t-4

 there's so much stuff happening, i'm sure i'm forgetting important notes along the way.

today began peacefully, with dishes, and moon knight, and interesting conversation* with mr smear.

* although we did have a serious argument when he told me i'm a hypocrite. i'm a lot of things, but i'm pretty sure i'm not a hypocrite. and besides, i'd only just explained to him what a hypocrite is.

it ended peacefully, with mr smear laughing until he choked multiple times while i read some more of the colour of magic to him (i'm thinking he's finally ready for it), and completing my employer's onboarding, and dishes, and having gd wake up to my howl of distress to advise me to put a glove on to retrieve the sink filter that i dropped into a particularly gross bin situation.

...

we arrived at the new apartment just before the plumber's brother did. we walked through the work that needed doing, and he pointed out that three taps needed replacing, not just one. and then he and his brother quoted me for the work, and my jaw dropped.

the landlord agreed to him taking care of the pipes, but didn't want to replace the taps... "right now", he said. so i asked him if we could make an arrangement, that i'd pay for the taps now and he'd pay me back later. and he agreed, and i rejoiced.

our friend/neighbor came down (she brought coffee) and joined us for a while, and when i felt i wasn't needed any more i headed to the office. when the plumber's brother was done and they were all heading out, she noticed something wrong with one of the kitchen windows - it doesn't latch, and we're currently in the middle of a storm with high winds and plenty of wet.

the good news (to my mind) is that the landlord's acknowledged this issue, so i guess it's clearly (again, to my mind) his fault if the floors get damaged. in the meanwhile, i managed to get our window guy from a few months ago to come in tomorrow afternoon, hopefully he'll come up with a solution that makes everyone happy 🤞

at the same time, while i was in the apartment i managed to get the electrician we used a while back to agree to come in and install three-phase under the hot plates. the "under" part will be tricky, but that's a tomorrow problem...

also, the plumber's brother came up with a great suggestion that makes installing our water dispenser much less messy.

work was crazy today. i got in 45 productive minutes after i came in, but then immediately had to return to the apartment to help gd with the unpleasant woman who came to take another look. i arrived to a not-unpleasant vibe, and after she left gd informed me that of all the details of her life to come into play, this woman grew up in the same neighborhood in turkey that gd lived in for a year. apparently, that's a reason to play nice with us. or maybe it's just because she's desperate for the apartment...

i paid the plumber (who'd become antsy), i ate, and i returned to the office. i had a long meeting trying to explain to my bulgarian teammates what i was doing to fine-tune the model's guesses and enable them to share the workload, and then a shorter meeting with my local teammates (kind of), and during that meeting one of the guys (the slipknot-not-synthknot guy) confronted me about the n-gram detection. we agreed to work together to see if maybe i'd missed something.

by the end of the day - an hour and a half later, because i had to go home again for another viewing - we'd determined that while the "gold standard" n-gram detection that i was using was as shit as i'd remembered, that there's another one he'd used before that was much less shit. but more important than that, he'd revealed that the company officially supports a very specific set of languages, and his n-gram detector proved 100% accurate (on our small sample set) for all of them!

so that's very exciting news, and tomorrow's mission is now to test this detection on as many production samples as we can to establish its "good enough-ness".

...

gd's done an incredible amount of packing and cleaning (even if, in my opinion, she really doesn't need to invest so much in the cleaning) over the past few days, but we're now getting to a point where there's not a hell of a lot to eat or eat with :P

it's very strange seeing the layers of our lives that slowly built up over the last four years being rapidly peeled back to eventually reveal an empty apartment that shows practically no trace that we were ever here.