bully birds

 i'm very upset right now. i just woke up after a long night; the first part was hours of being too tired to get up, but unable to sleep (restless mind) and being mildly uncomfortable, the second part - or last part, i should say, it was probably an hour or two - was sleeping soundly, feeling pretty good, and then waking up from a dream pissed off at my mother.

we went out to dinner together, and she ordered something called "dinner service". it arrived as a tiny serving for one of something that looked like noodles but with meaty-looking bits in it, with a price tag of R1500. when i asked her if it was as she'd intended, she nonchalantly said yes and took a bite of it. while i was being horrified by the cost, i learned that it was made of some kind of exotically cruel meat (kind of like foie gras), and i told her she'd be paying for it before waking up pissed off about the whole thing.

i got up, brushed my teeth, made myself a cup of coffee, picked up my laptop, and stepped onto the balcony to start my day, only to find a pigeon standing on our little table, having left a giant, wet turd on it as well as having had diarrhea in a couple of spots on the balcony floor. so i had to spend a couple of minutes cleaning all of that up, discovering that some bird had vandalized our glass railings by somehow pooping on it at an upwards angle. i was completely disgusted.

then i started writing this, and when i got to "we went out together" the damned pigeon returned, landing on the balcony railing right in front of me and not caring when i tried to shoo it away - i had to get up and chase it away properly.

fucker.

...

i didn't get any side-project work done yesterday morning, i mostly just went through my employer emails and found myself quite satisfied with the monthly newsletter i hadn't realized i'd been receiving 🙄

i had a good breakfast, went off to the office, and started the day with a particularly positive team daily. 

that was followed by a sad consult with the other contractor, whose reorg isn't going nearly as well as mine - his new manager's doing some messed up stuff and he doesn't know who's now in charge of his contract, and i advised him to immediately update his mentor and our team, let them know what's going on and find out who he's supposed to be reporting to. he's really nervous because he's convinced that our employer's having a hard time getting new contracts and he's worried about being fired... which is fair, but in my opinion if you're facing the same risk either way, it's better to be proactive and get ahead of it as much as you can. also, considering the last few weeks, i have a feeling he's less aligned with and more disconnected from our employer than i am, so if *i* haven't felt totally safe then i'm confident he's not feeling safe *at all*.

my workday was, like the rest of the them this week, flitting between my main project and my golang service side quest. with an uncomfortable half an hour being pulled in to an incident as a suspect, only to discover that my changes had nothing to do with it 😅

i've been working on this main project since the end of april, and it's been a massive (and long) rollercoaster, and yesterday i finally deployed the end-to-end code and was able to start testing it. while i found a couple of bugs at the end of the day, the project is essentially complete and ready for whenever they miraculously figure out the pixel matching component.

i also deployed the final fix to the golang service, so it's officially in good shape and actually maintainable by on-call people if anything goes awry.

for the company happy hour, i was treated to vegan nachos. as the only vegan around yesterday, i felt obligated to consume them, and for the second time had to deal with the weird childishness of a couple of people who made a show of being offended by the existence of vegan food. that aside, i enjoyed them, had a beer, and an exciting conversation with a new friendly who works with AI from another side of the org.

oh, i almost forgot. with all that, a good chunk of the day was spent debating with my friend and coworker. who, btw, has been putting some effort into my blockchain project, for which i'm very grateful. we've been discussing a lot of the current politics and philosophies of AI, and yesterday i (we?) had a really interesting revelation about the nature of consciousness which i'm planning to work through in an article.

...

i don't know what triggered it, but after the happy hour my stomach became extremely unhappy, painfully gassy. it was like that for the next few hours, and i ended up working much later than usual to finish up a report for my incoming and outgoing managers before heading out and doing a shopping mission on my way home. quite a roundabout shopping mission with mr smear, but a successful one and at least our time together was pleasant.

my sister got a bit lost on the way home from her day-trip, but we all arrived just in time for a really nice dinner (at that point my system had mostly calmed down). we talked a lot, and by the time we got up from the table it was quite late and pretty much bedtime for everyone.

...

it's friday morning, and gd's just joined me on the balcony, and my sister and mr smear appear to still be sleeping. i've just run through the plans for the day with gd, and now it's time to get started.

higher resolution

 i finally got to bed about half an hour after posting, then woke up with a jolt forty five minutes later from a nightmare in which mr smear had "pranked" me by leaving a bunch of dead insects in my bed, and then ignored me completely and became super defiant while i did everything i could to avoid resorting to violence, which all took place outside a door out of which burst the crazy mom from mr smear's class who was ecstatic to have caught me being aggressive, and taunted me by dancing around and wiggling her bum. i woke up furious with mr smear and having to suppress the urge to rouse him from his slumber and give him a thumping.

when i told him the story in the morning - less than an hour later - he was thoroughly entertained :/

mr smear decided - unsurprisingly - that he's done with the summer camp. the organizer said she'd put in for a refund, which will be immensely helpful.

i worked hard on the auto-doc for the next hour or two, the AI taking so long on one of the activities that i ended up staying home for my daily meeting and only then heading out to the office.

i spent the next few hours manically working on all the things at once, and somehow managing to make good progress on the auto-doc, on my primary data pipeline project, and on the golang service i've been helping out with because it's giving me satisfaction to be doing housekeeping for something that carries quite a load and that's been horribly neglected for so long.

lunchtime with the team i used to be embedded with was cool, i shared my inspirations from yesterday's game dev conference and that triggered some very interesting conversations.

i thought my presentation was scheduled for 2pm, so when 1.50pm rolled around and i had just discovered something broken... that was quite intense and disappointing, but discovering the meeting was actually an hour later was a huge relief! i managed to be ready in time ^_^

i was properly nervous and wired for the presentation, but it went well and i got some decidedly positive and constructive feedback. at first it seemed like my team didn't really get what was happening, by the end they agreed that the value it brings is undeniable and i know what they want me to do to try to encourage adoption.

i had a very short post-presentation break to gather my thoughts, and then i jumped onto a call with my actual boss.

...

once upon a time, when i was in the army, i somehow developed "jeep driver's disease". nobody could think of how that developed, i wasn't able to get the recommended surgery done because my rights to a rehabilitation facility were denied as permanent forcers inexplicably give up their lone soldier status, and i was extremely fortunate that at some point it just went away. when i went to a surgeon to check me out, he put on a rubber glove, and i blurted out, twice, that i was feeling really uncomfortable with the examination.

the second time i said it, he lost his temper and yelled at me: "what, you think *I'M* comfortable with doing this?!!"

i thought about this story on my way to work this morning, and that perhaps i'd start my compensation conversation with my boss with it. in retrospect, i'm rather glad i didn't :P

i began the conversation awkwardly, but i managed to say what i needed to say and it was an enormous relief that he handled it very coolly and matter-of-factly. after explaining the industry situation (which i'm already well familiar with) he inquired as to mine, and he expressed understanding and assured me that he'd consider it. the impression he gave me was that he might acquiesce soon, or possibly in a few months during the annual reviews, either way it feels positive.

...

when i called my mom and gd afterwards to let them know how things had gone, i was shaking a little.

during the day i'd pushed an upgrade to the golang service to get better metrics and make their emission more efficient, and looking at the dashboards and reviewing with AI two things became apparent: the first, that the metrics gave much better insight into the constant crashing that this poor service has been undergoing for the past couple of years. the second, that i made the emission so efficient that the frequency of the crashing increased dramatically 😂🤦‍♂️

so i stayed a bit later than i'd have liked preparing the fix, and then i left the office, arguably in the best spirits i've been in a while.

gd sent mr smear to meet me on the way home and help me with a quick grocery run, and then he helped me take out the recycling, which turned out to include a side-quest of finding a bench to dump unused school books on, and then it was time for dinner. t'was a good dinner, and we resumed watching the simpsons (it's been a while, and the last time i mentioned it was a big, unpleasant day), and then it was shower and bedtime and read a bit of alice's adventures in wonderland to mr smear (i starting falling asleep reading about the dormirouse), and i was going to jump into bed but i just had to get all this down first.

weekend vibes

sleep journal entry:

i had four coffees yesterday. prior to my third coffee, i was falling apart, foggy and tired and sleepy and having trouble concentrating, for at least forty five minutes.

i woke up this morning from a dream in which i was arguing with schwarzenegger's terminator over how to approach an accounting problem.

yesterday:

i had some stuff to do in the morning, but i ended up having a long chat with urchin instead. i feel bad, because i think i made her feel bad about her new corporate employer when i talked about the trust issues in our industry that i previously posted about...

...

on my way into the office i had an idea: i think a lot of what's wrong with western society comes down to having been raised to believe that we can be anything and we can do anything, which, when taken literally, ends up with people who cannot bring themselves to accept and deal with reality. it's a societal illness.

...

the team i sit with was off volunteering, to it was a quiet morning in the office. it was still kinda quiet after they came in, so it was mostly a relaxed end to the week and i seem to have gotten a handle on the current phase of my project.

i came home for lunch, ate a couple of lotus cookies and fired off a troll message to mr smear thanking him and implying that i ate them all. when school ended, i received the following response:

both hilarious and scary - on the one hand, it felt like a "we need to talk about kevin" moment, on the other i was highly amused by his emoji fluency 🤣

we discussed the upcoming exhibit, and he told me he was only missing one piece that got lost a couple of months ago, and i asked him to recreate it when he got home. as much for me and gd as for him.

a while later, i received a picture of his recreation, and it was brilliant ^_^

the office happy hour started less happy because i inadvertently raised the issue of them not having any vegan treats when i, personally, wasn't interested in the temptation. but my boss is also vegan (apparently), so the organizers were quite stressed about it.

i grabbed a beer, and approached one of the AI gurus about my openspec experience (which we'd briefly discussed a couple of months ago), and he offered to sit with me for a bit. we ended up spending most of an hour and a half in a flurry of installations and experiments, and i was pleased to see his enthusiasm when he finally grokked what it is i want to build. i learned a lot from the conversation in general.

i had an awkward interaction with my boss on my way out, he wanted to know my project timeline and i began explaining what i'd already explained to my manager, "assuming no more surprises, and every step along the way we've learned new and surprising things"... and he cut me off: "first the estimate, then the disclaimer" :P

i came home, mr smear and i strapped on our blades, and i took him for a round. he was really nervous and scared, but we got through it and he had some really good moments. we also had two encounters with really sweet dogs; the first, a puppy who was peeing himself constantly with excitement, the second a huge, fluffy, very nosey girl. i very much appreciate the additional positive vibe injection into mr smear's early experiences ^_^

just before we got home, he tried to roll a bit on a downhill and hurt himself as he fell. he was upset and started sulking away, and i caught him and told him he had to show himself he could do it - i'd been telling him the entire ride that his body's capable, it's his brain that needs to be aligned. surprisingly, for the state he was in, he went "fuck it", turned and rolled and t-stopped beautifully!

i was so proud of him, not just for the physical success but for the attitude, and for not ending the ride on a negative note.

we finished watching little shop of horrors over dinner, and got him into bed, and then i sat down with gd and we talked about something that she's always done when we watched tv or movies together that's really unpleasant*. it feels like we got to the bottom of it - it's more a communication thing than anything else - and it was a relief.

* she just fucks off, while we're waiting for her to continue. anyway, it's a little complicated.

i did nothing last night, and went to bed relatively early because my eyelids were feeling particularly heavy.

this morning so far:

i got up late, finished another chapter of watchmen, and finally replaced the UV light and purifier of the tami 4. something went egregiously wrong, though, and now we don't have a tami 4 for the weekend and a technician is (thankfully so quickly) coming in on sunday morning.

now that i've posted this, pausing to tear up at the opening sequence of darwish - desert adventure 2025 (quoting udi kagan's הלם קרב), we're about to leave for the school for the end of year exhibit, very excited to see what mr smear's been up to!

sleep journal entry

last dream: track listings on the sides of containers, a shul service with someone i know who'd recently been released from prison (and who was clearly a traitor) being loudly disrespectful, and a container tramsporting a carnival covered in sheets and i could see ninjas (the irony) hiding all across it.

i slept through - minus successfully turning off my alarm - until i was woken up to say goodbye to mr smear. i don't know when last i managed to sleep like that.

gd's back is sprained, so instead of finally getting ready for the hackathon and a pressured day, i'm quickly drinking a coffee then heading off to the pharmacy...

wake up

 i just woke up both furious and ashamed and sad. i had a series of three nightmares: the first, i couldn't get on an international flight because i was unable to fill out a form through an ever-enlarging cluster of technological failures. the second i don't quite recall, but it also had to do with systems failing. the third, i was riding a tandem bike with mr smear and he refused to get out of the road when it got dangerous, and defiantly kept both of us in the lane until i braked hard and dragged him and the bike off to the sidewalk. i was so mad and feeling so incapable of getting through to him without violence that i slapped him so hard that i broke his glasses.

it also doesn't help that i woke up much earlier to go to the toilet, and ended up doing exactly what i keep trying to avoid - doomscrolling. learning that the UN has continued their filthy campaign against us by adding israel to he sexual violence list when we're the victims of it (see the silenced no more report), and then learning that there's another global round of layoffs happening and that israel is likely to be particularly badly affected because of the strengthening of the shekel.

gods help us.

painful realizations

sleep journal entry: a couple of hours of restlessness, but no breathing troubles and no physical discomfort. the nights are definitely getting warmer, though, and we had a mosquito in the room...

the back of my head's still a bit numb, which is worrying :/

i woke up from a dream in which i was with a bunch of people playing sports (frisbee and ball sports) around an open light rail station. my alarm woke me up, and i got out of bed, but my mind and body were still in sleep mode for quite a while after.

yesterday:

my biggest issue yesterday was motivation. i was finally feeling better, tired but better, and i got a few admin tasks squared away before sitting down to work. my primary task yesterday was reviewing an incident that i'd been told about a few weeks ago, and my work day was essentially reading through a month's worth of messages and documents, and the deeper i dove (dived?) the more tragic i understood the situation to be. by the end of the day i was literally shocked to discover that the incident, a fundamental break in a critical component of the business, and the efforts to get things back on track are still ongoing and being blocked by the company's lack of any meaningful ownership.

i'm heartbroken for these guys, they're good people and they're working hard, but they're trying to fight their way uphill in an avalanche. i don't see how this company survives if it doesn't have a dramatic shift in culture.

i want to set up a meeting with my client and manager and explain this to them, but i'm struggling to come up with a way of approaching this without causing offense or throwing anyone under the bus.

[sends message to manager, receives an immediate call and proceeds to discuss concerns and strategy for 35 minutes]

well, that went well - i was a bit clumsy in how i expressed my concerns at first, but we aligned relatively quickly and he appreciated my suggestions; i think the most crucial element is ensuring that all the developers are aligned with what ownership of a project entails, and unblocking unofficial ownership by "outsiders".

...

i had a good sync with my mentor in the afternoon, and a pleasant one later with my actual boss. gd laughed at me afterwards for the "awkward sweats", what evolutionary purpose that serves is utterly beyond me.

...

aside from taking a walk to do some shopping, that was pretty much my day. the evening, however, was a different story.

when mr smear came home, i asked him how his day went, and he assured me nothing interesting had happened. as i finished work, while i was processing the bizarre work situation i'd just finished reading about, i noticed that the father of one of his friends had sent me a voice message, that the two of them had had a massive fight that got violent.

we then spent the next couple of hours alternating between talking and yelling, trying to get the story out of him. he eventually admitted that he threw the first punch - making him the biggest asshole - but the most concerning thing is that he claims he doesn't remember the sequence of events at all. i said that he's either lying, or brain damaged, and he's now latched on to the latter and is trying to convince us that he's actually brain damaged 🤦‍♂️

we had another talk about it this morning, strategizing, and i hope he takes our advice. in the meanwhile, i've just sent a message to his friend's dad, who just responded positively. i really hope these kids manage to settle this in a mature way...

sleep journal entry

 i made a point of staying up late* even though i was really tired. i took an iron supplement during the day, skipped the magnesium. during the night i experienced intrusive thoughts and hip discomfort, though not particularly intense.

* some development, and another failed run of slay the spire 2

i was traumatized by mr smear's alarm going off in our room at top volume, i was dreaming and the dream exploded into a nightmare of violated anger, with no recollection. so that's how i woke up. i combined my morning coffee with some starship troopers to calm down. it captures the concepts and atmosphere of basic training superbly.

and then i sat down to take care of the usual morning admin stuff and received an email that i'm being fined for traveling in a public transport lane even though i'd returned the car prior to the incident being recorded. dammit.

it feels weird to be going into the office today.

the twelve tasks of tuesday

sleep journal entry: technically a decaf coffee around 3pm. i still struggled with post-nasal drip and coughing for a lot of the night, but towards the morning i was able to sleep properly for a bit. now everything's starting to come out again...

earlier i had a dream in which i, along with a squad of sorts, entered deep into a terrorist's nest. one imbecile made enough noise to call attention to us, another (a kid i detested in primary school) did something even more dumb and suddenly we had to fight our way out. the battle was vicious and bloody (and involved shooting a lot of people in the eyes), and then i awoke.

...

i didn't get a lot of hours in yesterday, but i did end up with enough of a handle on the situation to be confident in how i move forward. the theme (or tantrum) of the day was due to ownership insanity - the devops who had seemed receptive to my initial proposal pushed back with the argument that there are two sources of truth, both valid even if contradictory, and that's on top of the situation in which there's no leadership coming from management and nobody knows what the situation should be.

it feels like the twelve tasks of asterix.

we weren't sure if we were picking mr smear up or not (he ended up going to his friend's place), but just before school ended his teacher called me for a long conversation - which needs a follow-up face-to-face meeting - with the fantastic starting point that they found all of mr smear's books! all but one, so my mother and i took a meandering walk through fascinating architecture to the bus, found the right book store, bought a copy of the missing book, sat down for a coffee, then walked home.

i didn't get much work done in the hour or so i was at home.

a potential impactful talk with my mom on the bus about my urban kibbutz idea.

one of the guys from my second team was looking through old stuff yesterday and sent me a picture of the gift i presented them during my farewell - it was such a fun memory!

mr smear met up with us at the mall after hanging out with his friend, we bought him a headband (his hair's been in his eyes) and he dutifully made sure it wasn't from adidas (i can't believe they're still operating in israel), then he sat down to eat his school lunch (?!) while my mom and i found a surprisingly good dollar store and picked up a bunch of things we'd been looking for.

mr smear wrote his name clearly in his new math book, dinner was great, and the evening was pleasant (including learning that the UAE has pulled out of OPEC).

i actually got a couple of practical things done before playing a bit of slay the spire 2, before hitting the hay.

sleep journal entry

 it was a horrible night, coughing and choking. and then a gross morning, with a sinus infection and a lot more expectoratin'. i'm so fucking tired.

in the middle of the night, after i did managed to fall asleep, i woke up choking from a dream about fighting drones with cyberpunk weapons. it's been a couple of hours, i wish i could remember the details.

i took mr smear to school this morning, and we talked about shaved heads (he has to wear a band for school while he grows his hair long) and tattoos (about not doing them without good reason, and not doing any that can't be covered up), and as i dropped him off i showed him a picture of myself with my head shaved. he was mortified :/

since getting back home, i've had breakfast (for my supplement regimen), watched a video about elon musk's tweet about UBI that's made me think the following: if the US could figure out how to enforce corporate taxes and shuts down loopholes for them and their wealthy elite, they'll have more than enough money to provide UBI and a stable, healthy economy.

bloody sunday

my allergies were more under control, but it was still a difficult night with a post-nasal drip so most of the night i was awake to some degree. between the iron and magnesium supplements, my lower back and hips haven't been causing me any real problems at night, although i did have some trouble during the day...

my last dreams were difficult: a massive attack on my armored corps unit with a zangief-like russian doing a lot of damage. then fighting to hold a vampire in a huge tank of water, assisted by an our-side vampire. something about making sure he didn't die, but not giving him enough oxygen to escape. and then she left me in charge, and aside from him wounding me in the underwater scrap, i accidentally gave him enough to get out.

i wonder if the vampire isn't AI.

...

after posting last night, my mother and i did our traditional annual try-to-find-out-what's-wrong-with-her-computer. i installed O&O ShutUp10++, and disabled all the recommended things, and it does seem to have helped. unfortunately, i then learned that she's still on windows 10 and her computer's too old to upgrade. so she either has to trade it in, or switch to ubuntu, neither of which are ideal.

and i can't give her my windows machine because the screen's too small :/

...

i woke up this morning to learn that there was a stabbing attack in our neighborhood yesterday by a south tel aviv gang of refugee / foreign workers' kids. i don't know how to break that to gd or mr smear.

i dropped mr smear off at school this morning, he's had a great idea for a front-door image!

i arrived home to learn that we're having hot-water cylinder troubles, which pisses me off not only because it's just another thing to deal with (i'm about to accompany gd to the clinic and hospital, her toenail issue has fast become an emergency), but because we just had a plumber in a week or two ago and he couldn't find anything wrong.

i'm so fucking over this week already.

sleep journal entry

my first two coffees of the day yesterday were decaf because i was still wired from the day before. the sleep i got last night felt broken, but i did dream, and i haven't been experiencing my usual leg/hip discomfort, which is probably due to the iron and magnesium supplements.

the last part of my last dream involved following someone to the "entrance" of his house, which included a terrifying jump around a corner at a dizzying height, and some kind of "bridge" which i couldn't see and didn't figure out before i woke up.

gd's other toe is looking scary. only this year (it was about this time last year), there wasn't any "accident" to explain why.

the alternative

a scratchy throat all day that caused trouble all night. it's still scratchy, but feeling slightly better right now so hopefully that's a trend.

i wasn't too sure that ze germans were doing the yom ha'atzmaut thing, and i made the mistake of only asking ru55 if he was going, and he didn't get back to me until this morning. so instead of going, i cancelled the car we'd rented and we had a "barbecue" hot-dog lunch at home that was really good.

a bit later, my mom and i dragged mr smear out to the beach. there was a chill wind on the beach itself, but once mr smear (mr inertia) was on the sand he didn't want to leave the beach, nor the sea. in retrospect, we should have brought him a towel...

otherwise, it was a beautiful afternoon. we took a slow walk down the beach and then up to allenby, where mr smear decided we should have hummus. that was a fantastic decision, we had a fun experience with the shifka and the meal was delicious.

then we walked up sheinkin, picking up some coffee along the way to the bus home.

unfortunately, i accidentally ordered a regular coffee instead of decaf. so it was around 6pm that i drank my fourth cup for the day.

we got home, and there was no argument from mr smear about jumping straight into a hot shower. afterwards, we started watching the tokyo ghoul series. which is really cool, but i did nap through half of the second episode...

dinner was the "barbecue" burgers, also delicious.

we got mr smear into bed, unsure of whether to expect a disrupted night or not because the ceasefire was supposed to end.

i went to bed pretty late (played slay the spire 2), and simply couldn't sleep. i estimate that it took me more than an hour and a half to finally fall asleep, after which it was fitful with claustrophobic dreams of an in-house rollercoaster with one of ze germans.

i struggled to wake up this morning, with my throat still doing a thing, but mr smear certainly helped as he made horrible noises (his throat) for the longest time. over coffee / his breakfast, we discovered that he's been avoiding going to school because he's been getting into trouble for not having his books. he's lost most of his books, apparently, and also never thought to report back that the lock on his locker is broken, and that he doesn't remember the code for the old one.

i don't know how much of any of that is actually true.

we explained to him that the books are expensive - they are - and that he's going to find them. and that all privileges are to be withheld until the situation is sorted out. on the bus to school, i explained what he needs to do and found his old lock's code, and sent a message to his homeroom teacher. on my way back home, he called to assure me that he's at least started the day off making an effort, so 🤷‍♂️...

also, on my way home, i thought some more about my work situation which is starting to freak me out. i've been trying to get a job done with AI that i have little context for, and the AI is leading me around in circles. not only do i need to change tack and focus on building the context i need, but i also *have* to  begin experimenting with AI harnesses because i'm feeling like i'm getting left behind on the most critical issue of our (engineering) time right now...

the needle

[currently battling a mosquito and losing]

 well, i did sleep last night. i had horrible dreams, though. involving really gross public toilets, amongst other things.

i gave up on reading dragon ball. it's like a pre-teen fever dream. combined with dragon ball: rick & morty i'm now pretty confident i never missed anything important.

our subwoofer situation: i was so excited the past couple of days, because it looked like the subwoofer was finally stable for the first time since we bought it. but today? garbage. i finally bit the bullet and ordered a new one, which will hopefully hook in to the shelf in the same way 🤞

work ownership mystery: i asked my manager to investigate, and he managed to get someone to approve my pull request. but then we learned that they didn't have the authorization to merge, either. a bunch of us (virtually) ran around trying to find out who's in charge, and so far the answer appears to be "nobody".

in the afternoon, my employer team had to sign in to a presentation that went on about an hour longer than it should have. i had to turn my camera off halfway through so nobody would have to keep seeing me rubbing my eyes and yawning.

mr smear had a regression today, and homework turned into a massive, unpleasant thing that got him punished. as part of the cooldown, i took him to the park to use the exercise equipment (i was too pissed off with him to train him, and i'm pretty sure he wasn't in the mood either), and then we continued on to do some sweet shopping.

i'm not doing to well with my weight situation lately. something about war and lockdown and yada yada yada.

dinner (we were forced to order in because my employer doesn't let me use my food allowance to buy vouchers) was much calmer, getting mr smear showered and toothbrushed and into bed proved stressful and stretched our patience completely, and that was on top of two attacks launched in that exact window. and i still had a little more work to do after he went to sleep, so i was even more annoyed.

now i'm playing catch-up and calm-down, as i type this i realize it's already past midnight :/

...

gd's friend (the glassblower who made us massage tools and gifted us with some bitcoin a couple of years ago) has been contemplating suicide for a very long time, and gd's finally reached a point where she can no longer bring herself to keep trying to talk him out of it. she's upset about this, and she wants to be a good friend, and i told her to just make her feelings crystal clear and deal with whatever may come.

you can't help everyone.

rough edges

 rough night. still better than with the previous beds, but having mr smear in the bed with us is just uncomfortable enough to make the sleep... not good. there were only two or three attacks last night, but there's no way to know whether it's worth sending him back to his bed or not because we can't tell when the next attack is coming.

and what sleep i did get was filled with disturbing dreams. i can't describe them better than "commando prostitute". and from that i woke up to a message asking for donations for two families from mr smear's school who live near it, and lost their homes in one of the attacks during the first first week of the war.

i haven't sipped my coffee yet, but i just spent way too long moving my mouse around, patiently and sadly, waiting for my computer to wake up - but it wasn't plugged in yet.

in addition to everything else, mr smear and i had to get up early this morning because i'm taking him for the allergy test. i had the presence of mind to ask gd if he'd had any antihistamines these past few days, even if i hadn't had the presence of mind to set reminders for him not to take any.

he had one yesterday.

so now we're going to the hospital to meet with the doctor anyway, but we can't do any tests.

...

at least yesterday evening went well. we had a good mma / taekwondo session, and we both felt sufficiently exercised by the end of it. we enjoyed another episode of strip search, and when mr smear "went to bed" (reading) gd and i shared a local beer (a bit too blonde for my tastes, but not bad flavor) and i watched a really comedy set that i've seen before (it's kellen erksine, it must have been republished), and then went straight to bed.

every day is (almost) exactly the same

 last night was rough. i wasn't woken up as much by the bombings because i had my phone off, so putting a stop to the horrible noises was exclusively gd's problem, but mr smear ended up sleeping most of the night in our bed and it's a bit crowded for my tastes.

i did have some mighty weird dreams, though. cthuloid ones, where creepy little humanoids were trying to eat my inexplicably long beard, and i got into a fight with the owner of the establishment who i somehow knew, and then had to escape some weird military-industrial warehouse, ending up climbing nets that had to be rearranged because whoever had put them up had done a really shit job.

an early meeting with my new coworker to introduce him to a new tool triggered a couple of hours putting together an article on it. i tried to get it published with my employer, but i've just withdrawn that application and applied to a publication with real reach, and where it's okay to make some money off it.

i had to "hold the fort" while gd rested this afternoon - she was having a rough day - and when one of his teachers was a no-show i managed to convince him to hook up the MIDI controller to garageband, which he really enjoyed. i don't know what he was doing, because at one point i had to put on headphones to block out the noise, but he seemed quite proud of himself.

in the evening i took a rather long walk (no sirens!) to stretch my legs and by a piece of equipment (a particular configuration of USB hub) that i discovered, on my return home, that i already owned.

i think i have a viable use for two of them, though.

i did another MMA session with mr smear, and every day we do this i feel better both physically and mentally. not only am i getting a little real exercise in, but i'm seeing my son develop the mindset and get comfortable not only in his body, but in his place in the world.

i've been trying on and off to do this since he was tiny, but better late than never. i guess he had to come to it on his own terms.

after reading him some more of the colour of magic at bedtime, and allegedly doing a breathing exercise to help him relax, he refused once again to go to sleep. gd let him read until almost 11pm, god knows what tomorrow morning's going to be like.

in the meanwhile, i went on a side quest with work stuff, and at the stroke of midnight sent a proposal to my team because the current CI configuration's driving me crazy with unnecessary wait times.

...

i have a feeling scrapper doesn't really want to talk politics with me, which is frustrating, but 🤷‍♂️

two for two

 i'm now two for two with the canishower.com app, i'm in.

i'm also two for two getting mr smear into short, but real, martial arts training sessions by rewarding him with screen time. my, how the mighty have fallen... but he did pretty well in yesterday's boxing drills, and was very pleased with himself in today's taekwondo drills. if this is what it takes...

also, mr smear and i made a fun little rage game during an attack today, capture the fly, sticklight's surprisingly good at what it does!

...

yesterday:

in a nutshell, yesterday was all about network disruptions; mainly due to misconfigurations, but also dealing with a lot of intermittent VPN disconnections that i've been experiencing ever since i got my company laptop.

it was extremely frustrating, and while i'm finally dealing with the provider's support directly... after an entire day of back-and-forth troubleshooting over email, i'm starting to suspect that their support team is a bunch of AI agents dressed in a trench coat 😕

who ever thought that the trickiest part of the turing test would be that humans can be so unexpectedly dumb?

the frustration of hearing a door buzzing just before a siren and hoping i didn't miss the delivery of the new network device...

gd cleaned the apartment yesterday, with mr smear and i helping occasionally. it's a big apartment, compared to what we're used to.

our early dinner, more like a very late lunch, was followed by me teaching mr smear boxing fundamentals, and then me continuing to work on the RCA that i was finally finished around 9pm, during another attack.

mr smear went to bed really late last night, and i read to him anyway, then crashed. and then half the night was spent with him in our bed after attacks.

i had a weird dream about him and his previous class, but they were much younger and in danger of falling out of these weird little cots.

today:

we all got up late, and i spent at least an hour tweaking the network until i had it good enough that it felt like maybe? we don't need the new network device. but after a day spent moving back and forth between the office, the bedroom and the living room, i'm pretty sure we need it to sit in the middle of the two wired points.

i struggled in a rush to get mr smear's account set up for his online classes, and then spent the work day feeling pretty useless and entirely unmotivated.

between yesterday and today, i got my first real taste of using MCPs. they can be extremely helpful, especially when it comes to understanding badly produced logs.

we received a very welcome voucher from my employer for a tub of ice cream. gd found a decent vegan salmon replacement (thank god), and brewer's yeast, that we could have delivered. and there was much rejoicing.

it's okay

i went straight to bed after posting last night. we only had two interruptions with attacks, but that meant about half the night with mr smear sleeping in our bed, which isn't terrible, but it's considerably less comfortable than him not.

another warning about an impending attack this morning, when i needed the toilet. so i held it in, and then suddenly it was a half hour later and no sirens...

i finally got up a short while ago, from a dream in which i returned to uniform with nystire: on our way into the base, nystire got bumped by a car driving out. it clearly hurt him, but when i wanted to stop the car and get him checked out he angrily yelled "i'm FINE!". then there was a large group of soldiers who'd just been sent off to a row of buses, and a whole lot of them had left behind bags and satellite phones. and then, finally, i was being briefed by a guy who - i only realized while he was literally climbing around on his desk - had no legs, and there i was, having been complaining about my boots not fitting (not to him, fortunately). after amusing him with a physiotherapy story, he told me about an experimental procedure he'd been denied because his operational capability wasn't impaired enough "by one point on the evaluation", and i woke up from the two of us laughing hysterically while he danced around his seat showing me how ridiculous that was.

now i'm back in reality, gd's sleeping, mr smear's reading (and trying not-very-subtly* to get to play oxygen not included like he did yesterday, in spite of his screen time punishment because of the extenuating war circumstances), and i'm having coffee and wondering how to approach my work day today.

* why is that always such a difficult word to spell?!

"professional" is being professional when you really don't feel like it and nobody's watching.

post-birthday different-kind-of-special

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

all the while in pain and dizzy.

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

the brain slimes out the headcase

i woke up from a strange dream where i reconnected with my first branch commander and his family out in the middle of nowhere. when i got up i couldn't remember his name, but firefighter came to the rescue and i could return to a reality in which it really doesn't matter :P

 today began with an argument over the couch, which *i* had thought we were keeping, and which i'm now scrambling to sell before the move. and i tried to put our mattress on facebook marketplace, but because i used the word "orthopaedic" it was identified as medical equipment.

i could only ask for a review on the grounds of "it's not offensive in my country" and "it was a joke",  and the review was obviously just as automated as the original misclassification. and then, to make things worse, i couldn't edit or delete it because it had been flagged, and i couldn't re-create it either because it was detected as a duplicate 🤦

a sweet couple came to look at the apartment this morning, right after i returned from the hardware store with putty and shpachtel and a replacement showerhead for our last week because ours sprung a leak last night, and they absolutely loved it and we all really clicked over our rick & morty and adventure time pictures on the walls.

i arrived at work a bit later than usual, fielded a call from a scary-looking woman who asked incisive questions, and then dived into work.

...

work today - aside from forcing myself to take a lunch break - was completely ridiculous. as a hired "expert", i probably shouldn't be reveling out loud in the fact that this is my first mlops experience, but my gods, this is a discipline of complete masochists and/or trolls.

my first success was navigating the docker resources required to actually run a model in an ml instance, and the next was figuring out how to request predictions. but then i had to deal with logits and understand that the model i was using didn't include the labels it was trained with. so the data scientist who helped me yesterday jumped in enthusiastically to help, and the two of us were like kids trying to find buried pirate treasure with a riddle of instructions and no idea which map they referred to. or whether or not that map was accurate.

by the end of the day, we'd managed to synthesize a massive dataset of sample sentences (in 235 different languages) manually using google sheets and gemini, and we'd coerced a cursor agent to run a script against the deployed model that took our dataset plus a guessed label mapping and try to figure out what the mapping *should* look like, and we were surprised and amazed when the first iteration showed a fair amount of success and gave us a great starting point.

just before i called it a day - it was already much later than i'd intended to stay in the office, and my brain felt like it was oozing out my ears and nostrils - my boss/client appeared. we enthusiastically caught him up, but he didn't like my original plan, which was to give the project until the end of today and then make a call to use a temporary fallback to avoid blocking an end-of-next-week delivery.

"you should be more optimistic", he told me.

now i'm at a point where i know i'm not going to work over the weekend, but it's going to be bugging me that i might need to work over the weekend in order to make this deadline.

...

i walked home, had a very serious discussion with mr smear (he made a bad call today, and may have initiated some real bullying by some kids in his class), but then moved on to more positive things and dinner and showertime and bedtime were great.

i'm sure i'm forgetting something, but it's late and i need to chill a little.

...

it’s (hopefully) mr smear's second-last day of his no-reading punishment. yesterday i told him that if he reads hebrew it counts as homework, not reading time, and he’s embraced that loophole and is thoroughly engrossed in a hebrew graphic novel i bought a while back :P

ginger rum

 i didn't get any real work done last night. i did manage to get a lot of busywork done, upgrading my macbook and installing and configuring useful apps, and the macos upgrade was a great opportunity for me to lie down and catch forty winks.

and then i completed the installation and went to bed. i mostly slept through the night.

...

right until around 4am, when i woke up from an odd dream about having to have mr smear's bar mitzvah in a mosque, and then leaving over a large boulder next to a platform with a gap between them; i woke up in the act of trying to catch him just as he stepped off into the abyss while i was telling him that he needs to be conscious in his life.

...

at least the video for our kibbutz cousin's 70th birthday came out well. in general the morning went alright, i got some more onboarding work done before leaving for the office.

i was decidedly anxious going to work, feeling overwhelmed. i started my morning warming up in the sun on the balcony again; by the time i came inside i was overheating - as was my equipment - because it was a much hotter morning than we've had for a while. i had a few meetings, which went alright, and then i put together an update to my new boss/client informing him of my progress and of the issues i've encountered. i was a bit anxious about pulling the trigger, but i knew it was the right thing to do and hoped that it wouldn't be unwelcome.

the rest of the morning was studying / reviewing documents, and then i had an unpleasant experience with granola (i thought it was just granola, but then i had a couple of bites and realized it had dairy chocolate chips in it, and then i had the taste in my mouth while getting rid of the stuff without making a mess), and then i came home for lunch.

gd and mr smear were busy cleaning the apartment (we've realized we need him to be good at cleaning because that might be the best he can hope for, career-wise), so i ate quickly and scrambled back to the office, barely making my second meeting with one of my bulgarian teammates.

TWO... HOURS... LATER...

that was a hardcore intro to getting our environments set up and working with a whole suite of new tooling, and by the time we were done i felt much less stress overall, but also i felt like my brains were bleeding out my ears.

fortunately, i managed to write all the good stuff down.

i took a tea break on one of the balconies with an amazing view of the rush hour traffic, called gd to show her, and the two of us decided it would be hilarious to send my terrified-of-heights brother a video.

i hope he took the video in good humor 😈

i spent the next hour tidying up my notes, practicing what i'd learned and bringing some of it into team-friendlier tools, and then joined everyone upstairs for happy hour. happy hour was pleasant, nice people and good chit-chat, and i had a very nice rum and ginger beer that had more of an effect on me than i'd anticipated.

 interrupted my new boss/client and one of my teammates to say goodbye, and i got a really good vibe from them both :)

now that i've come home, unloaded the day's stories on my wife, heard some good news about a cousin who might be able to help us with mr smear, and seen my son's lego helicopter that he built without instructions, and unloaded the day's stories here, i'm about to sit down for dinner, and then go to the monthly comic-book meetup to recommend the complete ballad of halo jones.