false start

yesterday was NOT the big day i was anticipating! it was a super weird day, to be honest. when i finally got up (i originally woke up feeling totally broken, so i slept on the couch for a while), i discovered that my new client had sent me a message the night before informing me that i wouldn't be able to go into the office.

later i learned that this is because they forgot to send me an NDA in time. so now that everyone's signed off on it, apparently i'll be able to go into the client's office tomorrow. maybe.

in the meanwhile, i submitted my spec repo article to my employer's publication and sent the whole company an email, realizing immediately after the window to "undo" the send that the subject of the email made it seem like i was challenging the project our boss has been championing... oops.

that set the ball in motion for two things: first, establishing that i'd be spending my work day trying to get on board with the boss's project, and second, that i would go into our office to try and catch the boss for a face-to-face to assure him that my project supports his rather than undermines it.

i jumped on a bus, listening to transformed - it's got a lot to offer, but i think i'd have benefitted just as much from skimming one of the many product operating model web pages - and eventually arrived at the office to find it empty and locked.

fuck.

so i immediately caught another bus home, and said goodbye to that hour and a half of my life.

i spent the afternoon jumping between the boss's project and mr smear's horror game, eventually getting ahead with both, and then took mr smear to the supermarket to try and spend as much of my lunch allowance as possible before it resets at the end of the month.

otherwise, we opened cthulhu fluxx and enjoyed a fun game before dinner, we watched the second episode of fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood, and the rest of the evening was quite boring. we all went to bed relatively early, although mr smear didn't actually fall asleep until something like 1am.

i woke up this morning after a relatively good night's sleep, looked out into a world that didn't make sense - it was cloudy and rainy in tel aviv on this last day of august - was reminded by gd that i have a kindle (i had to explain squatting to mr smear so that i could call him a squatter) and read some more of stranger in a strange land, and was very excited to receive vocal support for my spec repo initiative from my boss and for them to have accepted my article into our publication.

now i've explained to mr smear that today is get-ready-for-the-first-day-of-school day, and i'm about to have breakfast, and then head to our office to see what the day brings.

rituals

 it's just after 6.30am, i'm sitting on the balcony with a clay-colored mug full of turkish coffee, having just woken up and performed the ritual brush gum guard - brush teeth - open windows - wipe down chairs and table, it's a beautiful morning and in about an hour i'm going to be off to my second acupuncture session.

i had a puff last night, which helped, but it didn't stop me from waking up almost an hour ago and being unable to get back to sleep. i'm still feeling a bit tired, but overall not bad, and i think the biggest thing i'm conscious of right now is how i hold my left shoulder. years ago (back in south africa) i realized that my left shoulder's always lower than my right, and when i remember and i make an effort to bring it forward my neck hurts less. but holding it forward is conscious effort, and if i get too comfortable and forget then i go right back to where i started...

i noticed last night that my mattress dips deeply in the middle. i don't know if this is good for me or not.

...

huh, i just noticed: someone put the word ritual in spirituality.

...

i started yesterday with doomsday clock, which so far isn't bad, but... it's not watchmen. and it's weird, in a not-good way. it's not bad, though, as i said, so i'm going to keep going and hope to not be disappointed.

i've been listening to marty cagan's transformed, at high speed and with skipping, and it's got enough interesting stuff in it to make it worthwhile. i think i'd prefer a summary, though. i mean, a book on this stuff seems a bit much.

the work day involved a lot of waiting (PR frustration on my second-to-last day!) but the results were worth it - five months down the line, a ridiculous number of lessons learned, and the "new" analytics data is being delivered and rendered almost exactly like the "old" data, but via a completely different technology stack. it's arguably better, definitely cheaper, and i've managed to overcome insane obstacles (mostly self-inflicted by the organization) and deliver just before my last day.

there is absolutely no way i'd have been able to do this without AI. this was a massive up-skill with big lessons in corporate engineering bureaucracy, and i'm really, really glad that i'm delivering the solution with a repo full of handover documentation and useful scripts for testing and generating reports. working with a project repo turned out to be one of the most important things i did.

...

on my way out the building, i chatted with two of the guys about a sensitive topic: the guy who disappeared almost two months ago (though it feels like only a few weeks) was fired mere days after his wedding. which reminded me of an incident a couple of years ago when a coworker was fired right after his wedding, and though i can't find my post about the actual layoffs (which is weird) i made sure to talk about my feelings on the matter.

i only realized that i'd essentially bad-mouthed my client after i'd described the behavior as cruel, and impossible not to take personally whether it's personal or not 😫

having walked, rollerbladed and then barely slept the night before, i was too tired to do anything physical when i got home. in any event, i came home right in time for a big sushi dinner and the wonder years, and after the bedtime ritual we sat down to finish crocodile dundee.

*SPOILERS* we were all upset by sue's shenanigans, but also puzzled by the question of "why in hell would either of them think that taking mick to new york would be a good idea?". we see him being led through the city and put on display in the rudest, most disrespectful way... but then i had a revelation: it's the australians who've made the movie, which means that the movie is actually as case of the australians treating the americans like weird creatures in a zoo, and our mick's as much the curious visitor as he is the curiosity. *END SPOILERS*

and then it was bedtime. now i'm off to my acupuncture appointment, and then it's on to my very last day with the client i've been working with for the past eight months.

official

 i didn't take a puff on sunday night, but i slept pretty well nonetheless. i started my day completing my favorite thing is monsters volume ii.

the artwork is no less phenomenal than the first volume, but overall it just isn't as satisfying, none of the elements that were "wrapped up" make much sense, and there are a bunch of events that were more focused on being anachronistically inclusive and less on the actual characters and story.

it's full of wonderful creations and interesting moments, though, and ultimately I enjoyed it a lot.

...

a significant chunk of my morning and evening were spent worrying about finances. we're barely scraping through this month, and as a result of gd's panic (and her refusal to use cheap, effective but gross solutions) we've spent an enormous amount of next month's money on lice treatments that may or may not work.

it's not clear right now if we're done with this super-lice saga yet. we've established a protocol that we're going to stick to, wartime or peacetime, and we're going to hope for the best.

...

i started listening to the audible* audiobook of marty cagan's transformed yesterday on my way to the office, at 1.5x speed and trying to skip as much fluff as possible. so far, my biggest takeaways are that transformations are whole-org things that require buy-in from everyone, and that *gasp* small, frequent release cycles and CI/CD need to happen together or they're meaningless.

* i think audible should consider selling lifetime memberships and then charging a small amount per audiobook, rather than huge amounts per audiobook on top of expensive memberships.

...

a truck just drove past and made a sound like a quiet sneeze.

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my first encounter in the office was dx, and when i shared my thoughts on the map generator lessons from sunday night and what i thought might be the next step, he told me something encouraging: "i wouldn't be surprised if that's what everybody's doing in a few months from now". so now i'm motivating to figure out a good way to make a spec library so that i can tell my agents to insert a <pattern> in whatever project i'm working on and have it pre-loaded with everything it needs to ask instead of having to describe what i want from scratch.

...

i was sitting with my new manager, and we were discussing how we were both taken by surprise by yesterday's news that this is my last week, when my previous manager from bulgaria suddenly walked up and joined us - i've never met him in real life before! so that was cool.

the work day was mostly scrambling, because that's what this week is all about, to close up everything. and a break for an employer's group meeting. and another break to talk to one of the data guys after learning that a bunch of them have just been retrenched*. and, towards the evening, buying tickets to gd's and my first date night since my mom visited last year.

* i referenced the town hall here, but couldn't easily find my immediate thoughts on it, which were all around gratitude that this is my client and not my employer, because i would not have felt in the least bit safe.

i got home relatively late, and we watched the wonder years over gd's second delicious attempt at daal, and after catching up with and saying good night to my mom we did the shower and lice protocol thing and then settled down to watch about half of crocodile dundee together.

i was tired, which usually meant going to bed early and then waking up for hours in the middle of the night, so i took a puff, and actually slept well until morning.

catching up

 i've been complaining about being really sleepy in the mornings, but the plus side is that i have actually been sleeping. i hope writing this doesn't affect anything :P

i wrote up yesterday's experience this morning after mr smear left for school, and then rushed to get the dishes done, forgetting that i also needed to clean poop from outside our windows. on my way to work, i checked in with our neighbors and learned that we're not the only ones.

i've been listening to the american gods tenth anniversary audiobook on and off, and although the narration's not 100% i am enjoying it.

most of the day was all over the place, with the majority of it being dedicated to catching up with scr and introducing him to what we're all about. the late afternoon was all about preparing a release, and although i abandoned my coworker with a proper mystery in order to get home in time for dinner, we did manage to get through a lot of the process with significant successes.

another houthi attack. just me and mr smear and a couple of neighbors with their little kids, and one of them was being so cute that even mr smear was amused.

after getting mr smear into bed (with only one time returning to remind him that he's got to handle his fears with his imagination), i spent about an hour diving in to AWS account management, finally hitting a wall that i need our office manager to help me break through in the morning.

...

 my prayer was answered, and the rest of the day went pretty smoothly.

i mentioned GPU stuff the other day, this morning my boss asked if it would help if we asked our contact at AWS for some help. literally the moment i agreed, i wondered out loud if perhaps we'd been using the wrong instance type the entire time.

two short experiments later, and all of our cloud instance issues were resolved 🤦

otherwise, i spent the entire day doing everything except what my boss had asked me to do, except for the last half hour during which i managed to get it done.

the bus ride home was interrupted by a dramatic search for vegan mayo.

i ran mr smear through some math homework before dinner, and he did pretty well. my new approach has had some major wins, and some minor losses, but all-in-all i feel i'm on the right track.

i spent some time half-heartedly working on the new language project, and just played a little bit of slay the spire. i'm nervous about going to bed. i'm pretty sure my mother has the sleep cheat code installed, i wonder if i don't...

... probably not :P

...

i have yet to have a fully positive audible experience. either the books i want aren't available, or the narration sucks.