recalculating

 today was a DAY. i managed to get some annoying admin taken care of after mr smear left for school, and sort out an impending price hike from my mobile carrier, and try to help prepare gd for her day ahead with the cigarette bugs.

just before i left the apartment, i pulled the trigger on my PR, knowing that my bulgarian support team was on holiday and praying it wouldn't break anything.

i was still extremely anxious on my way to work, but i got in touch with my mentor and managed - through a bit of blathering - to explain the situation. he, positive as usual, assured me that i'm doing great. he asked if i've verbally abused anyone in the office, or physically abused anyone in the office, and said that as long as neither of those things have happened and that i'm doing my best to operate as professionally as possible, i can stop worrying about my misjudgment hurting my employer's reputation (and therefore my standing with my employer). and that besides, everyone must be fully aware that i'm doing damage control on a system that has been left in utter chaos due to bad management... just like everyone else's.

so that was really comforting, and although i still have leftover anxiety, it's worlds' less than it was.

i came in to find my deployment successful, which was another relief.

then i was asked by one of my client team's how long my contract is for, to which i replied, somewhat evasively, that i don't really know. on the one hand, i'm learning a hell of a lot of what i'm supposed to be learning. and it's a great place to hone my craft with (somewhat) less risk. on the other hand, it's a really toxic situation. although apparently on par for the course, these days.

i discussed yesterday's achievement of disabling all of the garbage that was unknowingly being injected into each and every prompt with a couple of people, two of them heavy, experienced users of AI. not only was i pleasantly surprised by their finding my personal skill-sharing strategy intriguing, but they'd never known about the extra weight either and one of them asked me if i wouldn't mind giving a short talk to the group about it 😅

i spent some time crafting a message asking for help with the new data pipelines, got called in to consult on a language identification problem and was surprised to find myself effectively running the meeting, and then i left the office to return home for lunch, stopping by the supermarket on the way home and finding precisely the kinds of plastic containers i was hoping to pick up for gd, who was apparently up to her elbows in cigarette beetles.

i believe i have a handle on their life cycle, now. it looks like if we manage to, erm, contain the present situation, we should be able to put a proper stop to the next potential generation. unfortunately, gd's had to throw out an enormous amount of very expensive food, which is thoroughly distressing.

i think i may have mentioned that money's a little tight right now...

after lunch, i returned to the office and began redesigning the monitoring dashboard. i would spend most of the next four hours troubleshooting the results, half of that time refining my agents' troubleshooting and self-improvement skills. while the improvements after yesterday's cleanup were palpable, by the final stages i just wanted to tell the AI "don't be an asshole" even though i knew that that probably wouldn't be constructive :/

i also finally delivered that report that had been causing me so much trouble - once the product guy gave me the green light this morning, it took about six hours to run...

i received an unusually helpful answer to my plea for help, from a couple of guys i've worked alongside before. one of them was in the office and introduced me to the two people who can actually help me, who very luckily are also in our office. and now i know that the work i've been planning to do - AI-guided, of course - has been entirely wrong 🤢

once my dashboard was looking good, i made my way home, dropping off my bag and picking up my child (essentially rescuing him from the trauma of experiencing gd freaking out over the nuisance beetles all afternoon) and heading to the container store. we bought a bunch of stuff - it's a little more expensive than the supermarket, and not quite as high quality, but it was a bunch of different shapes that we needed - carried everything back home and then continued on to the supermarket again, picking up a bunch more containers there.

we got home in time for a take-out dinner (gd was in no position or mood to cook), watched casual geographic and learned about gay giraffes, which was awkward.

we chatted with my mom, but mr smear brought the vibe down considerably when he became uncooperative at shower time. then, to make matters worse, he decided he needed to toilet. for almost an hour. it was very late by the time he finally had showered and brushed his teeth and gotten in to bed. i don't have any idea where we're supposed to get the patience from.

it's been a day. i think i'm probably going to go to bed soon. i'm expecting to sleep a bit better, he said out loud and then instantly regretted it.

0.8

 i guess the day worked out alright, all things considered. gd and i are celebrating the 12 anniversary of our first (and only) date [i just got lost down a rabbit-hole for a while].

i accompanied her to her appointment, which we almost missed because although we arrived on time, it was four floors from the reception and it's a really slow elevator. as we walked in i noticed the doctor had a french tinge to her accent, so i asked if french was okay and from that point (especially after the two of them strongly agreed about how awful celine dion is) she and gd communicated perfectly well and i was only able to catch the gist of things.

so gd feels heard and understood, and we have referrals to further testing and suggestions of what might be going on.

we returned home, and then i left for mr smear's school where i ordered a lemonade at a coffee shop and tried to get some work done while i waited for him.

that was where the AI really began to lead me astray; i hadn't read the project's installation instructions properly, and it hadn't read them at all, and it started "fixing" things that weren't actually broken, each fix breaking something else in a slow-motion chain reaction.

when school came out, mr smear called to ask if he could go to his friend's place instead. getting to my dermatologist appointment from there was going to be complicated, with or without him, so i agreed and then made my way to the clinic.

i arrived with some time to spare for some more work. or, i should say, more running on a virtual treadmill. between my lack of sleep and the sheer boredom of what i was doing, i was pretty sleepy by the time it was my turn.

the doctor was quick, and pleasant. he's not concerned by the lump on my neck, but he's referred me to an ultrasound and a removal, so i'll look into that tomorrow.

from there to the bus i was falling asleep on my feet. i did get a bit of rest on the first bus, but was still groggy when i got off at the prescribed stop only to realize that that app had steered me wrong and made me get off two stops earlier than i should have, so i had to walk an extra ten minutes to catch the next bus :/

i arrived at the mall, had a chat with my mom, then went to the bathroom before finding a spot at a coffee shop. i stood at the urinal next to another man with a shy bladder, and the next few minutes were very awkward for both of us. at least *i* eventually managed to pee :P

the next hour or two were the most productive of the day. about halfway through i finally realized what i'd been doing wrong, restarted the day's effort the right way, and finally had things making more sense.

mr smear really didn't want to leave his friend's place when it was time ("we were about to go to the park!"), but i eventually got him to come down and we had a good time together on the way home - aside from when an old lady fell hard while trying to get off the bus, poor thing was on a walker and dressed up (too much heel, too little skirt) and we all felt really bad for her. i hope she's okay.

the evening was pretty smooth. i completed the work i was doing, mr smear easily breezed through the homework he'd spent an hour staring at yesterday, we watched some more of ready player one (omg it's so good!), bedtime was smooth.

now [yawns] i think it's time for mine.

the drain

 yesterday:

you know what's a surprisingly good feeling? when i arrive to pick up mr smear after 7.5 hours with his friend and he's clearly bummed out that their time is over.

the return home with was really fun.

it was an easy evening, i read some the colour of magic (we've restarted it, i hope he's ready for it this time) at bedtime and then the evening went into a bunch of random stuff, not least of which being writing up my earlier LLM experience into an article.

today:

i struggled to sleep last night.

the morning started off pretty well, and when mr smear left gd and i launched into removing the paintings from the walls and getting the screws / fisher plugs out. and realizing that *i* was guilty of mixing posidriv and phillips screws throughout the apartment :$

i took care of a bunch of other small things, and then left for the bank to organize a bank guarantee.

...

it's 2026 already. we have ai, robots, and a new evolution of CRISPR, but there i found myself, walking out of the bank after TWO HOURS signing arbitrary pieces of paper to acquire a document allowing me to promise my own money to someone else 😒

and then, OMFG.  just as i got on the bus to get to the office, i received an sms from the bank saying that my chequebook is available for pickup 😡

...

the bank experience really drained me. i got to the office, drank a coffee, and got back to working on my language detection model. i did that for an hour, then had lunch with the other dev who was working from the office, and then he left. i got some more work done before the only other person in the office, who was on the complete other side of it, lost his temper with someone on the phone. i tried not to eavesdrop, ending up suspecting that he'd been yelling at his kids :P

the work itself went sideways. first, when after two days of investment into testing this model, and some apparently good guesswork about some of the bigger languages (french and german, amongst others), i discovered that the model couldn't distinguish between english and russian. at that point, the mapping no longer mattered and i stopped what i was doing to investigate the existing solution.

that was when i learned that the elasticsearch language detection model isn't very reliable either, and that my client has a fair amount of garbage detections in its dataset. i also learned that i have a real advantage in evaluating language detections models because i'm familiar enough with quite a few very different languages.

so the model i've been evaluating is out, though i have infrastructure available to evaluate others (if i can find any reliable ones with labels), and i've established that there's no point in training our own model on our production data. i'm probably going to have to find out how n-gram language detection stacks up...

i left early myself and caught a bus home, authorizing mr smear to go with his friend to the comics library and on to his place. that made it easier for gd and i to go to the new apartment to sign the contract.

we were there for quite a while, it's looking considerably better, and this guy's really giving good vibes as a landlord. i didn't realize how hard it would be for him to grip a pen (he's very handicapped), and there were clauses that neither of us could figure out who should do what with...

we left with a key so gd and i can get started, cleaning it up and moving small things, and taking pre-inspection photos and organizing whatever fixes he missed.

i dropped my bag off at home, then walked to the square to wait for mr smear. he didn't need me to do that.

when we got home he dropped a bombshell - he and his friend watched the first episode of rick & morty today 🤦‍♂️

i fired off a message to his friend's dad - he's never seen the series - explaining that i understand that we'll never have full control, but that i'd appreciate it if his son understands that it's wrong and that he shouldn't share it with mr smear... he responded quickly and warmly, i hope we align.

mr smear has long hebrew homework due tuesday, so after a brief debrief on the rick & morty episode we got through a chunk of it and then had dinner, and then got through the shower/bedtime rituals (showering without a shower curtain again), and after getting mr smear into bed* i got caught up in getting gd's ipad upgraded, which led to some yak shaving in an attempt to free up enough space, which eventually led to an understanding that it's not possible to update the ipad software and apple's successfully coercing us to either abandon it or trade it in.

i fucking HATE apple.

* it took him forever to go to sleep, though

i'm absolutely exhausted, i think i need to go to bed. i hope i actually get some sleep tonight.

tempest

 i'm still in shock. whatever else happened today was entirely overshadowed by mr smear terrorizing the household from the moment he finished school until 11.15pm.

he took an hour and a half to get home, which is a thing he's been doing for a while, and it's now clear that he's doing it in an attempt to get out of homework.

he had actual homework to do today (technically yesterday, but he claimed to have forgotten what it was), due tomorrow, and after three hours of him FAing i told him - with gd's support for the very first time, which indicates just how over his behavior she finally is - that he wasn't eating dinner or going to bed until the homework was done.

lessons learned this evening: he really doesn't give a shit until there's a threat of violence, or violence. punishment doesn't bother him. and in addition to that, he has zero respect for anybody, least of all himself.

here's the weirdest part of it all, though: the evening was a complete nightmare, but any time that he did decide to focus and do what we demanded of him - actually try to answer the questions - the mood shifted completely as he understood the material and what was expected of him. even when he needed my help, our interactions were calm and positive, as if nothing horrific had taken place minutes earlier.

in my estimation, the actual time spent doing homework was probably between half an hour to an hour.

but the other six hours of "homework time"? just sheer bloody-mindedness and insanity.

and then gd made him dinner, and he brushed his teeth, and he went to bed peacefully as if it was just an ordinary night.

...

the early morning was alright, minus a bad vibe over something dumb on his way out, and i left on time for my new employer's end-of-year event, wearing my jacket, my new waterproof shoes and carrying my umbrella.

on the way to the light rail station, i traversed massive pools of water that even my shoes couldn't protect me from entirely. i arrived in petach tikva in serious rain, with quite a walk to the event. but i made it, everything was fine.

the event was a tad awkward as i'm the new guy and haven't yet fully onboarded, but i met a lot of nice and interesting people and mostly had a good time.

the food was good, too - even if i had to wait a considerable amount of time for the vegan plates to come out - and i was very pleased to discover that the brewery is vleishik so the only milks the barista served were plant-based alternatives :)

i left with my new co-worker who i know from two jobs back, and less than a minute after we left the building we got slammed with a sudden, heavy downpour and heavy gusts of wind. that lasted about a minute, and then everything calmed back down.

we walked to and boarded the light rail, and got to tel aviv pretty quickly. unfortunately, we discovered once we arrived that neither of us had validated tickets. that wasn't a problem for me - i just generated one from the app - but he had an issue with his rav-kav and had to ask for assistance, which resulted in him being fined. i advised him to appeal the fine - it's really unfair, neither of us saw anything on the platform that might have helped (not a machine, not a sign) - but he's so stressed about the time cost of fighting it that i ended up telling him to just let it go...

...

i finished reading the complete ballad of halo jones today. it's brilliant. with all the mr smear shenanigans, though, i didn't have much time for any of the stuff i'd meant to do :/

and now it's very late, and i'm starting to fall asleep.

preparation

 yesterday:

i did a little bit more work on my side project, but spent a lot of the day on leetcode practice questions, when i wasn't just reading or doing chores (gd and i spent a good chunk of yesterday dusting and de-molding mr smear's room)

i picked mr smear up from school again, and we walked to the center again, and we picked up his friend's mounted poster, which looked amazing.

we got it home, the homework went well, and we ate way too many pastries for dinner.

bedtime was a bit rougher than the previous two nights. of course. but it could have been worse 🤷

i started falling asleep during jujutsu kaisen, but then woke myself up as i getting to bed :/

today:

i got practically no sleep last night. i didn't feel terrible this morning, but i didn't feel rested, either. but the entire night was a combination of mental restlessness and the usual lower back / hip pains.

i took mr smear to school by bus this morning, demonstrating to him that it's considerably faster than the light rail. i took a walk through the mall on the way home - by accident, really - and then spent most of the day doing practice questions on leetcode again.

this evening's planning - which was originally for me to go to a job interview - became complicated by mr smear's friend's availability... after a "discussion" with gd about mr smear travelling by bus on his own, it was decided that he would come with me to the interview, and we'd go together from there to his friend's place.

on the way, i decided that if bringing my kid to an interview was a problem, i'd consider that a red flag. fortunately, it wasn't a problem at all, everyone was cool (including mr smear!) and the biggest concern was that he wasn't impressed by their snack selection :P

the interview went on much, much longer than anyone expected (2.5 hours), but by and large i got a good sense of how they operate (i like the approach) and i think they were happy with my performance (in spite of my arriving with no idea of their tech stack or what they really do), and i feel a good culture fit overall. i hope the feeling was mutual!

mr smear and i caught a bus to his friend's, who was delighted by the gift, but disappointed that mr smear had to leave directly (by this point it was 8.30pm already). we then raced to catch a bus home, wolf down dinner, and get mr smear ready for and into bed.

fortunately, bedtime was smooth tonight.

oh! and we had an entertaining chat with my mom and sister, who's just announced to the family that my niece is pregnant again. none of us know quite how we feel about that :P

...

right, these past two days have felt a bit nuts, and i can't quite decide what i'm going to do right now. on my mind: praying that these guys are excited about me and that i get an offer soon, and hoping that tomorrow's HR interview with a well-known outsourcing firm goes well.

today felt like a good day.

the (big) little things

 today had some pretty important achievements.

after mr smear left for school, i had breakfast so that i could take some ibuprofen for the leftovers from yesterday's migraine and registered for unemployment for the first time in my life.

then gd and i walked to the pain clinic. it took a while to get to see the doctor, but he was in and available and he sorted us out with the recommendation we needed. afterwards, while advising gd not to see an osteopath for her shoulder issues, gd said something and he suddenly registered - apparently for the first time - just how disabled she is. and that was when gd's floodgates opened, because almost nobody we've dealt with really gets it.

i hung around and chatted with horseman while gd got a prescription, and then we walked to a copy shop to print a return label for a pair of shoes. i followed the instructions - sending an email from my gmail account to the shop's gmail account - but they claimed that "sometimes it can take a while" which doesn't make any sense. i half-jokingly asked if maybe their internet was disconnected, and the manager took offense and made a few snide remarks. while i was standing there trying to figure out whether it was worth being offended or not, i realized that the customer-facing computers were logged in to the same gmail account. so i hit "all mail" and lo! my email had arrived.

fuckin' idjits.

so i spent 10 NIS on poor service, a single printed page and a plastic sleeve.

then gd and i walked home, had a bite to eat, and after a few failed attempts to request her cannabis license renewal i made myself a turkish coffee for the road and walked the shoes back to the post office.

with everything that's been going on, i've needed any excuse for a walk and think, even if there hasn't been a whole lot of thinking going on.

i arrived at the packed post office, and tried to set the package down because usually they don't make us wait for that. except that now they do, and the clerk made me feel pretty shitty for not waiting my turn...

when i got home, i sat down at my desk and cranked out some improvements to the language app i haven't touched in months, and although gd got a bit frustrated while testing it i feel like it's actually on it's way!

i went to pick mr smear up from the school to take him gift shopping, encountering the unhinged mother and making a point of neither looking at her nor avoiding her. then mr smear came out and we enjoyed a pleasant walk to the mall, where we found some posters but not the right one. the guy at the store had a south african accent, and we ended up talking, and i ended up learning that we could do custom prints! so we found a perfect image, got an amazing print made, and hopefully tomorrow i'll be able to pick it up with it's basic mounting.

the owner of the store told me some weird stories. i'm not sure i really understand what was happening in them.

mr smear and i bussed home, and settled in to homework. the hebrew homework went well. the math homework started off pretty well, had some rocky moments, and then mr smear took a toilet break and when he came back he was completely unfocused and uncooperative, and i got upset. and then gd got upset.

and then i started thinking about how i got called out for getting upset with skippity in the office, and about how i wasn't modeling well, and i explained to mr smear that i wasn't upset with his homework performance, but with his uncooperative behavior, and that even if it was reasonable to get angry after having all my patience worn down, i wanted to get back to the positive vibe from before when he and i were both so excited by his progress.

and between the two of us, we did it. his behavior over the next half hour or so wasn't perfect, but i managed to keep an even keel and focus on the good stuff and we both learned some cool stuff; he learned about exponents, and we learned how to use prime factorizations to make large numbers easy to reason about, and he was super proud of himself ^_^

dinner was... i overate.

bedtime went similarly to yesterday - the new plan is working, hopefully it'll keep working 🤞

finally, after putting mr smear to bed, i tried one more time to renew the license, and this time realized that i was using brave with its shields up. so i took them down, and voilà! done. what a thoroughly different experience (not using machon mor).

nature nurture

 this was a BIG weekend.

yesterday:

it was a very rushed morning. i dropped mr smear off at school, then took the light rail to the hospital mall where i picked up a bunch of stuff for the camping, especially the two bags of large vegan marshmallows. i carried the shopping home, then spent the next while helping gd knead the six large challot, including one giant challah-peño.

between rising/baking sessions, i rushed out to pick mr smear up from school, stopping at the office on the way to pick up my sunglasses which i hadn't been sure if i'd left there by mistake. i only had a few minutes to get out of there, so of course it was on me to discover that the alarm hadn't been set the night before and that there was some kind of issue with it... i managed to shift that off to my CEO before heading out again, arriving a few minutes late to meet mr smear at the station and take a walk to yuka monsters.

we picked up our copy of the day everything changed, then jumped on a light rail to return home, help gd with the last of the challot, and furiously pack everything. it was far later than planned when i finally went to pick up the car, return to load it, and get me and mr smear on our way to the "fairy forest".

mr smear was very excited about riding up front for the first time in his life, and he did a pretty good job as navigator keeping track of waze and relaying data. it's also been years since it was just the two of us in a car together, so we blasted his playlist, and overall it was a good ride.

minus us leaving the three coconut waters i'd bought for the trip in the fridge at home :/

the camp site was really nice. the tent we rented was way bigger than expected (it said "two man", but we could easily have fit four full-sized mattresses in there with space for bags). the tap water was potable, though it didn't taste very good, so mr smear didn't drink enough :/

in general, the class kids have a good energy together and for the most part mr smear gets along with them. with a couple of them better than the rest, which is positive.

one of the parents - a linguist - started telling mr smear that he didn't need to learn hebrew, which upset me... i tried to remain polite while making it very clear that she was doing something inappropriate, but she just didn't give a shit and it wasn't until this morning that an opportunity presented to share a bit of mr smear's history and make it clear that we (finally) actually have a handle on the language issue...

dinner was quite an occasion, gd's challot were a great success, and challah-peño received a lot of welcome praise. afterwards, mr smear's new friend's dad set up a gas stove so that we could toast marshmallows, which for mr smear was an amazing experience, while for me it was a mixture of excitement and trauma trying to fairly dole out a limited number of marshmallows to a swarm of greedy kids of various ages and cuteness levels.

and then, we realized that that whole time there'd been another family nearby with lots of marshmallows - non-vegan ones - so they could have handled a lot of the load instead :/

mr smear and i hit the sleeping bags relatively early (normal bedtime for him), and he was very excited to not be going to sleep alone. we both fell asleep pretty quickly.

i must have woken up half an hour to an hour later. the sleeping bags we bought are good. and warm. and i suddenly realized that i hadn't showered, and that i'd needed to shower. and then the restlessness settled in, and it wasn't until very late (i'm guessing around 2/3am according to what i heard later) when everyone else had finally gone to sleep that i finally managed to fall asleep again.

today:

so mr smear had a great night's sleep; me, not so much.

we got up with the sun, brushed our teeth, and i somehow succeeded in coercing mr smear to come shower with me. i explained to him that if there wasn't hot water, i'd be going first and have to suffer the longest, and when we entered the stalls we discovered that there wasn't any hot water, and i understood what all the previous evening's screams had all been about.

but the weather was good, so the moment i'd dried off the sun began heating me up. mr smear did not want to get in - i mean, neither did i, really - but he eventually did it and got through it, and once he was dry he also felt amazing.

great success!

i'm quite proud of myself for taking the towels back to the car and using them to ensure that the front seats and steering wheel weren't hellishly hot when we left - not only did that work well, but the towels were also bone dry by then.

he convinced me to start our day with hal's kettle-fried jalapeño chips, then it was breakfast / coffee / him and his friend inventing an activity that involved eating painful things (including the chips) that none of the other kids went for, then a pass-the-parcel game which he eventually joined (and took away a squishy-ball prize he was excited about), and then we assembled for a hike.

it was a much tougher hike than i expected, but it was good, and we got through it. it took a little while to break camp - mostly due to helping other parents and getting into a conversation about age-appropriate gaming - and then we were off.

our biggest issue on the way home was that the UX of the car radio is awful, and we couldn't charge the phone and listen to music simultaneously. so we charged it for the first half, and listened to music for the second half, and by the time we arrived home we were both exhausted, hot, and hungry.

the rest of the afternoon was spent showering, eating, and resting (or napping, in my case), dinner and more of twins was good, and then bedtime was a bit rough because last night reset all the bedtime ritual progress we've made 🤦

anyway, it was overall a fantastic first camping experience for mr smear, and an excellent bonding weekend for both of us, and hopefully i'll catch up on some sleep tonight.

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 :/

work off (art)

 work off art was amazing. i don't remember the last time i went to an exhibit and was blown away by almost all of it.

getting there went smoothly in spite of the already mounting temperature, but that was mostly a matter of luck in timing. and we had time to grab a coffee before going in.

on the way out, we sat at hummus ha'ben shel ha'suri for breakfast, which we all enjoyed, and then walked to the hospital complex where gd had an encounter with a disrespectful pharmacist* while i deliberated between reasonably-priced and comfortable sandals and unreasonably-priced but holy-shit-what-is-this-magic sandals. i ended up splurging and going with the latter, which i pray i don't regret.

* i'm proud to report that she held her own, and made her accountable to her coworkers

we picked up a traditional bread-and-salt gift for tahoma for tomorrow, then walked home humming and arguing over the exact tune of a specific bar towards the end of daft punk - instant crush (i was wrong).

after learning some of the history of the ac/dc back in black album and listening to it in its entirety while resting on the couch, i spent a good chunk of the afternoon making some progress with the language app i've been working on in fits and starts, discussing educational gaming with sailor, teaching mr smear how to play roblox snake properly, doing tons of dishes and watching two episodes of deathnote on the big screen.

gin & tonic & coffee (the latter separately) and getting ready for shabbat.

enter the weekend

thought for the morning: what we need is a modern-day roBEN yeHOODa to steal our kids' attention back from english tyrant tech by providing addictive hebrew games and localized tween/teen programming

yesterday:

it was a very relaxing morning, i feel like i got into weekend mode a little earlier than was safe :P

it was a very interesting work day, and almost entirely positive. not least of which being a conversation with an incoming devops who's making aliyah on monday, and a surprise visit by a guy who appears to be our incoming devops manager. and it turns out he's the one responsible for bringing in the star we interviewed a couple of weeks ago. we talked for a little while, and found really good alignment, and by the time he left he'd signed the contract, which is excellent ^_^

...

when i saw (we use google's family link) that mr smear was off the shuttle and on his way home, i gave him a call to ask how his day at summer camp had gone. "it was great!" warmed my heart, and then i had to laugh because he was extremely enthusiastic about how good the second meal had been 😆

it looks like he's making friends and having a really good time, i hope it continues like this.

...

in the afternoon our late chief architect's family came in for a demo of what we've been up to, and we had a happy hour (or two) in his honor.

...

i was amazed to learn that our office manager is one of the officers whose job is to inform families of wounded or killed soldiers. i accidentally overheard a part of a sentence that i wish i hadn't :(

...

i managed to get home in time for dinner and deathnote, and we spoke to my mom who seems to be getting better (but was very busy patient-zero-ing yesterday so i gave her shit about being irresponsible), and shower / bedtime was pleasant and smooth. i told mr smear how proud i am of him, and how happy i am for him, that he's matured so much over the course of the past year, and this experience is convincing me that if the art school places open up he'll actually be ready for it.

then i settled in to complete some work i needed to do for a couple of my teammates, and what followed was a series of broken deployments with me becoming progressively more sleepy until almost midnight, at which point i gave up and dragged myself off to bed.

today so far:

i slept so-so, but the last couple of hours weren't great. i got up, and after a while scrolled through my notifications, and then retried the deployment one last time with the intention of rolling back a version if it failed.

it succeeded.

mr smear's just gotten up a little while ago, i've got yesterday's main points written down, and today's big plan is going to an art exhibition (work off art) across from my old office and maybe helping tahoma and his husband move apartments.

a hard day's night

 i'm really struggling tonight, though i guess there's an upside in that i've spent the past hour or two working on the language project and the frontend is starting to take shape.

i walked to the pick-up location, which was about 200m from where google maps said it was. the detour was fascinating because i didn't realize how much residential development has been done on the other side of the train station from us, and the guys at the store were grateful to be notified about the map issue and for me updating it. i walked to the closest light rail station and headed to work.

i arrived, sweaty, to a birthday celebration followed by a day that was predominantly me trying hard to balance letting the new guy do his thing and me (micro)managing him into making his thing actually help us. and trying to do it in a way that didn't feel shitty.

for the most part, though, the level of stress was so much less than the previous days that i found myself with a long list of things to do but a weird sense of being lost.

at 5.30pm, i decided to put my outside shoes on and go home.

precisely at that moment, one of the new guys arrived in desperate need of help. i had no idea how to help him, so i left, but i felt really shitty about it.

i arrived home, handed mr smear his new roald dahl books and enjoyed him reading me a story, then we had dinner, which was interrupted by someone calling to ask me for help. i literally didn't understand who he was or what was going on, and then suddenly i felt myself crashing and i rushed to brush my teeth and climb into bed.

where i spent a good few hours not sleeping due to a combination of dark thoughts and lower back pain.

in the in-between moments

 the ice-cream mission went well, we met up with mongoose and his daughter and aside from a moment where i rescued her ice-cream cone from a tumble to the floor (we think she thought i was taking it from her) and a few "the usual" moments of mr smear crossing lines, we had a pretty good afternoon.

today:

i got a pretty good night's sleep, but woke up earlier than my early alarm to take the dell in for evaluation / repair. the trip to herzeliya and back was pretty quick, but finding the place once i was off the bus was a bit of a mission.

both ways i didn't use my phone, and having that time to process my thoughts felt good.

the half hour or so between getting back home and leaving for work were stressful as i tried to set up my macbook for mr smear to use during the day. everything went wrong until i figured out that i didn't need to do what apple wasn't letting me do (their UX really can stink sometimes), after which i still had quite a lot of configuration to do...

work was full of meetings and interviews, some more pleasant than others, but mostly alright. and overall it feels like the day was successful. taking friday's cholent for lunch was a jolly good idea. learning that thurday's conversation with the new product expert inspired her to consider game dev a real resource for our product was exciting ^_^

i was a bit irritable this evening, but it was generally a good evening nonetheless. after watching why everyone is cancelling their duolingo right now i made an effort to get back into the alternative i've been putting together, and moving to a different PC has taught me that there was some funky stuff going on with my windows copy.

much frustration later, i've fixed and patched and i'm pretty much ready to move forward again. and developing on a macbook is much more comfortable, even while i'm irritated at microsoft's enshittification of vscode (using the extension marketplace).

but now it's much later than i expected to go to bed.

bumpy ride

 wednesday:

waking up early and sending mr smear off to school, still broken from lack of sleep

arriving to the office really early (but still with time pressure) to discover that my installation station had been stripped of all its cabling (amongst other things), and it would take about an hour and a half to get that sorted out.

at least the installation itself went relatively smoothly.

one of the aussies gave me and another aussie's cousin (he's helping out) a ride to the test site, where the story of the afternoon was hours of set up for very little payoff - not only were there loads of hardware issues, but the issue that i'd resolved by midnight the previous night turned out to be not fully solved, and it cost another three hours to understand what was wrong and resolve it.

and then cursor started bugging out, because we use devcontainers and microsoft (fuckers!) are now preventing vscode clones from using their extensions.

i don't know at this point how much of the solution to the problem is an actual solution to the problem, or a workaround for ms (and docker) fuckery.

anyway. at least i figured out the cause of one of the other issues we had (aws syncing syncs impossibly slowly if you have debug logs being printed)

anyway.

after wrestling with a bad router/switch setup, and waiting 90's download times for an OS installation, we were finally able to leave one of the machines in a state where i should have been able to continue the installation remotely, and we hopped in the car and rode back to tel aviv.

i arrived home around 11pm. signed in to attempt to finish the deployment, and discover that the machine was offline.

very frustrated, i went to bed.

yesterday:

i feel like the whole city woke up feeling more rested. mr smear went off to school again, i took care of a bunch of things that had been piling up over the course of the week, went past the clinic to get authorization for gd's procedure next week, and continued on to the coffee shop where astérix gladiateur was waiting to be picked up.

of course, i had to pick up a coffee and nurse it all the way to the office.

it was an exciting day in the office. the two most significant pieces of work i did were recording an online demo from a contractor (who threw up a little in his mouth halfway through 🤢), and taking a couple of guys with IT / devops experience into the warehouse and beginning to get a workshop set up there.

another highlight (in addition to the workshop, as opposed to the not-highlight of the demo) was a department weekly with lots of enthusiastic new faces, and a happy hour making a new convert both regarding shakespeare's sonnets and my vision for our software solution.

after putting mr smear to bed, i had a call with my boss; i suspected that i was going to be answering for having been a bit miserable the previous day, but it turned out to be a discussion about how to go about doing a deployment we'd had to defer and arguing over when to do it. we ended up settling on tomorrow night, so 🤞

today:

i guess i slept alright last night, at least better than has become usual. i was avoiding screens before mr smear left for school, and reading a canticle for leibowitz, or trying to at any rate. some of it i've really enjoyed, but the last quarter is proving to be a slog and with everything else going on i've decided to give it up.

while going through that, i realized that even if i'm not on screens i'm still focused very close to my head, so i decided to walk mr smear to school in order to give my own eyes an opportunity to "stretch". surprisingly, gd had had a similar idea simultaneously so we all walked together, which aside from an  encounter with a brazenly irresponsible dog owner was an enjoyable experience.

i had some important stuff to take care of, which generated a fight with gd that put more shitty vibes on the morning, but eventually worked through it and we hit the mall to do some grocery shopping and upgrade my phone.

it turns out the issue with my (old) phone has been that it's only got 4GB of memory, and with my "new" phone (the display unit, i got a significant discount for that) it's clear why it was so unresponsive; my baseline usage with nothing open is 4.6GB, and that's after uninstalling and disabling every app i don't need on a daily basis...

i'm a little concerned about the battery usage, but i'll give it a few days before i decide whether to complain or not.

on the way out of the mall, an older guy came out of the retirement home and lit up a cigarette while still inside the mall. i asked him to please not do that, to which he made stupid excuses and then started calling me a quibbler (not sure if the translation is good). so i called him a jerk, but he continued to act like a jerk and although i succeeded in walking away, it only takes one asshole to ruin a good day, and i'd already had some shitty experiences, and he occupied more brainspace than he had right to for the next while.

it was hot (summer's here) and i was sweaty and tired by the time we got home, but i had to rush off to pick up mr smear and help carry home all the books from his locker. i spent the next while napping on the couch listening to the audiobook of the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, waking up to gd reading asterix to mr smear.

i spent the remainder of the afternoon and most of the evening getting the new phone set up, while listening to insane AI covers like system of a crown and neon maiden.

we went to our friends for friday night dinner, which was a really pleasant evening, both for the adults and the kids.

it's now almost 1am, mr smear has just gone to bed and i'm about to jump in the shower and probably also go to bed.

a whole kernel through a nostril

we woke up this morning to another massive barrage. in addition to discovering that our neighbors are also vegan, we also learned about the US strike on the primary iranian nuclear facilities during the night.

now i'm listening to how islamists are attacking churches... they're deep into phase FA, i can't wait to see them FO.

...

yesterday:

after the midnight attacks on friday night we had relative calm. it was a day spent reading (i read about half of danny the champion of the world), we played (or, more accurately, i picked up a copy of webbed and mr smear played a lot). and getting the basis of the frontend for my language project.

in the afternoon, mr smear was invited by his friend to play table tennis, and i joined them and his friend's mother, scouted the area for a bomb shelter, and then enjoyed watching mr smear actually get into playing - giving him breaks by taking turns, and i was quite surprised by how good his friend is!

he came home with us and joined us for dinner, and his mother and i both made the screen-time rules clear. until dinner the two of them legitimately played, amusing themselves in hilarious fashion, and it was a treat to witness it. dinner was nice, but i was concerned about getting him home before mr smear needed to start getting ready for bed (and before the expected iranian attack), so i accompanied him home.

and then felt super awkward when i returned home to find mr smear still eating (demolishing a large pile of corn-on-the-cob), so he could've stayed later...

today:

it was a busy morning, and i was a wreck even though i slept a little better last night (not well, but better). i spent my work day in meetings, and working on something that took a lot more time than it should have, so unfortunately i'm going to have to continue working after posting this.

on a positive note, my mother sent me a whole bunch of documents and images of her parents and grandparents, and aside from being fascinating it gave me what i needed to respond to the people who've offered assistance with her aliyah process.

the saddest reason for a lot of lost time today was mr smear, two days after getting his privileges back, losing them again over homework (and lying to me). so that sucks.

but in positive news, we received the next two illustrated harry potter books (books four and five). it occurred to me that purchasing more beautiful books while we're under threat of getting our apartment bombed might be a mistake, but thinking like that is just silly.

[knocks on wood]

doing the thing (overeating)

mr smear helped me clean the window poop this morning. i sorted out a phone bill this morning. i booked mr smear for a dairy allergy challenge in september, and gd for a pain clinic consultation next week. i listened to some more of american gods.

i complained about the company breakfast, which was anti-vegan for the second time this week. then i ate four slices of bread, right before being reminded that we were being taken to an expensive lunch before they pitched us their services*. i ate a lot of really good food.

* we were pleasantly surprised and impressed by the expert recommending a competitor's solutions when he realized theirs wouldn't cut it

overall, it was a successful work day, but it included us making a decision that might well see us losing quite a bit of sleep in the coming week.

i got home in time to listen to mr smear practice on the keyboard, and do a good hebrew reading, and verify that he knew where to look in the book for his upcoming open-book science test.

it looks like we're dealing with dust mites :( gd and i have both gone over a lot of surfaces, hopefully we've gotten through the worst of it.

after shower / bedtime / lots of talk about mr smear's new/renewed interest in 3d modelling and game design (and me installing ableton live because the cubase trial is already over), i settled down to work on the language project and have been jumping between that (making good progress) and youtube/minesweeper since.

now it's after midnight, it's probably a good idea for me to head to bed soon.

retro-parenting and all the things

 this morning was a bit of a struggle (i did sleep at least, but not nearly enough), i needed to request a tami water filter technician again, have it out with a cannabis license representative (she told me which documents i need to provide and agreed that that should be clearly stated on the application forms). i ordered a bunch of asterix books in english and french and we did an online grocery shopping. and i worked a bit on the language project. then i accompanied gd to the clinic to request said documents on the way to work.

but then i realized, while at the clinic, that i'd forgotten to disconnect the tami so i had to come back home again 🤦‍♂️

anyway, work: i had a feeling that i wasn't going to get to work on my primary tasks today, and i was right. it was a bunch of distractions, not least of which being that gd needed me to go home, pick up mr smear, take him to his therapist, and then have him come to work afterwards.

at least he managed to find his way to the office by himself!

he did most of the homework there - with a little skiving off now and again - and we left the office in good spirits (although we ended up going in the traditional loops of him going to far with the trolling, which reminded me of josh wolf's big fight* and then suddenly i was transported back to the brawl with my father), and arrived home in time for dinner.

* omg there's actually a follow-up with his son.

with no screens, because he hadn't finished his homework. it was pleasant enough, though. and then we told him he'd need to finish the homework before bed. this started off alright, but we had two final questions to get through and he shut down. and we lost patience.

...

i think one of the hardest pills to swallow has been that we never set clear enough boundaries with him, and that not having a strong sense of them is literally hurting him both at home and at school, and is causing him to behave in ways that are potentially damaging to his future. so now we're scrambling to make up for it, but he's already pretty big and it's really hard to force him to face the world and do what needs to be done without things becoming... intense.

i don't know (and mostly don't care) what the neighbors think of the yelling and screaming, but i actually had to make my son properly afraid of me for what i believe is the first time in his life. he's often been angry and upset by me, sure, but not openly afraid.

strangely, once i finally got through to him and got him to accept his fate and finish the job, his mood rapidly settled and he became cooperative, and by the time he'd gotten through it he was clearly happy with himself. i talked to him (sternly) about not making us have to go through this sort of thing again, he calmly agreed and went off to shower and brush his teeth, singing to himself the whole time.

and bedtime was pleasant, too 👀

...

also strangely, i expected to be thoroughly worn out by all of that drama but i felt strangely okay. i spent a lot of the evening watching youtube videos (i really shouldn't) and playing a lot of minesweeper (i probably shouldn't), and fiddling with my computer settings (it keeps restarting randomly) and installing driver updates (which then mysteriously uninstalled themselves), and somewhere in there managed to fix the language project issue i'd been experiencing in the morning.

and now... i don't know. i should probably go to bed soon.

beats

 it was a big day, it had ups and downs. big ups, with a sprinkle of frustrating downs.

it started with me waking up with a sore shoulder, and it's ending with me either being eaten by a mosquito or just imagining it.

we left reasonably on time, with only a minor mr smear hiccup along the way. the drive there was longer than i'd anticipated, but we arrived relatively early in the day. it wasn't quite what we expected - the party took place in an amusement park - but for a family-friendly trance event it was a pretty good space.

immediately, mr smear decided he was struggling with sensory overload and wanted to go home. we tried to calm him down, and make him understand that we weren't leaving anytime soon, with varying degrees of success.

for round one, we hit the main floor while he sat outside drawing, but soon the wind came up and he went upstairs to lie on a bench and watch the floor from above.

in retrospect, i feel really dumb for not having brought him earplugs or ear protectors. i'm guessing roughly half the other parents remembered and/or cared :P

between rounds, we ate the packed lunch in the car and then played foosball before returning to the main floor. something bothered him (i found out later it was people eating at the table he was next to) and he went and sat outside (reading on his phone, i let it go for today), and gd and i continued having a really good time dancing, enjoying a beer or three (i only had one :P), and being both amused by all the families on the floor and proud of all of us for doing precisely what our people fight and die to be able to do: live.

on the way out, mr smear actually joined us for a final dance on the second stage (a dj with a didgeridoo, mr smear wisely thought it prudent to step away from the bass bin because he was feeling the beats in his chest), and the long ride back was (long, but) very pleasant. coming into the apartment, gd made a comment about how we need to do that more often and my heart lifted ^_^

the rest of the evening was good, with mr smear and i playing some there is no game together. eventually, he went to bed. everything seemed fine.

by the third time he called for gd, i went to go and see what was going on. i was surprised to find him in tears, and i pushed him to tell me why he was crying... to which he responded that they were joyful tears, because gd had sung him a lullaby and he'd felt truly at peace for the first time in years 😭

i've spent a little time working on the language project, but it's late and it's been a big day and i think i should probably go to bed soon.

buzz

 yesterday:

i felt better, at least. made more progress on the language project. waited twenty minutes at the store to pick up my "neon-nazi"s only to discover that i was supposed to wait for an sms update, but they sorted me out anyway. had a pretty productive day at work, with the biggest achievement being a coffee walk interview with someone we've been courting and who signed later in the afternoon. good for him (as a new oleh) and good for us! ate too much cake at the happy hour, brought home too much cake and nobody else wants to eat it. went through possible summer day-camps with mr smear (whose preferences surprised us) and tried to book it, but we're now waiting for them to get back to us :/

the bug zapper in mr smear's room is super bright and may have been a mistake.

a couple of hours work in the evening (to protect us from a mysterious bug that we encountered during the day), a little more of the language project, then finally passing out.

this morning so far:

getting up early, catching and crushing a fat, slow cockroach, being blown away by the dor brother's AI short film. fighting with mr smear (but winning, apparently) because i'm taking him swimming but he wants to go to his friday computer class. more progress on the language project. now getting ready to head out...

...

i hate the spice girls, abhor wannabe, but i've had it in my head the whole morning and am somehow enjoying the nostalgia of it 😶

deficit

 i didn't sleep enough, but that's normal. i was extra slow this morning, and then we had a "school team" meeting, which really took it out of me. by the time i arrived at my office i felt as if i'd already done a full day's work, and my throat was feeling scratchy, so i've been suspecting that i might have picked up a bug.

i can't right now.

i drank loads of coffee to compensate, but i still found myself passing out at my desk in the afternoon...

i got home at a reasonable hour, and i took mr smear (without any argument!) to the school to shoot some hoops, which was really fun :)

after getting mr smear into bed, i very excitedly managed to lock down a couple of mosquito zappers* inspired by the couple of nasty ones that flew in our window this evening.

* i love calling them "neon-nazis", but lipgirl called it a "little auschwitz" and that's definitely taking it

i had some wonderful breakthrough moments working on the language project, i've successfully completed today's minesweeper challenges, i watched some youtube, and i think i'm just about ready to go to bed.

...

there are two wars against israel right now (gaza is not one of them & israel is losing)

namaste

i went to bed late, but i got up way earlier than i wanted to. the day started off well, i spent the pre-school morning coaching mr smear through some last minute exam prep - he did really well! - and then rushed through an online grocery shopping so i could leave on time to get to our yoga class.

no buses for a while, i ended up arriving *just* in time.

it was a good class, not easy, with some highly amusing moments. i didn't hurt myself.

we got a good company breakfast and i showered before settling in to work; getting in and out of the shower wasn't amazing, but the shower itself is worth it!

it was a pretty successful day. but the most successful part wasn't me: i asked mr smear how his day went and i could hear how pleased he was with himself, because he's pretty confident he aced the test. i am too, but i'm more excited about him not only getting a handle on the math, but feeling good about it too ^_^

i left early to meet gd and mr smear at the pain clinic for her nerve block, but we arrived there to discover that we hadn't sorted out authorization and it costs thousands of shekels, so we rebooked, did some shopping and went home.

i got mr smear to work on cubase for a while, but to be fair a lot of the actual work was done by me. *we* put together a pretty cool beat, and i hope he learned as much as he claims he did :P

then he read a couple of pages of hebrew harry potter - well - we had an early dinner and a pleasant evening. i spent a couple of hours ironing out issues with the language project, where user registration and authentication is now good enough to move on to the interesting stuff.

it's late again. hopefully i'll sleep.