beep beep two

oh, wow! yesterday i forgot to mention something amazing - they've finally assigned a new therapist to mr smear, and we're meeting her early next week. this is a huge relief!

...

i went to bed late again, i did play some shadowrun but i also - finally! - managed to get my website working properly again. i learned some stuff.

getting up this morning was rough, but it was a pretty smooth morning. the scale reported 80kg for the second day in a row.

i took mr smear to school, and on the way back called dod and synced - he's had a hollywood-esque kafka-esque year or two, and when he started telling me some of the details that's he's uncovered recently it's looking like someone in the industry has somehow had him blackballed, and all he has to go on are suspicions and an investigation by a recruiter he knows.

wtaf.

anyway, as awful as his situation is, the combination of it with what i learned over the weekend means that he's in the perfect position to help me make one of my side projects profitable, and quickly, and if we can get that right we'll both be in a better place.

i rollerbladed to work, which was fine although my neck's been giving me trouble the past couple of days - i think it's got to do with the weight of my backpack and a bad strap configuration :/

the workday was good. three highlights:

1. there was generally a really good vibe in the office, it was fun.

2. we had an insane experience when i found a dead lizard on its back next to my desk. we then - as a team - spent the following five or ten minutes fighting over whether it was a real lizard or not. the poor lizard's corpse (i'm convinced it's real) suffered abuse at the hands of a coworker convinced that it wasn't real, and then ended up in an absent coworker's empty mug. the whole thing was just ridiculous.

3. after a lot of time spent troubleshooting my github user not being able to see a repository i definitely had permissions for, one of my coworker's suggested chatgpt. the first couple of suggestions weren't helpful, but the third? i'd never have considered it, and it saved the day!

here i'll note that there was a second attack on hezbollah this afternoon, in some ways even more robust than yesterday's. this is amazing.

it was darker than i would've liked by the time i left the office, but the rollerblade home was pleasant. the evening went well, although i literally started falling asleep while reading to mr smear and the sentences i was reading were blending with dream images...

the past couple of hours have been a blend of talking to my mom, watching random things, taking care of admin stuff, playing some inscryption, and reviewing my podcast feeds. i'm starting to feel like maybe i should skip doing anything further and just go to bed.

sat/sun

yesterday:

a quiet day, and i was still really tired. i managed to get a fair amount of work done on a new podcast episode, including at our local vegan cafe while mr smear dived into his new book. we watched inu-oh from start to finish and it was both disappointing and inappropriate for mr smear. the artwork was magnificent, the story itself was interesting, the music... the music was difficult to listen to, but the idea was good... but there was something fundamentally lacking.

we also started watching legend of the drunken master, which was apparently less inappropriate. but the movie starts with a bunch of disturbing stuff we didn't remember.

godsdammit.

i wanted to take mr smear cycling, but he was having none of it. he negotiated cycling next week - we recorded him agreeing - and instead walking to the climbing wall. it was a mostly good walk, although there was minor unpleasantness along the way and we arrived just as the wall was been closed due to an unexpected personal issue :(

today:

it was a pretty good start to the week, i got a bunch of paperwork filed even if i do have more to go, and i rollerbladed to the office, discovering a neat bike path that goes through midtown. it was a pretty good work day, even though i needed to snack a lot and there wasn't anything available, and i'm happy with how the first iteration of the tool i've been working on is shaping up.

getting my rollerblades on outside the building was unpleasant, but getting home was pleasant.

my only disappointment today is with mr smear not doing his homework again, which means it's going to start piling on... ugh.

published!

 the podcast has been resurrected, after quite a few hours fixing the feed (which i forgot about when i migrated from server to cloud a few months ago, and didn't have any of the backups i thought i'd made), and quite a few hours reclaiming the various accounts that have, for one reason or another, decided that i'm not eligible to manage my own podcast (i'm still locked out of iTunes, with nobody to talk to).

anyway, it's all good now and i'm really happy with the result. i did end up making a change on tuesday morning, and that was re-recording the intro with mr smear ^_^

you can hear the results (or see them, if you go the youtube route) here!

...

it's been a weird week so far, and i'm still waiting for the pager to go off when it's most inconvenient. i've at least enjoyed a fun achievement (i figured out a way to hack streaming response support for lambdas), and my annual feedback session with my boss this evening could definitely have gone worse. it wasn't stellar, but it's an alignment thing and every time we talk we both end up feeling like we're generally moving in the right direction.

gd's been having a couple of rough days. this week we've been working through the mad max series. she watched the first one without me and bailed about halfway through, and when i skipped through i realized that i'd never actually seen it myself. it's a milestone movie, but by today's standards not really watchable. the road warrior, on the other hand, is still great fun!

mr smear's had some good days and some not good days. we've talked a lot, hopefully some of it has landed.

my mom will be here in less than a month, and we're all excited! we're busy planning touristy things, i realized this evening that i don't think we're going to be able to do the winter vacation in montréal like we'd planned. c'est la vie.

fingers crossed

 it's just past 1am, and i've managed to splice together the new video for the podcast. using clipchamp and the sound recorder that comes with windows, i've managed to do it far more easily than using the macos tools! the quality's not perfect, but that's me and my not-studio conditions, and when i wanted to do something interesting with the audio i jumped back to garageband for its effects.

[this post was interrupted by a phone call, my heart started racing in anticipation for an on-call page. nope, it was a spam call. wonderful.]

the only thing left to do is review the completed video in the morning with my wife. i'm pretty happy to put the video out there, but i have a suspicion that there might be a couple of things that i should probably clean up... at least i know that if i do need to update something, it's really not going to be too big a deal.

imperfections

 today was mostly great. a couple of points of friction, but mostly great. we all enjoyed raiders of the lost ark, we went out for a bit and hung out at a local park, we watched a bit more of wolfwalkers at dinner time (after a tricky negotiation to get mr smear showered before dinner), and after he went to sleep gd and i finished watching serenity which really was brilliant in spite of the rushed start.

it's just past 1am and i've just finished the recording for the podcast episode. during the week i'll try to stitch it together, along with the update of mr smear and me singing the chorus of the pretender (which we might have to re-record because as amazing as it is with everything else, clipchamp tends to clip the first sounds when recording... thank the gods they haven't broken the sound recorder. yet.