the time cluster bomb

 today was weird. the deployment didn't go smoothly, but was ultimately successfully.

a religious family came downstairs to present us with mishloach manot, which i explained was very much appreciated, but as we've got a dairy allergy and we're vegan we simply can't accept. an hour or so later they knocked again, with a whole different arrangement, including baked goods with the ingredients handwritten.

so now i feel bad that we haven't reciprocated - we had no way - and we've had way too many sweets today.

also, mr smear's molar fell out.

he spent most of the day dressed up as harry potter, he did his own scar amazingly well, and was very disappointed that it wasn't a school day and there was no one to show his costume to but us :(

we literally walked around the block twice today for exercise.

i eventually managed to complete my investigation into whether my screw-up last week had any undetected impact, and spent an hour talking to a new coworker - both at my employer, and my client - about both of them and giving him the details i wish i'd had. i then followed that up with a complaint to the woman who brought us both in because he was also supposed to start both jobs on the same day, like i did, and that's messed up.

my most productive time today was spent on my phone control solution, which i've gotten to a point that i can start playing with the more interesting ideas.

thanks to AI.

the war goes on. it looks like however the next couple of weeks play out, we've essentially already won: the IRGC is effectively finished, the middle east has realigned itself. the attacks today were fewer and further between, but louder and scarier.

mr smear was a bit difficult today, on occasion, but also a lot easier to get through to (eventually). on the one hand, he's been cooped up, but on the other, he's refusing to leave the apartment to do anything social, and gd's sick and unavailable and i'm working and unavailable.

i'm tired. but also antsy. i barely have bandwidth for the stuff that needs brain, but distractions? i don't even register time passing.

the purim decree

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

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

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

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

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

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

purim ii

thousands of years later, in the same week of the hebrew calendar as the original purim, we turned the tables on a modern-day haman: khamenei is dead. and with him, his family, and his generals. the antisemitic anti-west coalition has begun to unravel.

so this purim we tell the story, and we live the story, and we will celebrate in the streets and drink too much, and possibly come up with a new baked good like "ayatollah's beard" (or "ayatollah's glasses"), and possibly add an appendix to the original megillah.

but, hive mind, i have to ask you: in this retelling, who is mordechai, and who is esther? trump is achashverosh, clearly, but is bibi our esther?

...

 holy shit. last night's sleep was heavily interrupted by missile attacks, and mr smear had to stay with us, so it was even more interrupted in between the interruptions. and then it was morning, and between attacks we tried to be functional, and i somehow managed to get some work done, and everything was really just a mess.

all my coworkers, israeli and non-israeli, are being very sweet.

i educated horseman and his girlfriend on middle east politics and anti-west propaganda today; it's one heck of a way to introduce oneself to new people :P

the most exercise mr smear and i got was a walk around the block to take down recycling. he was bored today. but also antisocial. and i could barely keep it together, and went down a savings / investment rabbit hole...

gd, in addition to everything else, is really struggling. if her situation worsens, we're going to have to head to the nurses tomorrow.

at least the groceries got through.

the latest attacks have been particularly intense, and it looks like they're using cluster bombs. as i just told my brother: we need to be grateful, as we need to be for every single war since 1948, that our enemies are so ideologically blinded that they’re incapable of discipline. imagine how much harder this war would be if iran hadn’t attacked ALL its neighbors!

really tough fighters get in the ring. pathetic fighters bully non-fighters.

babysitting

 i'm starting this post at almost half past midnight, and i've just managed to resolve an issue i've been struggling with for hours on end, herding an AI cat to solving a problem that's entirely out of scope but very much interferes with what is in scope.

i've been thinking a lot about context, lately. it's my job, but it's also a new frontier with... ahem... many different ways to skin a cat. i've also been thinking a lot of the AI vampire, the death of the craftsman engineer, and why replacing developers with AI is going horribly wrong. while i've been neck-deep in context engineering rabbit holes and side quests, and pondering how much of this experience might shape my own concept for an IDE.

it took far too long for me to realize that i needed to hack the LLM loop and make it more robust, which i did by instructing it to document the state of the code, then document each attempt to fix it, and append lessons learned to the end of the document to be used for the following iteration.

from there, it took eight iterations, at the end of which i instructed it to add an epilogue to the documentation explaining why it took eight iterations after restarting with this technique. and that epilogue was the first part of the entire process that i was actually able to understand, because it had been looping over and investigating interactions between a bunch of "black boxes" interacting with each other, at one point even going so far as to dive into multi-dependency byte-code.

all of this wrangling, while running a whole bunch of other small code and configuration changes, each of which requiring its own AI babysitting.

i didn't have a headache when i finally got home, but my brain hurt. and i still wasn't done, and i was still bothered by the main obstacle, so i couldn't let it go.

...

ironically, all of the above was done because i didn't have the credentials to run the test scripts i wrote this morning (also using AI, because now there's no reason to write a simple test script when i can just specify sample generators, test scenario generators, test runners, validators and clean-up scripts that all work nicely together).

...

this morning was a big one for gd; she's had a really rough few days (after a rough few months, to say the least), but we got her to the examination having followed all the instructions and procedures, and afterwards i got her follow-up appointment booked (post-biopsy) and got her home safely.

in the evening, i left the apartment almost as soon as i arrived to go looking for a frying pan, because ours is warped and gd's not handling (especially not with everything else going on). that hunt turned out to be a) not fruitful and b) very, very far. so i got back not only with an exhausted mind, but also physically tired. and then i took the recycling out with mr smear, and received an intense (but justified) talking-to about using the neighboring building's recycling bin (because ours has been stolen, twice), which was embarrassing to say the least. and then, just as i got back upstairs, big data sent a photo of some serious harry potter gear for purim so i launched out the door again to walk to the other side of the neighborhood to pick up the bag of goodies.

and then we ate (dinner was delicious), and then i had way more dessert than i should have, and then it was shower and bedtime, and then it was the extra AI babysitting accompanied by loads of youtube videos.

i wonder if i'll sleep tonight?

costume shopping rescue

did i sleep well? not really. but i definitely slept better. i'll take it.

today started with dubstep, setting up gd's sewing station / mr smear's keyboard station. i don't know where the power adapter for the synthesizer is 🤦

i had a positive service experience with the municipality regarding mr smear's school fees, and then an awful one with the car rental service - i still don't know if i was talking to an AI chatbot, or a really dumb human.

work today was difficult, in a different way. an entire workday spent shut up in a phone booth on a really, really boring call that i only occasionally had anything to contribute to. i would say my biggest contributions for the day included writing up a review of my previous explorer on glassdoor, and reading reviews on my current employer, and using AI to dig up some really worrying stuff in the codebase i'm working on.

i mean, in addition to the really worrying stuff that my team was finding along the way.

i feel bad for not joining the team at the farewell lunch for the guy whose last day today was - though my vegan presence would probably have complicated things for them - and i feel bad that the new guy who joined today seeing my help-i'm-trapped-in-a-cage face that i was incapable of taking off my face all day.

there was some stuff that i should have paid more attention to in our never-ending meeting, though, i regret not being present for the random gems.

i left early, and came home to pick up mr smear and head to dizengoff center to look for purim costume stuff. he wants to be harry potter - in addition to our love for the franchise, apparently some of the kids in his class call him that, between his glasses and his hair - and we were disappointed by what we found. i mean, mr smear was disappointed, because we found a proper set of robes but he didn't like that the gryffindor symbol didn't match the movie.

at least we both enjoyed onigiri on the way. and there's a new "retro gaming" store with a very expensive arcade cabinet with three thousand classic games...

he insisted that we go to azrieli to the harry potter pop-up store, so we hopped on a bus (and took a short walk) and arrived to discover that the store's been closed :/

but in any event i'd warned him that i wasn't going to spend stupid amounts of money on a purim costume.

fortunately, the shitty costume pop-up store at the center of the mall had a harry potter set! just a tie and fake round glasses (and a wand), but i took a dracula-style cape and mr smear was happy, so who cares?

(gd cares. she's not the one wearing the costume, but she's upset by the red collar and wants to cut it off. gods help me)

we then took a stupidly packed bus back to dizengoff, getting off a stop early because mr smear was suffering so much.

on a whim, i took him into "the fairy forest" and asked if they had any harry potter merch - they did. the young woman working in the "magic" store who hasn't read or watched any harry potter (!) unlocked a disorganized cabinet and we managed to find a "proper" gryffindor brooch, and we were done!

we went down to the vegan market (i'd intentionally gone with mr smear on a wednesday for this), and mr smear selected a bowl with surprisingly healthy home-cooked foods, along with two giant kubeh. the kubeh really weren't nice - too hard, and not very tasty - but we both tucked into the healthy stuff and enjoyed it immensely, even though it contained a few things mr smear usually despises :P

we did a little home center shopping, took a look at another new "game" store (gambling and claw machines), and then picked up a chocolate from vegantino. again (i picked up an egg last time, which was amazing). long story short: the chocolate is beyond decadent, it's expensive but absolutely worth every agurah, and omg mr smear and i were in dessert heaven and dessert hell at the same time, both trying desperately to make the exquisite experience last as long as possible.

our old landlords sent transfer confirmation of our deposit! ^_^

after all that, it was time to catch a bus home, shower, and get into bed. big data came downstairs to pick up something of his, and informed us that everyone's preparing to take shelter... we prepared our bedroom (shutting the steel window, readying our go-bag and a bottle of water), and then i crashed soon afterwards.

i woke up a couple of hours ago, and after watching some random videos and writing all this down, i think i'm almost ready to go back to bed.

the perfect beach day

yesterday:

we all went off to dizengoff, which was a lot less festive than anticipated. having said that, there was plenty festive outside, and it was a gorgeous day. we took care of a couple of minor things, including picking up a bunch of hebrew comic books, and then took a slow meander up to dizengoff square, where we stopped for a very nice lunch.

we all enjoyed the food, and we all had a good experience.

then we caught a bus home and had a pretty relaxing afternoon.

in the evening i took mr smear to the synagogue, he came without a fuss and in addition to some generally pleasant talks along the way, we had a pretty serious conversation about the weekly portion (which includes the story of the golden calf), why we're supposed to pray so often (specifically, the shema), and how those two both ultimately have the same moral: no matter how smart we may think we are, that we *get* the lessons from the torah, we're descended from the same morons who *forgot* about god after witnessing his miracles directly, after hearing his voice directly, and we need to keep playing our history on repeat so that we don't forget it and lose our way.

today:

i slept horribly last night. i hadn't taken my new nightly pill (alpha lipoic acid) and my hips hurt constantly, so i was in a lot of discomfort and i barely got any rest.

i started the day a bit antisocially trying to catch up with private instagram messages - the result of ignoring them for most of the week - and then i put down for satisfactory which is on sale right now and sat with mr smear while he got into it. so far, pretty damned awesome.

without a fight - remarkably - we began moving out for our ride to the beach around 10.30am as planned. it did take us about 45 minutes to actually start riding, but there were no bad feelings and it was turning out to be another beautiful day.

we enjoyed a good ride to the beach, which was easier now that half of arlozorov is open again and with decent bike lanes, found a good shady spot, completed the sunscreen ritual and headed into the water. the side of the beach we were sitting on was too rocky and cold, so we went to the other side which was easier on the feet but absolutely freezing.

we had fun in the water for a little while, then returned to our spot where mr smear insisted on me burying him a couple of times (it's his favorite thing), and after a lot of time trying to convince him to come into the shade i got to lie down for a bit. after we had agreed that it was a good time to go and find food (and coffee for me), it took about an hour to get him into the water to rinse off some of the sand, then out of the water, then through the showers, and eventually we were ready to ride again.

we tried a very busy coffee shop near the corner of dizengoff and ben gurion, but the service was shit and the menu vegan-unfriendly so we pushed on to eazy cafe, for our favorite salad and a generally good vibe.

we eventually got home quite late, took turns showering and then chilled the remainder of the afternoon away. the evening was pleasant, dinner was good, and after getting mr smear into bed gd and i watched a lot of andrew schultz - life, which is mostly just amusing but does has some really good stuff in it. we're a bit disappointed that monk's been taken off...

...

i'm on a water-only fast now for blood tests in the morning. i hope i sleep alright.

the festival of everything being upside down

ugh: it got worse before it got better.

around the time i finally went to bed, mr smear woke up needing to go to the toilet (so there was much messing about with lights). i closed my eyes and let gd handle it.

then, around 3am, i got up to pee, and found mr smear with his light on reading harry potter. i stood in his doorway and (gently but with a disapproving tone) made it clear that that was unacceptable, and that he needed to be sleeping so he could get up at 6.30am.

and that was when he started arguing with me. and on top of the bad vibe, once i got him to put the book away he then complained that he couldn't go to sleep because he'd read something creepy.

that was when i lost patience, and he was fighting back, and i'd been exhausted already, so i called gd in to handle the situation and tried to go back to sleep. but i was too angry, and i couldn't bring that anger down, and then i remembered jordan peterson talking about not letting your kids do things that make you dislike them, and that anger with him slowly morphed into fear for him.

i never really got any rest, and in addition to the psychological/emotional struggle my lower back started giving me trouble too.

i was a wreck come the morning.

i managed to avoid dealing with the issue until mr smear and i were both "awake" and doing alright, and then i took him aside and told him what i'd been feeling and worrying about. he seems to have heard me, he responded well, and the rest of the morning went well.

after mr smear went to school, gd and i left to meet up with one of my los angeles cousins' kids who's visiting israel from new york, and who i haven't seen since i was a teenager and he was little. we had no idea what to expect (turns out he did a little jail time at some point, so maybe both of them did?), but after arriving at his hotel (and taking a quick tour of a tattoo studio / gallery, it's kind of our thing) we found him and walked to a cool little coffee shop, and spent the better part of two hours enjoying a beautiful sunny morning chat with a really decent guy who turned out to be quite a kindred spirit ^_^

afterwards, gd and i took the light rail to my office from where she took a bus back home, and i walked in and immediately began to fall apart,

the coffee didn't help. the fruit didn't help. the hummus for lunch was delicious but certainly didn't help. and then a long meeting in a stuffy meeting room on top of all of everything made the struggle to keep my eyes open very, very real.

not counting the happy hour (and unveiling of our new logo, which is actually pretty cool), i spent the rest of the afternoon in a fatigue haze trying to compensate with lots of sugary snacks and i'm not quite sure how much i actually achieved.

after finally arriving back home, i helped mr smear with a couple more pages of math homework (with no drama!) and we watched an episode of delicious in dungeon while eating "drekfast" (dinner + breakfast), took care of some random things after getting mr smear into bed, and then went to bed myself and passed out.

...

aside from very long, very scary, very real dreams about a dinosaur apocalypse, i slept relatively well. now we're all up and coffee'd and breakfasted, we're off to dizengoff center to see what's happening there for purim.

chag sameach!

purimon haul

i'm feeling absolutely exhaustipated. probably going to bed soon.

...

today started off well. i helped mr smear get himself and his mishloach manot to school, he was very happily dressed up as a knight. i helped gd with the dishes, and then left for work early because i knew i was going to be out of the office for a couple of hours in the afternoon.

a lot of my work day was dealing with a broken machine and some software issues, but i did make a little progress by the end, and i did help my lead get his work done on time which was really important.

gd went to her sewing lesson today, and we'd planned to meet at home and then pick up mr smear together, with her carrying his mishloach manot home and me taking him to the orthopod. what actually happened was that mr smear called me much earlier than expected to inform me that school was out already and he needed help getting everything home, and on my way to get him i realized that with all of yesterday's drama i'd missed the memo informing us that school ended early :/

he had to wait for me for about half an hour, but he has a phone so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i found him and his impressive haul in very good spirits. i've seen photos from the day, and it did me a lot of good to see him full of smiles and having a good time ^_^

we carried everything home together, and at that point the day had become hot enough that i needed to switch to shorts. while we waited for gd to return, i talked to him about some things. some dealing-with-life things.

when i came home, i tried to help him with his homework but he blew up over a misunderstanding - those dealing-with-life-things became immediately relevant, but he didn't give a fuck and he refused to throw away the spade he was digging himself a hole with.

gd and i must have fought with him for at least an hour before he finally returned to his senses and could be reasoned with, and the experience was not only utterly insane but also thoroughly exhausting.

i helped him with a couple of homework questions, and then we ate dinner, and by the time he finally climbed into bed it was already 8.25pm and i had a meeting with gco and a potential partner at 8.30pm.

holy shit.

we went in to the meeting with little in the way of expectations, and i'm excited to report that it was a very constructive meeting. hopefully they'll start making some magic happen, and if they play it right there'll be exciting steps to follow.

drama allergy

 well, shit. today was pretty dramatic, my workday isn't over yet but i need to do a quick mind dump to free up some bandwidth for what remains...

yesterday:

i slept better on sunday night. i'm wondering if the alpha lipoic acid the doctor recommended is having an immediate effect. seems too good to be true, but if it's working i'll take it.

i rushed to the office early to return the keys i'd accidentally left with, and started the day on a zoom call with gd and mr smear's therapist which was generally optimistic.

the work day itself was tough, and i got home pretty frustrated.

mr smear did some good reading with me, and as a reward for doing it with a good attitude i started teaching him how to play minesweeper :)

after dinner i managed to make a little progress on a dev tool before settling down to watch an episode of monk with gd, after which i watched a few random youtube videos until realizing i needed to go to bed.

today:

i slept relatively well last night. lots of dreaming.

today started off pretty well, between the time mr smear left for school and the time gd and i left to meet up with him and his teacher i managed to make a bunch of appointments (from sunday's meeting with the doc).

the meeting started off awkwardly, as they wanted mr smear to introduce himself and tell us how he's doing. my gods, i wouldn't have been comfortable being put on the spot like that either, certainly not at his age, but after a brief silence we got things moving forward and lots of things were said.

in summary: mr smear's teacher seems really solid, and they appear to be off to a good start. i think we covered all the things that have been going on, where he's coming from and what he's been learning to deal with, and it was pretty optimistic. once he'd left the room, we talked about some of the heavier stuff.

of particular note was the councillor informing me that she received a call yesterday from the organization i spoke to, and she was offended that i'd reported that we didn't feel like they were doing anything. i made it very clear that our second complaint was about bullying, violence and harassment, and that until i informed the principal that we intend to go to the police the next time mr smear is injured we never saw any real response from the school. we talked about that in depth, and i think both the councillor and his new teacher understand where we stand and what's at stake.

i managed to keep my mouth shut when the councillor told us how important communication is, when we're the ones who've been begging them to communicate...

from there i went off to work. my lead and i came up with a plan, but my boss' request to prepare what i've been working on for a third party took up most of my day. and random conversations surround our procedures and practices too, i guess.

...

after lunch, though, was when all hell broke loose: mr smear's teacher dropped a bomb on the parents by demanding no dairy in the mishloah manot that the kids are supposed to bring tomorrow, and a lot of the parents were furious. not just because they'd already invested in and prepared the packages, but on principle, too.

my immediate reaction was flat panic because we do not want the parents or the other kids to resent us or mr smear due to his allergy. let me tell you, it's very difficult to navigate a situation like that tactfully when you want the teacher to know that what she's doing is appreciated (and correct, considering dairy is supposed to be banned on school grounds just like peanuts) but you also want the parents to not hate you.

i sent a message to the teacher to that effect, then i posted in the parents' group that i'd done so and that we had no intention of making everyone's lives difficult.

what followed was surprising: the mother of the bully from last week reached out to me, along with another parent, and both of them were stunned to learn that his allergy is a real danger and that he's been isolated from the other children because he's (justifiably) too scared to eat with or near them. i spoke to the mother on the phone, and she almost brought me to tears: she remembers being an isolated olah chadasha when she arrived, and she was deeply upset that mr smear has had to deal with the food thing on top of everything else. she's determined to use this story as a way to teach her son, and insisted on putting together mishloah manot specifically for mr smear.

she also convinced me to clear things up for the other parents. so i wrote a post in the group as follows:

hi everyone, i just spoke to some of you and realized that <mr smear>'s situation wasn't so clear until now.

<mr smear> has a severe allergy to dairy products. not a sensitivity - an allergy - at a life-threatening level. he has to carry an epipen with him at all times, and he is (rightly) afraid of other people's food that contains or may contain dairy products, so he usually avoids eating with the other kids in class or stays away from them because he is afraid that there might be an incident.

there are even kids in the class who take advantage of this fear to hurt him. just so you know.

we are very grateful to the parents who are considering the social implications of this, and those who contacted us - you touched us deeply. those of you who already understood and always cared - we thank you very much.

we're happy that <the teacher> is taking this matter seriously, but i promise that it is not our intention to make things difficult for you or your children. this is not an easy situation, for both us and you, and i hope we will continue to cooperate (and tolerate as much as possible) so that we can all be as comfortable as possible ❤️

the responses that followed were positive. and even if only some of the parents are with us and supportive, that's huge, and for the first time we don't feel so alone with this and we understand that the lack of consideration has mostly been from ignorance, not apathy. and now there's a bit of competitive overcompensation going on and it looks like a bunch of kids might be bringing vegan mishloah manot for mr smear tomorrow, so of all the directions today could have gone in i ended up having to give him a talk about showing gratitude for any gifts he receives even if they're from kids he doesn't like.

to underscore the first lesson, though, when i discussed it with mr smear after i got home he told me that he'd been really angry to learn that most of his class - after three and a half years with him - didn't understand what an allergy was. so today mr smear and their new teacher taught them. and maybe some of their parents learned, too.

...

that whole story took about two hours out of my work day, i went from terrified to overcome with gratitude to awkward and anxious and it took quite a while to come back to earth and be able to do some work. and then it was time to come home (late), i was supposed to help mr smear with his homework but between our talk and his stomache really hurting that didn't happen.

he'd better be doing okay by tomorrow morning. his best friend sent photos of himself hand-making oznei haman with pistachio cream for him. holy shit.