hyperviper is down

 "the faster the harder the louder the darker the better"

this time it *is* too dark, hyperviper, RIP. your stories will live on as legends (and, often, warnings to our children) and while i believe they're going to let you in upstairs, there're going to be some angels hiding behind the furniture when they do.

...

i haven't heard from hyperviper in a few months, the last real conversation i had with him was after a close friend of his passed away young. i'm still stunned by his passing this morning.

...

i don't understand how it's been an entire week with no posting, when it's been a really crazy week. oh, wait - i do have a suspicion about why i haven't posted. this week's story started on sunday morning. i dropped mr smear off at school, and then accompanied gd to the ER. well, to a weird barrier about 50 feet from the ER entrance. the hospital's waiting list for doing an allergy "challenge" is half a year and they won't do one for cannabis, so we followed our doc's unofficial instructions and administered it ourselves.

gd took a puff. i opened my laptop, trying to be productive. a couple of minutes passed, gd wasn't feeling anything and wanted to take another puff. i suggested she wait a few more minutes.

now, i don't know how long she actually waited, but she took another puff and then suddenly realized that she needed to sit down on a bench. we made it about five steps before she fell over (fortunately i managed to catch her). we tried again, didn't get very far. then a kind english-speaking religious man darted over to help us, and helped me get her onto the bench.

i tried to get her to lie down. at this point her eyes rolled in the back of her head, and her entire body was locked like when someone gets knocked out brutally in a fight. the kind man kept repeating that we needed an ambulance. then he suggested using a taxi. there was a taxi just pulling out of the bus stop we were at, and i flagged him down. we managed to get gd into the cab and the cab driver drove us through the barrier and dropped us off at the ER.

i've never had to find a wheelchair and wheel my wife around before, i had to work to prevent her from falling out of it.

triage. i knew i had to tell them the truth from the get-go. it was awkward, though.

blood tests. it's hard taking blood from someone who can't control their own body.

an ER ward bed.

gd was shaking, she could barely control her limbs. we (mostly i) told and retold the details to the various doctors and nurses in turns. they did an electrocardiogram.

gd started having a panic attack. while they went looking for an ativan, she managed to breathe herself out of it.

slowly, she began to feel better. slowly, we began to realize that it was entirely possible that we had rushed her to the ER because she was just really... REALLY stoned.

there was no anaphylaxis. there was no stroke or paralysis. gd was just fine, and much more sensitive to medical-grade cannabis than we could have expected.

...

it took forever to get out of there. we cabbed back home and i spent most of the day working where i could keep an eye on gd, checking every now and again that she was still breathing.

so... it's school holidays. most of this week, gd's been at home. i worked from home the first couple of days, from the office the rest. gd's been taking the occasional puff with the windows open, which is fine, but that last-one-before-bed puff after mr smear's been put to bed and it's too cold to leave the windows open? most nights this week i've gone to bed early feeling a bit stoned.

and i've been sleeping much better than i have in ages.

...

on sunday night, netanyahu fired gallant and our entire country erupted. on monday, he pulled back and postponed the judicial reform until after the passover holidays. so the story's not over, but everything feels calmer now and it's a huge relief. one sad thing in particular on monday morning sparked optimism, and that was the crestfallen face of one of my coworkers who's been a staunch bibi supporter until the firing. if he can see the cracks in bibi's facade, there's hope for our country yet.

to all the protestors: i'm very grateful to be proven wrong. even if it's only temporary, it's a real relief that the judicial reform has been put on hold for pesach.

it's just as big a relief that netanyahu has played his cards so brazenly that even his supporters are beginning to see through the cracks that he's willing to burn everything and everyone in pursuit of power and his will to stay out of prison.

bibi's not interested in the well-being of our nation or our country. he never has been.

i find it intriguing that he's been forced to capitulate to ben gvir, who's very quickly demonstrated both how power-hungry he is and how politically naive he is.

i just want to take this opportunity to say that this is precisely what's wrong with coalition governments. a coalition government is a group of political parties that, individually, did not get enough votes to rule, but that are now in a position to rule us anyway and can get away with pretty much whatever they want.

that's not very democratic. and it doesn't matter if it's a right-wing coalition or a left-wing one.

...

on sunday night we had the final round of my script. it was complicated, but ultimately successful.

on monday evening i had the weekly meeting with my boss. it began with an unpleasant surprise - he had accidentally tagged our CTO when asking if i was ready for the meeting, and i was suddenly sure that i was about to be let go... i had mentioned that i wanted to take a long weekend in lieu of the two fridays that i'd had to give up, and things got awkward. maybe it was just me. i hope it was just me. either way, there's no compensation for time during a crisis in a startup, and i guess i wasn't really expecting there to be. and he made a good point that nobody's watching the clock anyway. and that i'm just about to mark a full year with the company, at which point my options will vest, and then it'll be "my" company too. i explained (truthfully) that i wanted the company to succeed regardless. i remembered how grateful i am to have a job that i (mostly) enjoy, with people that i like. it was good motivation.

the rest of the week was a bit weird. i guess it's not even over yet. we've had a couple of surprising new issues with our ci/cd pipelines (which i'm responsible for), and we've been having trouble with costs. every time i fix one broken thing i discovered another, and it's been a long week trying to catch each falling domino before it hits another one...

...

mr smear has been generally cool and calm this week. we had an interesting breakthrough yesterday, as i waited with him outside the school for the gates to open. he opened up to me about a dynamic between him and a couple of the kids in his class that's really toxic, and he appears to have actually taken my advice. a part of the advice was "letting us in" and telling me and gd about what happens at school so that we can help him when he's struggling, and when i got home from the office in the evening he did just that. it looks like my advice helped him get out of a situation with the slow kid who harasses him a lot, and i'm hoping that this week's lesson will stick!

...

last night i watched bert kreischer: razzle dazzle, and it was hilarious. i convinced gd to watch it this morning, and she enjoyed it too. last night we watched most of hey big boy, and it's great in spite of my being familiar with some of the material.

i ditched work early this afternoon to grab a coffee with spot and his wife and "smaller" child. the kid's two and a half and bigger than an average four year old! it was a fun coffee, and getting a ride home was an amusing little adventure.

we're slowly making our way through season 5 of adventure time. mr smear is loving the bfg. we gave up on danny the champion of the world because as brilliant as i remember the book being, both mr smear and myself are uncomfortable with the heroics involving killing animals even if that's not really the point of the story... this week mr smear showed me a little booklet that he made, more of a pamphlet trying to convince others to not eat animals. it's evident that he's trying to be encouraging rather than forceful, which is heartwarming.

still tired

 and sore. my neck's been giving me a lot of trouble these past few days. my sinuses are okay right as i type this, but my nose has been mostly stuffed or running the past few days. it's all exhausting.

yesterday:

i left the script running after posting yesterday morning, dragged myself out of bed three or four hours later feeling groggy and borderline hallucinating. i woke up to find that it had crashed just as soon as i'd locked the screen (intentionally leaving the machine open and running), and it would take hours of running the script and keeping an eye on it before i finally had the data we needed.

it was a sad, busy morning.

the data was ready by the time we needed to pick mr smear up from school, and my plan was to get him home, deliver the emails, then head out for lunch with the mongoose and fam.

my chain of command had other plans.

we met up with the mongoose and co, and almost immediately i had to abandon them to find a bench to work on. it took almost two and a half hours before we were sure we were doing the right thing, and my batteries (my laptop, my phone, and my body) were almost drained by the time i pushed the button. the first run was going swimmingly right until the credentials expired - the production single-sign-on settings are for a very limited amount of time and the number of emails that needed to go out have multiplied significantly since the original script. the second run seemed to be good, but my bosses identified at least one mistake.

there was nothing i could do but wait until i got home to investigate. i rejoined everyone, picked up a cup of coffee, and enjoyed a pleasant walk home with my family, even stopping for an ice-cream along the way.

i figured out a way to investigate the errors, and was mortified to discover that i'd sent out about 1500 emails that shouldn't have been delivered. then i began debugging the script, and by the time i was done i'd realized two important things: first, that out of 3500+ emails, only less than 20 had been sent incorrectly.

i cannot overstate what a huge relief this is.

second, that it was an absolute miracle that it was such a small number of errors. in order to determine what *should* have gone out i ended up doing a significant refactor of the script, and i can now quite confidently say that the following dangerous mistakes were made:

1. i was really tired and we're all under time pressure
2. the scripts that were built with a simple requirement have become increasingly sophisticated / complicated on the fly, each time at the last minute
3. no reviews

because... reasons.

anyway, we finally got some reprieve yesterday evening. i was told to leave off and enjoy shabbat dinner with my family. i was worried that they literally meant just dinner, but shabbat is already over and i haven't heard anything.

today:

today was a good day. it began with a serious and seriously good gaming session with mr smear. we checked out the demo for space explore, which was awesome, and then we dived into space crew: legendary edition. it's like ftl, but 3D, and while the controls were tough to learn it was thoroughly satisfying getting through the tutorial. even more satisfying was mr smear agreeing to do the entire tutorial himself, not only getting the hang of it but also the satisfaction of it.

and then we opened geometry wars 3: dimensions evolved.

it's brutal. aside from genuinely having a blast both literally and figuratively, i was extremely impressed that mr smear pushed through in spite of the difficulty. we played together, or took turns with the story mode, and it was awesome.

in the early afternoon we went to a birthday party for a kid in his class. it was at the ninja pro course on the other side of bavli, so we ended up renting a car2go. it was overall an enjoyable afternoon, in spite of a couple of minor incidents, and it really lent some perspective watching mr smear interacting with the other kids and the others kids interacting with each other. there's work to be done, but he's doing fine. not great, but fine.

after getting home, gd and i watched some of the second episode of power slap, which is thoroughly entertaining and completely impossible for me to take seriously as a "sport". mr smear and i played some more geometry wars after he finished showering, then i put two of the latest comic pages onto the public website before dinner. we continued watching adventure time, and then it was mr smear's bedtime, and i've been faffing around since. now it's my bedtime. hopefully it'll be a quiet night and hopefully i'll get some rest.

too old for this shit

 tuesday: back on-call, rushing to make an appointment with the mental-wellness institute in person. 

being on-call with my backpack and having to make a real effort not to faint. that would last the whole day.

locating the build in an area of tel aviv i haven't been in since i left that's been heavily and impressively gentrified (around karlibach). i had everything i needed to register. i registered. now there's a five month waiting period before we can get an initial consultation.

holy shit.

then i fast-walked to meet up with gd and mr smear at the paediatrician. he didn't have an ear infection after all. and he was offended that the doctor had to examine him in a sensitive area (where he was complaining about the pain the day before).

i walked mr smear to school, then took a bus to work. it's a bus i never take, so gd and i were quite amused when she got on a few stops later.

it was an interesting workday. i got home later than planned, but having delivered something i was happy with.

yesterday (kind of):

another long, busy day in the office. the last few hours my stomache began to hurt. it's been iffy since. i've also been struggling with seasonal allergies for the first time in forever.

today (kind of):

protests again, so much so that mr smear's school day was upended (although i think he enjoyed that).

it was a long, weird day working from home. i got some things done, but nothing that felt like an achievement. around dinner time things got crazy, when i received completely new requirements for the scripts that have burned a lot of my personal and family time. it's bothering me that it's now just about 2am (3am, the clock's moving to summer time) and the only time today that i wasn't working was about half an hour playing video games with mr smear before dinner. i even worked through dinner.

...

i'm fucking tired. fucking mosquito. fucking script that i'm praying is doing its last run because we need to push the buttons in the morning, at the same time that i'm supposed to be helping gd with something sensitive and making sure we have groceries etc. for shabbat. i'm fucking tired.

ha, ha, it got worse

 we're calling it "chaos week" at work, and my personal life isn't feeling less chaotic.

friday:

i was very relieved that it was weekend. i commented as such on a few occasions, not knowing that i was shortly going to be eating those words.

gd and i did a big grocery shopping, which was heavier than usual and i wasn't feeling great. i felt shit, to be honest. and i was on a half a cup of coffee to boot.

then we picked up mr smear, and sat down with the teacher. we were pleasantly surprised to find her welcoming and appreciative of our (and the other parents') situation, and we officially had approval to let him bring food and snacks and no sneaking necessary.

so that was good.

then we got home. and i saw a message from my boss asking me "what's up?"

not the kind of "what's up?" i would appreciate on my weekend. it turned out that the scripts i'd manically built and run the day before needed an overhaul, with four hours to go. there went my friday afternoon. i managed it in six, and was still running the damned thing while my family waited for my to say kiddush.

that really sucked.

saturday:

i woke up tired, and spent the entire day feeling sick. except for the half hour or so that it took to decide to take mr smear to the beach - we quickly got ready, walked a few blocks, and realized that we were about to be hit by massive, grey rainclouds. we made it back home just before it began pouring. i spent the rest of the day either watching adventure time with my family or lying in bed feeling ill.

by the time i got into bed i was convinced that i wasn't going to be able to work yesterday.

yesterday:

positively, i woke up feeling alright. not great, mind, but functional. i had a bunch of things to take care of in the morning after dropping mr smear off at school in the light rain, but due to the rain decided to stay home.

good call.

it got much wetter.

yesterday was a weird day. it was bursts of working hard tempered with weird periods of downtime.

in the evening i went to pick up mr smear, and while we were leaving the school i got a call from my boss informed me that we were about to start working 24 hours in shifts for the next week. i told him i prefer the midnight - morning shifts. i felt my heart sinking while i said it. i mean, it's true, it's just that i don't wanna.

good thing, though, is that it means my on-call week is now being shared about the team when they're on shift, so that's good.

the evening was the evening, i went to bed tired and late, but not too late because i had a strong suspicion that i'd get a call in the night.

i wasn't wrong.

today:

so last night i ended up working about three hours in the middle of the night after a long day of work after working hard or being sick all weekend after a long, intense week.

i got up feeling pretty wrecked this morning. it didn't help that i'd seen an email in the middle of the night from mr smear's teacher informing me that he'd "gone on strike" yesterday. she'd moved a girl in his class to his table, a little girl who disgusts him because she doesn't wash her hands after eating, and he flat out refused to do anything he was supposed to until the teacher moved him. she's not going to move him, so he just sat and played with his pencil box the entire school day.

i'm equal parts mortified, amused, and almost proud. like, i'm embarrassed and proud at the same time. it's weird.

so this morning we had a family meeting before school, and he was not happy to have both of us explaining to him in no uncertain terms what happens to kids who grow up without learning how to play the social game. it would take the entire walk to school to (somewhat) calm him down, to find an analogy to help him understand that loving someone doesn't mean letting them do whatever they want. (i found one - if a puppy wants to walk into a busy road, do you save it?)

along the way, i crossed the road to talk to our neighbours who were kindly offering us a ride, and i signalled to him to walk on towards the pedestrian crossing. he misunderstood my signal and came rushing into the busy street, which is when i automatically found myself yelling "no... no... NO!" so that the whole neighbourhood must have jumped.

our neighbours awkwardly drove slowly right behind me until we got to the pedestrian crossing, with the people behind getting so frustrated that they angrily overtook at the crossing and almost wiped us out.

so that was a fun morning.

the mental wellness institute wasn't answering their phone today. i tried a bunch of times over a course of hours. no answer. bloody brilliant.

today was another day of hard graft, minus a short break to pick up mr smear early because he was crying with stomache pain. they couldn't see him at the clinic but booked an appointment for him in the morning, at which point he went to the toilet and then his tummy felt fine again.

*$#!ing kids, man. anyway, we need the appointment because he's still got an ear infection so it works out.

about two minutes before we arrived at the clinic i started feeling dizzy, sick and faint, and i suspect it was my heavy on-call backpack pushing on my nerves. it took me a little while to get back to normal after setting the bag down. fainting sucks.

gd did a grocery run while i did some snooping at the hospital's emergency unit to figure out how we're going to do our own private allergy test. we have a plan.

i got home with the heavy backpack and the shopping just in time for a meeting with my boss that never transpired. i managed to get through a productive afternoon, finally firing up the scripts (with a few last-minute modifications, of course) just as gd served dinner.

i'm bombed. i needed to get this all out before crashing. i'm very grateful to be off-call until 8am. and to all, a good night.

the dreams!

 i forgot about last night's dreams. nightmares, i mean.

the first dream i was trying to save my family from carjackers and kidnappers. my strategy was bad (in retrospect) but successful, only on the way home mr smear was driving on the freeway with me not yet in the car hanging on to an open door that was in the process of being ripped off backwards. when i finally managed to claw my way back into the car my family and the mongoose all tried to convince me that there was nothing wrong with driving on the freeway when one of the doors was still open.

the second dream ended with me trying to get massive fungus off my foot - like, a large mushroom was literally growing out of it - and ending up with literal holes and tunnels through my foot that i could see through. and there was a piece of my foot that i'd thought was part of the fungus but actually turned out to be a bionic plastic-mounted LED that was docked into my flesh.

...

that reminds me, i woke up last week with an odd expression repeating in my mind: "you might be able to catch pizza, but you won't keep up with my racing ketchup".

hello darkness, my old friend

 it's the middle of the night, and i passed out on the couch a little earlier, waking up to brush my teeth and go to bed and then realizing that i needed a shower, and then realizing that the celebratory beer after a few days of enthusiastically hitting the scorpion pepper hot sauce had joined forces to make it problematic for me to be horizontal without suffering from acid reflux. so here i am, quietly jotting down some notes on a particularly intense end to a particularly hectic week.

today was the first day that i was "pretty much okay" as far as the sinusitis thing has been. still not 100%, but basically okay. each day this week got a bit easier, but today was the first day i would have been willing to step back into the office and in retrospect i'm very glad i didn't.

...

work-wise, this week was weird. AWS made an unexpected change to a header format that took us by surprise and blew us and all our customers out the water. we've spent this week scrambling to band-aid and do damage control, and while i wasn't involved in these efforts (i'm on-call next week) i did feel the effects in that all of my work lost priority. it's very frustrating begging for code reviews on work that you're excited about and keen to see the back of.

that changed this morning, though. just after 11am i got pulled in to write a Very Important Program to compensate from one of our most central tools' inability to provide one of the services we're paying for. it involved working with a bunch of disparate parts i'm not familiar with, and i found myself under time pressure while my body and brain were both pulling in separate ways. aside from picking up mr smear from school, i didn't really have any breaks and the final stretch was very stressful as everyone was nervous about the task going smoothly and there were a couple of last minute changes required.

it was very satisfying and gratifying to push the button on what now feels like a decent and solid interim solution, seeing everything green and working better than expected. i have to press that button every day for the next few days, and i'm confident i've built it well enough to make that easy.

additionally, we had an incident last week with broken deployments that cost us a lot of money, and although broken deployments are very rare for us i managed to put in a neat little circuit breaker a couple of days ago. just in time for the next broken deployment, and it was a pleasure to see it working beautifully in the wild.

...

mr smear's been having an interesting week. physical health-wise it looks like he might be sporting an ear infection, so we're keeping an eye on him and hoping he has an easy night. mental health-wise we had an episode yesterday that was sad and frustrating, but also gave us a bit of insight into how he operates when he's upset. it was a huge relief to wake up to find him in a better place this morning.

we tried in november/december to organize a consultation with a child psychologist - in addition to him suffering two crazy parents, we've all been through a very stressful ordeal the past few years - and they never got back to me. i finally got hold of them this morning and they informed me that they hadn't ignored my previous email, that they'd issued us authorization on the same day and that we were supposed to be informed by our local clinic. i contacted the clinic and they claim they sent me an email to that effect, but i never received that email. also, i don't think any of that little circle makes much sense. whatever.

in another, much worse bureaucratic bungle: other parents have been complaining that their kids haven't been eating in the after-school program, i didn't even realize until this week that mr smear hadn't been either. this week we had a zoom session with the two women in charge of the food program for our district, and it was eye-opening. out of appreciation for the importance of children getting fed sufficiently every day, the requirements for the kids meals are painstakingly measured and enforced. these people are not messing about. unfortunately, while they very carefully select nutritious foods that meet the macronutrient requirements, they pay no attention to what the food actually tastes like. the women were not interested in hearing the parents' concerns, but i lucked into a rare opportunity yesterday when i picked mr smear up from school as the vegan meals are pre-packaged (like tv dinners) and one of the child-minders had taken to putting the ones he refuses (which is most of them) in the fridge. so i got to take a sample home.

the food tasted surprisingly good, but it was exceptionally, unpalatably dry and unseasoned. mr smear agreed. so we did an experiment, and i mixed a little ketchup in the sample i'd taken out and heated in the microwave. mr smear enjoyed it. mr smear enjoyed it so much that he insisted on putting ketchup in the still-cold container and ate it all up.

so our new plan is for him to sneak ketchup sachets in his bag so that he can enjoy the food. also, i've got an appointment to meet with his regular school teacher in the morning to "discuss" this nonsense about him not being allowed to bring granola bars to school. i was hoping to avoid a battle but one of mr smear's classmates is a little piece-of-shit snitch who ratted on him because he saw that mr smear had a granola bar on him a couple of days ago.

...

i think that's the most interesting stuff. otherwise, gd's still having a rough time, not sure what we're going to do about that...

i really haven't had bandwidth for anything extra this week. i need this weekend.

oh, and we've been watching adventure time over dinner. we're just entered season five. so far, it's glorious.

all over the place

 it's the middle of my third night with sinusitis, i'm tired and my face is tender and my nose is running constantly and i couldn't sleep so here i am writing in my journal.

wednesday:

the only thing i recall from wednesday is that my boss called me in to re-task me, which was a little sad considering i've been getting into a good groove. and mr smear seemed to be a bit feverish.

thursday:

gd wasn't sure whether to send mr smear to school or not, but the rule is "no fever: school" and we got him there. it's good i was working from home because a short while later i needed to pick him up. he seemed fine, so i strongly suspected that he was playing it up after two days at home.

i now know better.

thursday morning i discovered, during our morning meeting, that all the time i thought i was muting myself with my headset i was on full volume because my macbook doesn't think i intend to use my headset's microphone when i plug it in. i was mortified while thinking back to all the times i've muted myself to yell something to gd or mr smear, or cough, or fart... i'm still mortified.

i was also finally frustrated enough with my lack of slack notifications that i reached out to their support, and what i got back literally shocked me. it turns out that for many moons at least my macbook has silently been putting me into "do not disturb" mode with no indication as such. someone at apple signed off on a "feature" that blocks all my notifications during my work hours. what the actual fuck?

on thursday night there was another terror attack in dizengoff street.

friday:

mr smear seemed well enough to go on his school trip to the museum. apparently he found it boring, i'm not more curious to see for myself than before. i dropped him off a walked straight through to the train station, and took the train to rosh ha'ayin to meet a co-worker and get a ride to our company hike.

on the train i heard a crash, a soldier had fallen down the stairs with a heavy backpack on the other side of the car and she was sobbing and in pain. i made sure she was being taken care of before sitting down again, but it was heartbreaking - i hope it wasn't as bad as it sounded.

the ride to the camping spot was nice, we arrived and i was treated to a breakfast of wafers and orange juice and a story of how everyone's night went. there'd been an attempt at a terror attack in the middle of the night just a literal stone's throw from the campsite, nobody was armed and the only trained fighter was the only one to say "i'm out" and go home!

the hike itself was generally excellent, i was fortunate to be able to borrow a big hate because i would've gotten even more sunburned otherwise. my legs and hips had been feeling a bit stiff, which i attributed to the rollerblading on tuesday night, but at some point i started feeling a bit nervous about my right knee (the one that was operated on).

there were two small kids with us, and one of them decided that he wanted to go up over the train tracks rather than under them through the tunnel. this was fine until we had to come down from the tracks and it was steep and muddy, and that was where i discovered that my shoes had very poor grip. the trouble started with me tripping over a thick metal wire at the top and catching myself with my hand on a very sharp corner of the bridge (the rest of the surface was pretty smooth, so that was bad luck). everyone else made it down safely, some sliding but nothing crazy, but i lost my footing near the bottom and managed to launch myself over a bush and about a two meter drop onto rough stones.

i don't have any clue how i managed to turn myself around and not face-plant, but i'm still amazed by how gracefully i landed even if i did end up rather scratched and bruised. i had such an adrenaline spike that it was a while before i was certain that i hadn't really damaged anything...

we got a bit lost at one point, and the way back was pretty tough. the fact that both kids made it was amazing. the fact that their dad was brave enough to bring them by himself and could handle carrying the smaller one about half the hike was pretty damned impressive.

anywho, we ended the hike on a great note and went to a nearby italian restaurant to celebrate: the geppetto pizza bar in tzur hadassah. i wasn't very excited about their vegan options, and the waitress wasn't confident that they'd be willing to improvise - but they managed to put together a vegan cheese calzone for me that was absolutely heavenly!

i got a ride back to rabin square and walked home from there, very conscious of my legs and my step counter. i think i'd hit about 17000 at that point and i was grateful to get home and slide into the waiting hot bath.

it was good for my legs, but it was too hot for my blood pressure and i stayed in their a little too long, so i needed to lie under a fan and recover for a bit after i wobbled out and got dry.

mr smear and i helped gd bake the challah, and we had a really nice evening.

it was around bedtime when my throat started scratching.

saturday (yesterday, kind of):

i was sick. i was off-balance, felt like shit, headachey. i spent some of the morning playing video games - gd and i started getting into overcooked 2 - but for most of the day i was bedridden or couchridden. i did enjoy listening to absolute mad lads - kevin mitnick, but didn't really have bandwidth for much else. i was sure i'd be taking today (sunday) off.

sunday (today, kind of).

after a surprising amount of sleep for an unpleasant night with heavy sinuses, i got up feeling much better this morning. i walked mr smear to school, then accompanied gd to a doctor's appointment in ramat aviv. aside from a runny nose and slight cloudiness, i was fine.

i worked from home today, which helped. it wasn't an inspirational day, and one of my coworkers and i are having a bit of a disagreement about how i proceed so hopefully we'll be able to resolve that tomorrow (today, kind of).

gd went to the shuk today by herself, so color me impressed. in the evening we picked up mr smear from his animation chug and happened to walk past the street art group on the way out, and the woman running it was only to happy to fit him in to her monday session so we're all really excited for that!

dinnertime/showertime/bedtime was fine, but i needed to get into bed myself immediately after saying good night to mr smear (it's been like that for days), and i struggled to sleep until i eventually got up to post this. an hour or so ago? whatever. i'm just messed up enough to be having trouble sleeping, but not enough that i shouldn't (theoretically) be able to lie down and get some rest.

...

sunday / yesterday / today / whatever we celebrated our first year (back) in israel! i'm filled with gratitude, it's hard to believe we got through all that insanity, and then more insanity on top of that insanity, and here we are. through perseverance, amazing friends, a frightening amount of debt and sheer luck, here we are.

purim sameach!

yesterday (monday) began with a scare, during sunday's housecleaning labor it appears that i managed to tweak one or two things in my back and i spent the morning on the verge of a massive spasm. fortunately i managed to get mr smear to school without incident and gd smeared deep heat (bengay) and hammered me until everything softened up a bit. it continued to threaten for the rest of the day, but the threats were comparatively mild.

it was a busy workday. i enjoyed great successes with some sadness sandwiched in between, but sadly was unable to push my changes before the end of the day as one of my coworkers broke something important. i took today off for purim and i'm hoping they didn't push anything too interesting on my day off...

today was great! it started with a rough wakeup, but quickly smoothed out. gd assisted me with the remaining mold areas and we're pretty much complete, there are difficult-to-reach parts of the apartment (of our windows in particular) that look like nobody's cleaned them in eighteen years...

a cousin from england is here for a week and we bussed through to have brunch with her. we had a really nice time (and i ate far too much), it was all gravy until mr smear decided he was bored... no matter. we went past dizengoff center and stopped at the grocery store, we would have picked up a vegan burger for mr smear at the burger king but there was something wrong with their order systems.

once home, mr smear continued playing minecraft education edition while gd and i watched chris rock's new netflix special, which isn't very funny but is 100% on point and well worth watching.

afterwards, i took mr smear for a walk to and around the museum grounds. on the way we had a "tickle fight", something which had become a point of contention a long time ago (he would consistently use it at the worst possible times as an attention-grabbing device), and we've had enough of a break that i was finally able to relax my guard and we both enjoyed ourselves. we then had a special treat dinner on the way home - i picked up a laffa with salads at one shop and a packet of falafel balls at another, and we stuffed the falafel into the laffa for him while i ate a regular falafel pita. we got home in time to watch an episode of adventure time, and i ended up having time to read to him before heading out to join TAR purim.

it's been a decade...

the evening was fun, and was more of a reunion than anything else! i managed the route in my finn the human onesie with the hood over my eyes (some people managed it in outrageously complex costumes, so not much of an achievement), ending the evening with incredible vegan ice-cream from leggenda.

i've stretched, showered, and posted this, now to find out if i'm going to be able to sleep or not considering i needed a late coffee just to be able to get my blades on in the first place :P

i'm REALLY glad that i took today off. today was an awesome day.

the spring clean

 today was intense.

we've been having an issue with mold for the last while, and it seemed like we were winning until gd took some clothing out of our closet yesterday and was distraught to discover that it was covered in mold. so this morning, after i dropped mr smear at school dressed up as a creepy skeleton and apparently understanding that purim is not halloween and scaring the crap out of other kids isn't what today is about, gd and i set about getting rid of this horrible, shitty infestation.

it was heavy work, but between the two of us we'd organized everything we needed and by the end of the day it looks and feels and smells like we got the job done. there's a little bit left to do tomorrow, but this was a huge endeavor and we ended up having to throw some things out and clean and repack a lot of stuff...

...

off the top of my head i don't recall what wednesday was about, but thursday was a long day that felt entirely unproductive until everything came together in the evening, and i ended the work week with a complex sense of a) satisfaction that i'd completed an important piece of the puzzle and b) anxiety from what i expected to be the final piece of the puzzle. today got off to a great start, in that i completed the next piece that had been worrying me, but although what i did worked there's something mysterious that appears to be interfering with me testing it.

one step at a time.

...

the weekend was good, relatively relaxed. yesterday morning was all about me aligning my personal projects and mr smear playing minecraft educational edition, so in the afternoon i took him to the park to throw a frisbee around. we had fun, and he's getting pretty good! but at some point he got bored, and instead of telling me he was bored decided to troll me instead, which made for a bit of unpleasantness. fortunately we both cleared the air quite quickly and enjoyed a good walk back.

i'm reading danny, the champion of the world to mr smear and it's a book i'd completely forgotten reading, only something seemed very familiar in the first two paragraphs and then last night i came across a phrase that caused an *ah-HA* moment: when i was nine i decided that i wanted to be a "designing engineer" and as an adult i've always wondered where that particular combination of words could have come from - now, i know!

...

gd and i have been watching everything everwhere all at once in bits and pieces, and so far it's surprisingly brilliant considering how much praise we've heard from "normal" types :P

distractions are like feet...

 one goes in front of the other...

i can't believe it's tuesday night already. i also can't believe that i got so distracted i forgot that i meant to go rollerblading tonight.

the last two work days have been good. kinda fun, good vibes. i hope it holds.

...

my eye seems to be doing fine, it was a bit worrying for a while and then it started getting better. it was weird. and yesterday afternoon i knew it was healing because it was itching like crazy. i've never imagined the inside of an eyelid itching before.

...

i took mr smear to the allergist on sunday by myself, i still kinda feel like i survived an encounter. it was mostly fine, to be honest, but we had an incident (he was offended that people tried to give him mishloah manot and a gift of a book, i really don't get it) and some bad feelings. then, on top of that, we learned that he's allergic to dogs and both the assistant and the allergist herself told us explicitly that getting a dog would be a bad idea.

...

mr cat finally completed the latest three pages! so i dropped them all at once for my patrons, considering they've seen no progress in three months... i'm really happy with how they came out ^_^

...

last night mr smear and i completed charlie and the great glass elevator, tonight we got started on danny the champion of the world. i couldn't remember even reading the latter, but after two paragraphs i started getting flashes of random details and i'm super curious!

...

gd's been having a really rough time lately. her procedure didn't have a lasting effect and she's really struggling with the healthcare system here (even if i'm the one interfacing). hopefully tomorrow's appointment will be a bit more positive than her last one.

...

on a completely different note, gd and i watched the hateful eight. it's magnificent. like watching an excellently executed stage performance, only tarantino-esque.

...

oh! and i completely forgot about the electronic pen i bought. we've had another session with it since unboxing, but i haven't had bandwidth to play around with their website like i'd planned.

one thing at a time.

lots of nothing

 today was a good day. my lower left eyelid's a bit swollen and quite sore, which i suspect might be due to accidentally getting shampoo in my eyes yesterday, if it's not okay in the morning i guess i'll be paying the doctor a visit...

... otherwise, today was a good day. it began with me being extremely amused by mr smear playing spider-man - if there's one thing we're not worried about, it's him not getting exercise due to playing video games. for him it's an unusually full-bodied experience, while he's beating up bad guys he's jumping around and dancing and wriggling all over the place, it's literally amazing to watch! and hilarious :)

we watched a few episodes of the third season of adventure time, after which we walked to eazy cafe for a really nice brunch with sailor. then we walked down the road to a cool park, where we not only had a fun time but we picked up a great french kid's book as well! (petzi et le 7è continent)

we were all tired by the time we got home. we snacked a lot and watched more adventure time, then mr smear continued his game of spider-man until dinner time while i did the dishes and read stuff.

bed-time went well, and then gd and i settled in to check out the hateful eight. we've paused it halfway through because it's late, but we're both thoroughly enjoying every minute of it. it feels like it was made for theatre and it has definite echoes of reservoir dogs.

today was a good day. i've been feeling surprised all day by the novelty of getting through a weekend without feeling any anxiety about some urgent thing or other.

parkies

 i tried to search for that episode of carte blanche, or clips from it, where they covered parktown prawns. ever since seeing that repeated clip of a person launching themselves off of a toilet in abject terror, going to the toilet in the dark has invariably included a moment of worrying about whether i'm going to recreate that scene no matter what side of the world i may be on!

i've only encountered those things in real life once or twice, which confirmed for me the veracity of the "i'm still standing" ad... which, sadly, i couldn't find either :(

...

what i did stumble across, though, was becoming the alien: apartheid, racism and district 9, and i just realized that i haven't seen district 9 since it came out! that movie definitely deserves a re-watch.

closing the week

i'm feeling surprisingly accomplished today!

wednesday:

my throat was stilled threatening me, and my brain was a bit fluffy.

i woke up still feeling horrible about the night before, and mr smear did too. i tried to apologize but he was having none of it, which really stung, but a little later he said something and i realized what exactly he'd been so upset about, and it turned out to be a simple misunderstanding. it took two seconds to clarify and rectify the situation and everything was fine again.

i'm still feeling hugely relieved.

after dropping him off at school, i wrote up an article about scribble diffusion. this is a real game-changer for AI-generated art!!

i worked from home again, and it was a long and difficult day. i barely remember it, to be honest. it's all a bit of a blur.

tuesday and wednesday were particularly bad days for internet connectivity, and i was frequently disconnected from meetings and ultimately had to rely on my phone for a mobile hotspot.

yesterday:

there was a strike on yesterday, and i worked from home while gd and mr smear went through his online assignments together. it was a looooooong morning for them, but they got it all done in the end and i'm very proud of both of them - they did need the occasional help, but for the most part they figured it all out.

the internet technician came to sort out the problems we've been experiencing for the last week or two, and he showed me a picture of the cables - they're literally hanging in mid-air, so of course we have disconnections if there's any wind. he's managed to re-stabilize it, but i've just signed a contract with a different ISP and we'll be switching over to fibre soon.

i had a weird day, however. i really struggled with the work i was doing and i was feeling a bit out of it, not only was it hard to concentrate but at some point i realized that i had no idea what i'd been doing for the couple of hours prior to that moment... but by the end of the day i'd gotten the first task (of a big, important series) complete and had learned a ton, and i finished the work day on such a high note that i actually had to make an effort to "put my pen down" and leave the final tweaks until sunday!

the babysitter arrived on time, and mr smear immediately began acting super-weird. apparently he was totally cool from the moment we left, but it was enough to be embarrassing...

gd and i thoroughly enjoyed our evening with tahoma and his husband, nystire and his wife, and nyah nyah and her husband, it was raucous and silly and fun and it's been far too long since we got to just be people around others and not parents for a while.

today:

i managed to get up early today, feeling slightly hungover in spite of the fact that i didn't drink very much last night. gd, on the other hand, felt very hungover. she went back to bed as soon as mr smear's bag was packed.

mr smear said something eye-opening to me on our way to school this morning; i'm paraphrasing, but it was basically: "dad, am i'm an ideological zombie because i want everybody to be kind to animals?"
i'm literally amazed that my suspicions seem to have been correct.

i started my day with a bumpy bus ride to the kenyon ayalon mall to pick up what i thought was an electronic pen to use with scribble diffusion. it wasn't, it was basically a very advanced etch-a-sketch, so i went into the mall, picked up a coffee and hung around until the computer store opened.

they didn't have what i wanted either. but on the way out i noticed a stationary store that did have what i was looking for! the G430S is a little more pricey than i was planning on, but we've now gotten a good hour or two's use out of it (on both a macbook and a windows machine) and i'm well pleased that i bought it ^_^

i returned home in time for a quick breakfast, then rushed off to pick mr smear up from school - i left late, walked really fast and arrived just in time, by the time we returned home i was feeling pretty exercised. we immediately left home again to do the grocery shopping, and by the time we got home from that expedition i was properly exercised (12000+ steps) and in dire need of a nap.

so i napped a couple of hours, an absolutely glorious nap, then got up to spend the rest of the afternoon on chores and reading. mr smear's grounding ended at sunset, at which point we unboxed the pen and got to work :)

he's now playing some spider-man before dinner, and i just listened in on the temple service; i'm just feeling a lot of gratitude for everything we have and for being in a good place mentally.

win some lose some

 today was long. ultimately successful, work-wise, but a bit of a failure on a personal note. there was some friction at bedtime, and i mishandled it. i regret saying good night on an unhappy note.

i worked from home today and i was kind of okay, but my throat's still uncomfortable and i didn't feel like going rollerblading was the wise thing to do.

i've spent the evening doing bits of not much (perhaps i shouldn't have engaged in an argument with a troll who's literally a philosophy professor in an established university), mostly reading up on cool tech and mooching on the couch but being particularly blown away by my initial attempts with scribble diffusion. this is incredible stuff!

am ai nervous?

 i was so bothered by my ai experience that when i woke up yesterday morning i felt compelled to write about it. and then i listened to the recent hard fork episode of the daily podcast on my way to work and things are getting *really* creepy.

my work day was good. i feel like i've made a lot of progress, even if i haven't yet completed the ticket i've been working on...

i left work early so that i could get home in time to help mr smear with his homework. some of it went well, but most of the experience was quite negative. i'm feeling proud of myself that i didn't lose patience until we'd passed the two hour mark, but gd had lost hers way before and we ended up having a generally shitty evening.

he apologized on his own, which i'm proud of him for, but i don't know if he really *gets* the lesson (this is his second "grounding", and it doesn't feel like the first one was so long ago) or if we're going to have to go through all this again...

anyway, i managed to have a constructive evening. but just before going to bed i felt my throat start getting sore, so i'm at home today hoping it's not going to become a thing. of course i would get sick two days before we get to enjoy an adults evening with friends with a babysitter looking after mr smear...

...

this morning's been going well so far. i got mr smear to school on time, got the dishes done, took the broken plunger that we bought on friday back to the store, picked up better gear to deal with the mold problem that we've been dealing with the last couple of weeks...

now, to work.

messy

 i'm tired, and i have a headache. i'm still reeling from the news that a cousin's husband committed suicide a few days ago.

it was a partially successful day, i'm getting really positive feedback from my boss but i'm still wondering if he's just keeping me in a holding pattern or not. at the same time, i don't have the energy, interest or bandwidth to interview anywhere and the recruiters i dropped my guard with have been giving potential employers my contact details without letting them know i'm not jumping in with both feet.

as i type this, i've finally gotten a cdk reconfiguration right after an hour or two of troubleshooting. i also tried to get chatgpt to give me a summary of a book i read ages ago, and it straight-up lied to me! (i wouldn't even have known if i hadn't had my own copy to verify)

this morning i struggled with midjourney for a bit, i finally got the hang of giving it an image prompt and text prompt combined but it refuses to turn my entire hand into a robot hand and the results are consistently... weird. and not what i asked for.

[i'm too tired to type out a nuanced explanation, so suffice it to say that gd and i went together to pick up mr smear from school and the type of person leading the class was... unexpected. we were relieved to discover that there was no agenda, just a person, because gd and i have strong opinions on the ages appropriate for certain conversations and there are lots of people who don't agree with us]

another real weekend

it's a particularly special feeling being able to close out the weekend with the sense that i did precisely what i *should* have been doing with my weekend: resting my soul.

yesterday got off to a busy start - first, i published my new video. afterwards, we did a quick grocery shopping, which is normal, but then rushed home so that i could make it to the school in time for mr smear's class "family day".

a bird shat on my shoulder along the way. it was lucky. for the bird. i guess some things don't change.

we tried to get haircuts and failed, stopped at eazy cafe for a delicious lunch and coffee, then chilled the rest of the day. mr smear got hot chocolate with marshmallows. predictably, he loves it.

this morning started off with me "reading the papers" while mr smear played minecraft, but eventually - when it was his breakfast time and *my* play time - i fired up kingdom hearts iii to see what all the fuss was about.

it's amazing. it's a final fantasy with disney characters, and mr smear totally got into it with me.

in the afternoon, we all walked to the city centre, and were joined for a while by sailor. gd really wanted hummus, and after a little bit of a mission we eventually returned to abu dhabi and all thoroughly enjoyed our meals. the walk home was nice, though a bit chilly.

i needed a hot bath when we got home, and the evening was peaceful and enjoyable. mr smear pleaded with me until i agreed to a hot chocolate with marshmallows before bed...

i'm tired. my body's a bit sore. i think i'm going to do some stand-up gaming and then go to bed ;)

awkward thursday

a few days ago, inspired by back to the future, my son came up with an idea for time machine boots - very similar to the delorean, where if you walk fast enough the shoes go backwards or forwards in time. unfortunately, they have a slight design flaw in which the wearer of the shoes' feet go with the shoes but the rest of the wearer is left behind. shenanigans ensue.

...

our home internet connection's been all over the place this past week or so, we've had a technician replace our router's cable, another one replace the building's amplifier, and nothing's worked. this morning i updated the network appliance firmware (which i did around the time the troubles started), and it *crosses fingers* looks like everything altogether has final done the trick.

spotty internet is tough. first world problems are real problems.

today began with a phone call with a man who wants to hire me while i'm not sure i'm actually interested in switching jobs. after the awkward call, i sent a flurry of messages to the recruiters to remind them of my situation and we all (mostly) agreed that unless i'm really excited by something we should arrange calls with anyone.

in the afternoon, i got a surprise call from another company :/

...

i had a hard time getting my head into work today. yesterday i made progress on a frustrating piece of work i've been fiddling with on/off for weeks, and today it almost felt like i was going backwards trying to take the next step. there was another project in a similar state. it wasn't a satisfying way to end the week.

we love watching mr smear play spider-man on the ps4. it's a full-body experience for him, a real work-out! it's also a really great game.

after dinner i wishing my family a good night and hopped on a bus to watch another improv competition, i arrived a couple of minutes late but it didn't really matter. it was a brilliant evening, a lot of fun, although something in the final post-judgement piece put me in a weird mood and then the post-event music was so loud that i couldn't heard what anyone was saying to me.

anyway.

i came home, showered, and edited what looks like my actual final recording of the slam, and now i'm fiddling around with midjourney trying to decide what direction to go in before i turn in.

which will probably be any minute now. or after another cup of tea.

...

bing with chatgpt is producing some amusing yet disturbing interactions.

tuesday wednesday

yesterday:

i managed to ignore all the noise and focus on an important refactor i've been working on / trying to work on for a while, and last night i managed to get it completed, reviewed and deployed in time to test it. i woke up this morning to see the results and they were heartwarmingly positive. that was a nice way to start my day.

i've been snacking constantly for a while, and not completing my daily fast, and not getting much exercise. last night i got home with a bellyache, and the belly in question was a lot bigger than it should be, and i've made a decision to reset and get back into the routine.

not every day can be a "cheat" day.

today:

aside from the fact that mr smear threw up at school while gd was at the doctor's and i had to jump on a bus to the rescue - he gleefully bounced out of the gate knowing that he was going to get to enjoy an afternoon off - i had a really constructive day and squared away a couple of important things. i left work on a good note.

i also had an opportunity to talk to ric, but as much as i'd like them to understand that they've done amazingly well in spite of fighting a series of uphill battles alone, the tone of the conversation was really sad. i'm praying that whatever happens, the next phase of their life is smoother.

i've been thinking a lot lately about our situation here. my aliyah was only successful because of the support i received and an incredible amount of good fortune. there's no way i could have handled any of the first twelve years alone, and there's no way in hell we could have handled last year's move alone. we have every - single - day of our israeli lives to be grateful for and amazed by.

...

i've been entertaining introductory calls, and it's weird. mostly because i'm not quite convinced i want to leave. some days are better than others.

...

i've been doing a lot of reading lately - newsy articles more than anything else - and i have to say that it's inspirational how much we're advancing technologically. it looks like we're fast approaching the singularity, and the curve is becoming more and more visible, in particular when looking at AI, VR, aerospace, genetics, robotics... these are certainly interesting times!

israeli hump day special

work-wise, sunday went much better than anticipated. and i've since had a one-on-one with my boss who seems very happy with how i handled the week.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

gd's nerve block + radio frequency treatment happened. we got there on time, and the last time she had a nerve block we were in and out relatively quickly. this time there was a long, long line of old people and a lot of confusion. eventually they explained to us that it's a day procedure, and if there are complications or concerns with previous patients we could wait anywhere up to four hours.

i had to pick up mr smear from school, and gd wasn't allowed to be there without an escort.

fortunately we eventually got sorted out, they did the procedure while i picked up mr smear and we got back to the hospital in time to take her home.

it was a weird evening, but we managed.

on sunday night, i couldn't sleep. my mother always tells me that if i can't sleep i should get up, but i was too exhausted to get up and too sore to sleep. so for about four tortuous hours, i just lay there miserably with my mind escaping to a problem that couldn't be solved without being up and awake and online. at one point i was finally able to get up and stretch (it was my lower back, mainly), went back to bed, then eventually got up and stretched a second time and that did the trick.

it was pretty awful.

i got mr smear to school yesterday morning and then went straight to an eye exam. the doctor puts drops in my eyes to make my pupils dilate. the exam was fine, and apparently my eyes are just fine, but i didn't have sunglasses and the walk home into the sun was hardcore. it was painful, and my body was still messed up from whatever it was that was keeping me from sleeping and i was exhausted to boot.

the coffees could barely keep me functional yesterday.

and there were impotent protests making the bus take much longer than usual.

somehow, yesterday was productive in spite of how bugged out i was. i was sore, tired, and had a head full of cloud the entire day, but i managed to close a pretty complex ticket so i left the office on a good note.

it helped that i managed to make my annual dermatologist checkup on time, and picked up a really good pita (just salads) and fries on the way back to work.

i handled a big grocery shopping on the way home, and we had a pretty good evening. i ended up going to bed surprisingly late considering how i'd been feeling (i was working on an article about something i learned recently), and i actually got a pretty good night's rest.

i'm still tired this morning, but definitely doing far better than yesterday. let's see how this one goes.