cross-ay-eyed

mr smear took the graphic novels back to the comics library yesterday, and i couldn't figure out what i wanted to read before my screen time and then... oh, yes, i wrote up my previous day's adventures, and got not-a-lot done before heading out (back) to the office.

i did not focus on my primary task today. i mean, i made some progress, but for the most part i was heavily invested in the distracting work of resurrecting a retired dependency so that i could fix a bug in it that i need to make the project i resurrected yesterday work properly.

and we had two important meetings yesterday. the first was an engineering all-hands that sounded eerily familiar, with zero irony. i had a little trouble with feeling sleepy, but i woke up to ask a question and had the VP come bouncing up to where i was sitting with the mic, and then very much not like my question about how metrics for velocity conflict with demanding accountability in terms of quality.

at least i managed to catch him for a positive chat immediately afterwards :P

i had a meeting in a fridge phone booth a few minutes later, and i realized just as i signed in that i couldn't find my hoodie. so, on the call but muted, i rushed around the office trying to find it, eventually guessing that it had fallen behind the stands where i'd been sitting, and managing (with enormous relief) to snatch it up and find a booth in time to follow everything.

my new manager is cool - i've worked with him before - but it's not clear how aligned we are on the mission so i had to be really careful to raise all my points in a way that didn't feel confrontational. i think i did alright, but i've now told everyone very clearly that i'm hoping to be able to start experimenting with integrating my hackathon solution by next week; both because it gives me a deadline i have to stick to, and because i'm nervously in a race against time to get *my* opinionated solution in before somebody comes and up with something irresponsible instead :P

when i left the office, i called gd back and we got into it about whether or not we can afford a dog, or will ever be able to afford a dog. that had to be put on hold while i travelled to my employer's office by light rail. there was a lot of tension, but we managed to move through it and had a heavy but important conversation about the challenges gd's been facing with language, community and work over the past few years, and how to approach them.

the meetup at the office was pretty good. not only were the talks not boring (i learned a few things about agentic ai and agentic memory), but i made small talk with a guy who turned out to be another ex-saffer (he went to school with one of my cousins' kids) and the conversation ended up going off the rails in our unique saffer way. it made the eavesdroppers (and there were a couple) a little happier about the hardships they're forced to endure :P

i had a good chat with the head of our group afterwards, though i said something in a clumsy way - i'm sure she doesn't remember, but it's bugging me - and then i bussed home just in time to say goodnight to mr smear and have a bit of a chat before he went to sleep, and watch most of another episode of ludwig with gd, and now...

... i dunno. i think i'm too tired to do anything productive, but also not tired enough to go to bed and actually sleep 🤷‍♂️

positive feedback

 i've realized that i don't suffer from very mild narcolepsy, there are just three specific situations which tell my brain it's safe to turn off and it's really, really hard for me to fight them. the hairdresser's chair, the dentist's chair, and meetings. those are my shutdown buttons. some people count sheep. i count shears, drills and droning.

...

yesterday morning began with a serious effort on my autodoc side project. mr smear left late and under tense circumstances.

most of the day revolved around the broken deployments, which became extra-specially sensitive the moment i realized that the running instances where last deployed several years ago and the "successful" manual deployments i'd seen had never actually done anything 🤦‍♂️

later, i learned from a couple of the more experienced engineers that this kind of thing is actually quite normal.

lunch with the lunch group was fun, although it began with me opening my soup in a way that sprayed it across the table and across one of the guys, which was quite embarrassing.

the big division meeting: i spent about two thirds of the meeting struggling to keep my eyes open, and praying every time i nodded off that i hadn't snored or something. i was very grateful to have come out of the stupor by the time we got to the big announcements, and it's now pretty clear what my new role is and how all the pieces fit.

i like (the idea of) my new role. a lot.

...

then i had a call with my mentor. he gave me some good advice regarding how i communicate with my manager: "i've run into <x>, it's going to cause a delay, i'm taking care of it" is a solid formula that i've used a lot, but i still find it interesting to think of it as a formal structure.

i told him about my role change, and how it fits in with my roadmap, and about my autodoc project. he was very excited about all of it, and offered me some very good advice about when and how i write about it.

and then he informed me that he has feedback for me, both from my client and from my employer: apparently everyone's quite happy with me. this is a huge relief, and it feels good.

long may it last.

...

the last part of the day was all about finalizing the deployment fixes, pushing them and monitoring them. by sheer luck, i saw from the git graph that someone else was working on the repo at the same time, so i got in touch with them directly to inform them of what i was doing and why. aside from blowing their minds, i managed to get them excited about dashboards-as-code and i had them on hand to approve my PRs, so when i left the office it was after making sure that the service is actually serviceable and nothing seems broken.

[quickly stops to flip open the work laptop and double-check that the image tags really were updated]

so i walked out of the office in pretty good spirits ^_^

...

my afternoon and evening were exceptionally gassy. i have no idea what i ate or when, but it went on for hours and was very uncomfortable. you know how "every 'no' brings you closer to a 'yes'"? well, my spin on it is "every fart brings you closer to a shart". fortunately that didn't happen yesterday, but it probably could have.

anyway, i dropped my bag off at home and took mr smear with me to the mall to pick up his second pair of shoes. notable moments: witnessing a bunch of hormone-drunk teenagers harassing a sex-shop worker, buying socks, and a fight over mr smear reporting a clean bus for being dirty. otherwise, we had a pretty good time. and talked a lot, some of which about the LARPiness (or lack thereof) of his summer camp.

we had a very nice dinner while watching a lot more of guardians of the galaxy, and after mr smear was in bed gd and i finished another episode of ludwig. then i went straight to bed, for most of a night's sleep.

train of thought

i missed my sleep journal entry this morning:

3rd coffee 15.23

23.54 bed

6.36 up, not great sleep

that's because although the day started just fine*, my alarm went off at 8am to warn me that i had to be on the far side of kfar saba by 9.30, for a company (my employer) volunteering effort. i dropped everything, got dressed, rushed out to the bus stop, and travelled to my destination, which took a bit more than an hour and a bus switch along the way.

* fine, aside from gd being furious about the "deal" that trump ostensibly signed, which i later understood was yet more meaningless bullshit (it's essentially an agreement to extend the bullshit negotiations)

i arrived a little early, but the address wasn't precise. i asked the office manager / organizer to clarify, and that's when she called to drop the bombshell that the effort had been cancelled. and everyone had been informed of the cancellation except me, because she hadn't noticed that i'd registered (i'd registered during the initial sign-up).

what a fuck-up. so i bussed all the way back, having lost of couple of hours of my life that i really could have used. i quickly ate breakfast, then continued on to the office for a very long, busy day full of a mix of continuing to assist the previous client team with continuous incidents (two coincidences together, today) and making a bit of headway into understanding my own project.

also, a group meeting that was supposed to be a talk, but the speaker wasn't available so my mentor volunteered me to share what i've been up to. fortunately, that went well and turned into an entertaining and constructive conversation.

oh, and there was a small dog in the office bullying the big dog. that made me dislike him, but then he peed next to my shoe (on my shoelace!) so now i dislike him even more.

i left the office an hour and a half later than intended, arriving home with less than ten minutes to spare before another meeting that i'd forgotten about. that one went on for about an hour and half, but it was very interesting and, i hope, productive.

i had a quick dinner and we said good night to my mom, then gd and i did the grocery shopping, then i made myself a tea and played slay the spire 2, and then i was about to go to bed when i realized that i hadn't recorded by journal entry for the day, and now it's tomorrow so it's too late so i wrote this instead.

and now i can go to bed.

patience is a virtue signal

"patience my ass, i'm gonna kill somebody" - the vulture

 i must be getting better, because it's almost 1am and i'm only now getting ready to go to bed. one of my nostrils is a noticeably blocked, but otherwise i'm doing okay. for now...

the next meeting was run by the guy responsible for my current project, but related to an aspect of my previous project, which is owned by a team that doesn't really know anything about it. he mumbles, and even if he didn't mumble it would still be difficult to understand him - not the greatest communicator. and the team lead who didn't know why she was in the meeting doesn't have the best english, so i was amused when i saw that she'd sent me a message thanking me for summarizing - i explained that it wasn't for her, i really did need to verify that i'd understood what we were talking about for myself :P

mr smear came home, and he was absolutely taken with the bean bags; as gd pointed out, he's all cat.

i was supposed to leave the apartment at that point, but then learned that i had a meeting with my employer team. which turned out to be an hour long presentation, or sales pitch, for software i really don't care about. i was so bored by the halfway mark... it was basically an unpleasant minesweeper session for me.

i took a walk through to the courier pick-up point, which was quite a long walk, but it felt good to be out in the sun (even on such a suddenly hot day) with my brain switched off. then i caught a bus home, and between the bus and our apartment took a quick detour to hunt down gluten-free pastas for gd.

the good news is, i found some - and the spaghetti which we tried tonight was surprisingly decent! - but by the time i got to the self checkout i was already sans patience from all the tourists and leisure class people in the store and i had a really hard time keeping my cool while waiting for two women moving in slow motion and with entirely suboptimal bagging strategies.

i came home, oversaw some of mr smear's progress (he did well this afternoon) and got back to work. once done, mr smear called me over to demonstrate that he'd solved the multiplication level in human resource machine all by himself, and he was rightly proud of himself ^_^

i received a very strange email this evening, apparently from an investment research company who are offering to pay me to answer questions about my previous employer, answers which, if honest, would explicitly violate my termination agreement and i'd owe them my severance pay back. i wonder if this is a case of entrapment?

dinner and some more of dead poets society was nice, although by the time we got to dinner my patience had been worn down to nothing; i did lose my cool with my mother while trying to help her, and as much as it was partially her fault i was upset my reaction certainly wasn't appropriately measured. mr smear also did a little patience testing, but for the most part he continued behaving well.

after dinner i did a little more work on my telephony side project - i'm rather pleased with the results - and after watching a few videos i decided to allow myself some spire slaying. i've just completed my first run with the defect, so that's all the characters done (no ascensions yet), and some of the relics and cards i picked up were completely insane!

...

some good news, at least - it looks like gd's toe might be starting to heal 🤞