upended

 there's this ridiculous idea that's conned most of the software industry, that human engineers can and will be replaced by AI. that AI is cheaper than the human labor that it replaces. that driving adoption means tokenmaxxing, that AI vendors will continually reduce costs and improve the models. that the playing field has been leveled and anyone with an AI agent at their disposal now has godlike powers.

these past couple of months, the chickens have started coming home to roost. all the prices have gone up, but the vendors aren't making any money because it's still costing them more compute per token than they're asking for. so they, in turn, are dialing down their models because the dumber they are, the more loops it takes to get stuff done.

very few companies can afford the burn.

my client is one of the many that can't. so, weeks after a town hall in which they explained how finances were tight, followed a short time later by explaining that autonomous agentic workflows are going to be the primary mechanism for software delivery and on-call resolution, followed by a week of costs going up while productivity tanks... i arrived at the office on wednesday morning to discover that everyone had been allocated a $12 per day AI budget.

average costs per day had been in the high double digits to low triple digits the whole week.

there was a massive uproar, and the budget was increased to $30 per day. barely enough to get anything done, and engineering is beginning to understand that this effectively means returning to the good old days of having to understand what you're doing and craft code like peasants. there's only one problem, though: last year the company fired half its staff, and rotated all the rest, so nobody actually has any experience with the software they're officially responsible for. hell, barely anybody even knows which software is under their ownership. at a guess, i'd say that the ratio of software engineers to software repositories is somewhere around 5:100, which is something i think about a lot since learning about conway's law and organizational scaling.

it'd be funny if it wasn't so sad. and the saddest part is that these blunders are hurting real people, with real families to provide for and real mortgages to pay off.

...

i spent a large chunk of my day fixing a deployment pipeline - some random devops guy had made a change a couple of months ago that literally did nothing but break it - while expensively asking the AI tough questions to ensure that it wasn't making shit up. i also had a lot of issues with the company-mandated claude code wreaking havoc with any and every plugin or skill i attempted to work with.

i did take a pleasant break to coach sailor on working with AI, and continuously snipe him for insisting on staying south africa instead of coming home.

...

i came home, took mr smear for a pleasant walk around the park, then returned for dinner, then took another walk with gd and my sister as well, for a tour of our old neighborhood and a good view of a particularly impressive moon.

after getting home and showering, we watched a little but more of redline, then put mr smear to bed and repeated the trick of me taking a puff before passing out and actually sleeping again.

gd says my snore is the most comfortable she's ever heard.

...

i began yesterday doing random shit on the balcony, including trying to help the ex-saffer i met a few weeks ago whose department has just been laid off. i caught up on quite a bit of reading, watching, and had a big breakfast before heading out to the office.

i started my day trying to work with haiku, but anthropic's cheapest, shittiest model is so useless it seemed to be trolling me and i immediately switched back to sonnet. work-wise, i spent most of my day planning and executing a task i had been expecting to get to on monday or tuesday, and thinking very, very hard about my personal AI usage and what a harness should look like. and trying and failing to get anything real done on that last score.

i hit my $30 limit shortly after lunch, but the software to track it hadn't been installed yet, so it seemed fitting that that was the point at which i voluntarily restarted my machine and synced with the rest of the organization :P

...

that was around the time i got a phone call out of the blue from my mentor, who informed me that my client has apparently decided to stop working with outsiders altogether and that the two of us currently embedded with them will be moving on in a month's time. apparently this is a money thing, because their feedback for both of us has been positive, so i guess my town-hall feelings from a few weeks ago weren't wrong...

i asked what i should be focusing on to make sure i get to my next client as quickly and smoothly as possible, and he informed me that between my auto-doc project and consistent publishing of articles he doesn't believe i'll have too much trouble. this is good.

i waited until my counterpart had been informed by his mentor, and the two of us sat on the balcony for half an hour strategizing. he'd been taking the whole thing a bit personally - his new manager has been behaving very strangely since the big reshuffle a couple of weeks ago - and i think it helped him when i put the pieces together and suggested that the manager probably knew this was coming and just isn't very subtle about trying to get ahead of it.

either way, we have a month to focus on up-skilling in AI and we're in a pretty good place to be doing so. i also told him about the up-skilling solution i pitched to the boss, and he's interested in helping me make that happen, so that's good.

...

by the end of the day, i'd installed codex with my personal subscription on my work computer, and delivered a first iteration that looked pretty good, and had an awkward encounter with my client who's pretending everything's cool until they break the news to us on sunday, and had a wild political debate with the AI guys that was actually quite fun.

and stopped myself from "just one last deployment" on a thursday evening :P

mr smear wasn't at home when i arrived, he'd gone off to a new friend's place for a swim. i quickly shared an update with gd (i thought my sister could hear me, so i had to re-tell over dinner), then headed to the hairdresser. crazy singing guy was outside again, harassing the nail salon next door, and i got a pretty decent haircut - i think? - and then came home to shower and do a little more AI work until mr smear got back and we could sit down for onigiri (to celebrate the girls finding a mold) and corn on the cob.

the AI work i did was validating. codex is simply better.

dinner was delicious, then i did a little more fiddling around with AI and unity, and then we all sat down to finish watching redline. redline is a phenomenal movie, with a bizarrely jarring ending (kind of like grease), but really the greatest pleasure in watching it is seeing it as an art delivery mechanism. it's gorgeous, and it's simply mind-blowing seeing how gorgeous it is knowing how it was made.

...

i took another puff last night, but it didn't seem to take. am i already developing a tolerance after two nights? last night was long, and my lower back hurt a bit, and i barely got any sleep between lying restless and uncomfortable, and then i finally had enough just over an hour ago and climbed out of bed and am now sitting on the balcony typing this with half an eye on the world waking up around me.

the malicious compliance genie

 today was rough. i started writing an article inspired by it, but then the evening fell apart, and by the time we all reset i was too tired and depressed.

today was a long and difficult day battling with AI in an effort to get it to explain the current state of the system i'm working with. and the more i dug, the weirder things got. i feel completely out of my depth, and i'm under immense time pressure, and it's not fun. and most of the effort was in getting the AI to follow my instructions without doing its own thing.

i was ready to leave the office more than an hour before i was finally able to walk out the door. i came home, dropped off my bag, took the recycling down, then left again to try and get my hair cut. i managed to get my hair cut, and it's not bad but it's much shorter than gd's happy with... so i had to buy her a bottle of wine to make up for it :P

gd had her wine, i had a beer, and dinner was nice. after dinner we chatted with my mom, and then things got tense because gd's struggling with the infestation (which she's already effectively stopped, but she's freaking out about the final clean). and along with that, the usual struggle to get mr smear to just shower and get ready for bed without drama. and then he got out of the shower and showed us that he's got some new issue with a couple of his toenails (looks like his shoes might be too small) which is yet another thing we didn't need to deal with. and then, while trying to calm down and get ready for bed, gd needed to discuss something political which i didn't really want to talk about, but i also didn't want her to stew alone about.

so now i've played (and been defeated in) a map of slay the spire 2 with the regent, and i've written this, and i've finished my tea, and i'm hoping that i'll not only sleep tonight, but also not wake up feeling like a haven't.

i can't believe tomorrow's thursday. i have a one-on-one with my manager, i guess it's going to be an interesting day.

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.

a power day

 well, the next part of the day was pretty rough - but in a fun way, i guess? it certainly was an experience. 

firstly, mr smear is now full-on into counter-strike, and it's nice to see him not giving up and getting excited by his successes. so it was a cool tone to set before we head out to his regular allergist checkup.

but we headed out right in the heaviest part of a massive thunderstorm. fortunately, we both had our big-enough rain boots on, the water levels were high everywhere and my waterproof shoes would have been flooded from the top. and we had a time avoiding cars spraying water onto the sidewalks, and we got pelleted with hail (his first time outside in hail), and the walk from the bus to the hospital was just ridiculous - a real urban jungle adventure - and of course, the sun came out just as we arrived at our destination.

from that point on it became impossible to close my umbrella...

there was a bit of confusion (which was to be expected) at the reception, but we made it through the bureaucratic gauntlet and went upstairs to the allergy clinic. it was war-time very quiet and there were only two other kids there, surprisingly calm and extremely cute children, so off the bat it was a much less stressful time with mr smear. at that point my tiredness and lack of caffeine began catching up with me, but the allergist and her nurse were efficient and mr smear managed to distract himself from the prick-test itching with games on his phone, and pretty soon we were discussing the results.

it seems like, sadly, his allergy level is stabilizing rather than going away, we'll know better in the next year or two. but even so, the level it's stabilizing at is far less dramatic than before, so while he'll still need an epipen and to be careful not to consume dairy, we don't need to be so scared of accidental contact.

it's / it should be fine.

we went through the hospital mall, where i picked up an emergency coffee just as the attack warning sounded. considering the fact that the roof is made of glass, i get why the safe area was three floors below ground... there was nowhere comfortable to sit, so the two of us walked around the parking lot full of people occupying themselves on their phones and amused ourselves playing word association games.

then we returned to pick up a couple of things at the supermarket, and a couple of bottles of sublingual b12 at the pharmacy (while waiting in the uncomfortably crowded aisle for the self-service checkout, gd called twice while i was holding an umbrella that refused to stay closed, a cup of coffee, and two bottles of b12. i was not in my happy place.

mr smear and i took a bus home - to his chagrin, he always wants to walk these days to get some exercise - and he signed on to his remote classes while i finally got wednesday's code review approved and got started on the follow-up improvement. gd has managed to schedule me a haircut, so a short while late i headed out to catch a bus to sheinkin.

i had some time to spare, so i got a little more work done and drank a coffee that i must assume was soy milk (because they said so, and i honestly can't tell). i arrived just on time for my haircut appointment, and another attack warning. everyone headed across the road to a hotel shelter (the same hotel my cousin threw his farewell party in on mr smear's birthday), which was an interesting experience, and then we returned to get into it. i thought the coffee would keep me from nodding in the chair, but...

... i'm really happy with the haircut. gd's happy with it too. i'm very enthusiastically grateful that i'm no longer sporting my jew-fro / isro :P

it took a long time to get home (i shouldn't have gotten off the bus when i did), and while i waited for the connection mr smear had an accident while helping gd and the two of them had to deal with a smashed plate. so that happened.

the evening was me completing the work and studying a bit (data engineering), and mr smear playing more counter-strike, and then a pretty intensive training in which mr smear admirably demonstrated that he not only could STFU when being given instructions, but that he could redirect his anger and frustration energy into the drill we were doing (a liver shot combo) (even if he did feel the need to tell me that he was imagining that he was hitting me), into continuing the work through discomfort, into stepping into his first impact training (feather-light touch from me, but a big deal for him), into pushing himself through difficult post-training exercises (like planking, diamond push-ups, crunches and burpees), into taekwondo-style stretching.

all the while holding himself in check, even when it was clear he was emotionally at the edge. when we were done, his pride was quiet but visible, and he didn't argue with me the first couple of times i told him how proud i was (he did a bit later, though :P).

a great dinner (double yo-egg, both types as a very successful pre-pesach experiment), and everyone into the merch episode of strip search with lots of pausing to discuss. shower-time and tooth-brushing time were very positive (gd and i were loving him singing along to my playlist at the top of his voice), and his bedtime was earlier than it's been for a while and much more peaceful.

after saying good night, i went on a hunt for vitamin d resources that someone asked me for regarding testing / screening and dosage:

there're a lot of studies that discuss the unreliability of testing - this one's pretty clear - check out the "sources cited" button beneath this video (it's really worth watching). 

see also the "accuracy of screening tests" section of the US preventive services task force report.

and then i watched a whole lot of youtube videos (war news interspersed with random shit), and now this, and then... maybe i'll go to bed soon.

[attack warning]

the purim decree

 today is tuesday? yesterday was monday. it is purim today, i read (the translation of) megilat esther last night and mr smear is dressed up - wildly successfully, especially the scar which he did himself - for a day in which we are following mordechai's edict to the letter, destroying our enemies before they can destroy us.

sunday night was a lot quieter than saturday night or sunday (i'm obviously not speaking on behalf of those who've been affected, an ex-coworker of mine lives next to a building that was struck, and another missile landed next to mr smear's school, and iran is using cluster bombs again, which is a real war crime), and i got up yesterday somewhat in shock at having rested. it was mostly a work day, which was weird, but i did manage - between attacks - to get to the store and buy a "mickey mouse" cable so that i could set up a mesh network because switching from wifi to wifi was driving me nuts.

unfortunately, the speed of my now-stable network is disappointingly low :(

i got mr smear to come upstairs to our friends, where he and their daughter got on well but the younger son was having a very emotional evening... us adults had a reasonably good time, though. and gd stayed downstairs and got a bit of a break.

oh, yeah - the technician arrived yesterday morning to look at the electric hob, which was playing nicely, of course. he fiddled with the triple-phase outlet, hopefully it'll remain stable.

i'm going to be diving into work soon. i'm very disappointed about the state of my hair, which was supposed to be cut on sunday evening. i'm sporting harry potter vibes of my own :P

stretched

 i'm pretty tired. it was a good day, but very long.

after mr smear left for school, i made this (gd won't let me post it, i think she's being paranoid):

which reminds me that i thought of another one in the middle of the night, but didn't write it down and forgot it :(

first thing on arriving in the office, i apologized to our client on behalf of "my team" for making him wait for me yesterday.

a lot of learning stuff, still more onboarding (finally got the big stuff done with some help from IT).

it was nice to be able to pop back home for leftover lunch.

a few conversations getting to know people, a few very awkward moments (that i made awkward).

i came to find my son's hair cut (gd did it this afternoon), and his homework done, and then i shaved and showered and we watched some more a-team over dinner and i got a bit carried away with dessert (the jalapeño pretzels and dried mango), and i've got stuff to do and i'm too tired.

good night.

procrastination

 ha ha. today was not about preparing for tomorrow's interview.

i mean, i *did* do some prep work, but a large chunk of the day was spent getting to the haircut, getting the haircut, and getting home, and although i napped for a lot of the haircut itself i was so tired when i returned home that i barely had it in me to shower to rinse my hair before passing out on the couch for half an hour...

and then i had to take mr smear out for some exercise and fresh air. it was a pleasant walk to the library, but the way home was mostly him complaining about being tired and sore. i'm wondering if his muscles have atrophied over the course of the past couple of weeks :/

lots of dishes, and the last channukah candlelighting, dinner (watching the original highlander movie, the common sense media reviews did not prepare us for the homosexual slurs and other colorful sexual language), and getting mr smear into bed, and reading a particularly scary chapter of the ocean at the end of the lane, and then more dishes, and then...

i dunno. i think i'm going to bed early tonight and hoping for the best.

slow day

 yesterday:

mr smear and i are getting into a much healthier homework groove.

i finished reading blindsight yesterday:

blindsight is mindblowingly ambitious, and it does a damned good job of delivering. having said that, there're some intense sequences that i just had to allow myself to not totally follow, and i'm sure that i wouldn't have been nearly as impressed if i wasn't already deeply fascinated by a lot of the ideas watts has stitched together.

i started reading the first percy jackson book yesterday (mr smear's on no. 5 already), and it's really good.

a surprise intro interview in the evening, i felt like it went well but they haven't got back to me yet.

mr smear's punishment was over, so we finally continued watching awakenings.

i played disco elysium until around 1am.

today:

i actually slept pretty well last night, and i had a couple of intense dreams. unfortunately, most of the morning was me still half-asleep and in a dream state, with every act a struggle...

mr smear wanted to go to school on his own, so until gd dragged me out the house to accompany her to the hairdresser i alternated between napping, reading percy jackson, and watching more jujutsu kaisen*. 

* so far, nothing too crazy for mr smear

while gd got her hair cut, i nursed a coffee and mostly stared out the window... primarily because my eyes were giving me trouble. it looks like ocumetrics is finally doing human studies...

the only other outing i had today was being sent to pick mr smear up from school with umbrellas because we were worried it might rain. for the rest, i basically did very little.

mr smear's homework was tough, but not unpleasant - i struggled to explain to him how to translate a multidimensional graph into various average calculations, and he struggled to understand, but we got through it eventually, and in good spirits.

then we finished awakenings, with lots of feelings all round.

it's been a bit of an uncomfortable evening: i watched random shit on youtube and played minesweeper challenges, when i should have been doing pretty much anything else. i should be reading, or playing a proper game, not this time-killing bullshit.

the relief pt ii

 i left work early yesterday to walk to mr smear's friend's place, where i found him and two other kids midway through guardians of the galaxy. so i guess that's a thing, and i bought the first movie so we can all watch it together.

we enjoyed our walk to the mall, by which time mr smear had decided that he was really hungry so - thinking we had time - i ordered a good hummus meal (with salad and chips and falafel) and we set to. but then we ran out of time, and i had them pack up the leftovers (really not a lot) and rushed to find the hairdresser.

the hairdresser experience was excruciating. i don't like the vibe, i didn't like the woman wet-barking-coughing throughout her pedicure, i never like having to intermediate between gd and a hairdresser when describing a haircut, or mr smear's demands not making any sense, i found the woman trying to help me by dragging a wobbly table with a glass bottle on it so that it smashed all around my feet unhelpful, i didn't like the fact that neither of the hairdressers seemed at all interested in cleaning up the mess, i didn't like having to explain to the hairdresser that the obvious chunk of hair missing from the back of his head wasn't perfect, and i hated paying NIS 100 to experience all of the above, plus walking my kid out with a shit haircut.

mr smear and i caught a bus home, i finished the leftovers and although late, the rest of the evening was good.

except for bedtime and the night, because he kept turning his bedside lamp on at all hours and shining it into his face to prevent scary images when he closed his eyes, which straight-up prevents him from falling asleep.

today:

i caught up a bit of sleep during the night, but there were some sleepless chunks, too. and a dream that involved camping in some kind of ghost town with joe rogan 🤔

i bought mr smear the first percy jackson book this morning, and so far he's super into it.

i took the morning nice and slowly, only really interrupted once by a call from mr smear begging me to let him install chatgpt on his phone because he really wanted to talk to someone, and i hadn't accompanied him. i keep thinking about des bishop on mindfulness.

i went to work, arriving just in time to hear the story behind miyacholaleynu. after an emotional rollercoaster, i rushed out to get to the school in time for a different kind of emotional rollercoaster, our meeting with the team.

firstly, it was a completely different vibe and experience from his previous school. but secondly, the shit we heard made us deeply concerned that he's on his way back to his previous school. not only has he been pretending to the teachers that he can't understand a word of hebrew, and not cooperating during his lessons, but he's also been skipping art lessons (?!?!!), in addition to using the forbidden teacher's computer and looking up horror. these are all red lines for a school that so many kids fight for the privilege of attending, and we are literally at wits' end.

i grabbed lunch and returned to the office emotionally drained. the conversations over lunch were interesting, though. the rest of the afternoon was essentially me doing something that i haven't had to do for months, and really hitting walls (the whole ecosystem of gpu drivers is awful).

eventually i left the office and came home, just in time for dinner and a very difficult family meeting, followed by more of the same when speaking to my mom.

when i put mr smear to bed, i physically removed his bedside lamp from his room and told him that the scary images he sees when he closes his eyes are his brain punishing him for feeding the scary wolf. i advised him to spend his pre-sleep time visualizing good experiences with his teachers, proud moments, and literally getting his hands dirty in his arts class and enjoying it.

at the end of the day, if he ends up getting chucked out of the arts school it will be thoroughly tragic, and we'll just have to live with it, and there will be nothing we haven't tried to help him avoid that fate.

it took me a while after putting him to bed to figure out how to lock all the playstation accounts with a code and prevent him from creating new ones, and then i tried to continue working but the machine i needed was offline, and then i spent a lot of time catching up on instagram messages, and now it's midnight and i'm probably going to go to bed very soon.

common ground

 it's been a long ass-day and i'm exhausted, but i'm sure i won't have time to post anything tomorrow so i'm going to jot down what i can before i crash:

i accompanied mr smear to school this morning, then hopped on a bus to the post office to pick up a package for gd.

i was on my way home this morning from dropping my son off at school, it's a beautiful morning and the world feels a whole lot more right than it did just a few days ago.

and then, out of nowhere, my brain started pulling up flashes of trauma from the past two years. not the horrors of october 7th, not the endless sheltering from rocket attacks, not the immeasurable loss of our soldiers, not the endless defending ourselves from all the lies, but the "friends" who turned out to be evil scum. the traitorous jews who think that our enemies would spare them if they promote their evil agenda.

i don't know if there will ever be a reckoning. terrorists, jihadists? we know why they do the evil that they do. but those who support and are complicit in their evil? you're worse human beings than the terrorists. at least they have *some* integrity.

on my way to work i arranged for a technician to come and check out our washing machine, which has been leaking :(

i spent the work day jumping between interesting things, getting some minor stuff done along the way. the biggest and most surprising elements of the day were meeting a bunch of the new people and finding lots of different common grounds.

oh, and i reviewed and discussed the investigation results from our security company, it was satisfactory but we're still going to try to bring it in-house.

for a couple of hours between happy hour and me getting home i felt painfully bloated. but only for a couple of hours. i don't know why.

i rushed out a bit late for my hairdresser's appointment, i ended up five minutes late but it was alright. the haircut itself was good, and i only nodded off a couple of times (i tried really hard not to). the poor guy can barely understand english, never mind hebrew, so our attempts at small talk invariably resulted in him holding up his translation app to record me asking questions or making comments that really weren't important :P

although gd had a really rough day with mr smear and his homework, my experience in the evening was pretty calm. once he was in bed, i sat down to get some work done, which took about an hour and a half. i'm not quite sure what i've been doing for the hour since then, but i'm almost done with my chamomile tea so i guess this is it for now.

...

i'm a teensy bit paranoid because i either cut myself on, or got a splinter from, a hand grip on a bus this morning :/

a big bigtalk talk

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

feedback loop

 my mom's arriving in less than a day and a half! so now i'm starting to worry about how and when we'll all be getting sick as usual. i'm taking antihistamines and hoping for the best.

...

saturday night:

the deployment took quite a while, and i was very grateful to have asked for my coworker's support - not only did i need it, but my boss mysteriously bailed on us for a "meeting" just as we got underway. anyway, it was ultimately successful and our customer didn't have much downtime.

yesterday:

i started yesterday pissed off because i hadn't realized that our security team had booked me for an early meeting and it threw my plans off. the meeting itself wasn't interesting, but our new devops guy was deeply concerned about something that's not a real problem yet (and it'll be good news if it becomes a real problem), so the boss and i had to talk him through it...

we had lots of new people in the office, we're definitely growing!

a large chunk of the work day was spent getting our workshop set up, and it felt like we were quite successful. i rushed home to take mr smear to the end-of-year class presentation, and along the way got stuck into helping a coworker do a deployment that neither of us was prepared for 🤦

a script i asked him to run managed to break things, and by that stage we were running late and i had to abandon him to take mr smear to the school - i was quite relieved this morning to learn that he managed to come right eventually...

the presentation was awkward, and mr smear was being weird and annoying while i thanked his teacher and made it clear that we're praying she'll continue on next year (a lot of the teachers are quitting, and she apparently hasn't decided yet).

then we waited forever in a line for cotton candy, which really made his day, and then we came home and i worked some more.

mr smear and i had dinner (gd had prepared it before leaving for her haircut), and we mostly had a good time. then i watched some news and it sounds like the "ceasefire" with iran might end soon, so we prepared a ready-bag and hopefully we won't need it.

today:

i didn't sleep well, but i didn't have a particularly bad night, i guess. and it was a pretty relaxed morning.

work was a complete mess of back-to-back meetings, surprises, and overlapping demands. i took one of the new guys with to pick up a sumsum salad lunch, and discovered that he's just come back from a year and a half at columbia university - what a shit-show (O_o)

one of the security team sent me a very sweet message out of the blue to say that she'd put me up for employee of the year because of how helpful i am, which i found touching. then i had my one-on-one with my boss (which was just a one-on-one, i explained that i'd been concerned because the calendar event made it look like an HR intervention), and i was caught completely off-guard by the praise and appreciation, and we were both happy with the mutual feedback by the end of it.

and with all of that stuff going on, gd sent me mr smear's report card which - aside from some funny remarks about his lack of interest in a couple of subjects - was surprisingly positive across the board. we rewarded him with a day of no homework and alternating half hours of screentime, which he was really stoked about.

the end of the day was extremely frustrated, as everything that had worked in our little workshop mysteriously died and we ended up leaving pretty late because it took forever to get everything functional again. and i was so excited to get everything functional that i forgot to check if one of the attempting fixes actually worked :P

the evening was good, with only a minor peep from mr smear after bedtime. i did some work, and was going to do some more when i realized that i'm starting to fall apart, and i wanted to get this all down before crashing.

a pretty full day

 i *did* look at the PR last night, and was relieved to find it short and not very interesting.

i think i slept pretty well last night - i'm a bit fuzzy now - but the morning was more rushed* than i'd planned for and i left for work having had to skip a few steps.

* it involved a massive argument, but a very unusual one revolving around how we all deal with each other when we've all been influenced (or brainwashed) by too much internet.

i left the office just before our daily meeting to accompany gd to the specialist appointment for her toe. as we arrived at the hospital i realized we'd forgotten to bring the health insurance authorization, which is a real headache to sort out afterwards. while we waited, i video-called mr smear (who was home sick and watching youtube videos behind our backs) and instructed him in hunting through our documents, and was extremely pleased when he found what we were looking for! and then even more relieved when the receptionist informed us that he could just send a picture of it, so i didn't have to lose another half an hour to an hour picking up from home and waiting to deliver it... anyway, i was grateful and proud.

it was quite a relief when the doctor informed us that gd's suffering from a recently understood (since 2010) injury that women (with their longer and thinner toenails than men) sometimes suffer from. he explained it, and that we've caught it relatively early, and hopefully the treatment he's prescribed will be effective. and if not, we'll talk surgery. i really hope the topical cream does the trick 🤞

my work day was all over the place, but mostly positive. i left early and walked to gd's hairdresser, and although it cost double what i wanted to pay, it was definitely a quality cut and the overall experience (minus one of the other hairdressers being borderline abusive to his dog) was good. not including me falling asleep in the chair and then being asked - groggy - whether i was happy or not :P

oh, i guess their toilets are a bit dodgy, too.

anyway, i walked out into a beautiful evening, and thoroughly enjoyed my bus ride home (good trance music, and i found myself swaying to make the floor-glitter (whatever it's done with) move in trippy patterns. i got home in time to eat quickly with my family, and then dived into some unfinished work between getting mr smear into bed and tonight's houthi attack and going rollerblading.

by the time i should have been getting ready to leave, though, i just didn't have it in me. partially because i felt too tired and a little sore, but mostly because i felt like i was on the verge of a breakthrough. so i continued instead, and when i gave up on the AI helping me (after hours of being sent around in circles) i found some useful hints via a google search and *finally* managed to fix the first issue (out of two)!

just then, my coworker sent me a link to a PR because she'd figured out how to do something i'd struggled with an put aside a couple of months ago. it seems her prompt-fu is stronger than mine :/

i turned my learning into an article, published it (with a couple of side quests along the way), killed a large, loud bug that flew past my head and settled on a curtain (that i couldn't identify if you paid me), consumed internet garbage (links from copywriter, we're clearly diverging politically), and it's creeping towards 2am and i think i'm done with my day.

revelation

i'm too tired to write much down, and i'm driving a lot tomorrow. lemme just drop some notes.

yesterday:

mr smear's last day of school before the two week holidays. i finally remembered to move the furniture around so that gd could cut his hair in the afternoon before leaving for work. i struggled to make an appointment for her foot :/

i got to the office and took the opportunity to have coffee with someone, and he's doing what i think most people would describe as a dream job. (there're a few of those with us)

while i was explaining what i'm working on, we had a really exciting moment of inspiration (we're both into gaming and simulations) that chained into a podcast one of my bosses suggested and that led to a couple of really exciting conversations (with some other bosses). in addition to that, we had a retrospective during which i managed to connect a whole bunch of dots and received a literal "amen". and then, just before leaving the office but after managing to get something really tricky working, i overheard my lead grumbling (very loudly) and i literally took command of the situation and told him how we were going to handle it - in that moment it felt like a weird but significant shift in power took place.

i like working in an environment where our power structures are fluid, and i especially like being a part of an organization that might be making a sci-fi fantasy i've had since i was a teenager become a very real thing. and it's interesting to be feeling so aligned and in the right place when the beginning of this very week started off with me feeling frustrated and out-of-place.

i was super-excited by how the day had gone, but it wasn't over. after dinner chatting with gd and mr smear (they'd already eaten by the time i got home), i still had some work to do - it began with teaching one of my coworkers how to deploy something, but something went wrong. and then i learned that what i'd thought was working perfectly was missing an important piece of the puzzle.

today:

i slept rather poorly last night, mainly because the new pillows we bought suck.

it took me a while to get my day started. gd went to her sewing lesson and i left mr smear alone to go get my hair cut in a very fancy place. it's not an amazing haircut, but it's okay. gd's happy with the front but hates the back ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i didn't realize how much longer her lesson would be, so i sat around having coffee and listening to a podcast and reading random articles for a while, then rushed home when i couldn't get hold of mr smear (his phone was on silent) to pick him up and drag him out to join me and gd on a quick shopping mission... but to be honest, most of the time was spent in the harry potter pop-up store and with much enthusiasm on his part :P

we'd been trying to arrange a gift for our kibbutz cousin, who we're going to see tomorrow, and just as we left and were waiting on a bus i had an idea, said goodbye and rushed off to the sarona market where i found some south african sauces and spices, along with some of the saborito hot sauce range!

it was a great haul, albeit quite expensive.

the afternoon was spent eating delicious food, helping mr smear with his homework, and enjoying a glorious breakthrough with the work problem. i've handed over a working solution to my coworkers and in theory should be able to take sunday and monday's vacation without interruption ^_^

mr smear and i went to shul, and between the service itself and the walks there and back it's become a really nice way to close the week / start the weekend. after kiddush and a nice chat with my mom, we watched an episode of the simpsons, had a fun shower / teeth / bedtime ritual, and gd and i have been doing nothing ("parallel play" :P) since. but i think i'm going to go to bed very soon.

oh, look - i wrote a whole bunch of stuff.

fucking tuesday

 well... i was about to go to bed, i was falling asleep on my feet, when we realized that one of the key accomplishments of the day was for nothing - we lost a bag of t-shirts that we bought at the shuk this morning.

so now i've played some more inscryption, and i'm writing this up, and then hopefully i'll manage to get some actual sleep. last night i ended up playing final fantasy vi for about an hour after posting...

...

firstly, my cold / flu / whatever has been slightly better today, but still not great. it was rain weather, but fortunately not boot weather. after dropping mr smear off at school - with him having had a pretty good morning, and repeating his affirmation without hesitation, and being much more healthily social with his friends on the way to school than usual - gd and i headed to azrieli. we went through all the major clothing stores, and found nothing of interest, so we hopped on a bus to the shuk via dizengoff center (to pick up an emergency umbrella) and began the hunt.

we actually found what we were looking for pretty quickly. shirts for mr smear, shirts for me (now lost), and three pairs of decent, i-can-go-to-work-in-these cargo pants (that i had quite a time trying on in their open-air fitting room), and then we picked up a cauliflower meal from the frena place and sat down for coffee, enjoying a nice chat with an elderly couple that was in mixed hebrew and english, and which gd managed to follow and participate in quite nicely!

on the way to the bus i realized that my payment for the cauliflower hadn't gone through, so i returned to have my card declined a number of times before discovering that i had (rather unusually) some cash in my wallet. the ride home was consumed by me on the phone to my credit card company, learning that - once again - i blew straight past my limit by a lot and now i'm blocked for the next few days.

i really don't understand the point of the limit if they're only going to shut down my card way after i've spent too much money.

i mean, i kind of get it, but it's wrong and gross.

anyway.

i picked up mr smear from school, and on the way home we were treated to the sight of a jackal jumping out of the hedges at the park and racing right past us. which reminds me - one of the jackals by our apartment tried to start a howl in the middle of the night, and all the other jackals just ignored him so he dropped it 😂

we spent the next couple of hours doing his homework, which was at least a better experience than yesterday's attempt. slow going, though, and gd and i were horrified to discover that he doesn't know the order of the letters in the hebrew alphabet or the names of the months in the hebrew calendar.

WTAF.

after his "play therapist" arrived, i took a bus to the barber shop, chatting with one of ze germans about a project he wants me in on (which i can't be in on, officially). the haircut experience was pretty good, overall, although it had its awkward points: my "usual" barber had been the person i'd made the appointment with over the phone, so he knew that my first pick was someone else, the guy who did my hair did a pretty good job, though i ended up covered in hair and i had to ask him to fix something rather obvious, and my card was declined so i had to mission to find an ATM.

i waited so long for the bus home that i ended up walking instead, and i arrived home in time to shower and sit down to eat and watch the simpsons.

inspired by a chat with my mom, mr smear went to bed reading the hobbit graphic novel, which is very  exciting!

...

i started the day posting the following:

gaza-lighting: when you try to wipe out the jews in their own homeland, but after you've been defeated you occupy their territory and culturally appropriate their entire history in order to turn it against them, while raising your children as "martyrs" to complete your initial attempt to destroy them, claiming that *you're* indigenous and occupied and under threat of genocide.

("palestinians" are egyptians, jordanians and syrians who were abandoned in israel by their countries in order to use them as pawns in their long game of destroying israel. just to be clear, i'm very happy living with and alongside non-jewish israelis who accept our sovereignty and democratic rule of law. i don't feel the same about anyone who refuses that.)

what's happening with trump and netanyahu aligning to give hamas an ultimatum on returning the hostages on saturday is extremely exciting. this feels like what we should have been feeling the entire war - like america knows what's up and which side they're on - and while it may be too late to help most of the hostages it seems like it's on time to turn this whole ship around.

wacky wednesday

yesterday:

the interview didn't go well. it didn't go badly, but it definitely didn't go well. when it came to the technical part i was really unfocused, and all over the place - "all over the place" has really become my standard mode.

...

i was just saying to gd this morning that i've been riding between the edge of burnout and being burned out for a very, very long time now. it doesn't just make things tougher when they're not going smoothly, but it also makes me really unmotivated and demoralized.

...

i walked home feeling uncomfortable about my performance. i worked through some of mr smear's math homework with him, we had dinner, and while he got ready for bed we discovered a massive mold bloom in his bedroom so we had to work to get rid of (most of) it before he went to sleep.

by that stage i was completely done, over it, and most assuredly not in the mood to go rollerblading.

i put some time into preparing my laptop to be formatted (backing things up, primarily), then joined gd in watching some more beetlejuice beetlejuice. i'm not not enjoying it, but i'm not exactly engaged, either, and we keep falling asleep. still infinitely better than venom: the last dance.

today:

another weird day.

i woke up feeling very anxious about everything, took mr smear to school, and as i returned home received a phone call from the manager of a recycling site. amusingly, it turns out that while my complaints about the sites i've looked for are valid, there's a large site literally across the road from our apartment. with a sign. the only reason i didn't find it is because its google map pin is about 500m south of the place itself 🤦

i continued preparing for the great format, while gd worked on dusting and sorting mr smear's shelves (that's a hell of a lot of work, it hasn't been done in forever - possibly literally), and i was very pleased and relieved to receive a message from the company i interviewed with yesterday informing me that they'd like to proceed.

gd finally cut her hair short(ish), it's a lot of money but she's much happier, so... 🤷
(i don't really care much about hair, but i do prefer hers shorter)

i eventually took a bus to the office, and sat down with the CEO for our exit interview. it went well. we had lots to talk about, and in addition to giving me very positive feedback he and the CTO are being very helpful when it comes to the next steps and finding another gig.

and i can use my desk and equipment until the end of the month, which is extremely useful.

i then demonstrated my laptop's formattedness to the CTO, had an informal chat with him, and began the agonizing process of reinstalling the machine for personal use.

OMFG.

the reinstallation has taken many hours, and it's still not complete. i have, however, just managed to get the exercise code back to where it was on monday evening.

two of my coworkers (now ex-coworkers, whatever) came in to the office as well, and we ended up talking for a very long time, until it was dark and we remembered that rain was expected and we rushed out to get home before the downpour.

fortunately i didn't get caught, just lightly drizzled on. i had a long conversation with horseman about the game idea, then found that swordschool had added notes to our shared doc, and i'm pleased that we're all seeing value in this, even if we're not necessarily seeing the same value ^_^

we watched curious archive's the evolution of absolutely everything over dinner, and it's stunning.

mr smear's bedtime was alright - not excellent, but alright - and gd and i watched some more beetlejuice beetlejuice, and now i'm writing this down while messing with configurations and thinking about going to bed.

dental and rocket drama

[in case i miss a few, i'm typing this on my dell, and for some reason the keys aren't always registering] 

yesterday:

i left for work early to preemptively make up for gd's dentist appointment. i was pissed off about the code review issues - the clear conflict of interest - but i was determined to find a reasonable solution so i rewrote my changes on top of my coworker's branch, and opened a PR for him.

i don't feel like he appreciated that as much as he should have, but whatever.

for my second task of the day, it took a while for me to understand what i was meant to be doing but by the time we stopped for lunch i'd at least made some progress. lunch was good (gd's vegan cottage pie leftovers), and i left earlier than the estimate i'd asked the transport app for in the morning.

amazing how suddenly there was no way to get there on time.

fortunately, i registered that a bus that was supposed to have passed already was so packed that it was delayed, so i managed to squeeze myself in and arrived at the dental clinic just in time to help mr smear out the taxi and upstairs.

i had absolutely no bandwidth for work while we waited, and we were there for two hours. it was really good that i was there, though, because i had the list of things that gd kept forgetting to tell the dentist and we managed to get her on the same page regarding how much gd's been suffering and how urgent this treatment is.

also, i came up with an idea for a hairdresser business that gd could manage and we're both quite excited by the possibilities!

the ride back to work, during rush hour, took another hour. i arrived in the office just in time to help my coworker out with merging my changes and his, and then everybody else started leaving so i left too, doing a little grocery shopping along the way.

i was completely done by the time i got home. after dinner and getting mr smear into bed, i turned in myself.

today:

and woke up to the siren at 4.45am. gd hurt herself jumping out of bed, and between her and mr smear's bound foot we couldn't make it to the shelter, and simply stood outside our front door in the stairwell for five very cold, very uncomfortable minutes. recently a building collapsed after being struck, so after we got back inside i was haunted by the idea of us being crushed to death...

i stayed with mr smear for about an hour because he always struggles to get back to sleep, so i ended up with a very sore back myself.

winning.

at least by the time he woke up for his return to school his foot was feeling much better, so we unbound it and he was fine the entire walk to school. then i returned home to pick up gd, we went to the clinic to find out what was happening with her psychologist authorization, then caught a bus to the dentist.

on the way i had a great idea for gamifying property listings, so i wrote it up before coming to lebowski for a coffee and to post this.

i'm sore, i'm tired, and i'm praying that gd's session is going well and that the rest of the day and weekend will be at least relatively smooth.

the first of three

 i honestly don't know what i did yesterday, although some of it was dedicated to getting started with the google maps API and some of it wasted on trying to push something to a personal repository from my work computer (it's complicated by the fact that we use a special SSH agent for work).

in the late afternoon (relatively, for winter time) mr smear and i went out for a walk. he wasn't too into it (as usual) until we agreed to get some vegan hamburgers, but the state of the burger king toilets put me off completely so we walked around until rainbow opened (5pm, just as it got dark). the walkabout until then was nice, and we had some cool moments.

dinner itself was excellent, we both ate too much and enjoyed it immensely. then we picked up a meal for gd to go, and walked home, and i was really sleepy. i ended up crashing on the couch and going to bed early again.

...

i slept alright last night, although at one point i was restless and found myself on a thread about "unmissable" games, which led to me purchasing three new games this morning on steam's winter sale: planescape: torment, journey, and what remains of editch finch.

i'm very excited to try them.

...

the problem money finally arrived in our south african bank account, so we paid off the credit card debt and i initiated the closing of the account!! now the only outstanding debt is to my mom, it's a huge amount but we're finally able to start chipping away at it.

...

gd and mr smear accompanied me to the barber shop. i thought my usual guy would cut my hair - the guy whose haircuts gd doesn't like, with the ex-saffer mom so we have fun conversations. instead, it was someone who appears to be new - he's not mentioned on their website - and he was awkward, and he misunderstood me when i said i needed the cut to look professional which made things more awkward.

anyway, at the end of the day his cut satisfied gd, so we're good.

we continued down the road so that gd could start the process of getting her vape device fixed, and then further down to the mall. aside from using their restrooms, we were pretty much in-and-out and on our way home again. we stopped at home for about half an hour, then all left to take mr smear to his therapy session.

gd and i had coffee while we waited, and although i had plans for the half hour or so i ended up failing to troubleshoot why my computer couldn't connect to my mobile hotspot.

we picked up mr smear, took the light rail to azrieli, and mr smear and i had lunch* while gd shopped. and then we came home. the past hour or two has been all about mr smear getting through his holiday homework (most of it's done), and taking care of random chores.

* mostly vegan - the only way for their vegan shuwarma to be delicious is in their challah, which unfortunately has some egg in it :/

the price of teeth

 the game night at the mongoose's was fun last night, just a couple of us and mostly playing on the nintendo switch. his buddy gave me a ride home around midnight, which was very much appreciated.

i think i slept alright, kinda, but we were interrupted by another rocket attack from the houthis. fortunately, we all got to sleep late.

i spent the first part of the morning just catching up on social media, then we had a fight with mr smear about brushing his teeth (as usual), and once things calmed down the two of us had sufganiyot for breakfast and tried to play video games together and failed (i purchased an extra copy of little racers street, but we couldn't connect).

and then we headed out to the barber shop. they didn't have space for me but i now have an appointment for sunday morning. we walked down the road to the mall, and it didn't take long for me to get mall-people'd out. we stopped for lunch, which was nice, then fled outside to find coffee, and then we all agreed to just go home.

i needed that nap when we arrived.

i've done a lot of dishes this afternoon.

the biggest achievement today was setting mr smear up with his own bank account (kinda, it's in my name) so that he can begin earning compound interest on the little bit of money he's acquired, triggered by the fact that he's just lost a tooth, he's about to lose another one, and we haven't even given him anything for the last one...

gd's been freaking out and has been on the verge of a panic attack for days now because of her dental work. i'm trying to be supportive but it's very hard.

we lit the candles for chanukah and shabbat on a call with my mom, and the rest of the evening's been alright so far, with mr smear and me playing rounds until my brain started melting. it's a great game!