the stretch / eyeball melting

 sleep journal entry: i was so tired from the night before that i mostly slept well; when i got up in the middle of the night, it was very briefly and primarily due to a stuffed nose.

...

we're just about at the end of the month, and i just looked at my personal timesheets:

20 hours for my employer

50 hours for my auto-doc

105 hours for my client

...

 got up around 6am yesterday morning, and the first thing i encountered online absolutely stunned me (and, soon after, gd as well) and struck a devastating blow: protoplasm had posted a beautiful photo of him and his girlfriend a couple of days ago, but it wasn't at all clear that what prompted it was that last sunday, he woke up to discover that she had passed away in her sleep.

it's so completely and utterly wrong, and i cannot imagine the horror he's going through. we had quite a lengthy talk last night, he's holding up as well as can be expected and i'm grateful to know that he's got friends and family around him supporting him, but i feel bad being so far away and unable to be there in person.

...

from 6.45am until 6pm i was almost exclusively at my desk. the first couple of hours were putting the finishing touches on the auto-doc mvp and publishing my first article on the auto-doc, which was incredibly exciting but also tempered - as has been everything else - by the protoplasm news. the auto-doc is officially out there, and i'm praying it's picked up the way that i believe it should be and i'm fantasizing it will be.

the main thing i'm supposed to be working on for my client has been stuck in a holding pattern waiting on other people to click buttons, so my client work day became primarily about implementing my golang service post-incident recommendations which involved an inordinate amount of getting AI to not lie to me. in the afternoon i invested some time in writing up a one-pager and configuring the auto-doc for the client's infrastructure, which resulted in me stumbling across the SVP engineering's attempt to do the same work i'm doing (in the golang service), and politely messaging him to explain that i've already succeeded, and am simply in testing to prevent any further incidents.

thank god my software engineering efforts live and die by git graph being my primary interface to any codebase, if he'd "fixed" something without my context i might've had quite a time of paying for the merge :/

[though, in retrospect, i *could* have just excised his changes and written them off as wasted effort, but i'm still glad i caught him in time]

nystire came over and we took a walk through the park with mr smear, who'd had a little more exercise yesterday than i had, and i'm still being amused by mr smear's reaction when nystire suggested that we could always sell his kidneys to buy a gaming machine 😂

he's offered to take us stargazing with him in a couple of weeks, and mr smear and i are very much looking forward to it!

my sister had arrived home shortly before we got back, and everyone else helped with getting dinner on the table while i quietly fell apart from exhaustion. i managed to pull myself back together for dinner, then excused myself after a long conversation about protoplasm and my sister's friends and other-side-of-the-family's dealings with illness and death and bad behaviors to shower and talk to protoplasm and then say goodnight to mr smear and go to bed myself.

...

i did kick off the async game jam thing yesterday, but i was so tired there was no way i was going online :P

i've given up on the mastodon experiment and deleted my accounts. not only were they not providing me any real value, but they've become cesspool echo chambers of the regressive left and i couldn't find any communities with shared values or active members.

unfocused

i put a lot of work into the auto-doc today, i think it's kind of ready. almost. i guess. i dunno.

but it's after 1am and i need to go to bed soon. i did pass out a couple of times earlier while we all watched the addams family on the couch (gd agreed with me that we can do this during the summer holidays), but that doesn't really count, and my back and hip flexors were doing their thing :(

we watched some adventure time today for the first time in ages, and played a couple of games of guess who?, and my sister and i took mr smear for quite a long walk through to the port for ice cream, so we got *some* exercise even if mr smear is now obsessing over his belly again...

the resting restless

 am i okay? i did sleep easier after my previous post. i still got up pretty early, though. i started my day on the balcony, doing a bunch of random things* before getting to work on the auto-doc and its write-up.

* including resetting the theme of the sonnetcomix website, which has been bothering me for a while.

i managed to make a fair amount of progress before we left for the shuk. it felt like a long bus ride, we enjoyed a pleasant walk down the now completed king george street, we walked through nahalat binyamin, then back to the shuk, and i immediately split from gd and my sister gathering groceries and took mr smear for a (very expensive) fruit juice and to stand in a spot of shade away from the crowds.

today was hot.

we met up with the girls, took a short walk and said goodbye to my sister, then the three of us went to find a bus home.

apparently i was the only able-bodied person on the bus willing to stand up for a pregnant woman. it's kind of distressing.

aside from a very pleasant nap on the couch in the air-conditioning, and later going with my sister and mr smear for a last-minute shopping round, i've spent my afternoon and evening playing games (balatro and slay the spire 2), and watching youtube videos, and just generally quieting the noise in my brain as much as possible.

i've just scolded mr smear for having ignored his screen-time alarm (as usual) and sent him to shower, and i think i'm going to just continue to be "off".

hyper-real

 i slept remarkably well last night. i got up a little before my alarm this morning, and took to my office instead of the balcony so as not to disturb the kids sleeping in the living room. i began my day by writing up the article about what AI teaches us about human consciousness (leading to a new appreciation to the insights of the movie memento), and did some work on the auto-doc, then headed out with my sister to meet up with our cousins.

...

i'd managed to get the wrong address from google maps - i just checked, and the address in google maps is simply incorrect - and that led to some confusion as we first walked the right way, then turned back because the address was wrong, then doubled back once we arrived at the wrong place. so we arrived a bit late to the beachfront coffee shop. then ordering coffee turned into a thing (apparently the guy behind us was being weirdly stressed about me speaking to the cashier), and then we sat down at the table to discover that the chairs have all been bolted in place.

weird fucking place.

anyway, i spent most of the hour making my pitch, primarily to our younger cousin but it was a good conversation all round. i was very grateful that my sister was with me because she definitely contributed, and also grateful for our older cousin pointing out that our younger cousin has been looking for something meaningful, and by the time i had to run i believe i'd managed to put all the pieces together into something coherent.

i walked out of there buzzing after having been thanked warmly and told he was already thinking about it.

...

my phone went off informing me that i had a newly scheduled meeting that my manager had arranged with one of the data guys (they'd been ignoring my request for assistance for a day or two), and i rushed through the shuk, getting properly turned around, in the search for a quiet place to get online, all the while discussing the meeting and the idea with my mother on the phone.

with a couple of minutes to go, i sat down on a bench under a tree, sweating in the already-heavy heat, actively context-switching into the meeting and nervously praying that i or my computer didn't get shat on by birds. that was when i realized that it wasn't an online meeting, there was no link, and i had been expected to be physically in the office.

that was also when i saw that i'd just been contacted about the work i'd been doing the day before, and learned that by fixing the nine year-old bugs in the golang service, i'd inadvertently caused an incident 🤦‍♂️

fortunately, reverting was easy (because i'd fixed its CI a week or two ago) and i quickly made my way to the bus. on the way home, i continued to apologize and explain and reassure the poor on-call that the incident was over and that i would provide the post-mortem.

i was hungry by the time i got off the bus, and stopped at home to pick up a sandwich from gd and then walk it to the office. it was more than just a sandwich. it was a heavy, delicious sushi filling on good bread, and by the time i was done i felt a combination of deep satisfaction and a sense of having eaten more than i needed.

i arrived at the office just in time to see the guy i was meeting with leave for lunch. and, also, just in time for my elevator pitch to my employer.

...

the call was fifteen minutes long (it had been scheduled for half an hour), and he got the idea pretty quickly. he asked a couple of good questions, and then told me he wanted a PRD. so 🤘

then he informed me that he'd considered my request for a raise, and that these weren't good times for it but he does appreciate my situation, and offered me a very respectable bonus instead... on condition that i don't leave the company within a year.

i was very grateful, both for the bonus and for the implicit additional positive feedback.

...

writing an AI-assisted post-mortem is a treat. it put all the facts together, i edited and added a recommendation, and it was started and published within 25 minutes and without any stress.

my recommendation: protect the bad / broken client-facing behavior, but disconnect it from actually trying to do anything.

i was asked for help by one of my previous client team, and i hope i've managed to onboard him as a new (replacement) dashboard-as-code champion.

i bumped into the other contractor, and we talked about our employer's new market shift, and invited him to join my "async game jam" experiment.

i tried to discuss the incident with someone from the old client team, and ended up down a rabbit hole with another AI specialist and demo'ed the auto-doc. now both he and my manager want to see the one-pager, and he gave me some pointers as to what specifically he wants to see, which is encouraging!

i finally sat down with the data engineer, and discovered that the problem i've been needing help with was a bit simpler than i'd thought. we both spent some time working on the fix in parallel, hopefully it'll be in early next week.

i then had a one-on-one with my manager, which turned into a very long, very interesting debate because we have very different ideas about what to focus on when building out our harness. there are some things we clearly agree on, though, and i was pleased at the end when i made a suggestion that he was happy with, and even more pleased to speak to the AI specialist again and discover that he'd already implemented something similar that i can use to make it happen :)

the happy hour was good, and i continued my earlier conversation with my fellow consultant before my client / the boss pulled me in to a meeting with the previous client team's lead - he wants me to do another job for them next week, between other jobs :P

i worked another hour, then left the office feeling pretty darned good about how my day went.

...

gd, on the other hand, had not had such an easy day. she was traumatized by mr smear's friend from the wrong side of the tracks, and having to parent him in ways that one would hope a ten or eleven year-old wouldn't need. ultimately it sounds like she handled the whole thing excellently, but it was difficult and concerning. i discussed it with mr smear as we strapped on our rollerblades - he'd been supporting gd in trying to help his friend, and for the most part had behaved very well himself - and he seems to be a lot more appreciative of the parenting he's gotten having witnessed the alternative...

...

the rollerblading went well, though it got off to a frustratingly slow start, and we had a good time and it was a beautiful (if hot and humid) evening. it took mr smear so insanely long to get showered and ready for dinner, though, that by the time we sat down my sister had already returned home from ra'anana after having had dinner herself, but she sat with us to chat.

it was pretty late by the time we were done, and i didn't last long after putting mr smear to bed. i suspected i wouldn't sleep through the night, though, and i think i lay awake for at least an hour before getting up almost an hour and a half ago.

perhaps i'll sleep easier having gotten all of this down.

on the edge

 today was just... unbelievable.

i almost made progress with my auto-doc, but had to leave halfway to make it to the office on time for my team daily that i didn't know had been postponed.

aside from reviewing a teammate's code (which happened to provide some very helpful hints for my auto-doc integration), i spent all of my client hours working on the golang service that i'd said i was done with, but kept diving down the rabbit hole and discovering weirder and weirder things.

before noon i travelled to my employer's office to meet with the gameis guy. i couldn't find him, but i had a sync with my mentor anyway. then i looked for him again, bumping into my sales team rep and getting some "insider information" regarding which way the wind is blowing - anyone who isn't "with the program" as far as AI is concerned is going to have a very tough time finding employment or staying employed. i still couldn't find him, and ended up being drawn in to a "tech circle" (which was interesting), after which i finally found him but only had 25 minutes of his time before he had to go off to something.

so i sat down with him and his friend, and learned that they're both working at our employer as a day job, but run a gaming company as a night job as well. they gave me all sorts of advice, and insights, in addition to a brief summary of their crazy journey so far.

immediately after that i sat down with a guy i'd met at the hackathon, and i spent the next twenty minutes or so flooding him with info and advice (mostly about working with AI) and getting him onboard with my "async" game jam idea.

then i spoke to my group lead, and introduced her to my auto-doc, and she was super excited when she saw the demo ^_^

the rest of the work day - in the office, and at home - was all about refining my golang service effort and incrementally solving each wave of issues. it's been a trip, and a very expensive one: i'm pretty confident that claude's opus model has suddenly becoming considerably dumber and way more expensive :/

i got home to find gd in a state of shock, she has no idea how to deal with a little boy whose family isn't particularly into hygiene (or boundaries). i took the kids for a walk to pick up snacks, regaling them with AI horror stories; apparently, i was effective enough that mr smear's friend stopped me to delete chatgpt from his phone.

we were musing over whether mixing the salt & pepper chips with the balsamic vinegar & caramelized onion flavors of country chips would approach a salt & vinegar experience, and i decided it was worth a try: the kids were horrified, but i bought them anyway and after our sushi dinner (which we all ate too much of) we gave it a try, and while it wasn't what we were hoping for it was still a case of the whole being better than the sum of its parts.

i managed to get the two of them showered between getting home and eating dinner, which was quite a story.

my sister came home pretty late, after we'd begun trying to get the kids to bed (they're camping out in the living room), and while they amused themselves with non-screen activities (much to their chagrin) the three of us sat in our office and retold some pretty hairy parts of our life stories. and then it was midnight, and the kids had been asleep for a while without us realizing, and now it's time to call it a night and get ready for an important morning.

sleep journal entry

i got some work done on my auto-doc last night, but then mr smear asked me to read to him and i ended up putting myself to sleep.

ironically, he was apparently up a while later, sitting on the couch and asking my sister if she could apply a general anaesthetic because he couldn't sleep 🤭

i had a rough night. general mental disquiet, and plenty of lower back discomfort which needed heavy stretching. during a longer stretching session, i could hear what sounded like a post-zapper fly dying, but i wasn't able to find it.

gods, i'm tired. i mean, i'm up, but i'm tired.

a day

 i'm not going rollerblading tonight. again. this time because i've been so busy this week, and there's more busy coming down the line, and i've barely touched the auto-doc which is immensely important to me. so that's my plan for tonight 🤞

[please universe don't laugh]

work today was annoying. the stuff i was supposed to be focused on is consistently being blocked by the owning team, and then when they do approve my changes they don't merge them*, and then when they do merge them it takes ages to deploy, and then when they do deploy it takes ages to run the tests, and then i invariably discover that something doesn't work as advertised and i need to start all over again.

* not allowing someone to merge an approved request is really, really dumb.

so instead of working on my primary task, i filled my time with the golang service i wasn't supposed to be touching... i realized my original ticket was still open and then confirmed that all of my changes replaced the original, obsolete log noise with new, very real log noise that shows that an aspect of the service has been thoroughly broken for the last nine years.

*sigh*

on my way home for lunch (mr smear's leftover pancakes from breakfast), i picked up lactase for gd whose stomach has been really rough today - even more than before. i've warned her that she'd better go to the clinic tomorrow if it's not feeling better by then.

i signed into the all-hands meeting on my way home, i couldn't care less about the details but the guys kept pronouncing "people" like "pilpel" and he talked about "eating" the sales targets, so...

once mr smear was done with his screen time, we went out for a walk to the park, and got back just after my sister returned from jerusalem. we had a great dinner, and then chatted with my mom, and now it's shower-and-bedtime for mr smear...

unroutine

 oh. it's 00.28 as i begin writing this. i went to bed about an hour and a half ago, and i've been lying uncomfortably awake for the past half hour or so trying desperately to claw back the unconsciousness. my belly's been doing a thin all evening (again in the evening, again no idea what's triggered it), and my lower back's been doing a thing since i stopped sleeping, and my brain's been doing a thing since...

yesterday (saturday):

i wasn't very productive yesterday, mostly on purpose. i thoroughly enjoyed witnessing mr smear playing battlezone on the PSVR, and i tooled around most of the day arbitrarily, and i enjoyed a good afternoon nap.

in the late afternoon - around 4.30pm - my sister and i dragged mr smear out ("i don't want to go to the beach!") and we walked, in the not-too-unpleasant heat, down to the beachfront golda. after the ice cream break, we walked back up to the hilton beach, and enjoyed a lovely evening; unable to get mr smear out of the water, of course, and dragging his feet to leave the beach :P

after catching an outrageously packed bus home, and showering in turns, gd treated us to a great dinner and we all crashed.

today:

another reasonable night's sleep (only tonight breaks the streak). very reasonable, in fact. my sister left really early again (she went to tour the gaza envelope and see the nova site), mr smear slept in until around 11am and was annoyed that i'd bothered him (twice) because i think he should have some semblance of routine in spite of it being summer holidays.

i began my day on the balcony, then spent my work day in my office. the actual meaningful work i did was minimal, primarily because the people i need to approve my work are either on weekend time or enjoying the fact that nobody's work is properly monitored on sundays.

i burned a ridiculous amount of tokens improving dashboards and making an ai status tool look cleaner.

mr smear and i - and then gd - had a massive fight about music practice*, which eventually resulted in him actually practicing with a good attitude in spite of the emotional rollercoaster and having lost hours of screen time for being disrespectful.

* that he has to put his heart into it, not just get through it. and that he needs to treat it like a rage game.

we side-stepped the punishment by going upstairs to play settlers of catan, mr smear's first encounter with the game.

he enjoyed it!

aside from being vengeful (really just against me) and myself having a pretty rough game, we all had a good time and played pretty well. there was one incident which i still think is hilarious, but awkwardly so: big data's son got confused and thought that his dad had moved the robber to block him and mr smear, when it was actually me. but he was unshakeable, so i piled on against big data, at which point - in spite of my laughing - mr smear got caught up. this went on for a minute or two before i put a stop to it and admitted that it was me, which threw both the kids completely 😂

we got home at roughly the same time my sister did, and soon settled down for dinner. post-dinner i was becoming a bit frustrated with getting mr smear into the bedtime ritual, but i made good progress with the auto-doc project (i'm having a much better experience with codex than claude) and then read alice's adventures in wonderland to mr smear, which put me to sleep more than him.

reception

 i'm sitting here on the balcony after a surprisingly good night's sleep, in spite of mr smear's incessant creaking through the night on his air mattress next to my side of the bed.

i spent a good couple of hours yesterday morning working on my auto-doc: i'm very happy with how it's going. i'm so relieved that the presentation went positively that i'm in "calm down" mode. i'm under immense pressure to include certain improvements, write out a one-pager for my team, and get it out the door. all at the same time.

...

i had my quarterly roadmap meeting with my mentor yesterday morning. the roadmap bit went very well, although there was an awkward moment or two when discussing my auto-doc because he suggested that i could have done it without AI generating the documentation. then the real awkwardness began, when he asked how i felt about the company and we got into it over me feeling disconnected and not seeing the bigger picture. it turns out a) linkedin's algorithm just doesn't put all the usual stuff in my feed (granted, i don't use linkedin very often) and b) that while i've been complaining about there not being a company newsletter, i've been receiving a company newsletter in my email - my gmail inboxes were configured by default to only show my primary inbox, and i've been (unconciously) ignoring everything else 🤦‍♂️

once the meeting was over, i flipped through my emails and discovered, to my immense gratitude, that i'd missed an urgent and important email that had a deadline of a couple of days: choosing a gift for rosh hashana. if my mentor and i hadn't gone down that rabbit hole i might've lost my opportunity to pick up a significant shopping voucher, which in our current financial situation makes a very big difference.

a couple of hours after my roadmap meeting, the thing that my mentor had suggested for my auto-doc popped into my head, and i remembered that just that morning i'd read an article on the topic. i reviewed a couple of well-known packages and sent them to him, and was surprised when he immediately called me. not only had he only learned about one of those very packages about half an hour before, but when i explained that it might very well be a good dependency to build in to what i've got i could almost hear the penny drop for him, and he seems to have suddenly understood what all the excitement for what i'm building is about ^_^

...

the rest of the work day was finally uncovering the root cause of the golang service crashes and fixing it, and it was REALLY satisfying seeing the memory usage flatline when i finally deployed ^_^

i also managed to make some progress with my primary project, and after months of shenanigans i'm at a point where i've pretty much finished everything end-to-end but now have no idea how i'm going to actually test it :P

...

i left the office about twenty minutes before we had to leave home to do the airport run, and called gd to make sure she and mr smear were ready to go. of course, that was when she had just decided that she needed to wash the floors in honor of my sister's arrival 🤦‍♂️

i'd left the office in the middle of getting code reviewed and deployed, so in the literal few minutes i was at home i continued, and on the train i continued, and at the airport while waiting for my sister to clear border control i continued. border control gave me a little more time than expected because they had to hunt down her entry in the population registration - she hasn't been here for thirty years, and she left her ID in london - but she got through it eventually and our reunion was fun, funny and emotional :)

we took the train home, and the girls decided that walking the few blocks from the station was fine, which it totally was. the rest of the afternoon / evening was setting up, catching up, a really nice sushi dinner, a long chat with my mom*, and mr smear enthusiastically trying out his present of a beautiful box set of acrylic pens, then everyone getting ready for and into bed really, really late.

* although a bit intimidating, as she brought up the fact that mr smear's barmitzvah is in two years' time and we're not members of a synagogue and celebrations are a big deal that cost quite a lot of money.

...

while getting ready for bed, i saw that the summer camp organizer had registered the refund, which is a big relief.

...

i've been up since before 6am when i heard the front door close as my sister headed out to join our cousins for a day trip to metzada, and i can't believe it's thursday already. it's been a big week. so far. i'm very excited about so many things! a bit anxious, too, but mostly excited.

higher resolution

 i finally got to bed about half an hour after posting, then woke up with a jolt forty five minutes later from a nightmare in which mr smear had "pranked" me by leaving a bunch of dead insects in my bed, and then ignored me completely and became super defiant while i did everything i could to avoid resorting to violence, which all took place outside a door out of which burst the crazy mom from mr smear's class who was ecstatic to have caught me being aggressive, and taunted me by dancing around and wiggling her bum. i woke up furious with mr smear and having to suppress the urge to rouse him from his slumber and give him a thumping.

when i told him the story in the morning - less than an hour later - he was thoroughly entertained :/

mr smear decided - unsurprisingly - that he's done with the summer camp. the organizer said she'd put in for a refund, which will be immensely helpful.

i worked hard on the auto-doc for the next hour or two, the AI taking so long on one of the activities that i ended up staying home for my daily meeting and only then heading out to the office.

i spent the next few hours manically working on all the things at once, and somehow managing to make good progress on the auto-doc, on my primary data pipeline project, and on the golang service i've been helping out with because it's giving me satisfaction to be doing housekeeping for something that carries quite a load and that's been horribly neglected for so long.

lunchtime with the team i used to be embedded with was cool, i shared my inspirations from yesterday's game dev conference and that triggered some very interesting conversations.

i thought my presentation was scheduled for 2pm, so when 1.50pm rolled around and i had just discovered something broken... that was quite intense and disappointing, but discovering the meeting was actually an hour later was a huge relief! i managed to be ready in time ^_^

i was properly nervous and wired for the presentation, but it went well and i got some decidedly positive and constructive feedback. at first it seemed like my team didn't really get what was happening, by the end they agreed that the value it brings is undeniable and i know what they want me to do to try to encourage adoption.

i had a very short post-presentation break to gather my thoughts, and then i jumped onto a call with my actual boss.

...

once upon a time, when i was in the army, i somehow developed "jeep driver's disease". nobody could think of how that developed, i wasn't able to get the recommended surgery done because my rights to a rehabilitation facility were denied as permanent forcers inexplicably give up their lone soldier status, and i was extremely fortunate that at some point it just went away. when i went to a surgeon to check me out, he put on a rubber glove, and i blurted out, twice, that i was feeling really uncomfortable with the examination.

the second time i said it, he lost his temper and yelled at me: "what, you think *I'M* comfortable with doing this?!!"

i thought about this story on my way to work this morning, and that perhaps i'd start my compensation conversation with my boss with it. in retrospect, i'm rather glad i didn't :P

i began the conversation awkwardly, but i managed to say what i needed to say and it was an enormous relief that he handled it very coolly and matter-of-factly. after explaining the industry situation (which i'm already well familiar with) he inquired as to mine, and he expressed understanding and assured me that he'd consider it. the impression he gave me was that he might acquiesce soon, or possibly in a few months during the annual reviews, either way it feels positive.

...

when i called my mom and gd afterwards to let them know how things had gone, i was shaking a little.

during the day i'd pushed an upgrade to the golang service to get better metrics and make their emission more efficient, and looking at the dashboards and reviewing with AI two things became apparent: the first, that the metrics gave much better insight into the constant crashing that this poor service has been undergoing for the past couple of years. the second, that i made the emission so efficient that the frequency of the crashing increased dramatically 😂🤦‍♂️

so i stayed a bit later than i'd have liked preparing the fix, and then i left the office, arguably in the best spirits i've been in a while.

gd sent mr smear to meet me on the way home and help me with a quick grocery run, and then he helped me take out the recycling, which turned out to include a side-quest of finding a bench to dump unused school books on, and then it was time for dinner. t'was a good dinner, and we resumed watching the simpsons (it's been a while, and the last time i mentioned it was a big, unpleasant day), and then it was shower and bedtime and read a bit of alice's adventures in wonderland to mr smear (i starting falling asleep reading about the dormirouse), and i was going to jump into bed but i just had to get all this down first.

gameis 2026

 the gameis conference was nothing short of inspirational. up until a couple of weeks ago i was convinced that the israeli gaming industry was all about gambling; i arrived a little before the crowds, and i was really impressed by the local games set up to play; extremely high quality, both the studio and the indie games.

a guy i served with sat down next to me during the opening talks, and we were both - like most of the people in the room - made very uncomfortable by the fifteen minutes of "saying the quiet part out loud" explaining how to take advantage of "whales". judging by the audience reactions to that and the marketing talk that followed, and the antithesis in the more sentimental talks that poked fun at the first ones, we weren't alone. the only other uncomfortable talk was by a hardcore liberal american jew, whose thesis regarding making games meaningful was excellent, but who couldn't stop himself from putting his TDS and anti-musk sentiments on display.

lunch was surprisingly good, really decent vegan options.

the rest of the talks i sat in on were interesting, enlightening, and motivated me to want to Make Stuff. i've captured a whole bunch more game ideas, and as soon as i'm done with integrating my auto-doc into my client's systems i'm going to focus on some of them.

there were some awkward moments during the day, but i had an interesting phone call with sailor and a couple of positive interactions (one with an old university buddy who used to be a part of ze germans). in general, i feel much better about the lay of the land. and, considering my current situation - and my anxiety over tomorrow's attempt to renegotiate my salary possibly going awry - i'm wondering if i shouldn't try to move in that direction.

during the day i learned - fortunately from mr smear first - that mr smear and his "friend" had had an incident this morning. i told his friend's mother about the on/off bullying that mr smear's been experiencing the past couple of months, and i think as parents we're all aligned and hoping for the best... but either way he really doesn't want to go back, he's been really disappointed by the summer day camp in spite of a bunch of positive experiences.

i spoke to an organizer a bit earlier, and it looks like they'll refund us if he stops now (which is in spite of their terms and conditions), so we'll ask him in the morning and take it from there. it'll certainly put us under less financial pressure for this month, even if it doesn't really affect the next ones so much...

mr smear and i did a quick grocery shop and then sat down for dinner. gd made home-made hamburgers that were delicious, but none of us was hungry. i ate all my food anyway, because it was delicious and i felt uncomfortable leaving it on the plate, and i kind of regret doing that.

we finished watching chocolat, and we all loved it, which is awesome.

at mr smear's bedtime gd and i had a fight that was triggered by an argument over whether she could be a receptionist in tel aviv if her hebrew isn't great, and it took a lot to get to a point where we both heard each other...

now it's late, and i really don't have energy to work on the auto-doc, so i'm going to chill and go to bed soon and try to get as much done in the morning to be ready for the demonstration 🤞

big week ahead

 guardians of the galaxy vol. 3 was a mistake, and mr smear and i have agreed that we're not considering it canon. gd and i  watched it three years ago and apparently we weren't bothered by the hollywood tie-everything-up-neatly-with-a-bow drivel and the stream of character assassinations at the end. it kind of feels like the grease fan theory, perhaps rocket did die and the end was his ascension fantasy.

also, it manages to be a lot more gruesome than the others and mr smear - surprisingly - didn't enjoy that.

so that was a good chunk of yesterday. i also spent a few hours on my auto-doc side project, which feels like it's on its way to being ready for integration 🤞

mr smear and i put on our rollerblades relatively late in the evening, and headed out for some exercise. the first part was dramatically unpleasant (we keep having to talk about not being disrespectful, and yesterday evening's incident was on the heels of him lecturing me about how i should teach him and whether i was right to make him learn to ride a bike first), but we managed to get through it and enjoy the rest of the ride together. on the way back, we saw a jackal jump into the bushes a couple of blocks from our apartment and i had to explain to mr smear that - at his current speed - he wasn't going to be outrunning anything on four legs and might need to defend himself with his wrist pads if keeping away wasn't sufficient...

the evening was smooth, and included a visit from our upstairs friends. on their way out, big data informed me that our new fluxx packs have arrived, and that the delivery tax includes them playing with star fluxx before handing them over. they're not too interested in cthulu fluxx, though :P

i continued working on the auto-doc until midnight, by which time i was having trouble keeping my eyes open. due to hip flexor issues it took me a while to fall sleep, and i had to wake up and stretch again a couple of hours later, but otherwise i slept relatively well.

i began my day on the balcony enjoying the green and the breeze, invited mr smear over to explain palm tree growth and how deciduous trees' leaves are like tiny palms begging sunlight from the sky, only they wither and die as the tree curls up to hibernate for the winter.

now to start the new week, wondering if and when the war on iran resuming will affect us (especially with mr smear at his day camp for the next couple of week), and resuming the auto-doc work for the next hour or two before jumping on work-work (though the auto-doc is technically supposed to be that too) and trying to get as much done so i can take tomorrow off for the game dev conference with limited stress. oh, and planning for my sister's visit.

friday mall stress

the good parts of the day:

finishing up the baseline functionality of the auto-doc project, and it seems pretty solid! i've also written up most of the first article. the sun has already set, so i've effectively stopped for the day. that all took quite a lot of hours.

watching guardians of the galaxy vol. 2 together, even if i did fall asleep for a bit of it.

the not-so-good parts of the day:

the shopping mission... both parts. between not finding the stuff we wanted, and mr smear being a bit sick (snuffly, but he seems fine now), and occasionally quite disrespectful. and mall people, i was irritable as hell. also, gd and i having a fight over something (one of those relationship-long fights), and i've just learned it's still not done.

nervous juggling

 i already forgot how i slept on wednesday night, but i can say that last night wasn't bad. the last hour and a half in bed trying and failing to sleep was a bit of a drag, but overall it was alright.

yesterday was a really, really long work day. and i was manic - i guess i've been manic for a couple of days now - and doing a lot of nervous juggling while being bombarded with interesting information by the guy next to me (dx).

i spent two hours in the morning on my autodoc project before going to the office. for our team daily, i spent a lot of it trying to nudge my new manager without being imposing. then i spent the day trying to understand the existing ai infrastructure, and pitching my agentic skills (in zip format) to the vp tech, and reviving and reconstructing old golang services (everyone's too scared to touch them), and finally (finally!) getting most of my data to land that i've been working on for so many weeks now...

... and pitching my vision to random strangers (and getting buy-in ^_^), and discovering that my blockchain hackathon idea from 2021 (which i've subsequently tried to pitch to a number of people) has dx so excited that he's decided it's his "fable project" for the weekend - it would be so cool if he managed to pull it off!

between getting home and dinner, i gave mr smear the choice of rollerblading or walking. i was disappointed that he didn't want to get on his wheels, but i was surprised that he decided he wanted to walk all the way to the comics library (without any intention of actually going into the library). so off we went, for a very pleasant walk, discussing some horror game ideas he's had which are actually pretty damned good.

we got home and sat down for dinner, and finished watching guardians of the galaxy. what a brilliant movie. drax definitely gets some of the greatest lines.

after getting mr smear into bed, and in spite of the creeping tiredness, i continued working on my autodoc project for another two hours, before finally crawling into bed just before midnight.

...

now to dive back in until we all go out for the friday morning shopping.

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.

the king of the upside-down

 it's monday evening, just about two days have passed and it's been wild.

saturday night:

i spent the following few hours working on my hackathon project, troubleshooting github actions and eventually getting to the point where i'm ready to give the first iteration a try. then i went to bed, and caught a few (about three) hours sleep.

yesterday:

i woke up feeling less than stellar. but i got up, and had a coffee, and then accompanied mr smear to his first day of summer day camp. the first time was a bit complicated, but he managed just fine by himself this morning, so 👍

from the bus to the school we were accompanied by one of his buddies, and it was interested shadowing them and hearing them discussing how much happier they both are at the new school ^_^

i lurked a bit while mr smear registered himself, then made myself scarce and headed back home. the camp is a version of "the academy", the post-apocalyptic survival LARP, and i think that's pretty cool :)

i paid the municipality fees yesterday morning, which are still on the landlord's account. quite frankly, i'd rather they remained that way because he gets a significant discount, and at this point i really don't want to go through the ridiculous circus of recreating our contract and pretending to be moving in...

my first meeting was long, and tough. the guys amicable enough, but my gods he makes me uncomfortable. he's clearly very knowledgeable, but we seem to have a communication problem and he doesn't solve problems quite the way i do. also i was very tired. i was quite amused when we finally came to the conclusion that whether he likes my approach or not, it's the only viable one considering the state of the data.

either way, it was a massive relief when the meeting was over.

i spent quite a lot of time poring over documents my client had sent me over the weekend, which led me to read welcome to gas town, which is completely unhinged.

i managed to complete the morning meeting's change by the time mr smear got home, at which point we sat down and had a serious conversation about his first day; he's bored, he says, because although a couple of the things they did were fun, there was a lot of physical activity that just isn't what he's there for...

either way, he urgently needed sports shoes, so we all went to the mall for what is arguably our least favorite family pastime. the first place we went to - a department store - had very expensive options we weren't thrilled by. the second only had the most expensive shoes, great quality but not for a growing boy. the third... had what we were looking for. aside from a little bit of i've-had-enough drama on mr smear's part, we walked out with a solid pair of shoes and an order for an identical pair one size up at a heavily-reduced price.

there was a little more shopping to be done, then we caught a bus home. gd and i dropped off the shoes, the groceries and the child, and then went across the road to do some more grocery shopping. it was poor timing, lots of customers, one cashier and one self-service, and it took sooo long to get out of there...

over dinner, we started watching guardians of the galaxy. the rest of the evening was a blur. i think i went to bed relatively soon after putting mr smear to bed.

today:

i actually got a good night's sleep last night. my back's still really sore, though.

...

there were a couple of odd threads to pull at work today, the main one being as follows:

a couple of months ago i worked on a small service that nobody else understands. it's written in golang, and nobody in the company works with golang (they fired the team that owner the service), and it hadn't been maintained for a very long time. so i upgraded it to the latest version, and made the changes that needed to be made, and merged them... but nothing happened. i didn't break anything - which i was very grateful for - but what i thought i'd fixed still wasn't fixed, and i had to cut and move on to the big project.

on thursday i had some spare time, and i returned to the service and made an important fix (a serious memory leak). this morning i got permission to push it. i pushed it.

nothing happened.

the AI i used to investigate the dashboards and the logs came to the conclusion that i totally fixed the bug. it repeated this a couple of times, even though the dashboards didn't seem different at all, and so i carried on trying to figure out what was going on.

eventually, i realized that not only were my changes not in production, but neither were my previous ones, nor those of the couple of people who also touched this service in between. that the CI workflow  entitled "build - test - deploy" that ran successfully only builds and tests, but does not deploy.

the CI/CD workflows have never been CD, the deployments have only ever been manual, and nobody responsible for this service knows this.

you can't make this shit up.

...

oh! and the other consultant working with my client came by my desk after putting some pieces of data together and determining that there are people being fired by our employer for not being able to find clients. it calls the "i have job security" thesis into question, it doesn't feel so good.

...

in the afternoon, i travelled to my employer's office for a group meeting. i got called up, unprepared, to tell a story about failures at scale, and told the story of me returning to work after paternity leave and having to rewrite the project from scratch, getting to the deadline with everything working beautiful and discovering a bug during the demo that the managers saw and terminating the project.

the barbecue wasn't my thing, but they'd brought in a serious quantity of good hummus and falafel so i was sorted. i made myself a few pitot, and bounced from vegan conversation to vegan conversation - most of them initiated by somebody overhearing the tail end of the previous one and inquiring. all of it was amicable and i think i got some people to think a bit differently about it.

...

i caught a bus to the mall to meet up with gd and mr smear, who'd been forced to wait in a freezing reception for more than three hours for the eye specialist. tomorrow we're going to start hunting for a new one, and then call up the fat-fuck receptionist and tell her we're cancelling because she's a selfish piece of trash (gd described to me in detail how disrespectful she was towards everyone, and that she wasn't the only one to beg her to raise the temperature).

apparently mr smear's eyesight has improved? hmm...

we bussed home, gd prepared a gluten-free vegan pesto and avo pizza (which was delicious), and we discussed mr smear's day camp experience and explained that there's no refunds and he's just going to have to make the most of it. fortunately, as much as he's disappointed that there's so much physical activity, it overall seems like a pretty good place for him to be. he's learning interesting things (just not as much of the day as he'd like), including woodwork (which he is enjoying), and apparently the kids are generally pretty cool.

i'm tired. i really, really hope i get some sleep tonight again.

forced pause

 this weekend has been a trip.

yesterday:

yesterday morning began with us sending mr smear off to school, and me (after reading a bit of watchmen) settling down to get a whole lot of work done because it's been piling up and the deadlines are looming.

so, of course, i received an urgent phone call from mr smear's paediatrician to say that according to the radiologist there *is* a crack in mr smear's wrist, and she sent us a referral to immediately return to the hospital. gd and i rushed to get out the door to pick him up from the school, upset that the doctors would release him and upset that they could make such a dramatic error, then took him to the children's hospital, where we fortunately were immediately ushered into the ER and seen to very quickly.

it didn't take long for their trauma specialist to study the x-rays and inform us that the orthopaedic surgeon that had seen him the night before was right, that the radiologist had misread the images, and that our morning had been thoroughly disrupted for no good reason. and mr smear was bummed out because he was explicitly instructed not to use his phone or kindle or play games with his right hand, which he's been struggling to comply with...

during the course of the running around, i'd contacted my teammate for help, having figured out a piece of my project that could be easily delegated. i was very pleased and grateful to see that by the afternoon he'd managed to make some progress!

once we got home, i spent the rest of the day doing research and preparation for a lecture, and putting together and publishing a tool for migrating MCP configurations between AI harnesses, and watching a good chunk of monty python and the holy grail (mr smear got bored, but he's still quoting some of it anyway) and the gamers (the director's cut) which he found hilarious ^_^

oh, yes, and we took a walk in the evening to the special recycling facility and then to pick up some snacks.

dinner was great, and we finished watching grease, but the enjoyment was significantly diminished by some drama - mr smear, apparently unintentionally, was quite disrespectful to gd and it took some time for the situation to calm down.

today:

i woke up relatively late, after a pretty reasonable night's sleep. after a little more watchmen reading and cleaning the balcony, we put on the golden child which both gd and i remembered fondly. mr smear walked out the room halfway through, i passed out for bits of it, and overall gd and i were both saddened by how disappointing the experience was.

i'd spent some time the night before writing an article arguing the necessity of introducing our kids to the pop culture we grew up with, and this afternoon i sat outside and finished it. i said a lot of things i'm quite proud of, but only after publishing did i realized that the title's all wrong and it's too late to do much about it.

getting gemini to produce coherent images for the article was hard.

our second movie today (because of mr smear's arm, you see) was gremlins 2, which we watched beginning to end and all thoroughly enjoyed :)

i took mr smear for an exercise walk in the park, after which i had a long chat with my sister who's struggling with a whole bunch of difficult stuff right now. that's the sad stuff. the good stuff is that it looks like there's a good chance she'll be able to pay us a visit in the coming months! i didn't realize that we haven't seen her for almost half of mr smear's life, in my head we sent her off just a few years ago 🤯

i said goodbye thinking we were about to have dinner, but that plan was derailed by a sudden flood of water on our balcony threatening to come into our apartment. we set up a barrier, sent photos and requests to our neighbors to please stop whatever they were doing, and big data came downstairs to lend us a hand (or do the lion's share of the work) in trying to clear the blockage. it's a good thing i could lend him my proper galoshes, it was messy work and it was late by the time we stopped and agreed to resume in the morning.

i started on my dinner while while mr smear and his daughter (who'd brought some stuff down) finished theirs, and then it was time for getting mr smear ready and into bed. i'm sure i've left out some important stuff, but tomorrow's a big day (as is every day in the upcoming week or two) and i think i'm done for now.

not broken, well-fed

 i feel like i'm just about to fall apart.

this morning began with me getting out of bed a bit late, reading more of watchmen, making a bit of progress in a new side project before heading off to work.

work was mostly about migrating to claude - i'm still experiencing a lot of weirdness - and then we stopped for a small lunch (a tiny, oddly nice onion and raisin bagel) in preparation for the group outing, and then before i had a chance to grab a coffee and do something productive i received a phone call from the school: mr smear, in tears, believing that his arm might be broken.

i rushed out to make my way there - i tried to catch a cab, but the guy who accepted my fare was still busy with another one - and the fastest way to go was to walk quite a ways and jump on a bus. in retrospect, there was a better light rail option, but i was rushed 🤷‍♂️

in a nutshell: my son has decided that he's a claustrophile, so during a free class he decided to stand behind the classroom door. one of the kids in the class - one who's been quite aggressive and mildly violent with him all year - saw him and smashed the door into him. apparently the kid didn't expect to cause as much harm as he did, according to mr smear he seemed sincerely remorseful and apologized profusely.

i arrived to find him seemingly alright, although when we did get a chance to stop moving at the light rail, his arm did look a bit bent. off we went to the clinic to show his doctor, which was a walk, and she was very impressed with his newfound ability to communicate what happened in hebrew (although i had to reign him in a little). she gave us urgent referrals for imaging, so we went to the next clinic, which was another walk, for an up-and-down set of x-rays, bandaging and receiving a referral for the hospital because all the doctors had left already, and then picking up the x-ray disc. then it was another walk to the hospital (all this because the clinics and hospital are relatively close to each other, but the bus routes between them are complicated) where gd met us and took over.

the group had left for the outing more than an hour before, so i rushed to catch a couple of buses to get the office, pick up my bag, then catch the light rail and walk (another significant walk) to meet up with them.

i missed the food tour part of it, and i was starting late with the drinking part of it, but i made it just in time for the eating part, and omg it was amazing food, and there was a lot, and i ate and drank so much (i guess that's relative, two light drinks and three shots, but i usually don't drink at all), and the atmosphere was excellent and we all had a lot of fun. like, really, a lot of fun.

i was interrupted twice by phone calls: the first, the mother of the kid who hurt mr smear; i wasn't quite cold, but not exactly warm either (i don't really like her, she's interesting to talk to but immensely disrespectful), and learned that her son wanted to contact mr smear but hadn't told her why. so i told her why, and then sent her mr smear's number, and she's assured me (sure) that it won't happen again.

the second call was from gd to say that his arm looks fine. which is an enormous relief for a whole bunch of reasons.

half the group continued on to a bar, a few of us walked together to the light rail, and then i switched to the bus home, and arrived just in time to take the last few bits of mr smear's dinner laffa, and start winding down for the night. after putting him to bed, i put an hour into the side project, and now i've written this, and i think i just might go to bed.

return to routine

 more war. i mean, back to routine! shit, are we at *war* war or just the usual level? i mean, the kids are home but are adults going to the office today?

gods help us.

...

i got a bunch of admin stuff done yesterday morning, not least of which being registering and paying for mr smear's summer camp (is that even going to happen, now?) after realizing that i'd misunderstood the forms last time and stopped halfway.

UX matters, people :P

it took me a long time to get around to my actual work, but once i did i put in a good few hours and made some actual progress. one of my coworkers reached out for a half hour sync on maintaining dashboards in a healthy way, and i'm very pleased to see that the team is taking it seriously in spite of their initial skepticism!

i was a bit nervous about the "sync" that my manager invited me to - then learned why in a pre-sync meeting yesterday evening and was relieved to have been consulted before things get messy.

by the evening, i hadn't been out of my chair much all day, so i went to the library with mr smear for some exercise and fresh air (and to return a book, and pick up a few more interesting ones). it was a very pleasant excursion.

we watched macgyver over dinner, after which i made my extension look nicer and finished up the articles. then we learned that we're at war again...

... i spent the next hour or two trying to publish my articles (the medium website started throwing errors literally as i was publishing, and the emails were sent out with the articles in an incomplete state), then i played a little slay the spire 2, and then i finally went to bed.

[rocket attack incoming]