emulation

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

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

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

the rod of shower-destiny

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

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

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

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

priorities reversal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rough edges

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

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

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

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

he had one yesterday.

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

...

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

destabilized

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

crackles and booms

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

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

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

no offset

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

we all got up late again.

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

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

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

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

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

the counter-routine

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

every day is (almost) exactly the same

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

breathing easy

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

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

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

...

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

the world according to my son

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

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

so i guess i've dadded well. today.

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

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

where's the supreme leader?

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

less than minor disruptions

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

hopefully my mom will be too 🤞

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

less useless

 yesterday was - especially during this war - very strange.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

useless

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*I* has the dumb

 well, today happened.

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

...

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

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

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

with pleasure :D

...

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

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

online meeting inappropriateness

 two incidents today: 

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sense of accomplishment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

wired

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

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

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

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

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

inside

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

outside

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

today was a bit weird.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

two for two

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

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

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

...

yesterday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

today:

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

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

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

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

it's okay

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

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

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

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

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

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

the time cluster bomb

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

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

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

also, mr smear's molar fell out.

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

we literally walked around the block twice today for exercise.

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

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

thanks to AI.

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

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

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

the purim decree

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

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

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

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

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

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

purim ii

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

at least the groceries got through.

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

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

ding dong!

 khamenei is dead.

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

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

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

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

...

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