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.

down

 burnout? probably. sick? possibly. slow and clouded? definitely. yesterday was still rough, i walked in to the office (with mr smear) into a production upgrade that hadn't been prepared for, and that was missing a critical element. and then, on top of everything else, it took forever to understand that something in my personal environment was broken. it would take three hours before we were confident that the upgrade could be done and that somebody else would be able to take care of it.

at lunchtime, the salad group made salad. it didn't even occur to me to ask them to leave the walnuts out, which mr smear couldn't stand :(

the afternoon was full of interruptions. and when my boss informed everyone that bigtalk's out of the picture, he tried to take the sting out by joking that i'd "be happy to tell you the details" 🤮

happy hour was pretty good, mr smear loved the massive savory crepes and i made the mistake of drinking an 8% cherry beer right before heading into a nasty hour of troubleshooting with our frontend lead and a canadian contractor.

eventually, mr smear and i headed out and home, dropped our bags off, and jumped on a bus to join gd for dinner. but due to the protests the bus got stuck in heavy traffic, so we jumped off and practiced live location navigation (gd was a bit panicky about it), meeting up relatively quickly and then continuing to look for a place to stop.

...

the first place we sat down didn't have much that we were interested in, but then mr smear refused to ask a waiter for something he wanted and the ensuing argument made me get up and go. a short while ago we just had a repeat of that, and with everything else i'm dealing with i've explained that i'm taking a "parenting break" for at least a few hours.

...

the second place we found was rainbow burger, which was already one of our favorite spots. they've just introduced yo! eggs to their menu, as well as their new "sensational" seitan burgers, so we ordered one original and one sensational with an egg and the new won out over the old, and everyone was happy.

tired and grumpy, but happy with the food, at least.

the rest of the walk home and the evening was fine, though i was thoroughly drained. everyone hit the hay early, and aside from waking up and playing slay the spire for a few hours i was in bed until quite late.

...

i sent bigtalk a message this morning, even though i'm feeling completely out of it right now, to let him know i want him to succeed and offering him (when he's ready) to talk. i really hope his path corrects quickly.

...

i'm probably going to lie down again soon.

processing

 i'm feeling less physically and emotionally drained today, but i'm still struggling. mostly emotionally and in terms of desperately needing an uninterrupted day off.

yesterday:

starting to write up my experiences with bigtalk

mr smear and the drone workshop - he kind of shut down the moment he encountered the other kids, which really sucked. but my coworker who was running it was kind enough to do a private drone session later, and mr smear had an amazing time ^_^

...

making progress with the new devops guy, but uncovering layers of bigtalk's bullshit (amateur-hour and AI vomit). my boss informing me that bigtalk's hearing was basically him begging not to be let go, which is heartbreaking. i really feel bad for him, and i feel like the whole world has let this dude down; and he is one courageous dude.

...

a big moment with mr smear about tearing up artwork he doesn't like

planning to get dinner with mr smear (gd was getting her hair cut), and his friend inviting him to play table tennis. accompanying the two clowns on the bus, sharing hummus, falafel and chips for dinner, and occasionally jumping in to play some ping pong.

my mom's laptop being expertly stolen from her car

getting the kids home late (because his friend realized he'd left his phone by the tables when we were already on the bus we'd waited a while for)

a very late bedtime for mr smear, and therefore for us too

today:

i slept alright, but woke up early with my thoughts. continued writing.

we had a family meeting in the morning (regarding mr smear's workshop behavior, and his looking-at-his-failures behavior), and mr smear was very angry with me. but on our way home this evening, we had a very mature discussion and he acknowledged what we were trying to get through to him.

gd took mr smear to have bloodwork done while i had a meeting, apparently mr smear handled it impressively well.

it was a quiet day at work, though jam-packed with meetings and included a very intense lunchtime debate about israeli politics. it also included a two-hour long demo by a contractor, and i found it very validating that the new guy and i both came up with similar alternatives to his architecture and we both feel that what he's put together in two months is something either of us could do in a matter of hours... and better.

i came home, and took mr smear to dizengoff for their japanese food. we had dumplings and onigiri again, and mr smear ate the dumplings with chopsticks this time, and then we walked home picking up ice cream on the way. and talking a lot.

a lot of the talk was about bigtalk, and why this is such a difficult experience for me personally.

...

on an unrelated note, but running in parallel through the day, is responding to a south african connection on linkedin's anti-israel propaganda post. i felt i couldn't let the lies stand unchallenged, but the experience is gross.

...

i don't want to take vacation days unless i can actually enjoy the vacation, and i don't feel like that's going to happen anytime soon :(

facing the music

 i slept surprisingly well, all things considered. but i woke up feeling wired, so i skipped my first coffee and had a tea instead.

i'd woken up to the sounds of protesting, so i was surprised by how quiet everything was on my way to work.

i went past the clinic to try and make an appointment, but the receptionist didn't know how to help me. i walked to the closest bus stop, but didn't trust the public transport app and walked on, which turned out to be the right call. i did take the light rail for a single stop, but that was mainly as a break from the already rising heat. (still nowhere near as harsh as the last week)

i walked into the office just as my boss had informed bigtalk that he was going home until his hearing. i offered to speak with him, which in retrospect may have been a mistake, because a) he really has no idea why he's being let go and b) he blames me for my reporting to the boss and c) i realized, helplessly, that no matter what i say to him he's only going to hear what fits his narrative, which is precisely how we got here in the first place.

so... i tried not to say much, and i tried to be comforting, but doing both those things was literally impossible and it was just shit feelings all the way down.

and - since last week - the more i think about it, the more i think about how much of what he's told us is fake-it-till-you-make-it self-deception. all i saw today was a scared little kid, raw vulnerability, trying to make sense of something in a way that he's not going to be able to make sense of without a much deeper level of self-awareness.

as i said to my boss afterwards, if we were big enough to afford it, i would offer to mentor him.

the next hour or so was fully invested in disabling all of his accounts and rotating shared passwords.

...

at lunchtime i walked to meet up with gd and mr smear for his psychiatrist appointment. the intention of the appointment, to my understanding, is for the "doctor" (see the attached summary) to determine whether his social anxiety (which we now believe is no more severe than any kid's) warrants an "accompanier". but, of course, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

the meeting was okay, mostly, although there was a fair amount of awkwardness in mr smear's discomfort answering his questioning in hebrew (and the questions were uncomfortable questions in any language) and then, after he'd repeatedly mentioned his english not being great, he became offended when mr smear responded in english that he has "intrusive thoughts" and i asked if he was familiar with the term :/

...

i returned to the office for an hour or two of frustratingly difficult IT (security) work, then a couple of hours working with the new devops guy trying to restart the project that bigtalk never delivered.

and then the day ended (kinda) with me and another team member running through all our accounts to make sure we'd caught everything in the morning.

...

the protestors were gathering by the time i went home, and i walked through crowds of more and more people whose behavior (and placards) just upset me more and more. they're protesting against our government "abandoning" the hostages, as if there's anyone reasonable on the hamas side of the table to negotiate with. while i certainly appreciate their intention and their desperation, in practice all they're achieving - in my opinion - is demonstrating to hamas that the time for playing games isn't over.

...

the evening was pleasant, although i'm struggling with radiating nerve pain down my right side. and while gd had a much better day today in that department, she's also been struggling a bit this evening.

i'm exhausted, emotionally and psychologically. i hope tomorrow's easier.

fairy tales

 it was a hot walk, even if it was less hot than the previous days. we walked past a store and picked him up a malt beer, which made his day (up until that point), and eventually got to a coffee shop where i ordered a vegan dessert that was so over-the-top that it really made his day, and i read a brothers grimm story (the golden goose).

then we walked back home, where i picked up a (free) copy of joseph jacobs' english fairy tales and read jack the giant-killer while he played minecraft. then it was dinner time, and a smooth evening including more of the neverending story at bedtime.

after he went to sleep, i synced with my boss about tomorrow, which (confusingly to me) looks like it's going to be spread over a couple of days, so my plans for taking a day off this week are clearly on hold. i've spent the rest of the evening just trying to wear myself out with youtube and slay the spire in order to get some sleep, but i'm not feeling too confident right now.

i probably shouldn't have had that late iced coffee...

thinking

 well, mr smear did it - he handled his fears and he went to bed 🙏

i stayed up pretty late, but finally crashed and slept a bit. not enough, apparently, because i've spent most of the day uncomfortably alternating between reading and napping, with only a couple of longer periods watching an episode of doctor who and giving up on acquiring the zerg campaign in starcraft ii and ending up installing the original starcraft instead.

i've been making a lot of progress through elana gomel's nightwood, and it's riveting fairy tale horror.

now, to mr smear's usual chagrin, we're going out for a bit.

...

i've spent a lot of today thinking about tomorrow's dealings with bigtalk. i occasionally feel like things are going to be alright, but for the most part i'm quite anxious.

the good and the bad

 i don't remember how well or poorly i slept on thursday night, but last night was alright... until about 4 or 5am, when my hips started hurting but i was too exhausted to physically get out of bed and try to sort myself out.

bigtalk and i actually had a conversation about sleeping yesterday, he suffers from PTSD and he takes ritalin for ADHD and he was proposing melatonin, when i told him some of my stories about treating my RLS-like issues he was mortified - there's no feeling quite like winning the victim olympics :/

...

i woke up to a message from my boss letting me know that he's initiating a process to let bigtalk go.

i feel bad for him, but it's a relief. it's also scary, because the longer the week's worn on the less predictable he's become, and he's a security expert, and i'm nervous that might be able to do a lot of damage once he finds out. so when i got up this morning and spent twenty minutes writing up a protocol for his "offboarding".

still...

i really like the guy, but if you put a gun to my head i wouldn't be able to make a call as to whether he's for real or not. i want to mentor him, but at the same time i don't feel he's capable of receiving advice that doesn't already fit into his very narrow view of our field.

...

mr smear and i accompanied gd to the pharmacy on our way to the office in the sweltering heat. we moved from airconditioner to airconditioner, we took the light rail, and we arrived to find my vegan avo bagel untouched. so mr smear had a solid breakfast (parenting score!) and thoroughly enjoyed it :)

...

the big effort of the day was trying to deploy with bigtalk's new system, and trying to fix it, and becoming more and more convinced that this was an incredibly bad idea. the deal-breaker for me - the final, tiny straw amongst a host of others - was discovering that all of his work wasn't even based on our original scripts and didn't account for some very important behavior.

for anyone who works with code, the above is real, and it's not even the worst part.

that all came to a head - me explaining to him that we weren't going to merge, and that we were going to park his PR and rebuild a solution piece by piece that can hopefully salvage it for parts - while mr smear (remarkably patiently) waited for me to go and get him some lunch. the ensuing argument was painful, and went on for about half an hour, with him continuing to try to convince us that we were making a mistake.

...

mr smear put together a good salad, and enthusiastically demolished it. later, at our happy hour, the two of us hovered over the vegan sushi platter. at first, i handled feeding him with chopsticks, but at some point i managed to convince him to give them a try. he followed the instructions, and within minutes he'd got the hang of it!!

i don't know which of us was more excited ^_^

i didn't really get to participate in the game hacking event because it was a thursday evening and i was busy breaking our test site with a new release candidate. it was the perfectly horrible ending to a perfectly horrible day (for me), but mr smear had overall had a great time and even participated along with the two guys who were doing the game dev (although he got them into trouble with chatgpt because one of his proposed ideas wasn't safe for work :P)

we came home pretty late, and found gd in a rough state - she's basically been bedridden since yesterday morning due to nerve pain in her back that's radiating into her chest :(

after getting mr smear into bed, i played some slay the spire and then went to bed (relatively) early myself.

meat popsicle

 i didn't get back to sleep for another hour or two, and even then i didn't sleep very well, although i was able to get up later than usual.

my mouth guard is starting to fall apart :/

i was really tired today. really tired. like, possibly coming down with something tired. i arrived at work for another full team meeting (although bigtalk wasn't around), and it went on for a couple of hours, so we missed the daily with the rest of the department.

also, i left the meeting room freezing cold.

...

then i rushed out to meet up with gco and co, we ended up at the top of the building and had to rent a meeting room to get going, which was surprisingly expensive. getting sorted out took us about half an hour in total, but the hour that followed was very interesting and constructive. all in all, i'm very glad we did it.

also, i left the meeting room freezing cold.

...

i made it back in time to help out a couple of guys with random things, and then went into another hour-long meeting. at least this time i had coffee and a slice of cake with me :P

also, i left the meeting room freezing cold.

...

at this point, i was falling apart and i made myself a fourth cup of coffee. i needed to sync with some coworkers on our priorities for the next few weeks, and that was when i learned that bigtalk wasn't working on what we were working on, which is absolutely insane. i was completely stunned, and i lost my temper in front of half the office, and my coworkers ushered me into a meeting room where i explained to them why i was so deeply affected. they heard me out, and they were very supportive.

...

also, i left the meeting room freezing cold.

...

i found another meeting room, and sat down to be interviewed for a talent spotlight. i was still very upset about bigtalk, and i spent the few minutes i needed to wait just trying to calm myself down and get into an appropriate headspace.

i wasn't prepared (they'd only sent me the questions this morning) so everything was off-the-cuff, but by the end i felt like we'd all had a good experience and they seemed happy with what they had. i felt relieved because it went a lot better than i could have planned, and i feel like the resulting story they have to work with is good.

also, i left the meeting room freezing cold.

...

the next couple of hours were me trying to get work done with providing support to others, and eventually i left the office having encountered confusing errors with bigtalk's changes.

on my way home, i spoke to the incoming manager and informed him that i've completely lost faith in bigtalk's ability to function in our organization, and i made an appointment with my boss on sunday (when i'm on vacation, but he isn't) to let him know that this experiment is over.

...

i got home wired and overwhelmed, and needed to vent the day's stories to gd before i was able to calm down enough to eat. we had a good dinner, we enjoyed two simpsons episodes, and mr smear's bedtime (after putting in a few additional minutes of work) was pretty smooth with more of the neverending story.

the rest of the evening has been peaceful, not least of which being completing a fun run of slay the spire, and i think i'm just about ready for bed. caffeine-allowing, of course...

crash

 i woke up early to go to the hygienist. the experience was less painful than i anticipated. apparently i need to use a softer brush.

i bussed (very actively enjoying my music) to work, where i made the regrettably awkward decision to not go for coffee with our CEO because i'd just been at the hygienist (like, i didn't have to buy anything).

my new coworker and i spent a good ten minutes troubleshooting the coffee machine, and i was shocked to discover that he'd been unwilling to toss the extra trial-and-error coffees so he was drinking them (O_o)

i spent a chunk of the day completing the 1am story, and for the most part it looks like i succeeded. and, for the first part, it looks like the work i was doing before i encountered that stuff was good. the central part of the work day was a meeting for our algo team that i'd initiated, which was generally productive. unfortunately, bigtalk kept suggesting solutions to problems nobody has, which was a bit awkward.

amusingly, i found myself unwittingly describing the act of connecting, enabling and disconnecting as "tune in, turn on, drop out". two people in the meeting laughed, for everyone else it went over their heads , which would have been fine but they demanded an explanation. fortunately that was only a little bit awkward and passed quickly enough :P

the salad group's salad was great. the post-salad leftover chocolate-and-peanut-butter cake was also great. i feel like i'm doing a pretty good job of getting others to help me with it.

the most important piece of the work was a bit intimidating, so as part of gearing up for it i made myself a non-caffeinated drink; the only one i could find that tasted good was a vanilla chamomile tea, and then all of a sudden (probably because drinking chamomile is my go-to i'm-going-to-bed-soon move) i felt really drowsy as the previous couple of days caught up with me all at once.

so i left early.

it was hot.

the tech ops guy called me as i was about to get home, already feeling faint, with more problems.

i was feeling faint, and in desperate need of a nap, but i was so sweaty from the ride home that i had to shower before i could nap. i napped to the first episode of hunter x hunter, and woke up to mr smear playing insanely difficult levels he configured for himself in spiderheck.

dinner was delicious. afterwards, while mr smear prepared for bed, i ran tech support for my mom whose old email address had suddenly stopped working. we eventually came right, but not without some big feelings. then i read some more of the neverending story to mr smear and gd, and then arsed around as an excuse to drink another chamomile before finally going to bed.

...

and then getting up at 3.30am after being restless for a fairly long while.

...

the incoming manager reached out to me for an update, and i found myself in the weird position of trying to explain to him that the situation with bigtalk isn't entirely straightforward. i think i have a pretty good handle on him, he's not a bad guy and his work - when he understands the requirements - is excellent. but his ability to understand the requirements is clouded by his ego and inexperience, and his second-languageness in both hebrew and english, and his attention disorder. while at present it's safe to say he's better off as a one-man show, it's not going to be good for him in the long run to not have proper mentorship.

drama flare

 oh. shit. it was such a ridiculously dramatic day (so far) that i didn't even remember having trouble sleeping last night :/

...

today was mr smear's last day at summer camp. i received not one, but two hilariously inappropriate animations from him. he made it through the summer camp, and in spite of his protests had a generally good time!

...

this morning was very stressful, primarily because although i started out relaxed and in good spirits, it soon became pressured, with the main source of pressure being an upgrade to brave that made online grocery shopping impossible. i left without completing the orders.

...

the day didn't begin well. we had a devops gathering with our incoming guys, and while some of it went well, some of it was a shit show and i ended up having to be the adult in the room (reigning in both bigtalk and the new manager). the new manager called me in to a private discussion afterwards, where he not only made it clear that bigtalk's not going to be around long but that the woman i had issues with a couple of weeks ago is a proper dolores umbridge...

... fuck me.

i then took the new guy in to a private meeting to explain that the tension we're experiencing is entirely out of the ordinary, and what precisely is bothering me. then i took bigtalk into a meeting, where i really had trouble keeping my cool but he responded in a surprisingly healthy way.

after lunch, i made him walk both me and the new guy through his code, and he did a pretty good job of convincing us that he hadn't gone totally off the rails like i'd thought. but what he's doing is irreversible, so we have to be very careful how we test it and how we roll it out.

...

i managed to grab hold of our UX guy to discuss some of my ideas from friday night, and when he'd heard me out he pulled me over to his computer and showed me that half of what i was talking about was already in the pipeline ^_^

he was impressed by my other suggestions, though, and i even managed to solve a weird design issue he's been experiencing along the way.

...

the rest of the afternoon was a bit messy, but i think i finally got a piece of work done that i've been trying to finish for a week already. which would be great, but deploying it took forever and then i ran into the same bizarre issues that a couple of the other devs have been loudly complaining about for the past few days. that really messed up my evening plans, and i ended up leaving the office way later than planned.

and after having succumbed to temptation and polished off another slice of the cake from thursday's happy hour. right before dinner.

...

dinner with the family (and the simpsons) was nice, mr smear's shower time was far too long and frustrating, and there were some bad vibes around bedtime caused by him actively not getting into bed, when i was prepping for two different meetings. at least things were a little calmer by the time i was ready to say good night.

...

my elevator pitch to our product chief seems to have gone down well, and again, there's a lot of convergence going on - i've been invited to get involved in two closely-related projects.

between meetings, this post. in a few minutes, troubleshooting with our canadian contractor.

a big bigtalk talk

 it's the middle of the night, i've just spent an hour or so playing slay the spire and minutescape (and leaving the following review for the latter):

after three hours, i don't know whether i recommend this or not. on the one hand, it feels like there's a story incoming, and it has a certain meditative quality to it (if i play late at night it's like a lullaby with achievements). on the other hand, i honestly can't tell whether i'm getting better or whether my improved times are just a combination of bonuses and luck, and it feels like a really, really slow grind either way.

otherwise, it's bothering that my eyes are still quite irritated after a week of the drops that i was given for five days.

...

after seeing mr smear off this morning, i went to the hospital where they printed out his most recent allergy test results, then took those to the clinic to request authorization. then i returned home, grabbed my gear and headed to the office. the morning was a hot mess, which included welcoming the new english devops, syncing with my boss*, arguing about scope with bigtalk in front of the new guy because he insists on not understanding how to work with others, and juggling a bunch of support requests from all over the place.

* about bigtalk, and my own plans. it was awkward to realize that he'd joined the meeting while on vacation in greece - i hadn't noticed he was on vacation, but he insisted on continuing because he knew that i wouldn't have set the meeting if it wasn't urgent and important - but we're clearly aligned on what's happening with bigtalk. and his feedback for me and my own intentions was very positive, so that was nice.

gd and i had a parental guidance session in the middle of the day, and it wasn't at all easy. mainly because we have very different ideas about screen time and socialization; i'm worried about undoing our progress with mr smear by fuzzying the boundaries, even while i don't think giving him more "holiday" is a bad thing.

i was surprised that he hadn't asked me for the next one piece volume today, until he sent a video he'd made in flipaclip which i'd forgotten i'd installed for him. i watched the video on my way to pick up lunch, and it was so well done - albeit eerily gen alpha - that i giggled helplessly the whole way out the building. i felt compelled to share it with some of my coworkers, which led to potentially bringing in another coworker to the game hacking fold :)

the next hour or two were more of the same from the morning, and then i left early to get my hair cut. i literally passed out in the chair while the hairdresser worked, and aside from one thing i needed him to fix it seemed to go well.

on the bus home i had to work to solve a weird networking issue, and a little bit when i arrived as well, but after taking the last tortit ice cream from the freezer (and having to share it with mr smear, who'd previously asserted that he didn't like it any more) and jumping in the shower, we had a great leftover dinner (more of gd's not-onigiri) and finished watching stargate (which we all thoroughly enjoyed).

i read some more of the neverending story to gd and mr smear after he finally got into bed, after which i soon passed out myself. and then woke up a couple of hours ago.

conditioning

 we went out for a ride, and ended up at the pipe track. well, at the kids musical playground next to it. mr smear entertained himself, i made the mistake of sitting down in the shade for a bit and my brain and body decided i was done for the day... the way back was good, we stopped for him to enjoy an ice cream, and the only issue i had was that my shoulder and neck started giving me shit during the last stretch... just like it did the last time we went out...

gd tried to make onigiri tonight, and it came out... not onigiri. but it was delicious, regardless, and we all tucked in and did quite a bit of damage (considering she'd made rather a lot of food). and we got started on watching stargate. mr smear's first time and he is loving it.

i continued reading the neverending story when he went to bed, although the swamps of sadness scene was dulled by the fact that our upstairs neighbors are psychopaths and were drilling and hammering until recently. i watched some random stuff and played another round of slay the spire, and now i'm going to crash early in the hopes that i'll be able to sleep and the expectation that i'll be up in the middle of the night to work through bigtalk's PR...

gods help me.

onigiri

 the clinic: learning that one of the receptionists' kids also has herpes in the eye. mr smear's paediatrician wasn't familiar with CRISPR but asked me to send her info. we're praying that someone will figure out how to remove herpes soon, and not just from a petri dish.

the bike shop: both bike shops were closed, so we tied up the bike and continued on to dizengoff. we returned later and were treated to a demonstration of the changing of the tube and addition of a new liner to protect it, which was fascinating.

japan month at dizengoff: mr smear was thoroughly amazed by the food, in particular the onigiri. that makes two of us - gd liked it, but isn't a fan of sweeter sushi rice so would rather make her own.

fine by me :P

some of yesterday afternoon was crashing, some of it was working, and some of it was reading and playing card games (uno and fluxx), and mr smear and i played a bunch of starcraft ii together. the evening was a pleasant shabbat evening (with pizza in honor of mr smear's birthday).

after putting mr smear to bed, i tried to get into cyberpunk 2077. i tried. but i had to repeat a section that really felt forced (perhaps you get more choices going forward, but i just felt locked in and bored), and the default controls don't make sense, and by the time i realized i was confused about how to set the controls up the way i'd like i was done, and i put in for a refund.

i played minutescape until it lulled me to sleep.

...

last night i had some really cool ideas for work, and i woke up in the middle of the night and had to get them written down (and book appointments with two of our founders, and book a few days off for long weekends), and then just did random things (including resuming a game of slay the spire) until mr smear woke up.

i tried to get back to sleep, but since then my lower back and butt have been really hurting me. i'm exhausted. emotionally, too, because i saw a message from our tech chief about bigtalk's PR and now i'm confident i need to share my new concerns with my boss tomorrow, which really doesn't feel good. i mean, i like the guy, and technically he's brilliant, but he clearly doesn't have enough experience with collaborative efforts.

we watched son of the white mare, which is fantastic and strange and wonderful, and i was surprised by how much gd and mr smear got into it as well - it feels more like something from a modern art gallery than a feature film.

i've been reading some more nightwood, it took a while to find its feet but i'm a quarter of the way through and things just started heating up.

my aunt's boyfriend rocked up a little while ago for a quick coffee, bearing gifts from my mom. mr smear was very excited in spite of gd almost spoiling the surprise yesterday (note to self: never tell her anything that's supposed to be a surprise, egads)

mr smear's playing spiderheck, i'm contemplating scrounging for some lunch, and then we're going to go out with the bike for a ride.

...

my eyes are feeling a bit better, but i still need the drops quite frequently :/

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...

break everything

 today was wildly not fun.

step 1: wake up after a sleepless, though somehow not unpleasant, night.

step 2: try to find a newspaper for mr smear's paper mache activity on the way to his shuttle. discover that there's no demand in our neighborhood for physical news, and walk quite far to pay for one. then quickly head home, pick up my bag for work and take a bus to the summer camp. getting out too early (about halfway there), but fortunately only having to wait a minute before the next line came to the rescue.

step 3: get to work early, become convinced to go to the print shop before the day gets really hot. but the day was already pretty hot. i had an awkward meeting with the guy, but eventually left with an understanding of what to expect. i don't quite know how confident i am, but i guess it's worth a shot?

step 4: the day began in good spirits, but we had networking issues. i tried to fix them, but instead took the entire office offline and would spend most of the next six hours trying to get things working again. including hunting for a "console cable" in our warehouse and in two stores, to no avail. we managed to borrow one from our neighbors, but we weren't able to figure out what to do once we finally connected. all the while, the tech support was less than useless.

the above included half an hour to an hour of a distressing discussion with bigtalk, who's upset that the incoming devops manager is technically less capable than him and that he's effectively demoted himself by signing on with us. it was a complicated conversation, and i hope my advice helps him.

also during the above, two of us went to the new sumsum and it's waaaay slicker than the other branches.

step 5: the (work) day ended with incessant random things, and me not getting my tasks done.

step 6: coming home to a much-needed gin & tonic, a decent leftovers meal, and the realization that mr smear's going to be ten years old tomorrow.

he was very excited about me buying volume 3 of one piece for him. they didn't end up doing the paper mache activity. his eye seems to be clearing up.

oh, yeah - my eyes have been driving me nuts since sunday. what i've been doing seemed to have stopped the infection, but i'm still anxious that something worse might be on the way...

step 7: reading more the neverending story to mr smear (and gd) at bedtime.

step 8: our security consultant - after i've been complaining about one of their unnecessary decisions that's been causing me to be locked out of our password manager - finally did something she should have done from the beginning and completely turned the terrible experience around.

...

it's almost midnight, and the technician's supposed to arrive at the office between 8 and 11 :/

the tension

 my morning... did not go well. on the way to the office i talked to my mother about krybabie's wife whose been coerced into paying for and arranging an english police clearance for a child who was four months old when they left london, which makes my blood boil.

on the back of that, a couple of us spoke to lipgirl about the marketing lecture we'd been invited to on wednesday afternoon.

and then one of my coworkers dropped a bombshell - our tech ops manager is hiring someone to do a job that's essentially devops, in addition to "owning" the entire data pipel... nevermind the details. i tried to talk to her about it - this is after giving bigtalk a lecture about how we approach her - but she's a bit weird, and refused to talk face to face, and when i put everything in writing i tried to carefully step around the eggshells (and copied my text to my boss so he'd know what i said and how i said it), but i still managed to step on a landmine.

fuck.

so that happened. our boss has set up a meeting for the three of us on sunday, hopefully we'll resolve this.

it was a very busy day, with a few big meetings, but the end of it saw us quite successfully merging in the work from wednesday night and i got everyone excited about me interviewing the founders and first employees to start putting together our company origin story.

i happy-hour'ed a little too hard (from a sweets point of view), and i shouldn't have brought the knaffeh back home - i ended up being the only one to eat any.

about halfway through dinner one of my coworkers called me, and it took almost an hour to get him sorted out, by which time i was completely exhausted and had almost missed wishing mr smear a good night :(

the last thing that i recall from last night was a back-and-forth with a coworker who inexplicably refused to understand that the thing he did to solve a problem we didn't actually have breaks our deployments.

today so far:

i slept late, and relatively well. i've just finished my first coffee, helped mr smear enjoy his glow-in-the-dark lego that he just pulled out of somewhere forgotten, informed him that his bully's leaving the country before the new school year, and we're getting ready to roll our way to the swimming pool.

the hummus mistake

 yesterday:

i picked up the books on my way to the office, the original french version of asterix le gaulois along wiith roald dahl's dirty beasts).

it was a bit of a weird day, in that it was quite relaxed :P

the most important thing i did was sync with bigtalk about finishing his current task in time to demo it to the team this afternoon, and i really hope we're going to be ready.

a bunch of things made me get around to lunch quite late, and i got it into my head to cross the road and pick up hummus. and chips. and falafel. it was great, but i ate way too much (and that's without touching the pita), and when i started falling apart i decided to make a break for it and go home early.

i was almost home when my alarm went off reminding me of a meeting with our security providers. i died inside.

i arrived home, and immediately jumped onto the call, only to realize very quickly that it was a marketing lecture and i was trapped. i immediately shut off my video and spent the next hour barely holding on to consciousness. then i hit the bed for a proper nap.

i woke up in time for dinner, but i didn't eat anything, just joined mr smear in watching wish dragon, which turned out to be a great movie (mr smear shed a tear or two). the rest of the evening went pretty smoothly.

at 10pm, i jumped on a call i'd invited myself into for the test deployment of a feature that one of our contractors has been working on for about three months now. i'd intended to be there just to back-seat drive and make sure that nobody was engaging in deployment shenanigans while we're busy refactoring everything, but after a while it became clear that they were 100% dependent on me to get the job done.

two hours later, we'd successfully deployed and configured, and i was beyond ready to go to bed.

today so far:

aside from a fight (over video call) with mr smear about using his phone at summer camp, it's been a pretty relaxed morning so far. now i'm having an early breakfast and getting ready to face the day.

(professional) ceasefire

 yesterday:

on my way out the door i messaged my boss, who called me back pretty quickly and i explained the situation. he was shocked by what i reported, but grateful that i was proposing taking care of it, and then we moved on to discussing an upcoming reorg. after he repeated the phrase "you can go where you like" three times i stopped him to ask "you mean within the company, right?"

"oh, come on..." ^_^

i got to work and invited bigtalk out for coffee. the walk to the coffee shop was enthusiastic shop talk, but we got serious once we had our drinks. i started by getting a good sense of where he's at, which thankfully appears to be very much aligned with where i am / we are, and when i got to the criticism and strategizing he seemed very positive and receptive.

so that happened.

...

at lunch, over a funny conversation about hebrew accents, i discovered that my israeli coworkers had never noticed that shlomo artzi's lehatzil otach contains bad english 🤣

...

aside from a meeting after lunch where i had to be very active and involved while actively falling asleep at my desk, and aside from the morning drama, it was a pretty relaxed day and i managed to sort out one of the tech ops issues during deployment.

i came home to find that mr smear had had another good day at summer camp (although apparently the second meal had been physically too hot to handle). we had a good dinner and watched another episode of deathnote, and the evening was basically everyone passing out quickly.

this morning so far:

i slept terribly, or barely slept. i took mr smear to the bus stop, which we had to evacuate quickly because some fuckers decided that it would be a good idea to install giant screens for advertisements facing into the goddamned bus stop. there's no way mr smear would have made it onto his bus if i hadn't been there 😡

since getting home, gd and i have watched a bunch of random interesting things, and now i'm getting ready to roll out.

parenting (at home and at work)

preying on my mind this morning: overhearing bigtalk (apparently) badmouthing our tech ops' manager to him while simultaneously making him feel unappreciated. i literally didn't know what to do at the time, and then later the topic came up (partially) when we were talking to our boss. now i feel like i have to take him for a walk and discuss what happened, and i feel like i need to talk to my boss about it first, and i don't want to do either of those things.

monday:

i dropped mr smear off at his therapist and proceeded to work. i presented my roadmap to a bunch of coworkers, with the sharpest feedback being how i hadn't made the timeline clear. after an inspirational quote from my boss (churchill's "plans are of little importance, but planning is essential") so in the middle of the night, i spent an hour or two making a gantt chart that was received very favorably (and with surprise that i actually did it properly, thanks free online gantt chart software!)

the largest / most important effort went into setting up an installation machine, which provided some really tricky challenges and i ended up leaving without understanding how to connect two very important dots.

yesterday:

the houthi attack in the early morning proved a very effective alarm for mr smear's first day of summer camp. it wasn't the smoothest morning, but we arrived at the bus stop on time for the shuttle - a pity that the shuttle was about forty minutes late. but that did give me an opportunity to get a coffee from the bakery on weizman, which turned into quite a weird experience (from the confused cashier when i asked about their alternative milks, to the barista who didn't understand that "barista" wasn't a brand, to the french people standing and talking while inappropriately blocking anyone who needed to get to the counter, to the barista having difficulty letting me know that my coffee was ready).

on the way to work i spoke to my mom, who sounded pretty bad (and by the evening would sound terrible). we both expressed gratitude that none of us got sick throughout her vacation here, which was a first. i'm a little concerned by her always insisting that she feels fine when she's obviously really sick - serious patient-zero vibes :/

it was a very busy work day, with a highlight and a lowlight. the lowlight was the incident i described above. the highlight was figuring out, after a couple of hours, the ridiculous process of getting the installation machine accounts sorted out and operational. just in time, too: we had two urgent installations yesterday, and if it wasn't for that machine the tech op and i would have had to spend the evening in the warehouse.

instead, i made it to my dentist appointment on time. i hadn't understood that the pain i was having was due to a new hole, so it was a standard filling that needed to be done. the procedure was very uncomfortable, and it was very sensitive last night, but it seems to be a good job.

on the way home (the bus didn't arrive, so i had to walk) i tested my connection to the installation machine, and the successful test meant that i could have dinner with my family (when the two hours were eventually over) and watch deathnote and, most importantly, grill mr smear about his first day in summer camp.

there were a few hiccups and funny stories, but overall it sounds like he's managing well and having new and interesting experiences ^_^

the installation went on until almost midnight, and ended in a weird failure. but as i was reporting the failure, we received news that the deployment has been delayed. tech ops was really bummed out, but then i reminded him that a) we just got more time just when we needed it and b) that we'd been able to work from home and hadn't been stuck in the warehouse all night.

today so far:

i feel much better since finishing the course of antibiotics yesterday afternoon, they were really making me tired. my new filling seems to be settling.

payoff

tuesday night:

i finally managed to coax the deployment to succeed, but without a sense of success.

wednesday:

the day began with me learning that i hadn't been invited to the previous night's deployment debriefing, and i suspected that that was intentional on skippity's part to prevent me raising a bunch of issues he knew shouldn't have been. so i awkwardly gatecrashed, and took a number of opportunities to interrupt with my opinions.

it was entirely gratifying to get so much enthusiastic support from the other participants, and i felt really validated for jumping in because nobody else was saying what i was saying.

i had a potentially "final straw" moment with bigtalk, discovering once again that in spite of the extremely explicit ticket and discussion around it, he still hadn't followed the instructions. "you never said that!" he responded, at which point i showed him exactly how it was written in the ticket. "oh."

anyway, by the time the day was over, after a few more iterations, we considered his work ready to merge and we pulled the trigger. the first thing i did after he left was ask a couple of other devs to give it a try, and before i left i'd opened a PR for some minor improvements, but by and large we'd crossed the line and were ready to move on to the next thing.

which made me super nervous, because the next thing is the really hard thing.

gd and my mom made pastries with "chunk" fake meats for dinner. it's creepily close to a real meat experience.

yesterday:

the work day began with a pleasant conversation with skippity that made me feel like there were no hard feelings, and then i synced with bigtalk to make sure he understood what was required of him. i think it's understandable how skeptical i was feeling.

the day was overall pretty productive, with lots of noise (a fair amount of good noise) and a lot of me actively protecting bigtalk from distractions.

an hour before happy hour, bigtalk stood up and announced that he was done with his proof of concept.

i literally didn't believe him.

i sat next to him, he walked me through what he'd done and how he'd done it, and i was literally stunned, half disbelieving and half almost in tears (of joy and relief).

for me, the rest of the day was a celebration. i made sure that bigtalk understood what a big deal this is, and i discussed the implications with anyone who showed even the remotest interest, and i made sure that our boss was in on how things are going.

it feels like after a week (or few) of stress and suffering, we finally got a massive payoff.

i got home, walked with my mom and mr smear to the liquor store (rum and gin, and whiskey for a gift), and got home to another pastry dinner (everyone's really excited about vegan pastries, while mr smear is concerned about becoming chubby).

today:

gd's at her sewing lesson, we're off now to my surgeon appointment for my ingrown toenail while i feel like i'm recovering from a hard night of i-shouldn't-have-had-alcohol-with-my-antibiotics indigestion and fatigue.

but i feel good about how this week concluded. really, really good.