discombobulated

 today has been ridiculous. i got a (literal) couple of hours' sleep, then dragged myself out of bed to... i don't know what i did*... then rushed out to catch a bus to my mom's bank to sort something out with her account.

* [i started writing up a PRD for a system i've been thinking about since i lived in canada for my boss]

there was no queue, but no workers either, so the manager called me into his office. when i asked him what he would do, his advice was that it would of better value to us to go home and take care of it ourselves.

the bus driver on the way home / to my office took a wrong turn that sent us in a wide circle around the hospital, in traffic, which was ridiculous. gd handed me a small lunch at the door and i headed to my client, arriving just in time for my team daily.

the day was, well, busy. lots of babysitting AI, literally flipping between contexts like it wasn't hurting my brain. i have spent most of the day consistently switching between four or five different things at a time and trying not to lose my mind.

i currently *am* the orchestrator. i need to level up and outsource that function to AI already.

towards the end of the day, i saw someone start preparing a PR to go in before the golang work that i've been spending weeks on, on a project nobody ever touches, and that i'd finally asked for a review for this morning thinking it was done. i actually panicked, and sent messages both to the author and his manager begging them to make sure my changes went in first.

i'm very grateful that they acquiesced 🙏

i also spent a lot of the day troubleshooting my auto-doc integration. and after walking home and shaving my beard in an attempt to decompress, i dived straight back into it and i'm still going now (on the other machine). so now i'm going to deliberately stop what i'm doing and go play a game with mr smear.

oh! my sister and i were just talking, it looks like she has the exact same lower back / hip flexor thing and she also didn't sleep last night :/

getting stuff done

 it's been a busy morning! we failed to get gd's canadian crypto account reactivated (their verification is broken), but i managed to get my israeli one sorted out. this was after discovering yesterday that ethereum gas fees have finally normalized after all the upgrades, making it worthwhile transferring money, and that compound has been generating far less interest than promised.

i mean, with our amounts of money it didn't make a huge difference, but still.

while doing that, i managed to get the blast window for our shelter roped up so that gd can close it herself in case of emergency. gd and mr smear cleaned the house yesterday, specifically worried about all of us (including my sister and potentially mr smear's friend) having to sleep in our shelter bedroom together. apparently things are heating up, though i've been completely disconnected from the news cycle these days.

then i called and made an appointment for her to see the dentist, because of course she's in pain after her root canal and crown were done... at least her stomach seems to be doing a bit better today.

i think i've sent my insurance broker the documents she wanted - turns out my previous employer forgot to update the insurance companies that i wasn't working for them any more 🤔

finally, gd found our boxing gear (whew!) and i posted the mongoose's guitar hero guitars on the facebook marketplace.

so, all in all, it's been a morning.

[chokes on a raisin bran raisin]

revolving

 i ended up getting to bed pretty late, which i largely attribute to slay the spire 2.

mr smear's early alarm woke me up, and i had difficulty getting back to sleep. i woke up feeling zombified.

my day began with stranger in a strange land. i really wasn't into it at the beginning, and some of it feels really dated, but i pushed through that to discover that it's by design - as in it's at least somewhat satirical - and that considering the decade it was published in it shows such remarkable cleverness, both in its imagination and in its incredible ability to rewrite human experience from an outsider's point of view. it's also got a really dark feel to it. slow, ponderous, heavy, like watching a film through tv snow.

i had to force myself to put the book down and start my day.

adulting is stressful, especially unnecessary adulting. if i'm paying for additional medical insurance, i shouldn't have to work harder than them to get back money that's supposedly guaranteed.

[my previous ingrowing toenail from ages back is hurting again, suddenly]

i got to work, and found myself blocked waiting for the data team. during the four hours or so that i waited for them to get back to me, i continued to suffer in an infinite AI failure loop, which i tried to utilize as a test for my skill evolution. but when one of the data guys finally got around to me, he didn't agree with my approach and demoralization struck when i realized i might have gone through all that suffering for nothing (i mean, aside from the skill improvement).

...

at this point i received a call from the paybox retention team, who wanted to know why i ditched them and what they could do to make things right. i stood on the balcony, angrily describing their lies and how they've burned any trust i might have had in them, and by the time he heard me out he miserably acknowledged that he couldn't really make things right. then i hung up and went back inside, wondering if the people working near the balcony door had heard me... because i know that they heard me talking to mr smear earlier about why i'm not getting him a spotify subscription, as somebody came up and closed the door and i was quite embarrassed...

...

as we worked through the problem, though, we ended up hitting a wall that could only be resolved with the approach i'd been taking. so that was a relief. and then we ran into another wall, and the two of us split up to investigate alternate options.

i learned something today about connecting databricks to github, i figured out an undocumented way to use both APIs in way they didn't design for and it felt VERY good to see it actually work! it took a while to explain to the data guy how it worked, at which point he agreed that it's clearly the simplest and most correct solution for our use case, and that felt especially good after thursday's talks when i was so out of my depth that i could barely understand their questions, let alone answer them.

...

i came home in fantastic spirits. mr smear argued with me about discussing summer day camp because he already knew what he wanted, at least until he saw what the make camp is offering. we were sad to hear that he and his friend who's going aren't getting along so well - apparently his friend isn't friending much better than before they made up after their fight...

i slugged a 4th coffee in preparation for the night blade, then mr smear and i put on our rollerblades and went to the park and back. firstly, he's getting the hang of tying his laces intellectually, though his fingers are struggling. secondly, it was back to square one, he was very nervous at first, but we got there eventually and the way back was fine.

we came back to find gd with a sharp knife (always scary, and she was right nervous as well) and a delicious sushi dinner, which we ended by dipping unripe apricots into wasabi soy sauce with astoundingly positive results 🤯

i said goodnight to mr smear, then headed out to join the rollerblading group. just before leaving the apartment my neck twinged, and it caused me trouble the whole time i was out. i was already sore halfway to the meetup point, which was kinda sad, and i had to split halfway because i'd been feeling faint for a while.

most of my ride was fun, though it would have been more fun if i hadn't let myself get sucked into a really ugly political argument.

i came home almost in pieces, watched a crazy update from farzad about the coming robotic revolution while eating a second dinner, showered, and now i'm just trying to settle before climbing into bed.

good vibes

 today was really cool. i completed a previous slay the spire 2 run (ascension 1 with the silent and some insane shiv combos), and mr smear and i both spent some time reading on the beanbags.

gd gave hair a try while i set up blink for her so that we can put mr smear's money somewhere constructive. there literally aren't any viable banking options for us, and that's messed up.

our upstairs friends let us borrow their rollerblades and pads again, so i mr smear accompanied me to the recycling station and back. it was tough going - the ones he borrowed today fit better than yesterday, but they're damaged and caused him more pain - but learned an entirely new thing is hard, and he handled it very well.

we've agreed to go shopping on friday.

after showering, and then after dinner, i spent most of the evening working on my AI harness and honing my agent skills. dinner was late, and simple, and we spoke to both my mom and my sister.

between prompts, i watched an interview with angine de poitrine and then their live performance again. dammit, these guys are aweomse, and i can't help but wonder how insane it must have been for people to see them live for the first time not knowing what they were going to witness.

right, bedtime. not only is tomorrow going to be a high-pressure day work-wise, but we have a meeting with the school staff and no idea what to expect.

one drama at a time would be nice.

brain fogging

 once again, as it gets later and i get ready to go to bed, my nose and throat situation begins to worsen... on the one hand, the antihistamines seem to be helping a bit. on the other, this really can't be just allergies.

i'm enjoying the excuse to accompany mr smear to and from school these days, even though it's awkward and getting more awkward by the day. are we at war? will the bombing resume? or should we be living our best lives?

limbo is uncomfortable.

i told my team what i've been thinking, and that i essentially needed to go back to the drawing board, and they were understanding. in spite of a fair number of distractions, i did manage to be productive today and i'm understanding considerably more than i did before. i'm not quite sure how to formally introduce AI tooling into what i'm doing - i may have to treat it as local harnessing only - but at least i'm feeling a little less lost.

a couple of months ago i began the process of setting up paybox for mr smear, and then a few weeks later got his account set up. since then it's been unclear whether he's actually earning interest, and today i got in touch with their support. after they initially lied to me, it became apparent that children's savings accounts do not, in fact, earn interest. so the whole exercise was one in futility, and i've now withdrawn all the money and we're going to have to find another option. and, just like every other thing we've tried, this has cost us; not just in cash, but i've now got two credit cards that need to be cancelled :/

assholes.

i snacked a lot today. today was all about snacks. even if some of the snacks were essentially just an extended lunch :P

the supplement routine is getting a bit ridiculous, though. it's complicated, and i've kinda given up on intermittent fasting the full 16 hours (though i guess i've been unofficially doing less for a while now) because it makes it even more so. i can't drink tea or coffee for an hour before or after taking my iron supplement (or eating something with a reasonable amount of iron in it), and i've got to take vitamin D in the morning with food, and magnesium at night with vitamin C (but not vitamin D), and i have to have my handful of walnuts (or pancakes, if i'm in time for gd's breakfasts) for omega 3, and not forget to regularly take b12.

after my mom and i picked mr smear up from school, we returned home and then walked across the highway to find the supermarket. it really is well-hidden! mr smear's whole thing for weeks has been hunting for lotus biscoff cookies, and i honestly wasn't expecting to find them there.

but find them there we did :)

on the way there, i'd charged him with paying attention to the route so that he can he gd find the place, to which he'd responded in a decidedly uncooperative manner. i warned him there'd "be a test", and on the way back i quizzed him, putting the lotus cookies on the line. he was not happy when i "failed" him and assured him there'd be no biscuits until i got a map, at which point i went home and my mother volunteered to accompany him to give him a hand.

which he apparently didn't need 🤦‍♂️

it really is all about motivation with this kid. he got home, drew me a map, took half a biscuit and promptly forgot about the ones i'd offered him as a prize, and then settled down to try and improve his previous solution in human resource machine.

that was effectively the end of my work day :P

while he didn't exactly post the correct solution himself, he did work through it really well, he made a real effort and stayed focused, made a bunch of modifications that he was pleased with himself about, and when i sat down with him at the end, he was clearly on board with me every step of the way.

this is exciting stuff ^_^

just before dinner his new teacher called me, and our chat was pleasant. funny, even, in a distressing kind of way, because the story she told me was that she'd loaned mr smear a book for the lesson, and he'd somehow managed to lose it by the end of class even though nobody had moved.

my child is certainly talented.

eventually, i got the full story over dinner and everything made sense, nothing had been lost.

dinner was really good, gd and my mom worked together to produce a lentil curry that even anti-lentils mr smear found edible.

bedtime was smooth, i finally read a bit more of the colour of magic to him (we're so close to the end!), and i've now spent a couple of hours doing nothing of value (including some spire slaying). now i'm taking my cough to bed and praying to get some rest.

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.

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.

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?

stopped

 we joined our upstairs friends for dinner last night (pot luck), and it was a lovely evening. my second drink of the day, and their couch was soooo... couch. we haven't had a couch in weeks, and i was - as the quebecois say - bean grease.

we all came downstairs and crashed hard.

...

i woke up late this morning, after a pretty full night's sleep. then i did random stuff - beginning with a painful attempt to upgrade the comics i made two weeks ago (needs a paid gemini subscription, and i couldn't find any easily-installable plugins for gimp to use AI), and then mr smear and i watched an episode of solo leveling on crunchyroll, and then i passed out for another hour and a half.

in the afternoon - aside from eating a lot - i began trying to set up paybox young for mr smear, which meant me signing up for an additional credit card of my own which i'm not happy about. but after doing the math, i discovered that just in terms of pocket money alone (plus doubling any unused for savings) he's already unwittingly earned enough money that the bank fees are covered by the compound interest, so it's worth it.

only... he has to install a different paybox app, and it can only be installed from the israeli app store, and our family account is still canadian and it's not possible to sign in to a different account on a managed phone.

*sigh*

after much digging - again - i learned that the only way to resolve this problem is to create a new family account from a different email, then migrate everyone on our family account. which isn't a huge problem, because we closed our canadian bank accounts last year so we don't really need to be on the canadian store any more, but it's really annoying because child accounts can only be transferred after a one-week waiting period. because reasons.

so i've done half the migration, and i guess we'll see how things go next week.

mr smear and i took a pleasant walk around our "backyard" park - park hayarkon - and after eventually extricating mr smear from the exercise machines we stumbled across what appeared to be a juggling school, which was quite fun to watch.

then we returned home, and i jumped on a call with protoplasm for our first catch-up in forever, and then it was dinner time, and getting mr smear into bed a half an hour late time, and then shower time, and now... i dunno, i'll probably go to bed soon.

post-birthday different-kind-of-special

 dinner last night was nice - gd's first home-cooked meal in about a week. a little slower to cook with the borrowed plates, but it didn't bother me or mr smear.

the rest of the evening was all about getting into bed as quickly as possible, the shower was amazing, and i crashed pretty much immediately after.

in the middle of the night, i awoke from a sequence of nightmares: nightmares of being trapped trying to get home from work in a cavernous escape room (that was part of the office on a bond-like villain's mountain fortress), then of living at the docks and catching mr smear skipping school to hide amongst cargo loading equipment to play on his phone.

so that was me getting up at 3.45am with my nervous system on fire, raging at the afterimage of my dream son fucking up his imaginary life.

i did get back to sleep, a bit, but then i spent most of the rest of my time until alarm o'clock uncomfortable, and ultimately woke up with a stiff neck and the dizziness that often accompanies it. i mean, i might just be sick - gd's feeling similar today, in addition to the stuff that's been messing with her for months already - but still.

i think she might have been right on friday, that i shouldn't have let the mattress guy convince me to give it another week or two.

at least gd's happy with her side of the bed.

over coffee, i started putting together an article about producing comics with AI, but then i spent a large chunk of the morning sorting out address changes. and struggling - not for the first time - with the fact that we have money in our bank account but are unable to use our credit cards because we can't pay them off whenever we want.

not right now, but i think we need to consider finding ourselves a new bank.

on the way to the office i called social security, who informed me that the unemployment office hadn't updated them as they're reported. at the office, i remembered that nobody goes to the office on sundays, and according to the cleaning staff there was some kind of power outage as well. on my way back from the office i called the unemployment office, who after a very long time informed me that social security was lying. so then i called social security again, and the agent told me that the unemployment office was lying, and then i got really upset. eventually i got through to a manager, who "helped" me by directing me to the website to request that they look into it 🤦‍♂️

all the while in pain and dizzy.

i spent the rest of the day - until now - fixing the first iteration of my changes and learning how to test them. and eating and snacking a lot; i guess after yesterday's exercise (on top of the past week's) my body really needed more calories.

aside from pain and dizziness, my only real distractions were the electric hob installation (hooray!) and getting mr smear and his friend to come home on his way to the comic library to return the books (today was the deadline), and on their way from here i managed to catch them heading to bat yam by mistake in time for them to turn around.

parenting in 2026 is hard. navigating screen time, inappropriate content, lack of exposure to nature…

… but holy shit, being able to see where my kid is on a map, and know that i need to intervene so that he doesn’t end up in a different city by accident? priceless.

it's dark, the two of them should be making their way back soon, god knows how i'm going to get his friend home 🤷‍♂️

...

i have to say, slowly but surely our new home's starting to make sense. and it's huge compared to our last one, or at least it's much, much longer, because i've discovered over the past day or two that it's more sensible to call gd on whatsapp than to try to yell to each other, or get up from whatever i'm doing :P

overload

 it scares me that today's tuesday. and that this coming weekend is our last one in this apartment, and that there are so many unknowns, so many things i might have forgotten to take care of.

and there are knowns, now, too. gd went in to the new apartment today to take photos, and she called our friend down to verify that under the gas plate, the cupboard smells like gas. after a literal hour trying to get a technician to come and take a look (the first forty minutes were spent talking to the wrong gas company), the guy came in and confirmed that there's no leak, that the gas is off, and that the gas plates are probably broken 🤦‍♂️

there're water issues, too. blocked drains all round, and the toilets don't flush properly. and damage under the kitchen sink. and a whole story with the "jacuzzi". so we now have a plumber coming in - scratch that, he's busy, a plumber's brother coming in - first thing tomorrow morning.

and with all this noise in the background, i had to bail on a couple of hours' work this afternoon. i feel like i'm making good progress though - i've figured out a decent way to compare "my" model's results with what's in production - but it's a long, manual process and it's full of surprises.

oh, and at lunch today my boss/client and my team were having a very strange conversation about alcohol, drugs and chronic illness and i couldn't figure out if i was following what they were saying or not.

i didn't even talk about how my day began, yet - dishes, and reading moon knight: what a completely insane experience, and i mean reading it, it's properly destabilizing. i can't believe mr smear read it already.

oh, yes: i don't know what came over me, but i told him a really dumb but funny joke that could be potentially offensive to white saviors. he thought it was hilarious, and then i had to caution him about not re-telling it and now i'm wondering if i'm going to get in trouble for it :P

after he left for school, i took care of a bunch of things and then gd and i walked to the bank. it was a beautiful morning, and a good opportunity for some time to just walk and talk.

this time everything went quickly and smoothly, gd signed what she had to sign and i picked up the chequebook. we then went our separate ways, and when i arrived at the office *just* in time for my daily, i saw that she'd gotten home and received a message from the bank informing her that she'd left her ID there... so she had an additional experience on top of having to spend the day keeping house and packing for the move.

dinner was very late, but it was amazing. gd made a great ramen, with a yo egg on top with a runny yolk. it was glorious.

mr smear, in addition to doing his hebrew homework before i'd let him read in english (we're doing a weird thing since yesterday, hopefully it's not a bad call), decided that he's exhausted all the english stuff he wants to read and, entirely voluntarily, to both his parents shock and amazement, picked up the hebrew translation of kazu kibuishi's amulet (הקמע) and is devouring it.

...

my brain is throbbing, it's past 10pm. i'm going to make myself a cup of tea, and attempt to complete my employer's onboarding. and hopefully, hopefully, get a reasonably good night's rest.

the drain

 yesterday:

you know what's a surprisingly good feeling? when i arrive to pick up mr smear after 7.5 hours with his friend and he's clearly bummed out that their time is over.

the return home with was really fun.

it was an easy evening, i read some the colour of magic (we've restarted it, i hope he's ready for it this time) at bedtime and then the evening went into a bunch of random stuff, not least of which being writing up my earlier LLM experience into an article.

today:

i struggled to sleep last night.

the morning started off pretty well, and when mr smear left gd and i launched into removing the paintings from the walls and getting the screws / fisher plugs out. and realizing that *i* was guilty of mixing posidriv and phillips screws throughout the apartment :$

i took care of a bunch of other small things, and then left for the bank to organize a bank guarantee.

...

it's 2026 already. we have ai, robots, and a new evolution of CRISPR, but there i found myself, walking out of the bank after TWO HOURS signing arbitrary pieces of paper to acquire a document allowing me to promise my own money to someone else 😒

and then, OMFG.  just as i got on the bus to get to the office, i received an sms from the bank saying that my chequebook is available for pickup 😡

...

the bank experience really drained me. i got to the office, drank a coffee, and got back to working on my language detection model. i did that for an hour, then had lunch with the other dev who was working from the office, and then he left. i got some more work done before the only other person in the office, who was on the complete other side of it, lost his temper with someone on the phone. i tried not to eavesdrop, ending up suspecting that he'd been yelling at his kids :P

the work itself went sideways. first, when after two days of investment into testing this model, and some apparently good guesswork about some of the bigger languages (french and german, amongst others), i discovered that the model couldn't distinguish between english and russian. at that point, the mapping no longer mattered and i stopped what i was doing to investigate the existing solution.

that was when i learned that the elasticsearch language detection model isn't very reliable either, and that my client has a fair amount of garbage detections in its dataset. i also learned that i have a real advantage in evaluating language detections models because i'm familiar enough with quite a few very different languages.

so the model i've been evaluating is out, though i have infrastructure available to evaluate others (if i can find any reliable ones with labels), and i've established that there's no point in training our own model on our production data. i'm probably going to have to find out how n-gram language detection stacks up...

i left early myself and caught a bus home, authorizing mr smear to go with his friend to the comics library and on to his place. that made it easier for gd and i to go to the new apartment to sign the contract.

we were there for quite a while, it's looking considerably better, and this guy's really giving good vibes as a landlord. i didn't realize how hard it would be for him to grip a pen (he's very handicapped), and there were clauses that neither of us could figure out who should do what with...

we left with a key so gd and i can get started, cleaning it up and moving small things, and taking pre-inspection photos and organizing whatever fixes he missed.

i dropped my bag off at home, then walked to the square to wait for mr smear. he didn't need me to do that.

when we got home he dropped a bombshell - he and his friend watched the first episode of rick & morty today 🤦‍♂️

i fired off a message to his friend's dad - he's never seen the series - explaining that i understand that we'll never have full control, but that i'd appreciate it if his son understands that it's wrong and that he shouldn't share it with mr smear... he responded quickly and warmly, i hope we align.

mr smear has long hebrew homework due tuesday, so after a brief debrief on the rick & morty episode we got through a chunk of it and then had dinner, and then got through the shower/bedtime rituals (showering without a shower curtain again), and after getting mr smear into bed* i got caught up in getting gd's ipad upgraded, which led to some yak shaving in an attempt to free up enough space, which eventually led to an understanding that it's not possible to update the ipad software and apple's successfully coercing us to either abandon it or trade it in.

i fucking HATE apple.

* it took him forever to go to sleep, though

i'm absolutely exhausted, i think i need to go to bed. i hope i actually get some sleep tonight.

off script

 so there was a monday, and a tuesday, before today - but i only really recall the tuesday, so i'm going to work backwards and see if i took any notes...

today:

i did do a little work, in the morning and in the afternoon, but for the most part it was an admin day. on my way to the bank this morning i called the absorption ministry and made an appointment for gd to find out if she has cover for private hebrew lessons. at the bank, i signed off on the documents to open a savings account, one that i have to message them to ask them to deposit money into [i tried to locate a "scratch head" emoji and failed]

i walked to the mall and grabbed a cup of coffee, and then was joined by gd and mr smear and we got into buying his stationery for the fifth grade, which he enters next week 🤯

a religious woman overheard us working with the clerk to try and figure out what the list we had was asking for, and decided she knew better. the clerk was offended ("i'm not a retard!") and she didn't have much to offer that was actually helpful. afterwards, she tried to make smalltalk and i managed to drag gd out of there just as i heard her awkwardly transforming it into a real conversation...

we spent a few hours indoors, with mr smear playing a monster-eye-view of poppy playtime on roblox and promising that it wouldn't affect him.

we all went to the school together to pick up some of his books for the new year, then picked up a couple of things at the supermarket, walking home with our minds and tastebuds blown by the vegan cornetto ice-creams...

we then headed off to dizengoff center to try and find belts and sleeveless shirts for me, and a school diary (one that doesn't suck) for mr smear. we gave up on the shirts, but we did pick up new, smaller (better fitting) shorts for me, and then we went downstairs to the vegan market.

the burgers looked great, but i didn't trust the guy making them with his bare hands. mr smear wanted tacos, which was a great experience even if the filling wasn't amazing. we took barbecue seitan and quiche from the mom & son's random wares, and it was amazing. we made a terrible mess (mostly gd booby-trapping a drink and me and mr smear eating the tacos as best we could), but overall it was a good dinner and we ate too much. (we have untouched leftovers in the fridge)

we ran into some cousins on the way out the mall, hopped on the bus home, watched the second episode (episode 1) of ren & stimpy, showered and brushed teeth (i'm now using an ultra-soft brush, it's a weird experience), and read some more of the neverending story.

yesterday:

yesterday was supposed to be relatively relaxed. what began with me trying to finalize monday's fix (i'll get to that) turned into debugging bigtalk's build scripts, turned into me understanding that he literally built it from the ground up in direct opposition to what i'd instructed him, and in such a way that it would never work. i actually reverted his change before adding some stuff we needed to the original scripts, and every piece of code he wrote for us (or his imagined alternate universe version of us) has now been purged.

everything after lunch and until about 7pm was us scrambling to rescue a cloud machine that a) we have no way of interrogation for what went wrong and b) we had no idea was being treated as operational by our customer (officially it was a preview for testing). to make matters worse, in spite of my loud protests, one of the guys instructed the new devops to take it offline which made it impossible to recover. additionally, before bringing it back up they changed something critical about it, which broke my scripts.

it was as much miracle as effort, but we eventually managed to get it back up and running, and tomorrow i'm going to poke and prod everyone about doing a thorough RCA (even though i've already posted my recommendations).

we watched the second episode of ren & stimpy (to review it for appropriateness), but i started to fall asleep towards the end and i completely passed out while gd watched (until she passed out) the second season of the sandman.

monday:

i had difficulty getting up. i got to work, straight into a meeting with the new devops and incoming devops. and the meeting devolved into very severe unpleasantness - both in terms of cross-cultural communication (the incoming boss said something that our british devops understood as "your idea is shit"), and in terms of both me and the british devops losing respect for the incoming guys before they've even arrived. i ended up speaking to my boss about it, and his response to my saying that the drama "really isn't in my wheelhouse" was to chide me and remind me that in my current position, it's precisely in my wheelhouse.

anyway, at least the boss knows what's happening, and i'll worry about actual repercussions when the time comes.

the day was full of random distractions, but came to a head when a bunch of us sat down to troubleshooting the canadian contractor's code with him. we had no clear direction, but after an hour and a half we'd tracked down the issue and resolved it, which was a huge win because it's been hurting everyone in the team and preventing us from moving forward with a new release.

...

i tried to help my mother with her email issues after putting mr smear to bed, but i needed a nap. so i lay on the couch and set an alarm for half an hour, which i effectively snoozed over and over until eventually crawling into bed around 2am.

better

 today was better. it started rough, with a lot of time on hold with our medical insurance, and then we all went for a walk to track down the sleep lab at the hospital (the old lady at the information desk initially sent us to the wrong floor, a not-very-hospital floor) and i booked the earliest appointment available (april).

oh, and i picked up a copy of claudia ira davimes' the joy of being wrong, which is off to a promising start.

we then walked down the road to our bank branch, where it took about fifteen minutes for them to tell me they couldn't help me (i got a call in the afternoon and i'm satisfied with one of the savings "products" they offer) but gd picking me up an coffee slushy took the sting out. on the way home we picked up a bunch of things, including a lemon juicer like we have at the office which i'm way more excited about than i should be.

most of the afternoon was me installing and being sad that counter-strike doesn't run on macs, playing slay the spire, reading watchmen, and deciding that we were out of bookmarks and needed to fix that. and that if i was fixing that, i should make an attempt to figure out how to get organized with a gaming machine. so i hopped on a bus with mr smear, and the first store we arrived at was closed. then we hopped on another bus, and while waiting for my turn at the computer store i examined the bookmarks at the book store and was disappointed (to say the least). the guy at the computer store gave me a good quote and then advised me to try facebook marketplace first.

we went to the anime store, but while they didn't stock bookmarks, they did have a bucket of various trading cards so we chose a few one piece cards which will now serve us just as well. and then we got another quote from another computer store, and mr smear obsessed over all the anime figures, and then we walked home, having pretty good conversations along the way.

dinner was great, we introduced mr smear to ren & stimpy and watched another episode of the simpsons. gd's neck's been spasming all day, but i read a bit to mr smear at bedtime and the rest of the evening has been a mix of slay the spire and a new round of tool reaction videos.

omg i just realized it's 00.30 already and i'm working today. i had a couple of anxious moments today because i had to assist a couple of coworkers, and also had a chat with an applicant i used to serve with, but overall i guess it was a pretty good day off.

opportunity

 well, my shoulder's hurting this morning, but my eyes are feeling slightly less irritated and my teeth are feeling slightly less sensitive, so overall i guess i'm doing okay.

i'm feeling quite offended right now that putting money into mr smear and my shared compound account costs far more than we'll earn in compound interest over the next few years. i'm offended because crypto's been a big thing for so long already and it still doesn't make any sense for small players. and our physical banks don't have any incentive to compete.

mr smear just freaked out and dumped a really cool animation he made in flipaclip (after much struggling to determine that bluestacks still sucks and that flipaclip's pricing is extortion), but i got him to reattempt and learn what he should have done and he did. so at least one parenting win for the morning, not including him playing or singing iron maiden's two minutes to midnight every time he thinks something's going to be in two minutes :P

...

i walked into the office yesterday and sat down for a while with bigtalk to help him strategize. that was followed by a morning full of random shit, mostly frustrating, and i felt like my brain was melting (like i was maybe coming down with something, but in retrospect i think i was just tired and depressed).

the biggest downer was learning that bigtalk's definition of "fine-tuning" is completely out of sync with mine. he's been promising to deliver the Big Important Thing "today or tomorrow" since last week already and i'm just getting more and more frustrated.

the company retro was interesting, and i felt useful and needed. which makes me feel a bit weird about my position in the new org chart, where i'm just a devops and my "coach" is someone with less experience than me...

happy hour turning into an opportunity for a conversation about determining company culture (documentation and being remote-first), but that conversation led to someone even more important which was me determining the root cause for our algo team's difficulties and getting buy-in for my proposed solution from our de-facto tech chief.

and then i came home, without any issues with protestors (thankfully i don't have a car), and the evening was pleasant and we all went to bed pretty early. fortunately i was the only person who was awoken by the protestors flooding our neighborhood...

yom ha'aztmaut 2025: everything is on fire

the devastating eco-terrorism fires set yesterday seem to be relatively under control, so we can at least open the windows and go outside for yom ha'atzmaut.

this is a tough one.

a beautiful prayer has been written for it: a prayer for yom hazikaron and yom haatzmaut 5785-2025

saturday:

mostly resting, with mr smear finally feeling better. watching big, which has aged surprisingly well. an afternoon walk which turned sour, but managing to rescue it by the skin of my teeth (and a mix of forcefulness and letting some shit slide).

explaining to mr smear that there are four types of authority (power, knowledge, leadership, and dependency).

sunday:

a really good night's sleep

waking up to surprise renovations downstairs while trying to get stuff done, including lots of time on the phone learning that my debit card issuer can't cancel our debit cards

successfully getting our freelancer to deploy, then discovering that my son had informed his therapist and mother that he was suicidal. a long, serious but mostly positive talk with him and gd at schnitt's

homework help: after some fighting, establishing that he'd done the book report properly, making a lego pizza slice

spending the evening mindlessly doing minesweeper quests until way later than i should have

monday:

a very positive morning after a short but relatively good night's sleep. surprisingly good yoga start. surprise water outage, but at least an apology / acknowledgement from the apartment owner that he should have warned us beforehand

a reunion lunch with my previous teammates, no vegan options but a manager who took the feedback well

rushing to get the car and pick up gd and mr smear, surprise trucks blocking the pick up point after mr smear misunderstood that "meet us here" meant "meet us here now", parking too early, gd getting an answer about her toes (her toenail seems to be disconnected from the matrix, and might be infected)

fucking up the installation, a panicked hour or two with my lead on the line trying to help him (through his panic) to do stuff he doesn't want to do while simultaneously trying to get anydesk to work so i could rescue the machine i'd auto-deleted from our vpn

leaving the office around 9pm, getting on a bus with a suspicious package and getting off at the next stop because the driver didn't care. the next bus driver doing me a favor by dropping me off where he shouldn't have

getting myself cleaned up and then diving right back into work. making some progress but grinding until 3am before giving up

tuesday:

3.5 hours sleep, good quality sleep but waking up feeling broken

crazy day of non-stop support and phone ringing, exhaustion, napping before a sezchuan lunch, everything still broken but eventually somewhat successful (our test site, at least), the simpsons and pushing bedtime back a half hour (possibly a bad idea)

our whole family at the door putting shoes on to rush to the shelter before realizing that the siren was for yom hazikaron

an early-ish night

wednesday:

a proper good night's sleep

starting the day with a massive wake-up fight (see previous comment about possibly bad idea)

a clinic mission after dropping mr smear off at school

visiting the bank on the way to work: "you could have just sent me a message". getting the cards cancelled pretty quickly.

my son the asshole ("secretly" erasing the board every day, then threatening the kid who told him not to - the kid whose mother he insulted, and whose artwork he tore up, and who he hit with a rock - then calling gd in tears to say he was being bullied by the whole class, then kicking "the usual" bully, then telling the teacher she's an idiot that's being manipulated, then finally apologizing)

jesus fucking christ.

over the course of the day i managed to defuse the situation with my lead by agreeing to walk back a change he was unhappy about, and we're going to have to find a different way to approach it. and i expect that we'll know soon enough if that was what broke the deployments...

ordering lunch was a mess, wolt took the wrong payment method and the two agents i spoke to were completely useless. but the lunch itself was absolutely delicious (yellow curry), and i should only have eaten half of it.

the rest of the workday was smooth, cursor's "assistance" was a mixed bag (90% of the code was ai-generated, but it was also 90% wrong and needed a lot of iterating). i learned a lot about kubernetes, though :P

on the way home i needed to mask up because of the ash

a long "family meeting" that was very intense. parenting is hard.

a quiet start to yom haatzmaut playing minesweeper and slay the spire and thinking a lot about everything.

today so far:

mostly quiet, but now heading out with mr smear. we had a fight about heading out - as usual - but this time i warned him that we won't tolerate this shit any more. if he doesn't change this behavior, i'm going to start deleting his game accounts, like roblox and minecraft. i'm done.

chag sameach.

accounting

 well... this morning could have gone better, mr smear was his usual uncooperative-in-the-morning self and our day began unpleasantly. although we did eventually have a (relatively) good talk, he was still unhappy for most of the walk to school. then i dropped him off and told him i was off to the doctor, and he very aggressively demanded that i tell him why which was kinda cute.

[jackals going mental, i've shushed them twice tonight already and i feel like they're not caring much]

i walked to the clinic and sat with our doctor. by the time i left, i had referrals for a sleep lab, a neurologist, a psychiatrist and blood tests, along with a prescription for alpha lipoic (supposedly for my pseudo-RLS hip issues, at least it's not psychotropic).

i came home, helped gd with some stuff (her back's giving her trouble), then got sent out to draw money for her. i was feeling a bit woozy by the time i got back up the stairs, so i hurriedly wolfed down an early breakfast and headed off to work.

i think my work day was pretty good, but it could've been better. i'm very excited by how we're performing as a company, though, the results of our weekend efforts were particularly exciting ^_^

i picked mr smear up from his therapist and he hung around the office - mostly pretty chilled - and i feel like the end of my day was alright. then we came home for dinner.

...

gd and i had had a discussion about his eating habits this morning, it's something i've been bothered by for a long time: he only eats symbolic amounts of the food he really needs. tonight i was proud of both of them; in spite of the drama (mr smear claims it was the most traumatic experience of his life) he ate three whole slices of zucchini.

...

we had a good chat with my mom and sister while mr smear got ready for bed. one of my cousins' kids is coming to tel aviv and we're making plans to meet up. and it was a little bit of a relief that it's his brother who was the jailbird and not him. we saw my nephew for a half a minute, and were shocked because he's not looking too good at the moment - his health situation's been terrible, he's been having a really hard time :(

after putting mr smear to bed, brushing my teeth and showering, i settled in for some phone calls to my canadian bank. it took a few tries, but eventually i got them to close the account and it looks like we're properly done with them!

it feels good to close the chapter on that.

i just realized how late it's gotten, i'm going to try going to bed now.

happy new year!

hopefully 2025 will be decent. if it's even halfway decent it'll be infinitely better than the last one.

having said that, this last one has ended on an extremely good note. one of ze germans (the irish one) asked if any of us were interested in coming to the science museum in haifa, and i've been wanting to take mr smear but i thought it was closed due to the war. and it wasn't.

so, very last minute and to gd's chagrin (initially), mr smear and i very spontaneously jumped on the train and headed north. the train ride was cool - mr smear expressed his amazement that he wasn't on screens but also wasn't bored, though he now denies it - and we arrived there in good time.

mr smear was throughly engaged for most of our hours there, and he also got along really well with our friends (two kids, ages 4 and 6), and we all had a really good experience. after they left, we ran through the maze and then headed into the "behind the screens" exhibit, which was highly entertaining and very interesting for both of us, and we had to be ushered out at closing time.

the bus and train rides home were pretty uneventful, mr smear got his "rewards" of sprite and screen time, and we've had a pretty good evening overall.

...

in addition to the two of us enjoying a really fun day at madatech today, there was another momentous occasion we have to celebrate. this morning, i received an email informing me that my south african chequing account had been closed. this was good news!

but when i signed in in to check, i saw that our credit card account was in minus. this was bad news :(

partially because without a chequing account i've no way to pay it, but more so because two days ago, i asked them to make sure everything was clear for us to close our accounts.

so for me, the train ride (~1 hour) and the taxi ride (~5-10 minutes) were consumed with messages to my bankers. i had to explain to the first agent that i wasn't interested in paying, and that whatever it was he was telling me i should have asked for was their responsibility to have told me two days ago. he eventually transferred me through to the credit card people (this was about 45 minutes in), who took forever to respond and then closed the chat because i didn't respond within a couple of minutes. so i had to start again.

for the second agent i got through to, i explained that i wanted them to reverse the charge and close the account, and i was (and still am) literally stunned by her rapid reply that the charge had been reversed and the account closed.

so here we are, ushering in a new year with our only remaining debt to my mother, and nothing more being held over her and her apartment.

...

yesterday was a wonky day. the two memorable events were mr smear doing homework - fighting about it and subsequently doing it well - followed by me taking him to his jiujitsu class in the rain and realizing along the way that i'd misunderstood the hours update, so we arrived in time for the next lesson which simply wasn't appropriate ages for him.

*sigh*

anyway, it was a pleasant and interesting little adventure.

...

happy new year. may 2025 bring israel military success, peace and stability, both in the middle east and worldwide. the entire world deserves a break.

quiet morning

 during dinner i began to feel nauseous and faint, and at one point i just had to lie down and try to get my neck released. i'm pretty sure something was pushing on my vagus nerve. i ended up miserably going to bed early, and was fortunately able to sleep through most of the night (there was an attack by the houthis, but our area wasn't threatened).

i woke up this morning to an alert that the money i accidentally sent to the wrong account has been returned to the right place, which is a huge relief. i was very careful when entering my details to withdraw it to the new account 🤞

gd and i started the day watching grave of the fireflies, we stopped it when mr smear woke up. then it was watching a few episodes of house until one of them looked like it was hitting inappropriate material, and now mr smear's playing human fall flat while i try to figure out what i want to do.

the price of teeth

 the game night at the mongoose's was fun last night, just a couple of us and mostly playing on the nintendo switch. his buddy gave me a ride home around midnight, which was very much appreciated.

i think i slept alright, kinda, but we were interrupted by another rocket attack from the houthis. fortunately, we all got to sleep late.

i spent the first part of the morning just catching up on social media, then we had a fight with mr smear about brushing his teeth (as usual), and once things calmed down the two of us had sufganiyot for breakfast and tried to play video games together and failed (i purchased an extra copy of little racers street, but we couldn't connect).

and then we headed out to the barber shop. they didn't have space for me but i now have an appointment for sunday morning. we walked down the road to the mall, and it didn't take long for me to get mall-people'd out. we stopped for lunch, which was nice, then fled outside to find coffee, and then we all agreed to just go home.

i needed that nap when we arrived.

i've done a lot of dishes this afternoon.

the biggest achievement today was setting mr smear up with his own bank account (kinda, it's in my name) so that he can begin earning compound interest on the little bit of money he's acquired, triggered by the fact that he's just lost a tooth, he's about to lose another one, and we haven't even given him anything for the last one...

gd's been freaking out and has been on the verge of a panic attack for days now because of her dental work. i'm trying to be supportive but it's very hard.

we lit the candles for chanukah and shabbat on a call with my mom, and the rest of the evening's been alright so far, with mr smear and me playing rounds until my brain started melting. it's a great game!