not-so-free will

i think i slept alright. the eczema seems to be calming down. i started my day reading a bit of hellsing on the balcony.

then i jumped into work, right after realizing that today was the last day i can use my monthly food allowance and we hadn't spent any of it yet.

i ran the test, it went well. i needed help from my buddy, and only understood - after being quite a nudnik - that i'd missed her message to the team earlier in the morning to say that her daughter was sick and she didn't have much bandwidth 🤦‍♂️

i felt awful, and i apologized profusely...

i spent the next few hours re-evaluating the work i'd planned... or that my AI agents had planned... by the time i'd figured out my next steps, it was time to do a grocery run with gd to use up as much of the allowance as we could, on stuff we actually need. i honestly felt a bit sick, and tired, about halfway through the shopping experience. it could have been worse, i guess, but i just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

i got home, had two carrots with some hummus, and was about to do the thing i'd told my team lead i was going to do when an upstairs neighbor began heavy drilling. i had less than an hour to go until my meeting with my mentor, and if i'd done the thing the team lead wanted i'd have been stuck at home with construction site noises, which left me no choice.

i sent a message to the neighbor group, explaining how some of us work from home and doing any kind of construction without prior warning is inconsiderate (how do people still not understand this?!), then packed my bags and rushed out to catch a bus to my employer's office.

i had a little bit of time to spare to Do The Thing, and my mentor ended up being five minutes late, so i managed to pull the trigger before our meeting got started. of course, i ran into yet another surprising bug...

the roadmap meeting with my mentor was very positive. the feedback from him, and from my current client, was the same as my self-diagnosis two weeks ago: ironically, he informed me that while it's critical to focus and effectively communicate how focused i am at work, he believes that my lack of focus is one of the reasons why i'm doing as well as i am in so many different ways.

can those two things be true at the same time?

when he got to the point of asking me which technologies i wanted to focus on, i immediately thought of what i need to get my number one main personal side project i'm now working on to succeed, networking and security, but even as i said the words i was nervous about biting off more than i can chew. which, if i think about it, is kind of the point of this whole roadmap exercise, so...

i had some time before my evening course class began to do some more investigating, report to the team lead and work on a solution, all the while talking to coworkers / async game jammers, and a dutch coworker, and two guys who are essentially using our offices as a coworking space.

the class was full of useful information, but it started so slowly and with such basic material that by the time the good stuff came up i'd already checked out. i spent most of the class evolving my agentic skills, understanding that i've been dealing with a wild array of conflicting guidance, and a lot of the skill cleanup was being done by conflicting skills that weren't aligned with what i'd just corrected... so i had to figure out a solution for that, too.

i walked out with sfs and another guy who seems interested in joining our asynchronous game jam, and then split from them to go to the supermarket and try to spend the remaining hundred shekels. i got to the self checkout with a heavy load that i'd estimated would just about reach the limit, only to discover, after passing everything through that there were a couple of significant discounts! fortunately, the place was practically empty so i rushed to the dried fruits area and picked up some healthy snacks, which did the trick.

i waited a few minutes at the bus stop, and there were a few of us frantically trying to wave the next bus down as he skipped our stop entirely. i reported the fucker. at least the second bus stopped, and in retrospect it was actually a better route for me :P

i got home to a delicious meal - gd has outdone herself with her salads, and whatever it is she's doing with the potatoes - and we had a chat with my mom before putting mr smear to bed. mr smear didn't have such a great school day today; nothing dramatic, but his behavior wasn't good enough to earn him screen time. we talked a little about it at bedtime, and then about the girls in his class doing tiktok videos 🙄, and then i said goodnight and hit the shower.

he'd already gone to bed, so i had to keep my anger over his gouging the soap and leaving me with practically nothing to myself :/

i sat down at my work machine and continued with the skill evolution, which took me until almost midnight to get through... but i think i'm happy with it, and i'm hoping it's going to make a real difference to both my work environments ✌️

i'm so fucking tired now. i can't believe it's the weekend. even less that it's a long weekend, because my client gives everyone a mandatory two days off every quarter. that's pretty cool.

unscheduled

 i just extricated myself from a 1.5 hour async game jam call with horseman, my coworker and his brother, and that's only because aside from the fact that i'm getting really tired (and the brother's online ninja game made me a little motion sick) but because i need to write this up before i hit the sack.

[yawns and makes one last cup of tea]

[ahhh, chamomile and honey]

i got up, sat outside on the balcony with my coffee, and couldn't figure out what i wanted to do with myself. mr smear, after having badgered me for a while (and a few days, really), was allowed to watch the youtube playlist i curated for him, which included an inappropriate ze frank video about cuttlefish procreation, and i went inside and watched with him until he left for school.

i did a little "desk" clearing, with my new playlist extension working so well that gd came and parked herself on a beanbag next to me, with both of us overjoyed and shocked by the songs we haven't heard in years! unfortunately, the desk clearing got a little rabbit-holey with overcomplicated government websites, and gd never having earned a payslip in israel...

eventually i managed to make some proper time to prepare for my work day, trying to understand what had gone wrong on monday evening and what needed to be done to fix it. when i finally felt ready to respond, i noticed that i'd kinda misread my team lead's last sentence and that it wasn't as heavy as i'd thought.

i walked to the office, discussed the solution with my buddy before our daily, and after our daily got into it. it - would - take - me - until - around - 4pm - to - be - ready - to - merge. gods, it was a long day. however! by the end of it, i believe i'd finally solved the real issue with my tests taking so long.

i mean, i hope 🤞

i had a couple of employer meetings this afternoon, one of them with my mentor, who seems to think i'm doing alright.

the most frustrating part of it all was that as soon as i was ready, the entire company's build system went offline.

...

during the time that it was offline, a crane broke in the construction site next door and i went to investigate the drama. i saw lots of emergency vehicles, and then a bunch of first responders around a body they were performing chest compressions on. it looks like the poor guy didn't make it, and i regretted my curiosity.

...

my buddy came into the office with veggie crisps, saying something about the taste. i love veggie crisps, so i took a handful and tried one, and it tasted somehow wrong. instinctively, i reached for the packet and looked at the allergen listing, and saw that it contains dairy. it's fucking veggie crisps, the packaging is almost identical to the vegan crisps, and it has no mention of dairy anywhere visible. and everyone in the office agreed that the milk powder didn't taste good.

WTAF is wrong with people?!

...

when i finally came back online, it took so long to get my PR green, merged, and the build completed that the company's no-deployments-past-5pm rule was in force. i literally clicked the button when the clock said 17:00. i secured special permission from the team lead for an emergency deployment, and we let it run.

i came home past suspiciously heavy traffic (though i didn't think much of it at the time), straight into an hour of monitoring and troubleshooting. eventually, my buddy agreed that something was wrong with the deployment pipeline, and that it wasn't my code (which had deployed successfully into a region we can't test with), and i sent off a kit-bag question / update to the team lead.

fortunately, by the time we finished dinner and i saw his response, it was to say that we're stopping for the night.

we finished watching evan almighty at dinner, then talked to my mom, then noticed for the first time that something big was going on in our intersection - some kind of roadworks - and traffic was gridlocked and emergency service vehicles were getting trapped. the honking and the sirens and the angry yelling went on until just a short while ago, it was pretty intense.

[a few more sirens and some honking]

after getting mr smear into bed, my evening turned into an unexpected combination of vibe coding (mr smear gave me a good idea for monetization!) and pitching game ideas and playtesting. now i've written this, i think i'm ready to crash.

with what i have

 after watching bruce almighty this evening, now i just feel like god's taunting me.

first, today was pretty stressful - i'm behind on my project, which was particularly ambitious of them to assign to me from the get-go, and every step of the way i've encountered unpleasant surprises, obstacles, and it's a system that's remarkably complex by any measure. sprinkle on that a couple of misunderstandings - my team lead seems to think i'm investing time in things that aren't on the critical path, when i've literally done nothing but ask agents to take care of them on the side, but i've also been asked to do things that don't really make sense without more context and i only understood this evening (when it was already very late) that i could have done what he asked much earlier in the day... and then when i did finally do it, it was mostly good but buggy.

this is a really, really shit feeling. hopefully we'll be able to clear the air on wednesday.

...

otherwise, i began my day with coffee and kick-ass, and then sat down to spec out the first part of the networking system that i need to test if the game networking package i came across and the mental model i'm building in my head are actually viable. whatever happens, imma learn some shit.

i think i ate too much today. the rest of the leftover gnocci in particular.

gd and i had a follow-up conversation to what we discussed yesterday, and she's going back to sewing lessons. i really hope this works out✌️

...

in the middle of the workday crescendo - around 6pm - i rushed out and literally had to sprint to catch a bus to the pick-up point for the vacuum filters we ordered. i arrived at the place (a really impressive little-bit-of-everything store) pretty quickly, but found their service less than stellar. it took me a couple of tries to figure out where the postal pick-up area is, but nobody was there. i asked a worker close by if someone was there, and after a couple of non-responses he said yes. i went into the package area, i called around, no answer. then i went back to the unhelpful cashier at the front of the store, who assured me that someone was there, but under a lot of pressure.

up until that point i'd been the only one trying to pick up a parcel, but now there was a queue forming. i went behind the "obstacles" again, called out a few more times, and then, as i walked back out, the guy from before who'd said that someone was there showed up, and it turned out he was that someone.

asshole.

fortunately, i made it out of there with my package and got to the bus stop just in time to catch a ride back home.

...

that was went i engaged in the evening's finale, with spectacularly disappointing results. fortunately, my "buddy" was available to help me find and understand the logs, and i got a breakdown from claude that... seems confident. the last words from the team lead felt heavy, he wants me to explain the bug to him on wednesday.

i feel like a thunder cloud is over my head right now.

...

while i was out, i received a message from an ex-coworker, a wedding invitation. considering our financial situation, i wasn't sure that it was a good idea to go, but i discussed it with gd and then my mom, and we thought it'd be a good idea and a fun thing to do. then, just after we finished watching the movie and i said goodnight to mr smear, i sat down and opened the invitation, and discovered that it's limited to one person with no plus one.

that kinda sucks. but i'm also sure that none of the other coworkers' partners were invited either. so now i'm damned if i ask him to invite gd and damned if i don't :/

...

i'm so freaking tired of things not working out, or working out badly. and on top of everything else i'm not entirely convinced the cream for the eczema is working properly, which is just another layer of discomfort on top of everything else.

gratitude, right? i should be practicing gratitude.

the week is over

 today was pretty exhausting, and i'm probably going to go to bed soon. the work day was slow, and a part of it was due to the same cause i noticed yesterday... my AI agents were running full regression tests for practically everything, and i had to go through multiple iterations of instructions and skill tweaking to get it to stop.

i didn't feel good about the day of client's work went. not for the quality of the work, not for the quantity of the work.

...

i started the day with more evangelion (book 2), and i'm excited to see the episodes again. i took care of some admin, mostly paying bills, and then it was work, work, work until it was time to leave for my evening class.

i already know a lot of the stuff from the course i did at the end of last year, but there are interesting things i've picked up nonetheless. and it was an opportunity to play-test the daily challenges i've added to my sudoku. and i had an important couple of conversations with my coworker who's working two (or more) jobs...

mr smear had a good day, meaning that he enjoyed it and also that he behaved well enough to earn screen time. also, his "homework" involved shading techniques that turned out amazing. *and* he used a whole lot more of the page than he usually does ^_^

right, the only thing of real value i've done tonight has been building a scraper and a wrapper website for the darwin awards to make it navigable so that i can read them to mr smear :P

laid out

 i - did - not -sleep. holy shit. like, at all. i skipped my first coffee, sat outside scribbling furiously, apparently coming up with a pretty compelling game design. said goodbye to mr smear, reminding him to be a cooperative student as we usually do, and then dove in to a bunch of chores.

i seem to have successfully applied for gd's license renewal, which was no mean feat... at least partially because my password manager had the incorrect credentials for her account 🤦‍♂️

i didn't feel i had enough time to head to the bank and the phone repair place before my team daily, then discovered around the time of the daily that it had been cancelled a couple of hours prior. i got a good chunk of work done instead, and then left the apartment for a "long lunch" involving bus rides there and back, and 45 minutes waiting politely. i was still buzzing from last night's coffee when i sat down, but halfway through the wait i crashed. hard.

then, when the two old people ahead of me finally finished and left, my "personal" teller checked my ID, heard me out, and regretted to inform me that there was absolutely nothing he could help me with.

*sigh*

i crossed the road, paid for my phone repair (mr smear's smashed screen couldn't be replaced), and came home.

i sipped coffee and lay down for a twenty minute nap, augmented with some dub. then i dragged myself to my desk and put in an hour's work, and then signed in to an hour and a bit of a talk by a coworker in thailand who's constructed a fascinating setup with grokbot that i'm thoroughly convinced is a dangerous, very expensive mistake.

i work with AI a lot, and i do not believe for one second that it's a good idea to take my eyes off the code entirely. also, my best senior engineer refused to use AI for one week. by friday, he said something nobody on the team wanted to hear.. i've been thinking about it a lot since i read it. i think it's spot on.

i was interrupted twice during that talk, for the same thing: the first was gd yelling at mr smear over the phone, the second was his teacher calling me to discuss his behavior. after the talk we had a family meeting, and things didn't seem too bad, and then his teacher got hold of me again and they seemed very bad. someone's apparently having a massive regression and doesn't remember how being a student works.

we have a lice protocol, now we have a behavior monitoring protocol. at least the teachers seem to be doing their part this time, actually making an effort to inform us and involve us 🙄

i took mr smear to the comics library, which was as much an opportunity for a little exercise and fresh air as to discuss his behavior, and gd's response to his behavior, and how i feel.

i'm excited about the books i took out: the second evangelion volume, the first volume of hellsing, and - hidden away from mr smear - book one of kick-ass. i flipped through it while there, it's hardcore.

we got home in time for dinner, with gd's delicious not-sushi rice-paper rolls, spoke to my mom, unpacked the groceries, showered, put mr smear to bed, and (after i spent some time thinking about stuff, after spending a little more time researching stuff) gd and i tried to watch an episode of ludwig, but we both passed out on the couch and i only realized it when i came around again and found myself aware enough to laugh at something, then noticed gd wasn't laughing :P

i've just finished my tea, i've written all this, and i'm going to try to catch up on last night's sleep.

themes

 it's getting close to... oh, it is midnight. fine. today was a weird, unhealthily weird day. i've been sitting too much, eating too much, and i literally never went outside :/

i was woken up by mr smear's awful alarm being shoved in my face because neither he nor gd could figure out how to stop it when the phone is in downtime mode. i couldn't get back to sleep, and i remained decidedly unmotivated for a whi^H^H^H^H^Hpretty much the rest of the day :P

i started reading neon genesis evangelion, and i've immediately arrived at the conclusion that a) omg the manga is awesome but b) it's probably not quite as awesome if you haven't seen the anime.

i spent a bit of time on the phone with the dental clinic, the experience was shocking (although not as shocking as gd's failed root canal and her dentist's negligence) and i found myself both yelling at the receptionist and appealing to her humanity at the same time. apparently we can see the manager to complain in person on sunday morning...

my consulting coworker gave an hour long presentation today for her team's hackathon project during our client group's bi-weekly, half of which i was confused because something distracted me early and i didn't realize that zoom was showing her screen in a different tab. dammit. fortunately, i was wowed by their project on the day so i didn't have trouble following.

...

i received my payslip today, which thankfully included my bonus. i thought i'd be less disappointed if i didn't expect half of it to be taken as income tax, but now i see that it was literally half of the amount and i am disappointed. it's obviously far better than no bonus, though, so...

...

around noon a technician came for our electric stove. the one that we bought when we moved in. he took it off to the lab, refusing to give us even a general idea of how long we'd be without it :(

we are extremely lucky that our upstairs friends had a spare, although unfortunately our socket isn't regulation so we can't plug it in. but it does plug the hole in the counter, and we do have their portable stove for now, so... 🤷‍♂️

...

in the news, frontier models have been doing amazing things. i'm not talking about missing the point of math problems, although that's certainly interesting, but rather the crazy new game merging trend and someone (or a group of someones) finally getting some justice for decades of greedy abuse by adobe by "freeing" their software.

what a time to be alive.

having said that, *i* spent most of my workday using anthropic's newest frontier model, opus 5.5, struggling to get it to help me import a spreadsheet into my client's platform without it going off the rails, inventing problems that didn't exist, and just generally behaving badly.

it was a grind.

...

i had a little trouble with mr smear's attitude when he got home, but i managed to handle it and we had good results followed by a good talk. i had myself a nice glass of araq and started burning tokens - deliberately, in light of the fact that i'm about to try downgrading my subscription - making some interesting progress and coming up with a really cool idea for my sudoku game.

i stopped for dinner - the fall and rise of reggie dinkins is really fun - and a chat with my mom, read a little more of the light fantastic to mr smear, and then returned to the burn. gd restarted watching fauda, again, and because i've seen the first episode enough times i continued burning the whole time, jumping between different games. i'm using openai's latest frontier model, gpt-6 astra, and i'm experiencing mixed results. but much more positive results than opus, at least.

i should probably go to bed soon.

annual review

it was the 7th of october today. i thought about it a fair amount, though i tried not to. too soon. too close. in some ways it's still october 7th. in a lot of ways, sadly.

...

 i burned some tokens this morning, but nowhere near interesting quantities. i put lipstick on my pig of a fairy tales game, i put some polish on my sudoku game, and that led me down a rabbit-hole of revamping my personal website and getting donation mechanisms configured.

i hope it was worth it.

work: during the daily we were informed about a production incident, and my first thought (i don't think i was alone) was "i merged code yesterday, was it me?!"

it wasn't me, and i was pleased to be able to contribute to the conversation. after the meeting my onboarding buddy ran me and another dev through the investigation process, which showed a) that the new tooling (dynatrace) is absolutely awful if you're not interfacing with AI and b) that opus 5.5 gives very, very bad advice when it comes to managing production incidents.

i spent the next few hours back-and-forthing with agents on a design that i'd expected to have less to think about, but i was satisfied by the results by the time i had to head out to my employer's office for my first annual review with the boss. i'm a little nervous about how long each section of work is taking, hopefully i'll be in a strong position by my meeting with the team lead tomorrow afternoon.

my review was approximately the same time as gd needed to be at the absorption ministry offices to discuss her ulpan voucher, so she had to go without me, and i was pleased to learn that she got herself sorted out very nicely without me.

my meeting went considerably better than i'd expected. in fact, i walked out feeling pleasantly surprised by how happy the boss is with my work and my contributions, and even though the whole thing was over within fifteen minutes we had a couple of interesting side conversations as well.

i must have spent almost an hour catching up with the guy i was on my last contract with, and then i sat down and got a chunk of work done before finally calling it a day and beginning to make my way home. on the way, i contacted urchin and we chatted for a while, and then i received a message from mr smear's teacher confirming that he had, in fact, done the work he'd said he'd done and that it was satisfactory, which was an enormous relief!

i managed to talk mr smear into drawing something - even if he wasn't in the mood - and although he refused to do it as part of inktober it came out beautifully and he seems to be almost as proud of it as we are.

we watched the wonder years over dinner, all of us very disappointed in kevin (square dancing), and while mr smear was preparing for bed i began working on my old blockchain project, which as of a few minutes ago is beginning to take shape.

i'm tired. i think. i hope? *yawn*

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...

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.

paro-day

 i definitely have a nose/throat thing going on, not serious, but uncomfortable enough.

during my team daily i shared what i worked on over the weekend, and - painfully aware of this in real time - failed to communicate just why the games i made were even remotely fun or interesting. i felt so awkward 😬 

this morning gd decided to keep mr smear home and take him to the doctor, but then she suddenly wasn't feeling well enough to take him so i had to bail on two meetings (that were specifically for me) in order to take him myself.

the doctor didn't find anything interesting, and recommended sending him to school next time unless he's feeling unwell or has a fever. after stopping by the pharmacy, i took a number for the receptionist and then found myself in an uncomfortable race with an older woman who was trying to jump the line; when the receptionist noticed her hovering behind me she asked "are you with him?" to which she responded "i wish" 🤢

from there were went to the children's hospital to book a couple of follow-up appointments, after which we caught a bus home, and i pointed out a guy with frighteningly long toenails to mr smear who was horrified.

we arrived home to find gd had made a baked polenta with jalapeño dish, which turned out to be surprisingly more-ish and quite spicy.

i made slow but steady progress with my client's work, then joined my employer group's discussion about worktrees and our post-AI futures as plumbers and locksmiths.

between that meeting and leaving for my feldenkrais appointment, i reached out to one of the team and he helped me out quite a bit. then i walked to the clinic, and went through another awkward session. i truly don't know how i feel about this stuff, because the exercise she gave me seems to be a useful one, but half the things she did made me feel like it's the kind of stuff that only works if you truly believe in it, and the other half is suspicious but oddly convincing. for example, she had her fingers on each side of my neck, but on the side that's always giving me trouble the skin sensation was muted even though i could feel her fingers on both sides. whatever annoyingly gentle manipulations she did, after a while the sensations did become more balanced, so 🤷‍♂️

after dinner and another relevant episode of the wonder years*, and then i embarked** on a project inspired by one of my coworkers (in my employer group) saying that he can't work with something he needs to because the old-school tool he uses doesn't support it. that made me realize that it's cheaper for me to set the AI to work building me my own diff tool that answers all my needs that to pay for a license for any of the good ones that all only do some parts of the job well.

* the walk out: the americans lost the vietnam war primarily because their own population had succumbed to communist propaganda, and it's the same enemies with the same playbook turning the world against israel now.

** remember this picture, it taught me about derived works being under copyright. i had to drop the left one, which was perfect, and generate the one on the right instead.

we had a huge fight around shower time, with my queen of hearts decreeing "off with his head (lice)!" and me finally letting go in spite of the fact that as far as i can tell we clearly don't have head lice. so we wasted (in my opinion) an expensive treatment that for all intents and purposes seems to be repackaged margarine, which gd would never, ever put into her hair 🙄

anyway, it went smoother (and more buttery) than it could have, and the rest of the evening has been kinda okay. while i'm typing this, the app my agent is building keeps flickering onto the screen and disappearing while i runs tests, and the flashes i've seen so far are quite exciting.

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.

cheat day

 i did *not* lose weight today.

mr smear woke up worse than he was yesterday, so he stayed home. i began my day on the balcony, cleaning up someone's cigarette ash (apparently it's the woman above us, she's promised to be more careful) and trying to read knights of sidonia, which seems cool but i struggled to make sense of what was going on, or care.

i've just read through some reviews, and i'm not interested in giving it more of a chance than i already have.

i hopped on a bus to herzeliyah, walked through my mom's favorite mall (most of the stores were closed, but in general it looks very much the same as it always did), then past the country club and the school i once re-took linear algebra in (and still failed to understand very much), and then to the company status.

"breakfast" was pretty good, pizza and a too-hot grilled chilli and a bunch of nice salads. heavy discussions about south africa, the state of the industry, and then my previous employer.

then we were given a motivational talk by omri rozenblit, which was really powerful, and then we had our status, which was... unsurprising, which is more than desirable. it's comforting to know and have known what's going on, and we got some clarity into how we're adapting to the rapidly-changing market situation.

i returned home, after waiting for a while in the sun, herzeliyah style, and stopped for a hearty leftover lunch. then i got mr smear to draw on two stickers for my work laptop, then i walked to the office.

my first meeting was with the guy who wanted to hire me at the beginning of last year, and it was pleasant, though i did make it a little awkward. the second meeting was with my line manager, and aside from it being a fun talk, i caught him off-guard when i spoke about conway's law and i enjoyed seeing his gears start turning.

aside from those talks, i had two meetings with a couple of my teammates, both of which gave me insight into what we're doing and one of which gave me some really cool ideas of how we could operate financial analysis in a similar way to how we write code.

i didn't need to snack so much in between all of those...

the end of the day was packing up our work stations for next week's move, my manager needed to remind me that this weekend is rosh hashana and that we won't be seeing each other in person until tuesday :P

i rushed home - stressed about tomorrow's acupuncture session in my calendar that turned out to be non-existent - to get onto a webinar about the metro works that are going to be starting in the next few months. it was a looooooong talk (i played a lot of minesweeper games) but with a lot of encouraging aspects, not least of which being how clearly the people responsible for public transport in this region understand their mission.

i coerced mr smear into giving star fluxx a chance, and we had fun, and then we started watching an episode of the wonder years which involved animal cruelty so we had to stop halfway, and mr smear and i watched an excellent talk on the history of sumeria while i not only cleared my very large plate of food, but also the rest of the bag of liquorice allsorts along with a few blocks of chocolate 🙄

...

dark matter upsets me. phenomenal writing, great concept, but i just can't deal with that level of darkness right now.

sideways

 last night gd and i started watching dark matter. we continued this evening, and it seems appropriate; i feel weird. like, i'm in an alternate reality kind of weird.

yesterday was a work-from-home day, which began with one of my new teammates outing herself as a nose-picker while centered on on our team call, which led to me recording gd's hilarious response which gd doesn't think is that funny - mr smear agrees with me - and which neither my mother nor my sister were able to watch because of the subject matter :/

then another teammate outed herself as a "meat proxy".

i'm new, i didn't say anything.

mr smear was home "sick", and according to him the reason he didn't have any real symptoms all day was because he was entertained (screen time)...

after hours of onboarding and an awkward demo in which nobody else spoke either, i took mr smear for a walk to the comics library to pick up some books for the high holy days. i still can't believe that's in a couple of days!

oh - he learned about "stippling" from a youtube video and drew a really impressive looking ghoul / zombie.

i tried out the new astra model yesterday evening, it burned through my tokens but i'm not confident it did a good job 🤷‍♂️

in fact, it feels like all the models are chewing tokens more rapidly than usual. i've been half-assing two projects (one for my boss, and my auto-doc) and i feel like i'm spinning in circles.

...

in spite of his cough, we sent mr smear off to school this morning, snapping a photo of him with his toolbox and his portfolio as he headed out the door for his first full arts track day. he appears to have had a great day, and made a new friend, and he came home with a really cool couple of pieces ^_^

i continued with my half-assing this morning (i'm kinda doing it in the background now, but more like a quarter-assing), then went off to the office. today was more onboarding, but with a few surprises:

1. almost two hours talking to a monitoring expert about their lack of vision, who was really excited to hear my ideas

2. today i discovered that my division manager is the guy whose offer i rejected when i joined the defense startup, which turned out to be a dodged bullet because his replacement was unpleasant to deal with.

3. i forgot my headphones at home, and nose-picker offer to lend me hers. nuh, uh 😂

4. one of the guys keeps trying to prank the girls, and one of them almost fell for it but asked for confirmation (he was out of office). they turned the tables on him, and he's now convinced that she fell for it and feels bad, general hilarity ensued

5. i began to realize how powerful my client's solution is, and that it's used internally by default. zero privacy - all intra-org calls are recorded and reviewable by anyone in the company - but the benefits are enormous!

6. i think i'm dong a good job of getting some of my teammates on board with new AI best practices :)

7. there was a big "do" for rosh hashana. not only did i witness some surprisingly antisocial behavior by a couple of people, but the vegan option was malabi and it's the first time i've ever eaten malabi that wasn't enjoyable. i don't know why i finished it, and it took a while + another coffee (decaf) to get rid of the bitter aftertaste :(

after coming home, taking down the recycling and running into big data kicking a rubber mouse and dealing with a bicycle that doesn't belong to our building, mr smear and i played a game of cthulu fluxx before dinner that got absolutely ridiculous - he'd play draw 2 + doom and kept pulling creepers, by the last round he was literally holding half the deck in his hand!

we watched another episode of spider-noir over dinner, i really enjoyed gd's polenta but she didn't :(

it's late, i have a big morning (our company status), which was the retroactive reason for not rollerblading tonight...

shredding

 mr smear appears to be sick, so he came early yesterday and he's staying home today...

i bought him a lock yesterday morning on my way to my client, and discovered an amazing stationery store across the road ^_^

i realized on my way to the office that the client's catering is saving me a significant amount of money per month, which is a really nice bonus!

my day at the office was a combination of onboarding, meeting new people from the team, investigating the build failure that turned out to be affected more than just me, and all of this punctuated by round after round of shredding documents i've been gathering for the last eight months.

i'm most of the way through :P

my team lead has authorized me to take off a week for the sukkot holidays - i'm really excited for the staycation!

also, a decent lunch, a couple of healthy snacks, and too much shame to take an ice cream after going upstairs to find that the ice creams were all right outside an office filled with people and only a glass wall separating them. so my weight's down a little today already (back to 80kg after a week or two hovering around 82, and i have some shame to thank for that.

on the way home i called up sailor, and we ended up talking about his trauma-bonding. i hope my advise was helpful, but i also woke up around 4am this morning with an interesting idea for a game based on my understanding of mental trauma and spent twenty minutes or so working on writing it up.

while mr smear completed his rosh hashana cards (this was before i understood that he and gd hadn't understood the hebrew lit homework instructions), i watched more of des bishop's breaking china series, which is really fun!

we watched a sad episode of the wonder years over dinner (the piano recital), and after mr smear went to bed (relatively early) gd and i finally finished watching the first season of ludwig together, and i crawled into bed soon after.

...

we seem to have been out of the lice woods for a while now, and mr smear just got invited to sleep over at the carrier. so here we are strategizing over how to manage the next outbreak before he's even told us whether he wants to go or not 🙄

the first day of fall

 things that upset me in the middle of the night: looking at my phone's notifications, and then finding myself scrolling on instagram, and coming across these two self-hating jews discussing the ugliness of a rigged system that is everything anti-capitalists claim capitalism is: the opposite of a free market.

...

i'm regretting taking a puff before bed last night, partially because i'm feeling totally exhausted right now and it's almost 8pm and i'm drinking a fourth cup of coffee in order to be able to go rollerblading, partially because i passed in and out of conciousness earlier while listening to my new client's all-hands and i realized at some point that i'm not breathing with my whole lungs and when i do, it feels... smoky. like, tight and sticky.

i hope i don't regret this coffee.

mr smear surprised us by getting up and being ready on time for school, and then away he went. i took care of a bunch of first-of-the-month admin, and then suddenly it was time to go to work.

overall, i'm really impressed. the offices feel good, everyone i met seems relaxed and organized, even though they all described the work as anything but. during my first daily with the team mr smear called me, twice, while i was introducing myself - turned out he was worried that he couldn't find his meds, when he finished taking them yesterday already 🙄

i spent most of my day setting up my new machine and accounts and beginning the onboarding process, and talking to people, and i was *really* surprised to learn that my client offers catered lunches that include vegan options that are pretty darned good.

in the all-hands, i was literally amazed to hear them discussion employee retention and training, and making their approach very clear, and their approach is stellar. to go from a company continually laying off good workers to one making a point of developing theirs is quite a relief!

i guess mr smear and i shouldn't have eaten when i got home, because we also ate at dinner time and we both stuffed ourselves on gd's sushi while watching an episode of the simpsons that irritated me because its premise revolved around everyone in town being a total moron.

yes, yes, i know.

anyway, here we are. mr smear apparently had a great day at school, i'm going to at least try to go rollerblading tonight, and gd seems to be doing alright herself, so... 🤷‍♂️

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" 😁

false start

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

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

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

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

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

fuck.

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

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

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

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

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

finishing strong

 now i'm not so sure that walking to acupuncture and back was much better than taking a bus, because by the time i got home my hip was hurting... but the acupuncture itself was another good experience.

i stretched hard when i got home, and ate breakfast, and then all of a sudden i was running late for my last day with my current client.

the work day went as follows: i managed to figure out the final issue from yesterday's testing, and it turned out to have nothing to do with the data or the code. there was much rejoicing! i then proceeded to spend the rest of the day preparing the handover documentation, discovering an issue that required a backfill that sharpened the procedure documentation significantly. i had lunch with my client team, which turned out to be a really good idea because happy hour ended up being cancelled. and i managed to say a proper goodbye to pretty much all the people i have relationships with.

and then... and then i was done. i left my computer and my keycard on the IT guy's desk, and i packed my bag (with the headphones they gave me, i asked my manager the kit-bag question and he assured me i could take them), and i sent a farewell and thank you message to the boss and my managers, and then i left.

it's been eight months, some of it rough, all of it educational, and to finish on a good note with a delivered project on my unexpectedly last day feels amazing.

i came home, picked up mr smear and took him for a walk, which was going great until we had an argument about drinking water in the park, followed by a much heavier fight about him being an asshole about other people's music, which pissed me right off and made me want to throttle him.

we managed to get past the bad vibe about halfway home from there, and arrived in time for dinner and the simpsons.

now we're getting ready to go out, and gd's just informed me that she's going in spite of the fact that her stomach's doing a thing again today 🙄

hopefully it'll be a fun evening.

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.

shifts

 i've just got out of a cold shower after cooling down enough to get into it in the first place, having just said good night to mr smear having come in from the rollerblading group around midnight to find gd fast asleep and him still awake reading...

i feel like i barely survived the route tonight; it was *not* a "social" route, and more than the first hour was predominantly uphills. the wet bulb temperature is around 24°, and i don't know if that's why but when we stopped for a short break i was sweating so much that i felt like my eyes had flooded with seawater and i couldn't open them for a few minutes.

...

i had a somewhat productive morning this morning, planning out my repository, and i continued earlier before i left and i think it's looking good. the implementation has caused me to hit my 5-hour token limit for the first time since i signed up for codex, usually i'm only really focused on my weekly limit.

...

work was alright, though i am in scrambling mode while also trying to say goodbye without bumming anyone out. one good thing that's come out of this week so far is that one of their engineers needed to make a fix in the golang project i worked with a while back, and because i modernized it he was able to get the work done pretty painlessly and we were able to determine that the work was good pretty quickly.

...

around lunchtime, i jumped on a call with the teacher and her friend that we scheduled a week or so ago, and it was *not* the kind of call i expected. it looks like there's serious potential for something big here, and i've been left with a fair amount of homework to do.

also, i had to (metaphorically) sit my wife down and have a real-talk moment with her about what the implications are. she's got serious trust issues that i'm going to have to work around, but she assures me that she'll have my back and put her big-girl panties on for this.

i don't know what the chances of any of this becoming real are, but if they do it's going to be one hell of a ride.

...

we watched a particularly cringy episode of the wonder years ("steady as she goes"), which upset mr smear so much that he stormed off halfway through 😂

before i left, we watched a video on nuts and i learned that my regular handfuls of brazil nuts at the office might well have been messing with me! those things oughta have warning signs...