all business

now that i've thrown my entire evening to google's reader, i'm feeling up to the immense task of documenting my day.

1) maybe inspired subconsciously by fight club, but last night was sponsored by a well-timed bout of insomnia.

2) i moved SUPER-slow this morning, and somehow made it on time anyway. heck, i even managed to make breakfast and do some sit-ups.

3) i can count six cigarettes i smoked today, which is far less than the last couple of days, but far more than it should be. i've reached the conclusion that quitting smoking right before hitting a major transition phase wasn't the smartest idea ever.

4) i ate too much chocolate today. there's no hope for me.

5) i decided to pull a lame april-fool's on piles; an hour or so later the kid called me up, because it had filtered through to him and caught them both out - and the kid was at home on holiday ^_^

6) at the beginning of the day, one of my co-workers taught me something new and then jokingly warned me not to forget X, where X seems like a ridiculously obvious thing to do and quite hard to skip. i laughed, thinking that i wouldn't be caught out like that, but i suddenly realized this evening that i now have egg all over my face.

7) i was totally hyped by the time i left the office; it was a good day at work. i stopped by azrieli to buy gifts for tomorrow night (passover with kc's family at her parents' place), but there were so many crazies jamming the mall that i just did a quick pass through and escaped as quickly as i could.

8) met up with spot on the bus home, and we stopped off at the cafeneto for an animated recap of the last couple of days. sunshine spared me five minutes, most of which was consumed by a slightly awkward silence.

9) a journalist who remembered me from a previous job over a year ago caught me on my way out, and i sat and chatted with him for a bit before going shopping for chocolate. chocolate makes an appropriate gift, but i think i need to wrap it :S

10) as i said, i totally wasted the evening. and now it's time for bed. during the last couple of hours i've been considering the possibility that i really have changed a lot since i arrived in this country. it's not that i'm not interested in the same things, or don't maintain the same viewpoints (in general, of course): it's that i've finally gotten my life prioritized and i've gotten used to denying myself things that i desire.

so used to it, in fact, that i need to unlearn making myself miserable - i don't need to keep such a tight leash on myself anymore.

universcale is cool. i need a bigger screen.
cute video, ridiculous concept: the wiihelm

moo.com: after a couple of great-looking designs, i scrapped them because i have that much faith in online credit transactions

a space junkyard, for the child in every one of us

screening

great party! i definitely needed to let some aggression out. quite a few friends were there, too, and some very spankily-dressed cardboard boxes ;) [i suppose something rhyming with vixen would've been more appropriate :P]

ta2, wr and i went out for a rather good breakfast, and around 8am i returned home and crashed until 3pm ^_^
i enjoyed a great muesli breakfast, a pleasant chat with spot at cafeneto^*1, and afterwards watched stanley kubrick's lolita (finally), which was really good. and wasting an hour back-seat driving the kid's game of heroes was fun, too.

bedtime! tomorrow will make all the difference, i just hope it's in a good way.

^*1 i still feel the same way about sunshine, but i've decided i'm not chasing after her, just hoping things'll somehow work out. i don't want to be "that annoying guy".

chief crazy work-horse

the kid and i just got back from cafeneto - extremely therapeutic. things with sunshine seem alright, and the kid participates when i let off steam... he's like a good therapist :P

today started off dodgy - the anguish begun the day before hasn't abated, and until a couple of hours ago things have just been snowballing (as in getting bigger and bigger, not as in clerks).

it was a mission to get piles to help me take the plastic bottles to the recycling bin this morning. once we were done, i specifically told him - twice to make sure - NOT to throw away the packet. the kid and i were laughing now about the stupid, completely uncomprehending look he gives. halfway back to the office i registered that he wasn't carrying anything.
"what the $#@! did you do with the packet?"
he looks at me totally innocently: "i threw it away. why do you ask?"

most of what i recall from my army day (due to some memory-suppression) is playing spider solitaire. i started the day watching demo videos of ruby on rails with brother bear - friggin' insane, the things they do. it's impressive as hell, and i hope i don't find an excuse to have to use it (i don't do web dev. even when i do, i don't).

in the afternoon, i managed to catch our branch officer earlier than i'd expected. we sat organizing, but there was yet another screw-up on the receiving end and it's out of our control as usual. this is all very frustrating, as i write this i have exactly 1 week and 6 days to go before my release. this is a another tense period of my life.

i organized entry permission for a friend who used to serve on our base, and we milled around for about half an hour before i got back to my solitaire. the late afternoon was a bit of a blur of interesting work-related discussions and me stressing.

-- lying to the cute, well-intentioned girl on the bus --

i hopped off the bus, and walked through to meet ru55's girlfriend and pick up my calculus book. it's bloody heavy. we chatted for 50 seconds, and then i made my way to work (bumping into my tallest's ex, turns out she lives in the area).

my mother sent me an email laughing at me for my idea of studying engineering: most of my family on my mother's side are either in that or medicine :P

work SUCKED. i've now gotten most of it out of my system, the remainder of the evening was insane because my manager was almost as pissed off as me, and demanded that i call the guy - i had to learn his name, find his phone number (harassing a girl i've never met in order to get it), and eventually settle for mass emailing anyway. all this while handling mmf's RFIs (he's tampering with a website) and SxS's girl-friend trying to set me up with some french girl.

the final straw, when i was running late for the bus, was getting into the elevator and feeling something sharp in the middle of my back. i tested with my hand, and there was definitely something bothering me (my heavy bag on my back, not smart to not deal with it). so i hurriedly dropped my bag and was halfway through ripping off the windbreaker when the elevator doors opened.
so i moved my little mission to the foyer, where the guard stared at me in disbelief as i, in disbelief, removed a thick, inch-long nail from centre of the windbreaker's back.

how it got there is an absolute mystery to me, but it's the perfect physical embodiment of where my head's at. i handed the bent nail to the guard as i left, and just made the bus.

inpassing.org is excellent

drawing back the curtains

i walked out of work yesterday extremely upset. i'm not sure if i'm more annoyed at the provider for their shit or at myself for not catching on before. i was also brooding on not having found a chance to organize something for the kid: some friend i am :(

my mood wasn't improved by just missing the bus, and having to wait 45 minutes in the freezing cold for the next one. i was going through a brief few hours of being able to breathe over the sinusitis, but my cough was just making its debut. at least i had thumping trance to keep my brain a little more stable.

i shuffled my way in to cafeneto on a complete downer - i couldn't decide if i wanted to be alone or not. i began writing out a birthday message for the kid, and was most of the way through when sunshine sat down with me and asked what was wrong.
she helped me out, correcting the three mistakes i'd made (of which i'm quite proud, it was a long piece), and we had a bit of a general chat. she had duties, so i did get that time to myself, but she'd already made my day.
when she sat with me before i left, it was pretty much in non-awkward silence. and she told me to call her.

i gotta be honest - it's been a very long time since i've felt this way about a girl i know well enough by now to have gotten over the initial enthusiasm. i'm kind of wary about how she feels about me - i spoke to her earlier and phone conversations always make me uncomfortable, but the way she made me feel yesterday was worth any disappointment i may or may not suffer. i say may not because i assume indifference as a defense mechanism.

i walked home with a balloon and serious cheese-cake, but the kid was already asleep. i showered and went to bed, and woke up early to clean up the apartment a bit and to wake the kid with the aforementioned goodies. i felt rather odd singing happy birthday in a croaky voice with his shag giggling hysterically. maybe it was the fact that i was still in pyjamas. maybe i shouldn't admit to wearing pj's for manliness' sake, but it's frikkin' FREEZING.

i got to base before him, so i had time to transcribe the message to better quality paper, larger and better than pocket-sized squares. we celebrated two girls being promoted, which got silly at the end when brother bear and i settled on playing table hockey with bottle-tops. daddy-o wasn't impressed. i finally managed to get my degree signed for, and was informed that the fastest i can get it dealt with is by going personally to the induction base - so that's where i'm starting tomorrow.

i spent a large part of the day jumping from person to person to figure out how to get set up for daddy-o's presentation tomorrow... we won't be set up, because i only received the documentation (in hebrew) in the afternoon and it took me ages to figure out that it's too much work for a few hours and it requires somebody on hand to explain half of what's going on. it's yet another personal system that didn't have an end-user in mind :S

the bus to work was comfortably empty, but by the time i walked in to my office my nose had been bleeding for half the day and i had a headache. i had a quick and to-the-point chat with nql, who's agreed with me that the php stuff i've been doing isn't our job and is too pointless to waste more time on, and then i turned to cleaning up the project i finished last night.

that done, i informed the boss that i wasn't feeling good and wasn't going to stay on more than a couple of hours. i then turned my hand to that other project. the one i began in april last year. the one that until tonight has made me twitchy just *thinking* about opening.

i changed tack, and marked it for deletion, creating a new version in its place. two hours later we had a perfectly working version - all it took was for our provider to finally include the functions we requested more than half a year ago. we're even ignoring the fact that the functions' fingerprints / footprints / whatever they're called are completely not homogenous. the damn things worked and any changes that may be called for will be minor ones. with triple backups and "special care" stamped all over them.

i waited quite a while for the bus, although not as much as last night, and got home to write this, charge my ipod, shower, be irritated as hell about the state of our digs (the kid and i were on the verge of inviting people over for a housewarming, but there's no way we're ready for one), rewrite my cv and go to bed.

i'm missing a key, apparently

[a picture of the F17 key]

i spent a good 5 minutes trying to figure that shit out. i eventually gave up and just used the replace function.

WARNING: this is one of them boring posts. i realize that most of mine are, but it's my diary so suck it up. i just wish i didn't have so much to write :S

at 4.45am i received sms's from nql informing me that my newly completely image producer was giving trouble. i went back to sleep, and called him around 8am to learn that no, sadly, he hadn't bothered to read the documentation.

i was all proud of myself: i managed to handle muesli and coffee on the way to the bus this morning (that's two large cups, one requiring the use of a spoon). unfortunately, we missed the bus by a few minutes, so we only arrived on base at 9... at least nobody seems to mind me much :P

i have to find a copy of my degree to register it with the army, but i have no idea where it is since all the moving began last year. that's really, really annoying.

i finally got hold of someone that nystire's been on my case for a week about; to discover that i had absolutely no reason to talk to her. that was a bit irritating too. at least it was a relatively friendly conversation.

i spent most of the day learning about enterprise java beans. it took until the evening to get somewhere useful with them, but i've learned a lot. like, if the bean container area isn't visible, it's inactive: anything sent is queued up. if it's made visible suddenly everything happens, which makes a bit of a mess.
solution: zero the height and width. that's a stupid solution if i ever heard of one.

i saw the bull for about two minutes before lunch, and he's informed me that things have moved up a level. as grateful as i am, i can't help wondering how many levels the game has.

while tackling an annoying issue while testing, daddy-o walked in and made a request. the application i'm building to test with is intended as a surprise for him, it's something he requested ages ago, so i couldn't tell him why i was too busy. we spent half an hour figuring out exactly what he wanted, another fifteen minutes arguing details with brother bear, and then i sat down to an interesting little security debate with the kid: during this the kid hit upon a far superior solution to the problem we were supposed to be addressing, and we then further argued over whether or not we should ask daddy-o before implementing it.

a lot of the time the developer has a better idea of what the client requires in terms of implementation, but every now and again there are non-obvious reasons to use a sub-optimal solution. eventually i walked into his office and asked him, with the kid standing by: he apologetically informed us of the reason for the sub-optimal, and the kid had to concede ;)

the bus to work sucked - klapvoet and too many people. i sat chatting with a guy from our previous section halfway there, and the rest i had to fend for myself. walking into four hours of hell work, i had a talk with the boss who has decided that the protocol i've laid down is good as is, but has informed me that i'm being moved to full-time web development.

i dislike web development, most especially because it covers most of my cv and is possibly the most worthless experience i have (worse than casual sales for incredible connection? worse than driving for mr. delivery? i think so). having to sit through nql's explanations, though, when he's virtually impossible to understand in english or hebrew and has a really odd way of demonstrating things, and is a bit of an idiot (although his knowledge of php functions and linux tools is impressive) really agitated me.

and in the middle of all that he began explaining how we'd have to go through a large portion of code in order to figure out what we'll need... if that's not a case for "start frikkin' documenting!" then i don't know what is.

aside from an hour's supper break (i just needed to space out), i worked the entire time and was not enjoying myself.

i got home, changed, and went with spot to the cafeneto: sunshine got the first real smile from me all day :)

i had a 15 minute chat with my mother, just to update her on the proceedings that aren't really, and had to get all this shit out before showering and going to bed. i've switched to the new blogger, i'm hoping it really will be more stable.

i finally remembered to post a photo of the trophy i organized for the bull. [whose image has since disappeared]