processing

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

yesterday:

starting to write up my experiences with bigtalk

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

...

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

...

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

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

my mom's laptop being expertly stolen from her car

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

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

today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

...

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

drama flare

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

... fuck me.

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

onigiri

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

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

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

fine by me :P

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

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

i played minutescape until it lulled me to sleep.

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

pains in the neck

 wednesday was rough. i was fine in the morning - i took mr smear on an "outing" to pick up a parcel, which was nice* - and i was fine until i got into the office. but at some point something in my neck / shoulder spasmed and started pushing on a control nerve, which immediately triggered a painful headache, dizziness and nausea.

* he made a point of carrying something heavy because his new "resolution" is to not be lazy. that last all of a day, and then the next day he made a new "resolution" to be lazy again 🤣

and then i had to navigate two arguments with coworkers, mostly in a position of having to calm them down.

after a while i realized that i was on the verge of fainting, and i packed up and wobbled my way home.

i felt a it better after lying down and stretching and massaging my neck for a couple of hours, though i managed to bruise myself rather severely. i spent the afternoon / evening learning the hard way that my lead's warnings about never modifying git submodules directly were bang on the money.

...

yesterday was better, though i was still sore (as well as bruised) and my neck was threatening to go bad for its entirety. a coworker leant me a small but surprisingly powerful massage tool that i tried a couple of times, but that literally made my eyeballs bounce in my head and made me start feeling nauseous...

i started the day trying to read a canticle for leibowitz, which starts off well enough but i was still too sleepy to get very far.

on the way to the office, gd and mr smear joined me for a mission to the appliance store where we ordered a replacement oven (even with delivery it's cheaper than a repair attempt) and picked up a blender to boot. which i carried to work in the unexpected dribbles of rain that started when i left the building and only stopped once i found cover again.

it was a long and intense day, beginning with me moderating squabbles between my teammates and trying to keep everyone with eyes on the prize in spite of personal differences towards approaches. there were lots of feelings.

i warned everyone that we needed to rip the bandaid of our old tooling as soon as possible, and for my sins they complied. we're running into a lot of teething troubles, but rather sooner than later ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

my interview with one of the investors was postponed, which turned out to be a good thing because i spent most of my work hours running between people to give them assistance. or cheerlead. or commiserate, such as when my lead got irritated by a linter i'd introduced and somehow managed to deep-six hours of his work.

anyway.

we received some nice passover gifts from the company.

lipgirl had put me onto a midi controller (the akai mpk mini mk2), and i really wanted to pick it up before the weekend. at 19.45pm, i had just sat down to dinner when the seller contacted me to say he'd be at azrieli at 20.15pm, so i ate too quickly and scrambled to get there on time. in spite of the evening bus schedules and regular protests, i arrived with a few minutes to spare...

... and then had to hang around for another half an hour before he showed up :/

but he was cool, and i was happy to have paid about half price for a piece of equipment that looks really good and is in really good condition.

on my way to catch a bus home i walked past an old grocery store cashier who's always very kind (she's taken a shine to mr smear) and waved to wish her a chag sameach, and she called out for help - she's injured her leg, and was having trouble carrying heavy groceries to her bus stop. i gave her a hand, but as we arrived she suddenly realized she hadn't swiped her card when she left, so i quickly ran back to take care of that.

so it was with a good vibe that i caught an unfamiliar bus, with the driver making sure that i got to the right stop. and then i came home, chatted with my mom**, showered, put my son to bed, opened the gift bottle of gin and tried to continue watching redline. gd got bored, and wasn't interested in akira, so we ended up watching some of nightcrawler before going to bed.

** oh! my brother's oldest got married yesterday. none of us were invited :P

...

today: i think i must have spent about three hours trying to figure out how to connect the midi controller, create the requisite accounts, install the basic software packages... i'm sure there's a whole bunch of stuff we've yet to learn, but by the time we left the apartment for a gift-shopping run i'd at least managed to get mr smear able to play with samples in cubase elements, and he was making pretty cool noises.

[gd shatters a bowl in the kitchen]

we walked down to ibn gvirol, where gd got additional holes punched in her belts, we picked up a bottle of cognac as a gift for the seder, tried and failed to find someone to cut a new house key for us, gave up waiting for laffot, scarfed down sandwiches at cafe eva (and found black salt!), made it back to our local hardware store in time to pick up dehumidifying slabs, and have spent a cozy afternoon doing not much.

mr smear just got through his homework for the day without a fuss, and he did it well, and now we're settling in to skip shul and watch prince of egypt instead.

...

i just finished watching dave smith and douglas murray on joe rogan, which i found deeply disappointing. if nothing else, murray could have talked about the outrageous efforts israelis make to avoid civilian casualties, but either way he wasn't on form, and his manner rendered him less than effective. looking at the comments, he didn't convince anyone of anything.

quieter

 i definitely slept better last night. it was weird, though - i got a phone call earlier with the results, and aside from a recommendation to visit an ENT for my snoring i was informed that my sleep was just fine. but i slept horribly. so i don't know what to make of that.

this morning went pretty smoothly in spite of mr smear's failed attempts to stay home. dropping him off at school was pleasant - lately i'm making a point of taking him because it's the best opportunity for us to just talk - and i managed to fix up one of my side projects that i'd neglected.

and then... take care of the massive crow turd on the external air-conditioning unit outside mr smear's window. and it's neighbor, the windowsill turd we hadn't noticed before. gd was gagging, and i was upset: there's a massive difference between cleaning up one's child, or picking up after one's pet, than doing the same for somebody else's. or somebody else. or something else.

i felt violated. it was about the size of a border collie poop and i had to scrape it off in multiple attempts 🤮

...

it was a bit cooler today (and it was quite rainy this evening), so i regretted not wearing a sweater to and from the office. the office vibe was totally different today, as most of the org was either in the field or working from home, and at peak there were four of us in a large open space. it was strange, but not unpleasant. very quiet.

at lunch time - while scarfing down a mixture of leftovers that gd had put together that worked out surprisingly well - i ended up talking about our aliyah experience and about the state of south africa. i don't recall how the conversation got there, but i really brought the guys down and every time i tried to spin into something positive i managed to make it somehow worse :/

i couldn't stop snacking all day. most of it was the fruit platter that i effectively had all to myself :P

work-wise, i left after getting really good results that i'm very pleased with ^_^ (although i literally couldn't believe it when i finally got everything green!)

...

i came home a bit earlier than usual, hurrying to avoid the rain, and there was just enough time before dinner to do some of mr smear's hebrew reading with him and a page of his geometry homework. he did it all without the usual battle, and it was actually a good experience for both of us!

so that was cool.

we watched a disturbing episode of delicious in dungeon over dinner (episode 23 - griffin soup), and we had a smooth shower / bedtime. gd and i watched an episode of two of seinfeld after i saw a relatively recent interview with michael richards - the standup bits aren't funny, but the stories are great - during which i passed out on the couch and woke up to her watching a show in which a kid gets arrested on suspicion of murder.

i've been watching random stuff, and drinking tea, and i think i'm going to crash soon. tomorrow morning's going to be intense - gd's applying for her proper israeli passport, after which i have to go to the school to administer mr smear's meds (he's having another outbreak around his eye) because she's got a doctor's appointment - hopefully it'll go smoothly.

...

this is jd vance saying something brilliant and obviously true: outsourcing manufacturing has hurt the west immeasurably.

and here's boston dynamics showing off a robot that's more athletic than an australian breakdancer

stickers and scribbles

 okay, i'm tired. but i'm also agitated and frustrated - mr smear's school has been utterly unresponsive for more than two days and tomorrow's the deadline to register him for the art school. so tomorrow's going to be started with angry phone calls but, at the end of the day, it's really not in my hands...

i eventually climbed into bed after 6am, and the morning was really hard. so hard, in fact, that i skipped on taking mr smear to school - on the one hand i'm really impressed that we're at the point where he can go to school by himself, but on the other i'm rather disappointed because i quite enjoy the opportunity to chat on the way to school.

the office was really quiet today - one of the bosses kept repeating that, until at one point i offered to put some heavy metal on and she quickly assured me it was fine :P

i asked lipgirl if we had any stickers (swag), and she enthusiastically introduced me to the office label printer. omg i hadn't realized that label printers have evolved so much!

i learned stuff today, very slowly but surely. it's all about a crash-course in kubernetes right now.

i was so desperate for lunch that - believing that the order would take a while to arrive - i scarfed down the previous day's leftovers for breakfast. which was more food than i'd thought, and then a few minutes later a massive burrito arrived for me... and i ate it :/

gd called me in an angry panic, the new vaccum cleaner arrived and she couldn't figure out how to work it, so she wanted to take it back immediately. i've convinced her to let me give it a go first...

in the afternoon i returned home to pick up mr smear and take him to his final psych evaluation session (i sneaked photos of the school's form, that'll make for interesting reading). inspired by the morning's sticker session, i thought it would be cool if he drew something with a sharpie on my fancy water bottle, but he didn't follow the (very simple) instructions and started scrawling something inappropriate. both gd and i were upset with him, and to his credit he did feel bad, but at bedtime i proposed that we turn it into a bit of a graffiti project in the morning and he seems into it.

while waiting for him, i went back to the office thinking i'd continue working, but i had an issue with the coffee machine and ended up in an interesting 1-on-1 with someone i hadn't met before; i'd spent all day thinking that i just couldn't remember him :P

i picked up mr smear (he apparently did well) and we returned home, and between his shower and dinner i managed to get him through two significantly advanced paragraphs of harry potter. *i'm* learning as we go, and he's building confidence, particularly with the stuff that's more his level. this was definitely a good idea.

i had a salad (because of the overeating) and we watched the simpsons, then called my mom to say goodnight. once i'd showered and brushed my teeth i joined mr smear for calvin & hobbes, and i've spent the past couple of hours taking care of random items, watching youtube and ignoring a bunch of stuff on my to-do list.

i suspect that i should go to bed very soon, but i feel like i can't get my head into or out of anything right now.

drips

yesterday:

yesterday was... weird. firstly, my sinuses were busy and i developed a headache towards the afternoon, one which only intensified into the night. i barely slept last night, my head hurt, and i was uncomfortable and restless.

at the same time, i slept really well after my last post and my hips and legs felt much better than usual.

the work day was all over the place, lots of shouting (mostly nothing to do with me) and a few misunderstandings and stress over the work i'm doing. by the end of the day i had a pretty good handle on what was happening, though, which was a huge relief. and i was very proud of myself for bringing home the two extra "happy hour" desserts i'd picked up for gd and mr smear, who definitely enjoyed them.

...

over lunch, a woman from another company made our whole team hate her over lunch when she rudely sat down at our table and invited her friends to join her, when there wasn't any space and we hadn't finished eating.

...

i started listening to the interview with the united nations whistleblower (emma reilly) and it awful, but thanks to UN watch it's not as shocking as it should be. it does answer one of the biggest questions surrounding china's motivation to promote anti-semitic content on tiktok, specifically anti-israel propaganda since october 7th: the chinese are trying to divert attention from the very real genocide that they're perpetuating on the uyghurs, which they're doing in order to secure the particularly resource rich region that they're exploiting as part of their plans for economic world domination.

as much as i was already aware, the interview is an absolute revelation.

...

i've uninstalled the pokemon pocket app. good riddance.

today:

fortunately, i took a tylenol this morning and my head's been alright since then. mr smear had his mid-term today, which apparently went really well 🤞

i left early to pick up a package on the way to the office, but discovered on arrival that it would only be available from noon.

the workday was pretty good. after yesterday's win, this morning's effort went smoothly and i moved on to a surprise "favor" for one of our customers who's still using our pre-pivot platform. i managed to have that code complete by lunchtime, and the rest of the afternoon was a mix of finalizing, and exploring a potential memory leak "on my own time".

i've been using the AI-assisted terminal warp for the last couple of days. it's legitimately great!

...

i picked up one of the three calvin and hobbes compilations i ordered on the way home, and mr smear was very excited - we're all excited to be able to read it comfortably ^_^

i was concerned by the fact that the other two books in the set weren't shipped yet, but as i was trying to contact them about it i received an update that they're now on the way to us as well. awesome!

...

dinner was pretty good, but after dinner we needed to have a conversation - mr smear responded badly to a situation at school today and got kicked out of the class. the first part of the conversation went well, but then it turned to mma and it went... not so well. but as not-so-well as it went, i'm relieved that bedtime was okay.

unfortunately, mr smear's now dealing with an itchy nose and we're worried it might be another herpes outbreak. please god let it be something less exciting 🙏

back to school

yesterday:

mr smear's first day back at school (albeit fridays' "school lite")

a shopping mission gone wrong (gd panicking, and then feeling bad for not checking in with me before paying)

picking up mr smear and continuing on to a shoe-shopping mission down dizengoff just as the dust storm started.

trying out the 3D movie with the PSVR and being blown away, and ordering a bunch of 3D glasses on ali express.

another not-great experience getting mr smear to do his homework, but gd sitting with him and coaching him and getting through it.

replaying celeste all the way to where i gotten before. that game is hardcore!

sailor coming over for dinner with a lot more dietary restrictions than we were antipating, but gd managed to rustle something up and we had a great evening anyway. mr smear suddenly developing a pretty hectic cough.

today:

waking up to learn about our attacks on iran, and feeling disappointed that we've left the ball in their court again.

a VR start to the day, with a very enthusiastic mr smear. afterwards, i discovered a way to watch downloaded 3D movies using rad tv and the result was awesome!

spending most of the day reading articles and playing crying suns, with my family reading behind me - i think gd's just finished the wave, and mr smear's deep into the bone comics collection.

we had the usual fight about going out in the evening, but gd and i managed to get through to him eventually and we took the basketball to the high school courts with adult-height hoops. he didn't shoot a lot, but he got the ball in quite a few times and we were both very excited ^_^

then i had a turn, and i didn't do so well but i definitely got exercise. i didn't do so badly, either, but mr smear wasn't watching and decided that, absense any evidence to the contrary, that physics was against me and that i hadn't succeeded at all :P

overall, the outing was good and the evening went well. we started watching men in black over dinner, and after putting mr smear to bed gd finally watched the rest of demolition man while i passed out on the couch beside her. i woke up a couple of hours ago, groggy and sore, and have finally gotten up from either trying to stretch or doom-scrolling to make myself a cup of tea, post this, and play something before heading to bed.

i'm disappointed that my vacation's over, because i could definitely use a couple more weeks off, but i think it's been good for me. if nothing else, i've had less pressure and less juggling and that's made the world seem less overwhelming. and i think i've done a good job of not stressing about not Doing All The Things, while still doing a whole bunch of things.

out of office

 yesterday:

starting the day at the mental health clinic, for an appointment which took most of the last year to arrange. heaven forbid that should be drama free - mr smear and i were waiting outside when we heard lots of shouting, and it turned out that the psychologist, who's supposed to be dealing with people with psychological issues, greeted gd both rudely and aggressively.

WTAF?!

so gd was upset, the "doctor" was behaving like gd had done something wrong, and i had to jump in to the rescue... fortunately, the manager made every effort to fix things and, miraculously, an english-speaking shrink with a good attitude and a free slot arrived and the morning (and months of waiting) weren't lost. mr smear and i parked ourselves outside, reading and chatting, and gd was able to use her time and we're one step further down the road.

...

a surprisingly productive day at work in spite of the fact that i did *not* want to do any work. also, i was still in a mind-blown state from the vr experiences from the previous evening. i did have an argument with a coworker in the afternoon, and i was honestly really irritated by him not seeing things my way, but eventually i was able to put my finger on why each of us felt the way we did and realized that he was, ultimately, in the right.

it was a huge relief to leave the office, and (on-call notwithstanding) switch off for the next ten days.

i don't remember whether we tried to watch anything last night.

today:

i slept a bit better last night, but that's off a really low bar.

today was a big day, we set out to buy mr smear a proper synthesizer and we achieved our goal! we also tried to pick up some vr games along the way, but nobody seems to be interested in stocking them. we also looked at some books, then decided to get the entire bone collection on kindle instead.

the afternoon was spent playing with the new toy, and trying to watch a 3D movie on the psvr. that proved way more complicated than i was hoping... no success yet :/

mr smear played a vr space simulator that made me queasy, which led to a shitty mood, but eventually i got over it. kiddush for sukkot with my mom (virtually), followed by a nice dinner, interrupted by a hilariously crazy call from my sister who got herself into a particularly dramatic situation with multiple job applications and in addition to being entertained, i was actually able to give her some useful advice.

i hope she takes it :P

we put mr smear to bed, and i mindlessly/compulsively played did an idle run through kaycee's mod (only the final challenge enabled), and now it's anyone's guess what's next for the evening.

...

i've been doing holidays wrong, so i don't know how this one is going to turn out. my first priority is to rest my mind, kind of. and spend some quality time with my family. my second is to make some progress on the side project that i discussed with dod. my third is to try to arrange some test prints for my comics.

anything else is bonus.

s'not

 godsdammit, mr smear and i are definitely sick with a sinus / nose / throat / chest thing. AGAIN. it's been non-stop struggle since the last round of covid. this thing started at the beginning of the week and i was sure it was allergies, but now i'm convinced it's not.

i took mr smear to school this morning, but we turned around once we got there due to the nose thing. so the day started with me sitting between gd and mr smear, gd retranslating the text i worked on last night into french, and mr smear doing his hebrew homework.

it was another battle - as always - to get him to accept the fact that he was going to do it at all, a lot more effort than was actually needed to just do the thing. after all the nonsense, he breezed through it.

...

the work day was long, but i feel good about how it went. i bought the first volume of one piece on kindle - it's not a great reading experience, sadly - and i canceled my subscription to midjourney in favor of trying out GPT-4o. it looks insanely powerful.

...

i'm disappointed to have seen a moroccan ex co-worker doing the "free palestine" thing.

...

i'm falling apart.

three for three

 yesterday morning started off on a fantastic note - i disabled the linter and tested out my theory, and it worked beautifully! then i got some work done before taking a call from a recruiter for a company i'm not particularly thrilled about. i worked from home yesterday, and it was a long day but marginally successful.

mr smear and i got through most of his homework between last night and this morning, and we're currently trying to finish up the last two questions before shabbat begins. as frustrating as the experience can (and has) been, it's exceptionally rewarding to see him beginning to get comfortable and succeeding and taking pride in his successes.

last night i went out with sailor after putting mr smear to bed, and we ended up in château shuál, a really cool little place. by the time i got home, bathed, and had watched a bit of comedy before going to bed, it was 1am again...

this morning went pretty smoothly, and after i got home i took care of a few things while occasionally helping gd deal with the black mold (vinegar spray and elbow grease). then we did a huge grocery shopping (barely manageable, my back's better but still twitchy), started vetting the first gremlins movie, then i picked up mr smear and brought him home. we had a bit of a fight on the way home which resolved nicely - through the bad vibes i learned that he has grossly misunderstood my motivations as his dad, but once we aligned, we hugged and moved on.

i napped for about an hour, and woke up seriously groggy. now i'm just trying to breathe and relax into the weekend.

...

mr cat is making good progress on the next comic pages. they've taken forever, but i have a good feeling they'll be worth the wait.

...

we've been watching transcendent man in bits and pieces, and with that in mind some of the news i read today just blew me away:

• scientists build a working tractor beam
• a brain implant thinner than a human hair

it wasn't me

the last time i spoke with mmf i reminded him that in 2003 i was looking for a partner and i pitched to him an idea that i'd had about modular mobile devices; back then he shot the idea down on the grounds that nobody would go for it, and when we last spoke i'd just learned about phonebloks. today's mmf's birthday, and reminded of that conversation and curious to see what's new on that front, i came across this wired article from last month about project ara.

this is seriously exciting stuff! a pity i had nothing to do with it, but i'm very glad somebody made it happen :)

alert signal

an important TED talk on wireless technologies

i've been *not* worrying about this stuff for a long time, but he makes a few excellent points: not least of which being the accumulation of signals we're being exposed to over time.
i'm now convinced that we won't be going wireless in our next apartment. and that i need a tool like http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-schedule-airplane-mode-on-iphone-to-toggle-on-and-off-automatically/ so that our phones will simply check for messages at intervals instead of searching constantly. that's certainly not a perfect solution, hopefully one will present itself...

safely backing up a samsung galaxy s4

1. use kies3, not helium! the internets seem to think that the latter is a good option, and i think the internets are a bunch of elitist masochists.

2. kies3 has a contacts option for backup, but if you read it carefully it explains that it won't actually backup any kind of contact data that you might be interested in keeping. the only way to safely backup contacts is using your google account, and there's a good chance that your contacts aren't configured as google contacts in which case you WILL lose them permanently when you perform a factory reset or upgrade your phone.

a) always save contacts as google contacts. why there are any other options or why the google option isn't the default is an absolute mystery to me.

b) if your contacts aren't already google contacts, you have to convert them. there's the way to manage importing, though it seems a bit round-about. you might want to try playing with the menu options for contacts. there should be a move device contacts to option but you might have to go settings->contacts and use the import/export contacts option to import from your SIM or device to your google account.

it's probably a good idea to change contacts to display your google account contacts only.

linkage! and fat rants.

apple's losing it.

robert downey jr.'s winning it.

guitar solo faces explained.

earl sinclair IS notorious b.i.g.!

tanyer's rules for jiu-jitsu are spot on

america's making strides in the war on the war on drugs! they're now starting to get the message on a federal level. well done!

speaking of backwards things, rick scott is an asshole.

ooh - a tattoo pain chart.

---okay, so i think abby howard's AWESOME. but she did this comic on body image recently that upset me. why did it upset me? because being healthily large is NOT a problem, but being obese IS. it's unhealthy, and it puts a load on our health services and increases our resource requirements when we're already beyond capacity. it's not offensive unless you're sharing space on crowded public transport which isn't designed for obesity, like in economy class on planes; if somebody doesn't like the look, well, that's their problem and they can keep it to themselves.

but my real frustration stems from the fact that she's apparently into science, and she talks about how she's tried eating healthy. really? like, whose idea of healthy? was it a fad diet, like low carbs or paleo? or the "i'm not eating dessert" diet? because if she'd actually bothered to do a little research, she might have come across the huge body of literature that shows convincing evidence that the only "healthy" diet is a whole-food, plant-based one. if you're eating the western-consumer diet, where "healthy" means eggs and bacon for breakfast, red meat and chicken salads and lots and lots of dairy... well, that's not healthy.

show me a picture of an obese person on a whole-foods, plant-based diet. not vegan, because not eating animal products does not equate to eating healthy. whole-foods, plant-based. you wouldn't be able to keep your weight up if you tried.

mars one mit analysis

copywriter sent me a link to this really interesting analysis of mars one.

am i wrong in thinking that they really shouldn't be worrying about transporting spare parts, but should be 3D printing over there? and looking for ways to use the excess oxygen to produce ink...

the rush - part iv

[... continued]
i tried to rest, introducing myself to siri and being rather impressed. i uploaded to soundcloud for the first time, then rushed off to meet vfmp and his boyfriend for the monkland street festival. we had a nice walk but i couldn't avoid the sun even with my sunscreen, my big floppy hat and my jumping from shade to shade. it was waaaay too hot.

vfmp and i headed to shaïka for good wraps and to trade bad father stories; we talked about blood donations and i think he's provided me more than enough fuel for a poetic rant. i then took a long trip to meet with someone before her performance in an attempt to sort out a connection, we shared ten minutes together that were totally off-topic and for a reason i'd rather not go into i ended up returning home without staying for so much as a minute. that was totally unprofessional and uncool of me.

i went back home, feeling remarkably shitty about what had happened, and waited for gd to come home to discuss it with her. i was expecting the worst, but while things definitely weren't great they were far better than i'd hoped for and i'm extremely grateful for that.

we enjoyed a peaceful evening, punctuated by an attempt to do something cool for the als ice bucket challenge which resulted in an amusing fail video instead.

just before heading to see the teenage mutant ninja turtles reboot gd started hurting and then my nerve started pinching, so we arrived at the theatre in less than the best of circumstances. the movie was fun, really fun, aside from a bit of shaky-cam-itis and a couple of weird plot decisions. i have to say that the credits, both opening and closing, were awesome and a lot of the shots were just incredible!
ignoring about half an hour of gd's back giving her trouble we had a really good time.

---yesterday:

going to bed at 2.30am after learning about smashwords' greatness: they really are fantastic! they are without a doubt the future of publishing ^_^

...

i woke up to some poetic inspiration, and i'm ridiculously pleased with myself about what came out of it. gd gave me a lesson in humility along with a painful french lesson, after which we enjoyed a blissfully relaxed sunday morning. we arrived at midi 6 famished, and their soy latte to go with my "herbivore" was precisely what i needed ^_^

i finally figured out how to get a naked domain to redirect - that really should be simpler - and we finished watching cheatin' before i hurried out to godmother's for coffee. it was a gorgeous afternoon, the raspberries were delicious and the fact that fudgee-o double stuf cookies are vegan just made a fantastic day even better. also, yang's finally taken a step in the right direction regarding his education, so that's a thing.

i took my slightly pinched nerve and tender jaw (discovered earlier) to my apartment to pick up a set of keys, two folding chairs and the mezuzot off my doors. i need to put them up here, and i need to acquire another one.

i needed the nap that i took when i got home, but i woke up to go shopping feeling like i was still dreaming and had overdone the sun and not napped nearly enough. microwave dinner, posting, and transforming into a being of pure discomfort were the order of the evening... i guess my day couldn't have been too good :P

gd was watching fringe: we need to hunt down whoever's responsible for mastering these shows and slap some sense into them. you shouldn't have to keep turning the volume up to hear speech and down to prevent hearing loss during action sequences.

---today:

i woke from long dream sequences to a morning of k's choice and more posting. i rushed out, soooo tired and still trying to avoid excess coffee. i made it until 11.15, at which point big junior showed up to delegate a documentation task. fortunately, that's the kind of thing i'm really comfortable doing with my brain off so i completed that quickly enough and returned to my grand plans.

i may have sweated a little when i realized that i was reorganizing the team's wiki docs without authorization :P

my junk food mission to the supermarket next door was successful - they have israeli vegan munchies! nice one :)

the shitty part of the day was my wasting other people's time with non-problems - i had the dumb, i thought my virtual machine's hard drive was taking up 80gb and we spent far too long trying to resize a disk that was actually only 20gb :$

i left feeling incredibly tired and slow. the experience with the laser hair clinic was surprisingly pleasant; the technician was cool, she totally got my intentions, the pain wasn't as bad* and the terrible smell of burning hair didn't last as long.

* it apparently eases the less hair you have

on my way home, i found that siri doesn't work without an internet connection. that's just silly. siri. silly. siri.

i spent the evening almost resting, watching safety not guaranteed with gd and then the first part of the battlestar galactica mini-series when she went to bed. omg, i can't believe it's still so incredibly good, and just how much more powerful it is when you know what's coming!

...

this last post brought to you by a thoroughly irresponsible disregard for my need to sleep. but my chapbook has a nice cover now (thanks, pixlr!) and i'm fairly certain i'm gonna crash in a couple of minutes.

drained - part iii

[... continued]

when i walked into the gym a guy i'm friendly with was behind the counter, and he's taken it upon himself to right the wrong that is me having ordered a custom shirt when i moved to the advanced mat in jiu-jitsu and still not having received it. it turns out that the other guys were all blowing me off, and that the order had been cancelled. he was kind enough to use his employee discount and give me four shirts instead of the money back; he used his discount again later when i paid for my new fighting shorts. i'm really pleased with all that.

kickboxing was good, but i was breathing even worse than on tuesday! that was crazy :(

i ran into mti, and explained to her that the reason nothing's happening with the comic is because... nothing's happening with the comic. i've told her i'm hunting for new illustrators, and i really hope i find someone soon :/

badger gave me a ride to the supermarket and i bought some emergency supplies, i came home and ate while watching steve jobs: one last thing. the biography was way more in-depth but it's nice to actually see the footage.

---friday:

it was my second day of stomache troubles. otherwise, i enjoyed a good, relaxed wake-up. completely obsessed with the razors edge, total earworm.

...

örmagörd, i'm like a little kid - i was rocking out while brushing my teeth and ended up with swipes of toothpaste on my chest :$


...

having left my umbrella at work, i was forced to use my poncho. i'm very glad i have that poncho.

i made some progress towards transferring my apartment lease, and bought myself a keyboard for work because the ones the it department provides suck. i sat with one of the guys cooperatively debugging and had a hard time keeping my eyes open because i was so tired. after we were done, he spent an hour introducing me to the magic of twilio.

i briefly spoke with my toronto cousin, had an awkward moment in the elevator when i realized that i'd responded to a stranger's "have a good weekend!" with a "thank you", and ended the week with some hard work. i practiced role models on the metro - which seems a bit creepy - and met up with gd at p.m. for way more sake than i was ready for and a delicious, delicious meal.

we headed over to côte-des-neiges to a russian restaurant for kgb's surprise birthday party. we drank a lot and danced a lot and the borscht was brilliant after i scooped out the blob of cream to the waiter's dismay and disgust.

gd and i had a wonderful time. our tipsy revelrie felt sooooo good and i was sooooo grateful that it was weeekend and sooooo grateful for how the week had played out, but i wasn't so excited about chasing it all with a blood donation the next morning.

i fell into bed, absolutely wasted.

---yesterday:

i woke up with cotton wool in my head and mouth. it was a perfect cool, rainy morning and i was warm and toasty and foggy and sleepy and the belly discomfort from the previous days was gone and i was sooooo comfortable and i was enjoying my dreams and there's nothing i wanted less than to drag myself away from all that.

but i did. i clambered out of bed, got ready as fast as i could (not very fast) and left a little late for the slam team meeting. i arrived there and was met with a silent, empty room. i fired off messages to the rest of the team and eventually one of the flatmates appeared and reminded me that our usual host is away for the weekend.

i thought about that on my way back to the metro. since i've been at work i've been so overwhelmed that everything *not* work has been on autopilot. i knew my teammate was away, but didn't connect that piece of information to whether or not we'd be meeting.

wow :/

at least there was time to do the shopping i needed to do. it was inconvenient to be walking around with both a sweater and a poncho, the latter going on and off every time i left or entered a building, but i picked up a decent iphone case, and i found a good pair of under armor shoes to replace the ones that screw up my feet.

i would've picked up a lightning cable from the apple store if it hadn't been so pricey. i picked up a knock-off from walmart later instead.

i had a quick lunch / snack at home, which would have included baba ganouj had that not been taken over by a very serious mould, chatted briefly with my mother while setting up twilio (and forgetting my password, which would drive me nuts later), hunted down all the rental assignment forms and rushed out to get them printed.

...

a girl begging in the metro was particularly aggressive.
"sorry," i shrugged.
she took a step closer.
"how about two dollars?"
"sorry," i said as i shook my head.
she took another step closer.
"one dollar"?
now she was way too close for comfort.
"why are you sorry?"
i stared back at her.
"why are you sorry?"
"because i'm not interested in giving you any money."
"you could have just said 'no'" she snarled as she stalked off.

and you could have not bothered a total stranger, and not harassed him for trying to be polite in an uncomfortable situation.

...

printing the assignment forms was quick and painless. i stopped in at walmart to buy the cable, and by the time i got to my apartment there wasn't time for coffee and i'd only had my first cup in the morning. the guy i'm assigning to rocked up a little late with his girlfriend. nice kids, but *damn* they took a long time to fill out the forms!
by the time i walked out it was 6.30 and i was running late for the 7.30 movie and was exhausted and hungry and feeling bad for making gd meet me at the cinema after she'd had a hard day at work.

i then had to wait a ridiculously long time for my meal in the food court. then i sat down and the people at the table next to me were watching videos on their phones at top volume. then gd walked in, suffering real back pain.

[furious part i]

we went to see the movie anyway, clearing things up a bit on the way in. we'd missed the first few minutes, but it didn't matter too much. guardians of the galaxy is GORGEOUS. total sensory overload, funny and fun and we'll definitely be seeing it again.

[furious part ii]

---today:

after sorting things out we went to bed exhausted, i dreamed insane dreams and woke up with a stuffed nose.

[furious part iii]

we took a while to clean up, literally and figuratively, i was introduced to the pixies and getting a bit more sleep was good. we went to midi 6 for a desperately needed lunch, then headed downtown to brave the crowds and pick up an ipad to replace gd's computer. i mentioned my new iphone and the amount it's improved my quality of life - gd's pc has been driving her nuts and it's so old and dysfunctional that there's really not much we can do with it.

by the time we returned home it was 5.30pm and we still had tons to do. the evening has been spent setting up the ipad and introducing gd to its wonders, posting, grocery shopping, doing laundry, eating wonderful home-made vegan pizzas (groundless beef and daiya cheese), being admitted to a lone soldier's veteran club, and wondering where the time has been going while my task list hasn't been getting any shorter. and now it's almost 1am.

DAMN. i needed a restful weekend :(

drained - part ii

[... continued]

l'artère sent me an email that was distinctly lacking in professionalism, asking (months down the line) if i had paid up my event bill... which i had. not impressed.

i did some stretching, then joined gd in watching premium rush, which just seemed like a sorry excuse to put together cycling and new york city. not exactly mind-blowing.

trying to get to bed early became falling asleep after 1am.

---wednesday:

it was a rainy morning but a good one nonetheless. having forgotten my lunch, i walked into the supermarket across the road where i'd ordered commensal meals the week before. i get that the manager can't speak english, but when i asked in french for him to speak slower it really grated my cheese when he simply repeated himself at the same speed. it took me an awkward moment to figure out more or less what he was saying.

for lunch i decided to try a little indian restaurant nearby called "pushap". seriously? i just found my new favourite indian restaurant, and it's right next to my office. which means it's right next to where i *used* to live.

godsdammit.

their thali is insane. and it's only $5!

...

in the afternoon i discovered that i'd been attempting to solve the wrong problem... i'd been given the impression that the feature i was implementing had worked once and been broken, when in fact it had never been implemented. that meant that i'd been working in the wrong problem space, and my efforts moved from backend to mobile frontend. mobile frontend is a nightmare, and what remained of my week was spent trying to get ios and android phones to use html5 the way the standard is defined: when apple and google have specifically gone against the standard, the documentation becomes utterly useless and trying to work off it is a solid waste of time :(

i was stupidly tired after work, it was too warm for a sweater and too rainy to be outside and i was too slow for la panthère verte where i managed to offend the girl trying to be helpful because she switched from english to french and i misunderstood that she was actually explaining what i'd asked her to :(

it was a great poetry evening, though, and the only thing that wasn't cool had to do with team politics. that's something that really shouldn't be a thing :(

...

i was so excited to come home and find my syndicate scanner iphone case! and so very, very disappointed to discover that the iphone 5c's volume buttons are incompatible with iphone 5 cases. what kind of a design decision is that?! it's so absurd, why would nobody mention the difference when selling 5/5s accessories?! fortunately, my letter to vistaprint's support was responded to with a full refund, and that did a good job of reducing my frustration and relieving me from my sense of ignorance.

...

hot coffee: you don't need to see more than half an hour to get a clear picture of how messed up things are and how bad it is that we all jumped on the "frivolous litigation" bandwagon. george w., you never cease to disappoint.

...

i wrote "unnecessary stress" but i haven't a clue what that was about.

---thursday:

dreams: day and night in a dive bar in the middle of nowhere, then festival fields with a three-ferrari grand prize and plenty more on display

it was cold and raining when we woke up and we were warm and cozy under the blankets. i finally cleared all the dishes and bought a couple of ac/dc albums: back in black (because i owned it) and the razors edge. i don't understand how it's possible that i've never heard the title song from the latter, because now that i have i understand why it's the title song. holy shit.

at the beginning of my lunch hour i walked in to the bell store where i got my phone intending to purchase a case with the store credit the salesman had promised me, but he wasn't there and the guy i dealt with gave me shit even before he looked up my information. he was a complete ass and i walked out in a bit of a rage. the perfect frame of mind to be calling my building manager in. those idiots couldn't grasp that i'm offering them a tenant and the money that goes with having a tenant in an apartment they're complaining is difficult to fill.

my code was fine but my machine was down. i noticed one of the guys playing counterstrike global: offensive, it looks just like i remember cs, and i guess that's the next gaming purchase...

i received a call from hema quebec, but because the french don't pronounce the "h" i thought the poor girl was saying "emma" and that made me make her repeat it for a while before giving up :/

after all that frustration, i figured out the html5 quirks and received a call back from the building manager to say that they were finally acquiescing to my (imo very reasonable) demands. i did some git wrangling until i finally tamed the beast and then took a bit of time out for myself.

[continued...]

out of the way

before i begin squishing my week into this tiny space, i'm going to dump a few things that have been on my mind. in no particular order.

---twilio is amazing. i've been given a good introduction by one of my co-workers and it's something that someone like me could really use!

open-source mobile windmills? we could use a couple of these. the timing's good too: climate change has become disturbingly apparent.

support for non-immigrant lone soldiers. i think i need to get in touch with these people and become a node in the network.

discovery's dishonesty during shark week is sensationally disappointing.

sierra games are making a comeback!!!

when it comes to medicine, this is why reasonably evidence-based should be a thing.

essentially, ibm is working on synthesizing a human brain. with incredibly cool results ^_^

edward snowden *is* a champion of american values.

google smart lenses. say no more.