of how distasteful asuka's character can be. we sent mr smear off to school fully loaded with all the books he was supposed to have taken weeks ago, along with our usual recommendations to be a good student.

i sent a message to the woman i spoke to a while back about educational game dev, hoping for some advice on moving forward seriously...

i don't recall what i spent the rest of my home-time doing or working on, but i do remember suddenly realizing that i was late for leaving for the office.

the first thing i did was meet up with my officer's course friend - let's call him "hobbyist" - who gifted me a freaking awesome purple tentacle that's glow-in-the-dark and turns pink when heated!

it's so cool!!

then i joined my team for breakfast, they ate bourekas and i had stuffed vine leaves, which were pretty good. then we worked for an hour or so before heading out to our team activity.

i honestly expected our "drum lesson" to be sitting around in a circle with bongo drums or something, not a room full of proper drum kits (dampened) and a serious hour-long introductory lesson in which we got to practice the fundamentals - we had a really good time! drumming is awesome ^_^

from there we went to lunch at a restaurant in midtown. to be fair, the restaurant experience and its food left much to be desired, but the experience overall was nice. it would have been nicer if gd hadn't called me to deal with a school incident that not only wasn't urgent, but that i wouldn't be able to do anything about until i got home anyway.

so that kinda brought me down. never a dull fucking moment.

eventually we returned to the office - a few of us, at least - and i did a sprint to try and complete as much as possible before due-date, which is technically tomorrow, but it looks like the customer's fumbled something so i might have some reprieve.

i'm a little concerned that my team lead thinks that what my agent uncovered might be pure hallucination, so i have some early morning research to do tomorrow...

i came home and interrogated my son, grilling him for the details before the other kid threatened him with a glue gun. seemingly armed with facts, i messaged his teacher who quickly called me back, and explained what happened. one of the things we discussed was how ridiculous we both find it that mr smear still doesn't know his teachers' names, so she had to investigate... he figured it out about the same time she did, though. when she called me back, it was to inform me that mr smear hadn't told the whole story, but that they were taking his report seriously and promised to keep an eye on both of them.

also, that i can expect a call tomorrow from the head of the art stream, because as apparent as his talent may be, he's just not putting in the work 🙄 🤦‍♂️

god help us.

we got through the evening [i just realized i forgot to call my mom so that mr smear could say goodnight :( ] and i've spent the last while working on my sudoku game, which i guess can technically be considered warming up for the bigger stuff? probably not.

laid out

 i - did - not -sleep. holy shit. like, at all. i skipped my first coffee, sat outside scribbling furiously, apparently coming up with a pretty compelling game design. said goodbye to mr smear, reminding him to be a cooperative student as we usually do, and then dove in to a bunch of chores.

i seem to have successfully applied for gd's license renewal, which was no mean feat... at least partially because my password manager had the incorrect credentials for her account 🤦‍♂️

i didn't feel i had enough time to head to the bank and the phone repair place before my team daily, then discovered around the time of the daily that it had been cancelled a couple of hours prior. i got a good chunk of work done instead, and then left the apartment for a "long lunch" involving bus rides there and back, and 45 minutes waiting politely. i was still buzzing from last night's coffee when i sat down, but halfway through the wait i crashed. hard.

then, when the two old people ahead of me finally finished and left, my "personal" teller checked my ID, heard me out, and regretted to inform me that there was absolutely nothing he could help me with.

*sigh*

i crossed the road, paid for my phone repair (mr smear's smashed screen couldn't be replaced), and came home.

i sipped coffee and lay down for a twenty minute nap, augmented with some dub. then i dragged myself to my desk and put in an hour's work, and then signed in to an hour and a bit of a talk by a coworker in thailand who's constructed a fascinating setup with grokbot that i'm thoroughly convinced is a dangerous, very expensive mistake.

i work with AI a lot, and i do not believe for one second that it's a good idea to take my eyes off the code entirely. also, my best senior engineer refused to use AI for one week. by friday, he said something nobody on the team wanted to hear.. i've been thinking about it a lot since i read it. i think it's spot on.

i was interrupted twice during that talk, for the same thing: the first was gd yelling at mr smear over the phone, the second was his teacher calling me to discuss his behavior. after the talk we had a family meeting, and things didn't seem too bad, and then his teacher got hold of me again and they seemed very bad. someone's apparently having a massive regression and doesn't remember how being a student works.

we have a lice protocol, now we have a behavior monitoring protocol. at least the teachers seem to be doing their part this time, actually making an effort to inform us and involve us 🙄

i took mr smear to the comics library, which was as much an opportunity for a little exercise and fresh air as to discuss his behavior, and gd's response to his behavior, and how i feel.

i'm excited about the books i took out: the second evangelion volume, the first volume of hellsing, and - hidden away from mr smear - book one of kick-ass. i flipped through it while there, it's hardcore.

we got home in time for dinner, with gd's delicious not-sushi rice-paper rolls, spoke to my mom, unpacked the groceries, showered, put mr smear to bed, and (after i spent some time thinking about stuff, after spending a little more time researching stuff) gd and i tried to watch an episode of ludwig, but we both passed out on the couch and i only realized it when i came around again and found myself aware enough to laugh at something, then noticed gd wasn't laughing :P

i've just finished my tea, i've written all this, and i'm going to try to catch up on last night's sleep.

buzz

 i started a course this afternoon, and slugged a fourth cup of coffee to get through it. i'm regretting doing that, now. it's around 11.30pm and i'm kind of getting stuff done, but i'm psychologically and emotionally tired and i know i should be trying to get some rest...

...

i slept alright last night, woke up pretty early again this morning. my morning was predominantly spent "clearing my desk" in preparation for heavy focus on - essentially - just one thing. i think i know what that one thing is, but if i'm honest with myself i'm kinda scared that i'm making a dangerous decision.

i also had a good idea regarding printing the sonnet comics, and i've just sent off a request to the illustrator accordingly.

in addition to desk-clearing, i helped gd out with making some appointments, and then headed out to work.

i feel like my work day was pretty productive. if nothing goes wrong, i suspect we'll manage the wednesday deadline. also, i've now asked two of my teammates to test my wrapper for the company's claude code harness - so my harness harness harness - and i'm hoping they have good experiences 🤞

one of my teammates has a hornet problem at home. jesus.

after years of pushing gd to post her thoughts online, she finally got started today, and IMO she's off to a good start ^_^

it rained today, so instead of going straight to my class at my employer's offices i stopped at home to switch to sandals and grab an umbrella. on the way, i read a report from one of mr smear's art teachers... i'm struggling to wrap my head around the fact that he has catch-up homework because he didn't work in class on a project that is literally the coolest thing he could be asked to do. when i asked him about it later over dinner, he had no answer.

anyway, the class was long but interesting. i didn't get an opportunity to speak privately with my coworker who's doing three jobs about how he's doing it, which i need to do because i need to understand how i can do it too...

i got home to the tail end of dinner (mr smear watching casual geographic), and we discussed the school situation, and then it was shower and bedtime. i read a little to mr smear (which always knocks me out), and now i'm done a bunch of random stuff and i think it might be worth me attempting to sleep.

this is me wishing myself luck...

retrograde

i just read the disease of optionality: why smart people stay poor before dinner, i'm in that article and i don't like it. i've been saying for a long time that i'm constantly working on a million things at once, and this article has made me realize i need to stop and focus. especially now, this couldn't have been a more timely intervention.

...

emotionally, today was rough. i'm a mess. but in retrospect it was nonetheless a pretty good shabbat. i finished writing up an article on using AI to build models in freecad and blender, even though i'm not thrilled by how my print model came out.

then we headed out in the rain - with our broken umbrellas from last winter - to meet with a friend from cape town who's here on a program for a couple of weeks. she brought mr smear watercolors and a really good quality sketch book, which he showed genuine gratitude for, and we talked non-stop until she had to go, and gd had consumed too much caffeine :P

after we got home, ate breakfast and relaxed for a bit, mr smear - with a lot of patient harassment - helped me wash the floors, after which we sat down to watch akira.

the movie is not the same as the manga. there's a scene where one of the girls is "lightly" violated, and holy shit, we had to have a talk about what we'd just seen. the violence is intense, but after total recall, well... 🤷‍♂️

i took mr smear out to throw the frisbee again, and it was a fantastic opportunity to talk about some serious stuff; afterwards, we took our now "traditional" little walk over the bridge and around to return home, and mr smear confided in me that he doesn't know how to process the fact that as anti-sport as he is, he's enjoying rollerblading and frisbee 🥹

while doing a bit of cloud-watching, he also came up with something inappropriate that made me feel bad for laughing, so i made a meme of it (which he's not happy about, he doesn't like my concept for his joke nor the fact that i used AI to generate it):

anyway, i made a model of it, perhaps he'll be able to do something with it:

after showering, we watched the wonder years over dinner, and every episode just amazes me more and more that something of this calibre and this educational value ever made it on air for so long. it's magic.

we chatted with my mom, and then i read a little bit more of the light fantastic to mr smear, who called me a "weenie" because i started falling asleep while reading again :P

...

right now i'm not sure if i'm clearing my desk, thinking about focusing, or going to bed.

a path less travelled

 maybe i am stupid.

i mean, this certainly isn't the first time i've mused on this, but the fact of the matter is that most of my life - honestly, some of the biggest moments of my life - is based on dramatic series of poor decisions. in most cases, i've kind of come out on top alright, but not for any particularly good reason. providence, i guess.

here i am, it's saturday morning, early enough that the streets are mostly empty and i'm surrounded by the blind-friendly ticking of a pedestrian crossing and occasional engine noises* and a glorious orange-cloud sunrise, the air calm and cool enough for me to be wearing a vest, and gd and mr smear (apparently) asleep.

* a surprising number of non-electric vehicles, which feels weird after yesterday's spectacular reveal of tesla's "flying" "roadster".

here i am, trying to do damage control and figure my way out of living beyond my means, struggling to make a decision because my resume can't handle me looking for a new job right now, but also i can't professionally and in good conscience leave a new contract i've barely begun without burning my employer, and moving apartments right now would be a nightmare, and it's unlikely to find a viable one in tel aviv that's cheaper anyway, and we can't leave tel aviv without pulling mr smear out of a school that's legitimately good for him both socially and artistically...

a sports car zooms by, a crow cries, and here i am, typing this up and sipping on my coffee and wondering whether i have what it takes to pull myself up by my bootstraps - an apt expression for the sheer impossibility that it seems to be - and find a way forward.

...

here comes the sun.

...

thursday:

thursday was a work from home day. while wednesday was fulling of hitting walls, thursday was awkwardly, slowly, sliding up and around them. my AI context seems a lot more reliable, but being thorough demands running a lot of long prompt sessions which means a lot of (human) evaluation, recalibration, and then a lot more waiting until the next cycle of the loop. it makes for long days, and an almost arbitrary level of productivity, but i did feel like i ended the day with a sense of accomplishment.

...

in the early afternoon, the landlord's air conditioner guy arrived. he checked out the ducts, and arrived at the conclusion that we don't have a mold problem, just a dust problem, and i *hope* his assessment is correct. either way, his explanation of our experience made sense, so we're going to follow the new protocol and see how it goes: for heat, air conditioner only goes on *cold*, colder than outside and colder than 24°, and immediately afterwards we use fan mode to keep the humidity out of the ducts from condensing.

i still haven't received a response from the landlord after i sent him an update.

...

i still haven't received a response from the pain clinic doctor regarding the cannabis license renewal. i guess we're going to have to make an appointment.

...

the tax return situation: i acted on a couple of recommendations, and got good responses. it turns out the 15% fee the not-quite-nigerian scammer eventually settled on is a standard fee. i ended up going with dod's guy, hopefully they'll find something.

...

we watch the wonder years' "how i'm spending my summer vacation" over dinner, continuing to solidify what a remarkable, wonderful, helpful series it is. mr smear gets really upset by kevin arnold's behavior, so much so that he just wants us to turn it off...

yesterday.

... but then, like yesterday, it turns out to provide a perfect analogy to explain to him why his own behavior is problematic. halfway through the day i lost my temper with him because he started telling me off for not helping him with his chores, while i'm trying desperately to keep my shit together to find ways to feed my family. a little later, when i'd calmed down, gd suggested that it was kind of like how kevin was focused on his little problems while others' worlds were burning, and i sat down with mr smear to calmly discuss it. as soon as i talked about last night's episode he *got* it, and immediately thanked me (and gd) for making is clear :)

...

that was only one thing that upset me, though. i spent most of the morning and early afternoon upset with mr smear about something else... for years now, i've been telling him to keep his phone in his bag when he's not actively using it, and he's been refusing to listen. a few months ago mr smear cost us a phone by washing it after dropping it in a urinal - this was upsetting enough before we learned that we're in financial distress - yesterday morning his friend shoved him (or something) and he dropped his phone and it died.

oh, fuck :/

...

gd and i bussed to a supermarket in yad eliyahu (i don't think i've ever been there before) for friday shopping (and to use the gift card i received before the holidays), and i'm pretty confident it's the best one in the city. we had a pretty good experience getting what we needed, caught a bus home (a long ride, with stress after we'd been talking about potentially having to move house again), and then bussed to pick mr smear up from school.

i took with me a couple of our old phones, and after picking mr smear up (and being frustrated by him making us wait outside for ten minutes and then eventually go in looking for him) we caught a bus to a phone repair store, which turned out to be the guy from my old (pre-canada) neighborhood who i thought had closed shop, but had merely moved to the other side of the road.

of the phones i brought with, one didn't need any work done (it suddenly sprang back to life with 70+% battery after we plugged it in), two of them i left with him for evaluation, and the rest (i don't remember if that's one or two) he told us weren't worth the cost of trying to fix. what worked out well for us is that the one that came back to life was mr smear's previous phone (from before our experiment to use paybox before understanding that it's a scam), so after only a little bit if fiddling i was able to hand it to him, fully useable.

...

i spent most of the afternoon just processing and thinking, while experimenting with freecad and blender. by late afternoon i'd managed to hook them up to AI and gotten results that weren't amazing, but were pretty damned good nonetheless.

...

before sundown, i took mr smear to the park and we threw the frisbee around. with everything else that's going on, it was fantastic. we both got some exercise, we both had fun, and mr smear actually did surprisingly well. it was an experience to treasure.

...

after getting home and getting showered, it was time for kiddush with my mom. gd's gnocci dinner was great, we watched some interesting nature "documentaries" on youtube, and after we'd all eating our fill, we settled down to watch the original total recall.

i read through some of the other reviews, and apparently remembered this movie with less than total recall, because i decided my 11 year old could handle it.

let's address the sexual stuff first: there's so much, from the get-go, and it's SO inappropriate. not just inappropriate for an 11 year old, inappropriate for real human beings - from the hyper-sexual wife responding to her husband's nightmares and literally anything else, to the relationship between  ironside's character and his wife, to the cabby fondling the woman's breasts while waiting for quaid. it's weird, and boy, did that lead to a couple of conversations.

but then there's the violence. we're usually not that concerned with violence, but total recall goes far beyond what i remembered and is truly hardcore. gratuitous and extreme.

it's a phenomenal movie, really fun, full of iconic moments and with lots to think about, but i do wish we'd waited a few more years.

i put mr smear to bed afterwards; he wasn't that bothered by the sex and violence, but the mutants in the movie freaked him out 🙄

friction and the not-quite-nigerian scam

 today was messy. i slept pretty well, and loved reading some more of akira before screen time.

i'm really struggling with my various side projects, not only to make time to work on them, but to find mental bandwidth. add to that the stress of having paid the larger amount which adds pressure to make good use of it, and i'm... doing... great...

i fired off an email to gd's pain doctor regarding prescribed doses, and i'm hoping we don't have to go see him in person 🤞

the work day was long, and difficult. it felt like every round of PR reviewing and updating was backfiring worse than the round before, and it was only in the afternoon, having pitched my setup to one of my team, that i learned that my AI tooling setup was ignoring something critical that really could have made all the difference :/

so as much progress as i felt i was making yesterday, today i felt like i'd hit a wall.

the only positive work day experience was a tech circle meeting in which i actually was able to contribute. that was a huge relief.

...

a while back i received an offer of assistance with tax refunds, and this morning i responded. the guy called me up, and asked for a whole lot of my personal details, and i was starting to wonder if i was being scammed when he divulged that he's actually nigerian... nigerian iraqi, living up north, and according to everything i've seen his business is legit. but. he takes enormous percentages from his clients, so i'm trying to find someone whose terms and conditions are a little less unreasonable.

...

back and forth with the air conditioner guy, and this evening he was saying "it would only take ten minutes", and i suddenly realized we were not talking about the same thing. he then spoke to our landlord, and then the landlord sent me a flurry of upset messages because he's having a hard time financially too and he was not expecting such a huge cost, and he's (understandably) pissed off that he paid a lot of money for a mold clean that didn't clean all the mold.

...

mr smear went to a friend's after school today, which he said was a super-short visit and that most of their time together had been spent on the bus there, awkwardly not really speaking.

kids these days.

gd and i had to threaten him with pretty severe punishments to get him to finish his book report, but he did do it, and he did a really good job.

then it was dinner time, gd having celebrated us getting our stove back, with four hot sauces and two episodes of evangelion. it was a good dinner.

after showering and brushing teeth, i read some more of the light fantastic to mr smear, then sat down in front of my computer to poke the AI and do not much of value.

now i'm drinking my last tea and planning on climbing into bed.

momentum

 whatever else is going on, i woke up feeling better this morning. i started my day reading akira, the artwork is stunning and the story is... a bit different from what i remember from the movie, but i haven't seen the movie in forever so...

i began my functional day ordering hand-vacuum filters off of ali express, and unboxing the reflective straps i picked up yesterday. we found our sharpies, but then i discovered that sharpies and white-out don't mix, and then gd realized that she could mix up acrylic paint and did an excellent job of color-matching on our bathroom tiles 👍

[pausing to go and watch gd eating sunflower seeds, i was honestly convinced that she was somehow doing it wrong and now i'm trying to figure out how i've never seen her eating them before]

i walked to work a little anxiously, expecting another cyclist/motorcyclist incident in the walkway and identifying more with the poor old guy who was so angry about it a couple of weeks ago.

there were no signs, nothing indicating that there was a problem with the road i normally cross to get into the office, and i splashed down into what was either mud, or cement, and it went into my sandals.

i - was - pissed.

i tried not to track whatever it was into the office, which was nigh impossible, and found myself awkwardly and embarrassingly standing on a bunch of paper towels while washing my sandals off in the bathroom sink. not the greatest start to the workday.

work itself was fine, though. i made progress, and am feeling a bit of momentum, i had a pleasant roadmap meeting with my mentor, lunch was good (my onboarding buddy and i had a long chat about the differences in professional culture and work/life balance between the big companies), and i'm feeling pretty solid about my dev setup and the task i'm doing.

oh, and i had coffee with my old friend from the officer's course, and learned that's he's doing really cool hobbyist stuff with home automation and 3D printing. like, really cool stuff.

...

i received a call from the medical cannabis people, apparently there isn't an issue with gd getting a larger quantity per month. i really, really hope that's true 🤞

...

it sucked that the air conditioner guy couldn't make it this afternoon - or tomorrow, either - but it did give me the opportunity to go and hear eli sharabi speak. holy shit, that was an intense hour and a half. the fact that he's doing what he's doing and is maintaining the attitude that he's maintaining is nothing short of miraculous. there's no detail of his story that isn't devastating and heartbreaking.

...

i came home in time for dinner, and after discussing what i'd heard we dived in to another episode of evangelion. mr smear actually ate most of the chili, i didn't cry when i took too much carolina reaper sauce, and then it was shower / teeth / bedtime and i read a bit more of the light fantastic.

i couldn't figure out how i was feeling and i certainly wasn't being focused, so gd and i watched another episode of fauda, and i think i'm going to try for a (relatively) early night.