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.

entangled

i posted something this morning, and i'm disappointed that it hasn't got much attention:

nobody's talking about something that's really important: regardless of whether you've been retrenched or not, how do you trust an employer that would throw your fellow employees under the bus for the promise of cost cutting AI? how do you return to working for a company that did that to you? where's the incentive to work hard and behave as if you and your employers have a shared stake in the future of your company?

the accepted behavior of our industry leaders is nothing short of psychopathic, and nobody is calling them to account.  we've all just accepted that this is what business looks like now, and it's hurting not just the human beings who do the work and have families to provide for, but also the businesses themselves, and also our economies.

...

the pharmacy run was stressful. after waiting about half an hour, listening to music and knowing there were another ten numbers to go, i was suddenly yanked out of my reverie as i registered that my number was suddenly, unexpectedly up. i rushed to the counter, struggling to turn the music off (the button just didn't work) and get my paperwork out, only to find myself standing there waiting for someone who turned out to be a technician and not a pharmacist.

he was trying to fix the queue number system.

what followed was chaos, with a couple of us keeping track of the numbers because nobody - including the pharmacists - understand what was happening. as my meeting time got closer, i was approached by a woman who was also in a hurry and wanted to trade numbers.

anyway, that wasn't the worst of it. the worst of it was my credit card being declined, and having to set up gd's on my phone wallet with her validating it from her phone while the pharmacist became impatient and a large crowd was suddenly behind me. i managed to get it done in record time, but not without a high level of stress.

i managed to catch a bus and get home and join the zoom call one minute late.

...

after the daily, i ate a quick breakfast and headed to the office. it was a complicated day, with me untangling a mess of work that needed to be reverted, then replayed. i thought i'd done a good job of it, but around 5pm i learned that one of the reverts broke the CI pipeline and nobody (least of all me) could figure out how 🤦‍♂️

at least my sync with my mentor went positively, although a bit later my fellow contractor paid me a visit, distressed, because everyone he's spoken to about the hackathon has given him a different answer and none of them seem fair or right to him. i gave him some advice, but i'm glad i'm not in that position.

during the day it crossed my mind that there's a huge difference between standing on the balcony of a top floor of a very tall tower, and seeing a photo from it, so i walked home, picked up mr smear and walked back to the office to give him a tour of the four corners of our floor. he was thrilled, and it became a powerful lesson in perspective ^_^

we sat down to dinner soon after getting home, and watched the second third of little shop of horrors, which to my delight he's thoroughly enjoying and is completely invested. i must admit, though, i'm finding it more and more amusing that he often pauses to describe what's happening as if he's just had some deep insight or epiphany; like, he's just stopped us to demonstrate, unwittingly, that he understood what just happened on the screen 🤣

 ...

mozambicans: suffered the highest recent casualties, with at least five citizens killed during violent mob attacks and arson in coastal towns, displacing nearly 600 people.

malawians: hundreds forced from their homes, seeking emergency refuge in community halls and mosques while awaiting state-sponsored evacuation.

ghanaians: hundreds voluntarily repatriating via state-chartered flights out of johannesburg due to severe harassment and safety fears.

zimbabweans: facing intense harassment, unlawful evictions, and workplace discrimination as one of the largest migrant populations.

nigerians: dozens requesting emergency flights home, prompting government airlifts and formal diplomatic interventions.

somalians: small business and shop owners facing widespread looting, vandalism, and economic displacement.

congolese: refugees and asylum seekers experiencing systematic exclusion from public healthcare and targeted harassment.

if this is what's happening to black africans right now, it's not going to be long before it starts happening to white africans. and in the current political climate, it's probably going to begin with the jews :(

...

after saying goodnight to my mom, i discussed my fears with gd, which led to a conversation about how she's been handling the years since october 7th and her relationship with the news. along with everything else, i'm glad she's starting to feel a bit of relief and see the light as other nations begin to wake up to what's been going on under their noses all this time.

signed

i'm typing this while lying on the couch because my legs are giving me too much trouble sitting :/

so, first things first: i've just signed a contract with the contracting agency.

there are two reasons i'm not jumping for joy right now: the first, because i simply haven't internalized the fact that i've just accepted the offer i was praying for. the second, because prior to reviewing and signing the contract, we had an incredibly unpleasant end-of-day with mr smear.

...

the day started alright, and when i arrived at the school to pick up mr smear for his doctor's appointment i ran into his teacher, so i got some information about his behavior and she helped me get him out of there fast.

mr smear got into trouble yesterday because he was drawing "yo momma" jokes, which the other kids thought were funny but which his teacher did not. and in a different "didn't think they were funny" to how i didn't think they were funny when he repeated a couple of them to me. i mean, they had potential, but they just fell kinda flat :P

we picked up a coffee and an onion bagel to share (the bagel, not the coffee) on the way, and i told mr smear about an idea i had about fifteen years ago for QR codes. then gd joined us and we headed in to his appointment, and now he's on antibiotics for a staph infection and we have an appointment with a surgeon early wednesday morning.

i took him back to the school, and arrived home just in time to head out again to get headshots done by ze irish german. in addition to the headshots, we talked a lot and amidst everything else i was intrigued to learn that i'm not the only person who gets bad side-effects from cbd oil. i also thought of a way to bring him in to the QR code thing and he seemed receptive.

i returned home a bit before mr smear arrived, and i didn't a little prep for my 5pm interview. which didn't go as well as i'd like - it seemed to be going fine, until i got caught out on a thread behavior question that i just couldn't quite wrap my head around :(

then i got a call from the agency, and there was a bit of a negotiation, and then we had dinner and i received the contract and then bedtime was horrible and then i reviewed and signed and now i'm (intellectually, at least) being immensely relieved and grateful that my prayers were answered. and i've got until mid-january before i start so that's time to really unwind, because the last few weeks have *not* been a vacation.

sabotage and self-sabotage

 i had trouble focusing today, so i took a cup of coffee and walked to a local park, there was noisy construction going on there, so i walked further to the next park, which also had noisy construction going on, but it was less intrusive.

i would have enjoyed the experience of sitting on the bench, reading percy jackson and drinking my coffee, a lot more if i hadn't been harassed by mosquitoes. i'm pretty sure i got bitten.

the afternoon was pretty calm. when mr smear came home he did his homework quite well, and i read a bit more, and then there was drama with gd's daal recipe, and we ordered dinner, and then dinner was interrupted by a call from my aunt in los angeles, and then we spoke to my mom and sister, and then we watched an episode of dinosaurs, and then...

bedtime did not go well. mainly because we discovered that mr smear - who has been ignoring us and defiantly cutting his toenails insanely short - is now sporting two ingrown toenails and a really ugly infection 💔

i made some more progress with the assessment, at this point i'm approaching twenty hours and i think that's way more than is reasonable for a job application. having said that, i'm getting some experience with a whole new system and practice with golang after more than half a year of almost exclusively writing bash scripts 🤷

...

it wasn't all bad today, but it definitely wasn't a good day. in spite of lots of birthday messages and calls, which were really nice, this might be one of my least favorite birthdays in 45 years.

a new anxiety

 it's my birthday! it started off stressful, with mr smear and i needing to take a detour on the way to school to pick up antihistamines, and the pharmacy computers took a while to come online, and then when we finally got to the light rail we hopped on in the wrong direction...

and then i had a job interview that seemed to be going alright, when all of a sudden the interviewer rudely interrupted me to say "i'm out of time, goodbye" which made for a really shit feeling...

and then, because two of my possible references simply aren't responding, i gave my now-ex-boss who just fired me as a reference, and i'm now deeply anxious that this is going to fuck up my chances to get an offer.

so... happy birthday me :/

go, me.

 omg it's way past my bedtime 🤮

after getting mr smear to sleep, i sat down and started working on the assessment. on the one hand, i'm totally confident that i've understood temporal workflows (infinitely better than gemini 3 pro) and that i'm just about done with the most important parts... but i'm stuck in the last mile bullshit of something that really shouldn't be such a big deal :(

anyway, i guess i'm technically 45 years old now. i know i'm getting older because my greatest wish for the next year is for things to be more peaceful and boring than the last :P

shhhhhhhhhh 🤫

 i'm sitting here quietly in my bedroom because my family forgot my birthday's tomorrow and they're "secretly" making me card 🤣

today was pretty cool. this morning we watched batman begins, which of course we all enjoyed, and in the early afternoon mr smear and i rode / bladed to his school to test out the route together, most of which was fun.

one thing in particular got under my skin, though:

a ten year old just told me led zeppelin's whole lotta love is elevator music and now i need to figure out if that's an offense worthy of disowning him for 😒

the evening was chill, i've suddenly found myself on a drum & bass kick for the first time ever. and over delicious ramen* dinner we finished watching young guns, which was awesome.

* we're actively praying for positive news from the consulting agency soon 🤞

and now, getting ready for mr smear's bedtime and then probably putting some effort into the assessment.

half-and-half

so i did take thursday night "off", but i don't recall whether i went to bed early or not.

[oh! i went to bed pretty late, i just remembered witnessing some kids crashing into a parked car in the middle of the night and being grateful that a bunch of other neighbors ran downstairs to handle it]

i think i slept well, though.

yesterday:

after mr smear left for school, i settled down and got in a good couple of hours work on the assessment. relatively fun stuff, and now that it's functional and feeling good (i invested most of yesterday's time in UX) i've got the toughest but most interesting part of the challenge left, figuring out the right way to organize the temporal workflows.

we waited for mr smear to get home, then left to pick up gd's replacement vape cap* which precipitated a pharmacy visit, a stop to pick up onigiri, and a visit to our favorite nature store. we barely managed to get back to our neighborhood in time to do a last round of pre-shabbat groceries, and the rest of the afternoon was downtime.

* oh! on thursday we finally received what is hopefully the last document required for gd's cannabis license, so hopefully that'll be sorted out soon. so far the experience with the new provider has been infinitely better.

i spent most of my downtime rotting my brain (although mr smear and i did watch a couple of educational youtube videos together). mr smear spent a lot of his on a video call with a friend, trying to play games online together and failing. partially because i refuse to let him play roblox any more...

yesterday's challah-peño came out brilliantly (we used significantly more jalapeño than usual), and over dinner we watched the first half of young guns. as always, mr smear's initial response on hearing just the name of the movie was "noooo!", but once it was on he was immediately into it :)

after dinner there was a fight, but although it wasn't exactly my fight i ended up getting into it with gd, and after i got mr smear into bed we had an important talk about letting go that seems to have landed...

today so far:

i started reading the third percy jackson book before passing out last night, and woke up to resume it. it's off to a fantastic start! everyone woke up in a better space this morning, hopefully today will stay calm.

hi-caf

with all the cleaning over the past couple of days, my hands are really, really dry and cracking :/

...

i'm surprised that i slept at all last night, because i was still a bit caffeinated when i woke up this morning.

mr smear got himself to school, and i tried what the original airconditioner man suggested and managed to get the flaps flapping again without further cost 😤

i spent most of my morning being productive on the assessment. i also had that introductory chat with the company i was sure i wouldn't be interested in, and after hearing what they had to say i was honestly surprised to find myself liking the idea very much.

so now i'm up to five applications on the go... but i got exciting news in the evening: the consulting agency called to ask me for my references, so 🤞

i joined my previous (previous-previous?) team for lunch, which was great, and then followed a few of them to their offices for a really good cup of coffee before my coffee-date with an ex-coworker (newly ex). i was sure that something was up, but she was just being supportive and we had a really nice conversation.

once mr smear came home, i gave up on being productive and focused on helping him through his homework (and doing dishes). not only did we get through all his homework (and well, too), but i discovered simply sing which seems cool, though i'm not in a position to be putting down another $10 per month right now for the family plan.

we watched the second episode of dinosaurs over dinner, and then got through the bedtime ritual quickly enough that there was reading and talk-to-granny time, and then i finished reading chapter 24 of the neverending story and said a calmer good night, and now... now i'm trying to decide whether i have it in me to do some more of the assignment, or take the night off.

i'm leaning towards the latter.

procrastination

 i'm so over today. especially now, because i just had a fight with mr smear over bedtime protocol (an hour after his bedtime, forty minutes after i finished reading to him) that ended with both of us feeling shit.

but it could have been worse, i guess? we'll find out tomorrow.

...

today can be pretty well summed up by a distinct lack of motivation on my part. between yesterday's cleaning situation, and this morning's focus on the take-home assignment (which i've sunk a few hours into already), and then twenty minutes waiting by the school gate after mr smear was supposed to meet me outside, and then having to tail him to the library after he went by himself but decided to leave his phone at home*, and then overseeing his homework while helping gd out with dinner...

* okay, i'm actually really proud of that one. on the one hand, gd and i were freaking out because we didn't know if he'd even gone in the right direction. on the other hand, he felt confident enough to leave his phone behind, has actually decided that that was a good idea (!!!), and by the time i caught up with him he'd already exchanged the books and was on his way out.

[mr smear just came out to get some water, and i decided to let go (read: cave in) and hope for the best.]

at one point this morning, after completing a chunk of the project, i finally procrastination-cleaned the fans (i've been meaning to do that for days now) and then took a walk to sip a coffee and read a chapter of percy jackson. i wandered into the ridiculously overpriced neighborhood across the road, and decided it's a really awkward and unsociable area.

...

i can't decide if i should put everything down for the night, or dive back in.

professionalism

 godsdammit, today's been long. i accompanied mr smear to school because it was threatening to rain and he had to take sports shoes (tied in an inconvenient way) in addition to his rainboots (i'm not entirely sure he actually switched them for phys ed, he says he did) and an umbrella. thank god i was with him, because he started freaking out on the bus about how the shoes were tied, and whether he should be taking shoes at all, and how to validate his bus ticket when he has an umbrella in his hand 🤦

anyway, we survived the ride to school and he seems to have managed fine while there.

...

i got home, and triggered the take-home challenge along with two or three other application processes. then i spent an hour or two doing some studying for the challenge, and then the airconditioner cleaners arrived.

look. they did a great job cleaning, the airconditioners are definitely, thoroughly clean.

unfortunately, half the mold and grime they removed from the airconditioners ended up on the walls, the floor, and anything we'd accidentally left too close to them.

before they left, i showed them that the flaps aren't working properly, to which they responded that "that's just a function of time" even though the flaps were working just fine before they touched them.

and they left us with soooo muuuuuuch cleaning to do. and we found a couple more mold blooms we hadn't seen before. we're still not completely finished. i'm fucking tired. the skin on my hands is all messed up from the cleaning materials and constant hand-washing.

i wanted to go rollerblading tonight, but i haven't even got started with the solution design.

and i'm going to have to figure out how to fix those damned flaps.

...

scr called me up today, and we had a long chat about a potential partnership. it's kinda scary, but if everything falls into place it would be an incredible opportunity...

...

we took a break from cleaning to go to the dentist, where mr smear and i argued over what constitutes an "i'm hungry" snack and worked on his geography homework* while gd finally got her new tooth installed. for real this time!

* he has to learn the countries around the mediterranean, so i had him sketch a map for himself so he can practice offline. an unintended consequence of this is that i told him about italy being a boot, and he saw a boot, only not the boot 😂

after we got home, i got back into cleaning (and reading the incal) while gd made dinner and mr smear did the math homework, dinner was pleasant, and we've changed our sheets (we're using the new comforter), and mr smear is reading deadpool before bed, and i'm about to get ready for bed and then hope i have it in me to spend some time on the design.

or... procrastinate and dive into it in the morning. did i mention i'm a bit tired?

downturn

 well. i went to the offices, and i sat down and talked for half an hour. it was a pleasant conversation, i think, but it ended on a bit of a weird note and i literally couldn't figure out whether he's going to recommend me or not.

i mean, i really hope he does... i even ate additional pasta this evening...

...

during the interview, we talked about mr smear's school, and his comment (based on his son having gone there) was that it's a bit too individualistic. to which i responded that my son was a bit too individualistic before he arrived there. when i left, i spoke to gd and learned that, on track with that assessment, mr smear had got it into his head to use a marker to turn his face into a skeleton's, and was promptly sent off to the principal's office.

[gd and i giggling hysterically for a minute]

i keep imagining the principal keeping a straight face, as she asked him the following questions: in what class did you do it? what would your parents think? [there's a third question, but neither of us can remember it]

so this evening we had to explain to our son that there is a time and a place for everything... and that perhaps he might want to consider switching from film to theatre...

...

pre-dinner was rough. we had some homework tension (confusing questions about magic squares), though he did recover himself eventually and did quite well. but the downer was me receiving a phone call from the company that mr smear was with me for the interview, which i was certain i'd done really well in, to say that they were proceeding with other candidates.

that doesn't feel good at all.

bedtime was mostly good, though it was the second night in a row that mr smear made the final good night unpleasant, and now i'm processing shitty feelings and thinking about tomorrow morning, when i begin an at-home technical challenge that sounds like it might be complicated.

distraction

 yesterday:

yesterday got off to a busy start, mr smear went to school on his own (on his own by bus, which we only learned later) and we headed to bnei brak for an appointment for gd. the doctor could handle speaking in english, but gd did a great job of breaking her teeth and i was barely needed :)

we got off at the hospital stop to pick up some things on the way home, after which i spent some time preparing for an interview. the interview went well.

i chatted with my mom for a bit (mixed feelings: pride in my nephew for telling my niece what's what, sadness that she's been neglecting her older child while planning on bringing a new one into the world).

i dropped a return package off at the post office and then paid a visit to another clinic to confirm that we'd done the right thing when trying to book gd a followup appointment.

i did some post-interview "homework" (playing around with temporal), and then when it started getting dark i headed to the comic library - which i'd never heard of before - where i found mr smear engrossed in tokyo ghoul.

the library has a lot of interesting stuff, and i was pleasantly surprised to learn that residents have an all-access library membership, so we picked up a copy of the incal and two tokyo ghoul volumes and made our way home, with me investing some time in getting mr smear familiar with the landmarks along the way.

i decided to tell mr smear that i'm leaving it up to him to determine whether what he's reading is appropriate or not, and to talk to me if he encounters anything confusing or disturbing.

just before dinner i discovered that the dinosaurs tv series is on apple tv after all! so after mr smear got through his math homework, we sat down to eat and enjoy the first episode :)

it was an easy bedtime, and i fell asleep pretty easily.

today:

i slept quite a lot last night, and had a lot of strangely unremarkable dreams.

everyone's morning was smooth and positive, and i accompanied mr smear to school "just because". i came home for breakfast, and then gd and i walked to get mr smear's school logo printed on his shirts. on the way back we picked up a lentil soup, then i stopped for a coffee while gd visited the pharmacy, and then we stumbled upon a good place to buy a comforter (it's starting to get colder).

since we've been home, we've chilled, had soup for lunch, and i'm now doing a terrible job of focusing and being productive. it doesn't help that gd's watching 28 years later while i try to be functional...

...

and in an hour or so i'm off to a (hopefully) final interview for the consulting agency 🤞

nerves

i barely slept last night, not sure why.

i was supposed to supervise mr smear on the bus this morning, but we were so wrapped up in our discussion of how to tell jokes across different mediums (and the importance of panel layout, he's got strong opinions on swamp thing) that we auto-piloted to the light rail instead :P

i spent a couple of hours preparing for my phone screen, after which it turned out to be just a non-tech introduction. but it was positive nonetheless, and immediately afterwards i heard back from the outsourcing form, who's skipping a step with me and has invited me to what might be the final round! i'm legitimately excited about this one, i really hope it all comes together.

after that, my eyes were giving me trouble and i was feeling quite antsy, and i decided to take a walk with my kindle. i found a nice spot in a nearby park and read a little, but after a couple of pages i realized i just didn't have the focus. i walked a little further, found a surprisingly nice little fountain hidden away next to the park that i've never noticed in the three and a half years we've lived right next door, and then returned home just in time for a call from swordschool.

jesus, fuck, he's been going through some difficult shit. we talked for quite a while, so long that i almost entirely missed urchin's visit (we literally had a couple of minutes to chat before she left), and we're going to continue the conversation tomorrow. i'm planning on giving him a boost with one of his ideas and hopefully we'll enjoy some quick success 🤞

mr smear arrived around the time urchin left, and we dove straight in to math homework. well, he did - he didn't really need my help, so i got some of the dishes done.

mr smear has been repeating some mightily inappropriate shit recently, directly from his new friends at school. i'm trying to impress upon him, just in case, that friends don't pressure friends into doing anything they're not comfortable with, and that if he does find himself compromised, he needs to tell us so we can help him out of whatever shit he gets into...

a short while later, we all left for the hospital complex, picked up some meds and then accompanied gd to the pain clinic for her nerve block. after getting her ready for the doctor - which took a while, but much less time than usual - mr smear and i went through his hebrew reading homework. he did really well, but there were a couple of moments that reduced my patience, and then his behavior afterwards (he didn't want to do anything that wasn't on his phone, including not doing anything at all) reduced it further.

getting gd home after the procedure was pretty straightforward, and after a brief chat with my mom i took mr smear with me to go pick up dinner. some of the walk was unpleasant - my patience had pretty much bottomed out by that point - but most of it was us talking. a lot of the talk was about heavy stuff (aging, illness and death), which was fine except for the bit where i said something so heavy it upset him and i immediately regretted it...

we picked up... too much food. like, two of the dishes we could've left behind, and it was quite an expensive meal. having said that, the meals were delicious.

there were some negative feelings around bedtime (the usual), but otherwise it's been a smooth evening.

tomorrow morning i've got an appointment with the israeli employment service...

strangeness

 everything feels weird. i feel like i'm in some kind of routine of routine-less restlessness. each day different, but the same, and that's highlighted by the early sunsets and evening homework / dinner / bedtime rituals.

and the constant in-and-out of anxieties, some job-hunting related, some apartment-and-admin related, some apartment-hunting related.

...

the interview went very differently from what i expected, and i hope he follows through (he said he'd push me forward to the next step) because i might have been overly-enthusiastic during the goodbyes. it's an outsourcing firm, and the more he talked the more confident i became that it's a great fit for me. working freelance, essentially, but with a constant salary, and it being in the job description to focus on technical problems, develop domain expertise and not really have to worry about whether the client is actually successful or not.

mercenary, yes, but career mode mercenary.

...

after the air-conditioner cleaning, i informed the landlord who's now claiming that it's a cleaning problem, not a mold problem, which is completely insane. we're running the one in the living room at the moment, and it seems alright, but i'm nervous about mr smear having another breathing issue in the night.

at least i seem to have found a professional to do a proper clean.

...

i hopped on a bus to meet with my ex-boss. on the way, i snapped a photo of mr smear across the road, face buried in his phone screen. he's now been warned that i'm going to be trying to ambush him, and his privileges are on the line...

the meeting with the ex-boss went as well as could be expected, i suppose. he stuck to the lines he fired me with, but he did frame it a bit differently, and we discussed a whole bunch of uncomfortable stuff. at the end of the day there are some things he misunderstood (both in terms of what happened in the office, and in terms of what i actually do for a living), though it's too late for any of that to make much difference. and i do feel like he heard me regarding the impact of their bungling of the firing, and i got some clarification into some of the others' situations (it doesn't make their decisions better, but even if i think they're wrong at least i understand why they thought it made sense), and before we got up he offered himself as a reference.

i walked home, helped mr smear with his math homework (he's finally caught up to where he was originally pretending to have got to), we had a great onigiri / lasagne dinner followed by a chat with my mom, and then it was some more of the neverending story and me sitting down at my computer and having no idea what i want to be doing right now.

i should probably turn it off and read.

contamination

 i went to bed pretty soon after posting last night (i had one more cup of tea and read some more percy jackson).

around 2am, mr smear woke up coughing and choking, and it took a while before he was able to breathe normally and go back to sleep. i suspected it was related to the mold and the dusting we've been doing :/

the morning started off pretty well, and mr smear essentially handled the bus ride by himself. it was particularly nice watching him being responsible and putting his phone away after paying, and actually observing the world around the bus for once.

since i got back home, gd and i have been having a proper go at two of the airconditioners, and what we've cleared out so far is horrific. and never-ending. i hope i didn't get any of the cleaning stuff in my eye (i'm not sure). i hope it's now actually safe enough to run for a while...

i'm not sure whether i'm ready for the technical interview today, but it'll probably be fine. i have one goal for today: to try and find a way to explain manacher’s algorithm in a way that normal people can understand.

leftovers

a lot of today was taking up by multiple rounds of doing the dishes from yesterday (almost done), and eating multiple rounds of lasagne and onigiri leftovers (still plenty remaining).

gd and i cleaned the filters of mr smear's airconditioner, but then discovered too late that it needs an additional mold treatment :/

most of the rest of the day was spent doing interesting python questions. with a break at one point to read some more percy jackson and nap.

i took mr smear to school this morning, and he more-or-less handled the bus ride by himself (he needed a reminder from me not to get distracted by his phone). after school, he hung around with his friend for an hour and a half*, so long that it was dark by the time he got home and i was sent out to the station (*ahem*, the married "we" needed to go meet him). where i ambushed him, as he came out of the station with his eyes glued to his screen 😒

* it's a loophole he's using to get out of homework. but it's not really working.

...

he's in bed now, it's been a day. tomorrow's my interview, followed by a chat with my now-ex boss. i wonder if he'll surprise me with a real reason for stabbing me in the back and cutting me out of what should have been enough options to buy an apartment.

social

a couple of days ago i bought a couple of games that seemed like they would be fun to play with mr smear. unfortunately, mr smear tends to be contrary when it comes to game time - he complains that i don't play enough with him, but he usually only wants to play games with me when he's on downtime. he straight-up refused to give the night of the rabbit a try, and while i didn't want to give him shit for not wanting to play a specific game, i was frustrated with him for approaching it with a negative attitude.

while he played something else, gd walked in and sat down next to me to make a show of taking interest in it. i thought it was a bit too obvious, but as soon as his screen time was over he was hovering over me, getting very involved in the puzzle solving and eventually insisting on taking a turn at the wheel :P

gd invited our friends over for late lunch / dinner, and that entailed a shopping run and a lot of dishes. it also resulted in mr smear getting a lot more screen time than usual... but he did a pretty good job of playing host when they arrived, and after everyone had enjoyed a good onigiri dinner and he'd entertained everyone with goat simulator, he pulled out goodcritters and three of them settled in for a very serious game.

i cannot overstate just how big a deal that is!

the kids played until i was past everyone's bedtime, and they rolled out in a hurry to get home before the skies opened.

unfortunately, the incredible downpour began a minute after they left...

mr smear got ready for bed and went to sleep without further incident, which was pretty impressive all things considered, including the fact that he's still a bit traumatized by a scene from jujutsu kaisen (yuji's fingers being burned).

...

i feel like it's been a good weekend, and i feel relatively rested. regardless of how i feel in the morning, though, i'm going to have to do some serious interview practice tomorrow 'cause i need to impress a professional python expert (as opposed to a regular developer who uses python professionally).

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 mode

i couldn't keep my eyes open after posting, and went to bed pretty soon after.

i actually got some sleep.

i still woke up tired, though - even more than yesterday. i took mr smear to school, and joined him in being super awkward with his classmate who generally takes the same bus (and shares a desk with him).

i came home, watched another episode of jujutsu kaisen with gd, and then begrudgingly left to take my shoes for repair and accompany gd to the pharmacy. by the time we got to the pharmacy, i was feeling pretty bad (gd's also been feeling off the past day or two), so much so that both gd and i were worried i was going to faint. so i found a place to sit and a cup of coffee, and tried to recover in time for the HR interview.

we arrived home with ten minutes to spare, so i finished my coffee and gobbled down a protein bar (yummo's are really good) and logged in to the video call.

it was a good experience. i really like what they're doing and how they do it, and next up is a technical interview for which i *definitely* need to prepare.

i've spent the past couple of hours resting, watching made in abyss, and eating too many of the leftover pastries. i'm not learning. nosirree. but i must note that since the dramatic weight loss of the past couple of weeks, i seem to be hovering around 78kg which is amazing.

...

otherwise, it appears that mr smear had a test today that we didn't know anything about, and we're going to have to help him prepare...