a bundle of nerves

 i mostly didn't sleep last night. i was tired, restless, and struggling with anxiety all night. i did have a few brief periods where i slept deeply enough to dream, but for the most part i just lay awake, uncomfortable, all night.

my gods, life is hard right now. and it's Big Stuff. i'm riddled with anxiety and my stomach's roiling with it, and i'm struggling to catch my breath. i have so much to be grateful for, but i'm having a lot of trouble seeing the wood for the trees, and two trees in particular are beating me with their branches.

the first tree is my job. we're living beyond our means, and that obviously needs to stop as soon as possible, but the only way out is to find another job. as i'm a contractor and on contract, if i do find another gig i'm going to be screwing over my employer and my client. if i don't, i'm going to be living on borrowed funds (time). i've got to find a side-gig that makes money, or gd has to, but until any of those conditions are met we're basically a ticking time bomb.

the second tree is our home. gd turned on the air conditioner yesterday and we didn't smell anything, which was an enormous relief. then she turned it on last night and it was blasting mold smell everywhere (it's central), and our landlord doesn't want to spend more money and has been out of communication for about a month already. on top of that, he's supposed to authorize the fixes to the windows and doors that the transit authority is offering to protect us from the construction noise, and i don't think he's done that.

...

yesterday was a monumental fuck-up regarding the holidays. i don't know where everyone else gets their information from, or if the holidays document i got was updated and i just missed the memo, but i only found out yesterday afternoon that mr smear was supposed to return to school yesterday morning. and this morning, he's missing school because i'm taking him to appointments at the hospital. so 🤷‍♂️

i also confused my workday schedules, and didn't realize until i joined the team daily by zoom that everyone was supposed to be in the office yesterday, so i scrambled to get there once the meeting was done.

the work day was pretty okay. i took the leftover challah-peño, which almost nobody wanted to try, and in the afternoon managed to guilt two of my team mates into trying, and then another became intrigued, but i still ended up eating most of it by myself :P

i merged my first PR yesterday, and then spent the remainder of the day buggering about with an indecisive/self-contradicting AI. my team introduced me to the spend dashboard, i was pleasantly surprised to find that my AI spend is very reasonable, and shocked to see some of the bigger numbers on the board.

after work, i dropped my bag off at home and took mr smear to the comics library, where we returned the broken judgement on gotham and i was relieved to find that it was clear to the librarian what had happened and that we weren't at fault. mr smear took a while to figure out which books he wanted to borrow, but i discovered akira and evangelion.

i don't know if i'll sound as dumb to you as i do to myself, but with all the frustration of being disappointed by the reboot and annoyed with the series revisions because i don't know what's canon, nor what any of it is supposed to mean, it never occurred to me to seek out the original text!

we watched another great episode of the wonder years over dinner - it's amazing how well that series holds up - and then i read a little of the light fantastic to mr smear at bedtime, but i started nodding off and he took over and read to me, and then he switched to reading from the grimm fairy tales, and at some point i realized it was late and that we both needed to get into bed.

which, for me, was clearly a mistake. i couldn't sleep in bed, so i moved to the couch, where i didn't sleep very well either, but also found myself constantly overheating and sweaty.

...

it's now just after 7.30am, and i'm going to have to take mr smear to his appointments today, so i guess i should get some work done before we leave...

a series of unrelated events

 i guess i slept alright last night. i woke up to a pleasant morning, it's was cooler and cloudy today (the heavy summer appears to be over) and i finished reading the history of western art in comics, which was a bit dry, but nevertheless an excellent teaching tool and the illustrations are great. i was also struck by inspiration to do something with hieronymus bosch's garden of earthly delights.

i managed to take care of a bunch of admin today. i was disappointed to learn today that the voucher for a pizza hut pizza which i was gifted by an employer a couple of years ago had expired. gd and i got into a bit of a tiff about something - parenting related - and i was pleased to have been able to figure out (eventually) how to express my side of things in a way that landed. i might be rougher than i need to be, but it's important for me that my wife and child understand my motivation, and that my number one priority is and has always been keeping mr smear safe and making sure he can handle himself out in the world.

it's after half-past eleven and mr smear is reading in bed and giggling to himself... and that's after i finally finished reading the colour of magic to him a little earlier...

mr smear and i walked to the comics library, which we found closed until next week. that was sad. we continued walking to the icon festival, but as soon as we arrived mr smear decided he wasn't feeling well (i believe it was the crowds that put him off) so we walked right through it and caught a bus or two home.

i then chatted with sailor for an hour and a half (!), and i'm relieved and pleased that he's excited about the social media app i'm building, and while we talked i formed some ideas about how to turn it into a platform that supports others building "apps" on top of it ^_^

mr smear chose cthulhu fluxx, which is apparently his favorite, and it was a fun game.

we watched another episode of the fall and rise of reggie dinkins over kimchi rice dinner, during which i convinced mr smear to try a drop of the carolina reaper hot sauce 😈

after showering after dinner, we sat down to watch the second half of suicide squad. i must admit i dozed off a couple of times, and a lot of the writing and acting was iffy, but mr smear enjoyed it immensely so 🤷‍♂️

now, post bedtime (even if he's not asleep yet, and it's been about twenty minutes since i started writing - largely because i've been getting distracted poking the AI in the background), i've been making progress on the side project and also on my mini-games, but i think i might end up going to bed soon.

architecture adventure

random thing i made a little while ago

 what happened today? it started off simple, reading more of the history of western art in comics while sitting on a beanbag and using one of the new little tables for the comic and my coffee.

after gd and i did some online grocery shopping, i sat down to work on the database redesign for my social media project, which turned into a proper collaboration between me and the agents and i ended up with something that feels really solid and clean.

gd had to go to a physio appointment, so we accompanied her, and then i took mr smear for a walk down to migal hashalom, found the entrance on our second try and hung around the ground floor exhibit* for a while examining the designs for what could have been and musing over an "i can see my house from here" artist's rendition...

* i tried to post a video to my app while there, but there was a bug. i just learned now that the "bug" was that the AI "forgot" to complete the work 🙄

from there we walked to bialik square, through nahalat binyamin, which triggered the only drama of the day - mr smear noped right on out the moment he recognized that we were near the market, and i needed to threaten him with punishment to get him to follow me on a speed run through the crowds.

we did okay.

we eventually met up with gd, then wandered around a bit looking for a place to have lunch, and the walk through the holiday crowds of mall people down king george and through the actual mall raised my stress levels step by step until i was almost as emotional as mr smear had been earlier... but we finally found some peace and quiet, pleasant reggae and good hummus and i pretty quickly regained control of my nervous system.

it was a great meal, and i don't think i ate too much.

the bus ride home was a bit rough - line 5's drivers are always really heavy on the pedals - and when we got home i was suddenly overcome by a deep, desperate exhaustion, the kind that made me wonder if i was sick, or narcoleptic after all. when the groceries arrived i got up to try and help and ended up sprawled on the living room floor for a forced nap for half an hour (i was feeling really faint, so i lay down on one of the beanbags). i woke up groggy and still really tired, and even with a 4th coffee i still felt like crap for a long while after.

the recording of gd fixing my hair had been processed by then, and between then and dinner i set about downloading the auto-generated captions, cleaning them up, and then running them through a local AI (ollama + gemma) to translate them to french and hebrew. that's been an experience, let me tell you. challenging, but interesting.

we had a very light dinner, watching youtube videos on the playlist i curate for mr smear (he'd been watching that while i was focused on the caption editing), and after dinner and showering we all sat down with a bowl of salt and vinegar kettle fried chips and watched the first half of the original suicide squad movie.

i think mr smear's enjoying it, and it sounds like leto's joker is his favorite 🙄

since putting him to bed, i've been watching lots of random videos, slowly turning my brain off, and i think i'm just about ready for bed.

a busy pause

 i don't know what switch off meant yesterday when i wrote it, but i was still messing about (on and off) with my side project and a new minigame [stops writing to prompt the AI to improve rotation behavior]. 

most of yesterday evening is a blur to me now, but we watched a great episode of spider-noir over dinner, and after mr smear went to bed* i spent some time driving myself crazy playing cook, serve, delicious!...

* a process that began at a relatively reasonable hour, ended around midnight, and at some point when i went in to turn off the lights again and tuck him in he was offended because i didn't do the bedtime ritual and he'd forgotten that i'd already done so much earlier :P

i went to bed late, but not too late, and i guess i slept alright. on my way to bed i had a revelation about the change that came over me since last week's game meetup talk - i got so excited about the potential for making money with games that i lost focus, and i need that focus and excitement for the raw components of the game before i can start making something that's lucrative. every single thing i'm building, or failing at building, is a lesson, a dot to connect when i'm ready.

i woke up to the stress of reading a post i shouldn't have looked at before coffee, another oleh really struggling economically. one of the things i did after coffee was creating a facebook group to help olim network and build things.

my morning started quietly, a little meditative outside time followed by getting back into history of western art in comics, and then finally settling down and taking care of a bunch of admin that i've been putting off for about a week now. after mr smear completed his chores, he asked if we could play something together, but neither of us could agree on what. eventually he sat down to play valheim, and honestly, it did me good. first, because he made a point of chewing gum** the whole time, and second because he was playing something outdoorsy and really getting into it. it's like that "the children yearn for the mines" meme 😂

** "training": both exercising his jaw, and practicing dealing with the fact that it doesn't keep the taste for more than a couple of minutes.

our big adventure today was going to find some kitchen items and something we could use as a low coffee table for when we're sitting on the beanbags. on the bus, we encountered the old man who took a dump next to the bus stop a while back, and as soon as we recognized him we all quickly and quietly agreed to slide over to the back of the bus.

the sales lady at the kitchen store was stunned by gd's hilariously disorientating description of how normal it is for her to cut herself in the kitchen (or while cutting hair), she helped us figure out what we need to buy (it's a chain-link glove) but we've had to order it in gd's size. then we caught a bus to the hardware store, almost getting run over a few times by wolt drivers, where we found what we were looking for but everything felt like far too little value for money.

we walked up to the square with all the restaurants, and sat down to two delicious bowls of hummus, one with vegan shuwarma, and then headed down to osher ad to be amazed both by the prices and quality of their products, and by the lengths of their queues during the holidays. we'll go back there another day.

we were planning on coming home but ended up in azrieli mall instead. i had a coffee and mr smear and i milled around waiting for gd, crowded by surges of mall people, but fortunately not being pushed beyond my usual limit. i mean, it was exhausting, but it didn't put me into fight-and-flight mode like it usually does.

we found *exactly* the coffee tables we were looking for at the dollar store, very cheap and absolutely perfect. we caught the bus home, and halfway there i jumped off to take a call from the dermatologist i'd been waiting to hear from for two days - she's not concerned, she agrees with my assessment - and after having a bit of a rest (taking out one of the tables, lying down for a bit, then hearing gd out as she described how she's selling some of her childhood toys she's been carrying around because she's come to understand that she's holding on to nostalgia for really dark times, and then sitting down to edit the haircut recording from yesterday.

i've done very little development / AI whispering today, and that's okay. i've just had it out with mr smear over his piano practice (i wanted him to practice a new thing he's just learned before stopping), but otherwise things are good.

the opening gates

 we never got to pokémon yesterday, but we did make great progress with our bird game, it was a great experience both as a father-son bonding session and as a building-something-good session. then we washed the floors, which took a while but is always less work than i expect it to be, by which time it was getting dark and we hadn't been outside all day, so we strapped on our blades and went for a night blade.

overall, the evening was excellent. there were a couple of shit moments, though, the primary one being almost being crashed into by an idiot kid on an electric scooter.

we had a good, but late, dinner and watched random videos from mr smear's playlist, and then it was bedtime.

i guess i slept alright, if not enough. i began the day with the other ant-man comic, then did some random stuff, then tried to get some actual work done - my employer expects us to work on holiday eves, but not my clients :P - and the first hour or so was spent migrating from helium to brave and upgrading software. then i settled in to write up some notes about my project and put AI to work investigating the current state and poking around to surface the risks, and i think i have enough to have a sync with the team's product lead when we're back in the office to determine how much effort this is going to require.

from there, i went out with an already irritable gd and our already irritating son to do some shopping, and while she let me win the argument about which grocery store to go to first, she turned out to be right that they wouldn't have any vegetables and then she was doubly pissed that we had to walk much further to get what we needed...

at least the rest of the shopping expedition was somewhat successful.

when we returned, i sat mr smear down to play pokémon, but gd turned it into a family meeting first. then we resorted the cards and ran through the tutorial, and we both had a good time. then we moved to the computer and got back to work on the bird game, and although the AI has been dragging its metaphorical feet the game itself is at least fun to play.

now it's about to be yom kippur, and gd mistimed dinner so it looks like i might be starting the fast a bit late... and taking mr smear our rollerblading, so i'll probably be drinking some water too :/

but i've eaten plenty today, carbo-loaded, in fact, so i'll probably be fine. two bowls of rice, and pancakes, and gd's failed experimental baked potato chips, and choc-chickpea fudge... i'll probably be fine.

drips, some slow some fast

we started watching the fall and rise of reggie dinkins over dinner last night, it's legitimately good. after getting mr smear into bed, i continued with my diff tool.

i finished reading one of the ant-man comics we borrowed from the library, it wasn't bad, it was entertaining, but it definitely wasn't the kind of writing i get excited about.

i spoke with my mentor today, who made me feel really silly: why not take something that has many users like kdiff3, and write a plugin for it? it's worth looking into, though kdiff3's last update appears to be over a decade old... [EDIT: brave search gave me the old kdiff3, there's a new one that's actively maintained]

i ran into another guy from my officer's course platoon this morning, it was pleasant catching up :)

i was asked for an opinion on one of the team's not proposing to his long-term girlfriend, it sounds like the team primarily comprising married moms has a very specific vibe. amusingly, them working on the first guy convinced the guy who sits next to him to get engaged last month 😂

i managed to keep my mouth shut during the lunchtime discussion about sleep training, but later - and i honestly don't remember what triggered it, i think someone in the team was talking about "eating healthy"  [EDIT: it was a conversation about healthy snacks]- i laid down some of my opinions, the most harsh regarding fish and seafood and children's cognitive development. i was pleasantly surprised that it became just another calm conversation, and then it was over and we went back to work.

at least a couple of my teammates seem to be excited about the tools i shared today. i started diving into my first task with my "buddy", and i think i have a pretty good handle on it. unfortunately, it was a day full of distractions and by the time i sat down to look at the code i discovered that my dev environment's completely buggered, even worse than before i managed to get everything working yesterday 🙄

on our way out the building, i found myself facing into a crowded elevator across from someone from my previous client, which was awkward. then i thought i saw the guy from yesterday ducking round the corner with a cigarette in hand, and i walked all the way up to him before realizing it was someone else. there was no one else around.

i stopped by the hardware store and picked up a "mandolin" slicer and and knife sharpener, then i came home and was greeted by mr smear trying to show me what he's decided he's ready to put together for a youtube channel. i'm very excited about the comic book he picked up for me at the library today: judgement on gotham!

i tasted gd's new chocolate chickpea fudge, which... i don't know how i feel about it. it's not bad, it's very moreish, but i think i prefer my fudge either chocolate, or chickpea, but not both.

gd and i finished watching the witness after putting mr smear to bed, it still holds up.

my busy sinuses / post-nasal drip / sore throat was worse today than yesterday. it's really late and i'm worried about not sleeping tonight.

...

the "naza" documentary: anyone who's served here or knows anyone who's served knows that this is a massive pack of lies, but for whoever isn't sure, here's a rabbit-hole to go down. this is not a case of freedom of expression, this is a case of malicious disinformation being used to support our enemies during wartime.

gaming in the new year

friday evening was lovely. the kids were all fine, although they didn't eat anything and between gd and big data's wife there was waaaaaaay too much food. i... i ate too much. so much that i was very uncomfortable and needed to keep myself upright for a couple of hours after we got home to ensure i wouldn't have indigestion :/

both yesterday and today were essentially spent either making games, or playing games. cascadia was a great success. the mini-games i've been experimenting with have been a great success. i spent a good hour or so with horseman discussing game dev and vibe coding, and then blockchain dev, which was cool.

mr smear and i played settlers of catan with our upstairs neighbors this afternoon, which was mostly good except for a) big data getting upset with his youngest - as usual, but his youngest just continued doing the things that he kept asking him to stop doing and it got so bad mr smear joined in, and i had to stop him - and b) mr smear "jokingly" calling big data "asshole" because he did something that stopped his plans. at the end of the game we managed to make it worse when i told him to apologize and he repeated the word while apologizing 🙄

we watched more spider-noir, we watched more the wonder years, we watched the first half of the new masters of the universe which is a tragically funny parody of the original series, but with too much violence and swearing to be appropriate for kids. the casting for evil-lyn was spot on 😂

what else? i don't know. i guess i should record that my throat's been scratchy for the last couple of hours, which i definitely don't need, and mr smear's cough hasn't fully let up yet. oh, and gd made pretty good chickpea fudge today. and my main thing these past two days has been the games i've been working on. it turns out making nostalgia-flavored edutainment mini-games can actually be fun, to make and to play!

unexpected things

i jump-started my day yesterday by taking the rosh hashana cards mr smear forgot to deliver on tuesday to the school.

on the way, our bus was stalled by a homeless guy who literally stood in front of the bus, smoking a cigarette and trying to goad the driver into a fight. the driver kept edging towards him, with his fucking bus. the homeless guy didn't give a fuck. then, suddenly, another bus pulled in front of us and the homeless guy ran into it with his lit cigarette to go and terrorize the poor people on it :/

i stopped at the pharmacy on my way home to pick up gd's meds (a long wait, but less long that usual), then came home for breakfast and to begin working.

...

it was my first group meeting with my client, and i was unpleasantly surprised to be asking to introduce myself to the group immediately after the manager had given me a pretty robust introduction. in retrospect i should have probably focused on the personal aspects of my life rather than the professional 🙄

regardless, two people reached out to me privately as a result of my introduction: the first, a fellow contractor who i didn't realize was in the same group. the second? a guy from the officer's course i haven't seen in almost sixteen years, who i happened to be thinking about on wednesday because we were last together at the same place our company status was held!

...

the work-from-home day went alright, but for two things:

the first, that i had a real snacking problem yesterday, and by "snacking" i mean "i ate a few more actual meals than i should have". so it's not that the quality of the food was questionable, but the quantity was out of control.

the second, that at the beginning of my meeting with my lead he asked me to pause the recording, and after a congenial personal sync during which he wanted to know how i was feeling about things, i asked him for feedback and learned that there is a point regarding my progress on which he's disappointed.

i spent the rest of the day heavily focused on resolving that, and i believe i finished the day having made good progress.

...

gd had a big day yesterday: she finally got the haircut she's been longing for for months (she had to postpone her appointment until we were sure we were through the lice incident, and the incident caused her to cut her own hair in a way that bothered her), and she finally got it cut short which i've been suggesting for years. so we're both happier now :)

in the afternoon we went to two stores to do the grocery shopping, and by the second we found what we needed for the long weekend and, specifically, her experimental kebab dinner.

...

while i didn't enjoy the experimental kebabs, the episode of spider-noir we watched along with it was great (i *love* the cameo musical phrase appearances borrowed from all the other spider-man movies). after dinner / showering and brushing teeth, we sat down to watch the second half of judge dredd. overall: it's a bit childish, standard 90s action fare with one-dimensional characters and some heavy character assassination by wedged in "romance", but the concept of megacity one, and the ABC warbot and mean machine, was great and we all had fun.

two puffs before bed (my lower back and hip flexors were doing their thing), and it helped.

...

i woke up this morning to a coffee on the balcony (no comics, no computer) while thinking about my tarot game (i'm feeling quite lost, actually, when it comes to the actual game mechanics), and i've since spent the past few hours working through my open work in my auto-doc project and my employer's spec project. i'm done with the former and just about (i think) done with the latter, and now gd and i are leaving our heavily coughing mr smear at home to go to the mall and find a board game that she's interested in playing.

the calling

t'was a strange day.

the guy who was at the same client with me asked me if i was coming to the office, he meant my now ex-client's office :P

i spoke to the sales guy, after about ten minutes the conversation went in a way i didn't know how to end, eventually i just kind of extended my hand for a handshake and then fucked off.

i'm convinced the awkward guy from the game meetup is autistic, because i spoke to him today and when we were done talking, he just stared at me for far too long until i unintentionally continued the conversation, and then we had another long silence before i said "cool" in a way that finally made him go "i should get back to work"...

but they're interesting conversations, and i'm learning a lot from him, so i guess if that's the price i have to pay 🤷‍♂️

i spoke to my boss, who was cool about my work and my contributions to his project, which was cool.

i had lunch with a new guy and an old guy, and we had a really long and interesting argument about team management that ended with "it's hard to argue when everyone's right".

i had a talk with our insurance broker, we managed to reduce my payments by a little and i hope not in a way that'll end up hurting us.

i got some work done on my auto-doc project, and at the same time on my tarot game, though the latter took on/off work until just a few minutes ago to finally get right, and i'm still not quite sure what the problem was. regardless, every small achievement makes me feel like i'm finding my calling in life.

am i missing anything up until this point? i don't think i am.

i went past osher ad on the way home, and picked up a cheap set of pots, and then walked a ways to run to get on a crowded bus to get home, drop off my stuff, and walk to the clinic for my first feldenkrais session. it was a bit weird, not least because my right shoulder started hurting intensely while she was working on my left, and we weren't able to trigger it again.

i'm not quite sure how i feel about this stuff just yet, but it's intriguing.

on my way into the treatment / examination, i received a message from my new client informing me that they expect me in the office tomorrow. cool.

mr smear was quite annoying this evening, but overall we had a good one. we watched the third episode of fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood and ate a huge dinner, and mr smear got into bed not unreasonably late. between sessions of arguing with the ai about my game, i watched fascinating videos about falling down and watchmen, the former being compelling and the latter completely blowing my mind, especially in light of me having just re-read it.

it's late. i'm going to try to get some sleep now.

...

another mashup the world needs: she's got the look / hold on to my fur. i can't help but hear similarities both in the non-chorus versus and in the "na na na na na" "nya nya nya nya nya nya" 😁

just the good stuff

 it's been an hour or two and i have no idea why i'm not sleeping, so... here i am 🤷‍♂️

...

on friday night, we watched the first wallace & gromit, which was great, but gd and i were both falling asleep by the end of it. we all went to bed, and i slept well.

after starting my morning on the balcony - having cleaned a whole lot of bird droppings and re-sprayed the bird repellent, and then being harassed by a bumblebee - i then moved to my office and finished writing up my article about my new spec repo.

that felt good.

...

i then spent the next few hours working on my tarot game, which involved website scraping, establishing the rules for the basic game, and implementing a deck being shuffled and dropped in to the game, which worked out *really* well! i mean, like, so well that i got high fives from both gd and mr smear, and not just myself :D

in addition to that, mr smear joined me and we worked on his game for a while, figuring out the design needed to do the first real experiment of "is it fun?" while he regaled me with descriptions of the enemies he's invented. which, by the way, are genuinely disturbing and make me continue to question whether i should be assisting him with this or not...

by the time we got the design worked out, and my initial experience implemented, we were down to 1% of the five-hour window's tokens remaining!

...

we strapped on our blades, a little worried about the weather app warning that it apparently felt like 36℃ degrees outside, and went out for a while. as we headed out i warned mr smear not to whine about how far we were going to go or about going home, and to his credit he didn't - we went all the way to the park lake, and he was great! he did excellently, we had a good time there and back, i managed to get him to drink from a water fountain without too much drama, and when some kids kicked a soccer ball right into his path and he fell, he landed really well. score!

...

after getting home and showering, we re-watched the first episode of fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood over dinner, then received a package from our upstairs friends who had just returned home: cthulhu fluxx and star fluxx! i'm very much looking forward to playing them ^_^

...

i got into judge dredd comics when i was a kid - my first tattoo was inspired by the world of megacity one, and chopper in particular - and when i saw the stallone movie i was at the same time overjoyed to see so much of the world brought to life, and upset that dredd removed his helmet and rico wasn't rico. i've been carrying that with me for over three decades now (say what?!), but this week i decided that it's time to put my big-boy pants on and introduce my son to the franchise via the movie and then let him discover the magic of the comics if he wants to.

we watched the first half of the movie tonight. mr smear is definitely enjoying it, and i let go of the minor grievances and enjoyed it far more than i did in the theatre :)

...

i really hope i can get back to sleep soon, today's a big day!

achievements unlocked

 alright! we had fun last night, yohay sponder's show was brilliant (even though it was very different to the one i went to with the same name), gd had a good time, we both laughed hysterically many times, and then we returned home to find mr smear also in good spirits, having spent the previous couple of hours playing video games without his parents to bother him :P

i don't recall what i did between getting home and getting into bed (aside from showering, brushing my teeth and spending half an hour on the spec library i've been working on for the last few days), but i ended up going to bed around midnight after taking a puff.

i slept pretty well.

i woke up earlier than i would have liked this morning, started my day with my morning ritual which included reading more of doomsday clock on the balcony, but relatively quickly arriving at the conclusion that i really don't want to read any more of it.

i really want to like this. the artwork is superb, and there's clearly a will to do something interesting, but the result is an incoherent mess and i just cared less and less as the panels wore on. this feels stuck somewhere between a cash-grab and an attempt to recreate something that was truly groundbreaking but without offering anything new.

instead, i spent the next couple of hours working on the spec library, then we all walked to the book / stationery store to buy what mr smear was missing for next week, and to the cobbler to pick up my sandals (expensive, but he did a great job), and then we took a bus to fox to learn that nobody stocks shorts in my size this late in the season (it's still mid-summer), and then another to dizengoff center, stopping along the way to eat really good hummus.

most of that story took place under a bit of a cloud because mr smear was being shitty, but by the time we sat down to eat things were fine. so lunch was great (except for the bit where i unwittingly dipped pita bread into gd's hummus, completely forgetting her need for sterile gluten-free environments, and then had to scrape out anything that might've made contact and hope for the best... so far, she seems fine.

*phew*

we found no shorts in my size at the mall, or nothing that i'd be interested in wearing, at any rate, but we did pick up mr smear's new glasses, so it wasn't a waste of time.

we came home, immediately began preparing the challahpeño, and i dived back into the spec library. within the three hours that i spent on it before leaving for shul, i achieved the following:

1. completing the main work, and figuring out how to interact with it.

2. testing it out on my other game project, very successfully!

3. writing up most of the article that i'll publish along with it.

i fired off some screenshots to dx, and he's excited too ^_^

i took mr smear to shul. this evening's service was weirdly short because a lot of stuff was left out, but that was because it was dedicated to the kids going back to school and (apparently) a conversion class graduating. mr smear was generally cool, he handled the babies well, and i was fascinated by the child-like mentally handicapped guy in front of me who's extremely muscle-y, but was so freaking cute as he kept jumping up and down whenever there was singing and his mother had a really hard time explaining to him that he was too big to join the little kids for their little ceremonies.

...

well, here we are, getting ready for kiddush at the end of the summer holidays, the shabbat between having finished strong at my previous client and looking forward to a new client with interesting potential, having completed the exciting work i embarked on at the beginning of the week...

shehecheyanu vekiyimanu vehigiyanu la'zman hazeh

rituals

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

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

official

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

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

anxiously quiet

 we did a lice treatment last night before showering and going to bed very late, a very oily treatment, and my eyes are still irritated and they feel oily :(

yesterday morning was all about the pharmacy mission and weekend shopping. and monitoring and responding to the comments on gd's post, some of which were very angry at gd's observations on the neglect of children's hygiene, and some of which were very validating.

i ended up spending a good chunk of the day* on the auto-doc project, and then a very little bit of time before dinner on the map generator's seed algorithm before dinner. while that was happening, i also got mr smear to draw a couple of sketches of me because i want him challenging himself and practicing portraits, and hopefully i'll be able to get him to do that again today.

* i mean, a legit work day's worth of hours, though a lot of working with AI is firing off a prompt, switching to youtube, and then reviewing the results a few minutes later. but i also used a "teach-me" skill i've been working with since thursday (inspired by one of the guys at the game dev meetup), and i used it to verify that one of the big changes i've made to my auto-doc project actually makes sense.

[goes away, comes back a bit later, eyes feeling a little bit of relief]

the two puffs i took last night were very effective, and i slept.

today so far: reading some more of my favorite thing is monsters, doing a little more cleaning of the top of the kitchen cabinet (the third round in eight months, making progress), and then a whole bunch of nothing (minesweeper while "catching up" on youtube), now it's breakfast time and then... who knows?

the end of a week

 i took a puff last night before bed, but it didn't make me sleepy and i ended up waking up much earlier than i wanted to. but i didn't struggle with my back or hip flexors, whether that's because of the acupuncture or because of the weed doesn't really matter.

i was actually going to try the medication the doctor prescribed me, which sounds great on paper but turned out to be an anticholinergic, and i'd quite frankly rather continue with my possible sleep-deprivation path to dementia than take a practically guaranteed path. just sayin'.

...

most of my work day revolved around completing the backfill, and discovering that an external tool that's recently been introduced has been starving the processes, slowing everything down and then killing them when they hit an arbitrary timeout 🙄

one of my client team came to me to discuss the fact that i'm leaving - he'd just found out - but later the boss told me everyone had been informed on tuesday. i don't know what's going on, but whatever. dx and i discussed a game idea he had when he was a teenager that's absolutely brilliant, hopefully one day we'll collaborate on it :)

i got home, emptied my bag and took mr smear to the school to pick up his books for the next year. on the way home, we came across a really nice kitchen store and i found mugs!

the bus ride back was apparently mr smear's best ever, mainly because he was so excited about how modern and clean it was :P

we arrived just in time for dinner, and the simpsons, followed by a conversation with my mom (including teaching her some AI fundamentals) and... letting mr smear play plague inc before showering and then going to bed just as late as we did...

...

so i got up early this morning, and enjoyed my coffee while reading more of my favorite thing is monsters on the balcony, put together the new fan, freaked myself out by looking at our financial situation, and am now getting ready to make myself breakfast [i got distracted, now it's eaten already] and do some game dev / ai experimentation.

...

"super lice". of course. fan-freaking-tastic. gd's just sent a warning to the class parents' group which basically feels like posting a sign on mr smear's back :/

the doing feeling

 today was tuesday. i honestly don't know where to begin, and i'm sure i'll miss something.

the second volume of my favorite thing is monsters is off to a good start.

gd and i had a very serious relationship talk this morning, which went very positively, but it was addressing something that's probably just a feature of our marriage and we'll have to manage it in a loop 🤷‍♂️

i spent most of my work day babysitting and troubleshooting the backfill, i'm still encountering small surprises. my manager informed my team that i'm in a notice period, but he did it in an uncomfortable way, and then he told me they were planning on making an announcement, but as far as i know the only person who's been told is dx, and he already knew. whatever they're doing, it's really weird.

my two teammates of the past eight months are now both members of my async game jam 🤘

my manager hasn't done anything about my auto-doc project, so i went over his head and sent a brief directly to the guy in charge of tech direction...

pioneer wanted me to sign an NDA before sharing an app design, i convinced her that she was being silly but once i saw what she wants to build i understand that it's way beyond "an app". i also posted this morning looking to see if there's interest in a hebrew language meetup, which it appears there is.

i left early, switched computers at home, and headed to a game dev meetup. i spent most of the non-talk time speaking to a coworker, i'm grateful for the advice and knowledge he shared but it did get a little awkward at some point, because he apparently isn't great with social cues. null sweat, though, because i learned a lot this evening, and all three talks were surprisingly entertaining!

- when to build infrastructure, when to hack

- how to identify and test good ideas

- tips on game dev collaboration / team building, and the basic idea behind building for steam

as i was leaving, my mom called to share how excited she was to be enjoying life of brian on her new television ^_^

i got home in time to eat some dinner, say good night to my mom with my family, and then decide to go rollerblading in spite of not feeling entirely up to it.

i don't know if my problem tonight was being out of shape, anaemic, or just lazy, but aside from some rather brutal uphills and leaving half an hour early and barely managed to get home without collapsing, i had a great time!

...

something's been happening these past few weeks, and i'm starting to feel like i'm getting back into a groove i haven't been in since before i left israel - i'm *doing* shit, and feeling progress, lots of different kinds of things but all somehow related and working together. i'm feeling *potential*. and it's nothing short of thrilling.

...

it took me a while to cool down enough to shower, i had a cold shower, and now i'm going to stretch a little bit more and go to bed.

some of the surprises were good

 i had a rough hour or so last night with my hip flexors, but otherwise i managed to get some pretty good sleep (going by the fact that i remember that i dreamed)

i started the day with volume 2 of my favorite thing is monsters, and aside from that and grocery shopping online i don't recall doing anything interesting.

work began with two conversations about game development - dx has apparently begun trying his hand at it, and one of the other guys showed some interest as he worked on simulations as part of his degree - and a little bit of jumping between tasks.

at noon, i received a phone call from the immigrant employment woman - i'll call her pioneer - and we talked for about an hour, this seems a natural fit for a partnership and she appears to be on board with my vision for a digital kibbutz. immediately afterwards, i received a message from a high school teacher i met last week informing me that she might have found some interesting people to work on another project of mine, one that ties in with the former.

this is all very exciting.

unfortunately, i learned that a meeting i was trying to set up with someone at my alma mata isn't going to happen, and i'm pretty disappointed because it should be something totally aligned with their values...

i came home for an employer group meeting, some of which was quite enlightening, and after an hour or two of more work i called it a day and mr smear and i strapped on our rollerblades and went for a ride.

oh, i watched a couple of my more recent spoken word pieces [1] [2], and i have the strangest sensation of wonder that i wrote those, because for years i've been feeling less than inspired and capable.

dinner was delicious, and i ate plenty, and then i gorged myself on chocolate, liquorice allsorts and whatever the fizzer-like candies are called. then we had a chat with my mom, which included a big discussion about mr smear's barmitzvah plans, and after saying goodnight to mr smear gd and i watched a bit more of ludwig.

i was already in bed, but then gd walked into the fan carrying a cup of water which was somehow my fault, so now i'm cooling off and hoping to get back into sleep mode soon.

a skip and a leg day

 did i... did i skip a day?

yesterday:

i spent a couple of hours on mr smear's game yesterday, but the biggest event of the day was watching die hard together, which was the only screen time mr smear was allowed until dinner because he'd been pretty rude to me in the morning.

my son discovered liquorice allsorts and i discovered my sunflower seeds had the words "unsalted" written in large print on the packet that i hadn't registered when i bought them :(

the rest of my day was doing not much, but lots of it :P

oh, and i had a good chat with vfmp for the first time in ages. i'd come up with a prank to play on his antisemitic brother, and we both laughed hysterically as he told me a story of their sibling rivalry and the results of him exploiting a cheat in a game they used to play together 😈

dinner was sushi again (^_^) and more of the wonder years. each episode generates interesting discussions, necessary discussions that mr smear doesn't necessarily want to have :P

he got to play more thief after dinner as compensation.

today:

i slept pretty well again last night. i got a variety of stuff done today, but my work day was mainly me jumping between tasks and struggling to make real progress on any one thing. lots of small disappointments.

one of them being that after generating enough data at the end of last week, my cost estimates turned out to be considerably lower than i anticipated...

around 4pm i decided to get up from my desk and walk mr smear to the comics library and back. we picked up my favorite thing is monsters vol 2 and doomsday clock, along with volumes 4-5-6 of attack on titan for mr smear, after discovering that the books on the shelves are doubled up and we hadn't noticed all this time!

i advised mr smear as he signed up for an account on a website that asks you to confirm you're over 18 (it's a monster wiki, i'm pretty sure i'm doing the wrong thing), while i played around with agent frameworks and specced out some more work on his game.

dinner was delicious, not-quite-sushi but similar, and we watched an episode of the wonder years that we essentially had to force mr smear through as he died inside from "14th hand embarrassment" - yes, 7x as worse as 2nd hand - but he survived the trauma in spite of his protests 😂

between then and now, i came across a post on facebook from a woman who seems to have the same idea i do about employing immigrants, it looks like we might have some common ground we can cooperate with so i'm quite excited!

...

i'm feeling my hip flexors getting irritated again, i had a couple of days' reprieve while my back hurt and now i'm uncomfortable :/

much thursday

 yesterday began with reading more of my favorite thing is monsters (volume 1 of 2, i just learned), which i just completed now.

it's sublime. between the phenomenal artwork, the gut-wrenching stories, and the real-ness of the characters, this is an absolute masterpiece.

the big story from yesterday morning was having the plumber - clearly a devout muslim, making his jewish blessings contrast starkly with his kneeling to bless his cup of water - do a great job of replacing the cistern and a not-so-great job of turning a small leaky faucet into an unusable one. now i've got to get him to come back for the latter before the weekend...

the work day was unusually calm. i had a big, healthy side-dish lunch from the shuwarma place that i picked up on the way to the office, i'd been feeling faint and weak again and i'm becoming increasingly concerned about possibly being anaemic. i got the backfill started, and it went pretty smoothly, and over the course of the afternoon i got the action plan worked out for the work my client team and i have been discussing, all using opus and all far cheaper than using sonnet.

let's pretend that makes sense.

by the time i went upstairs to join everyone for happy hour - a farewell pizzas-and-drinks for the AI team lead - i was ready to trigger the implementation and i left the agent with an instruction to document every step of it and make best guesses that didn't conflict with the established plan.

when i got back to my desk more than half an hour later, it was still running. after about an hour, it was done, and while i haven't evaluated the results yet - i was just waiting for it to finish so that i could go home - on the surface it looks good and i was shocked by how little it cost relative to what i've been spending on tokens since they introduced the budget a couple of weeks ago.

anthropic + bedrock = scam.

i dropped my bag off at home and took mr smear for a walk, a lot of which was spent discussing his game design ideas. i've agreed to help him in a bit, when his first screen time kicks in, to start building his game with him.

what a time to be alive.

gd's chili took a lot longer to be ready than she'd expected, but it was delicious. we watched another episode of the wonder years, and then i worked on my tarot game until i couldn't keep my eyes open any more and went to bed.

...

over dinner, mr smear discovered that he was having another outbreak around his eye. it's been quite a while, and considering the fact that i'd been considering taking him to the pool soon i'm grateful it happened before that, and that we didn't once again worry that the pool was causing it...

i didn't sleep very well, so i'm tired still, but that's just par for the course these days 🤷‍♂️

live demonstration

 it wasn't a presentation, it was a live demonstration. i spent the rest of my morning running through all the steps and trying to make sure it would go smoothly.

i was feeling a bit faint again, but also nervous, and particularly nervous about eating anything that might cause me any kind of gastric distress. so in the office, i avoided any snacks, even nuts, except for two pieces of fruit, and of those two pieces the banana tasted suspicious.

it was a weird few hours in the client's offices, i just found out one of the guys i'm sitting with is leaving at the end of the week and everyone thought i already knew. mixing-and-matching AI agents is awkward, dealing with surprise bad data is frustrating, and nobody knows how anything affects token usage.

then i shifted to my employer's office. on the light rail, an apparent dance troupe boarded our car to film a jubilant celebration, which felt a bit forced and incongruous with my reverie but i appreciated it nonetheless.

it was a huge relief to learn that my demo wasn't the only thing we were doing yesterday. also, that i'd arrived half an hour early and i needed about twenty minutes and help from an IT guy to get my laptop hooked up to the audio visual system.

that gave me ten minutes to have an exciting chat with one of the game jam (potential) participants.

then we stopped for hamburgers. i got five small, pretty good vegan burgers, which meant a few to take home to my son and his new friend :P

the live demo went pretty well, but there was a loooooong time waiting for an AI initialization that was quite awkward. overall, i got some great feedback and engagement, though, which was very encouraging!

on my way out, i spoke to one of our group leads who informed me that a company has already shown interest in me for my next contract. on the one hand, that's a big relief. on the other, it's working with a tech stack i really don't care for... the same one i'm working on currently :P

i came home, dropped off my back and the burgers, then caught a bus to herzeliya, refreshing disturbed's the sickness album in preparation for meeting david draiman (fanboy gush).

the evening was really interesting and satisfying. i had a bunch of conversations, with a bunch of inspirations, and made some good connections. at the very end i got to exchange a few words with david himself - i was awkward, but he was cool - and then it was time to return home.

the last bus arrived ten minutes late and was marked as being out of service, but at least it got me home at a reasonable hour (and reasonable expense). i gobbled down leftovers, showered, and managed to put my back out leaning over to pick up the laundry.

then i slept. i slept pretty well, but i woke up with sciatica firing on all cylinders and even with help from gd and a lot of stretching, i'm still not in good shape...

regardless, i started the day reading more of my favorite thing is monsters, and now that i'm reading anka's story it's clearly not appropriate for mr smear at all. possibly not for gd, either. i was so thoroughly engrossed and traumatized that i didn't realize where i was nor what time it was, so now that i've quickly eaten breakfast and written this down, i'm running late for work...