i slept relatively well, but i think the past few days of not sleeping well are catching up to me. i just got up off the couch after more than an hour "sleeping in". when sending mr smear off to school, i informed him that we're going to the class pool party this afternoon. he's looking forward to it, but disappointed that we probably won't go rollerblading today.
i really hope this sticks!
i missed my sleep journal entry this morning:
3rd coffee 15.23
23.54 bed
6.36 up, not great sleep
that's because although the day started just fine*, my alarm went off at 8am to warn me that i had to be on the far side of kfar saba by 9.30, for a company (my employer) volunteering effort. i dropped everything, got dressed, rushed out to the bus stop, and travelled to my destination, which took a bit more than an hour and a bus switch along the way.
* fine, aside from gd being furious about the "deal" that trump ostensibly signed, which i later understood was yet more meaningless bullshit (it's essentially an agreement to extend the bullshit negotiations)
i arrived a little early, but the address wasn't precise. i asked the office manager / organizer to clarify, and that's when she called to drop the bombshell that the effort had been cancelled. and everyone had been informed of the cancellation except me, because she hadn't noticed that i'd registered (i'd registered during the initial sign-up).
what a fuck-up. so i bussed all the way back, having lost of couple of hours of my life that i really could have used. i quickly ate breakfast, then continued on to the office for a very long, busy day full of a mix of continuing to assist the previous client team with continuous incidents (two coincidences together, today) and making a bit of headway into understanding my own project.
also, a group meeting that was supposed to be a talk, but the speaker wasn't available so my mentor volunteered me to share what i've been up to. fortunately, that went well and turned into an entertaining and constructive conversation.
oh, and there was a small dog in the office bullying the big dog. that made me dislike him, but then he peed next to my shoe (on my shoelace!) so now i dislike him even more.
i left the office an hour and a half later than intended, arriving home with less than ten minutes to spare before another meeting that i'd forgotten about. that one went on for about an hour and half, but it was very interesting and, i hope, productive.
i had a quick dinner and we said good night to my mom, then gd and i did the grocery shopping, then i made myself a tea and played slay the spire 2, and then i was about to go to bed when i realized that i hadn't recorded by journal entry for the day, and now it's tomorrow so it's too late so i wrote this instead.
and now i can go to bed.
our pre-hackathon talk was interesting, i was grateful that my wife had come home in time to keep me supplied with coffee and for our beanbags which served as both seat and stand.
in the background i was installing local llm models, one of which initialized and was so heavy it killed my computer and it took so long to shut it down (everything was unresponsive, and the audio was jittering) that i had to rejoin the meeting from my personal laptop...
over lunch, gd and i watched the first bit of the ludwig pilot, and it starts off really strong!
i struggled to "wake up", as i mentioned before, and by the time i was (relatively) ready to dive into my work i received a call from one of the juniors - the same jobs had died once again. i found what seemed to be a smoking gun, connected some dots, and it looked like a broken infrastructure upgrade, but later on (after finally wrapping my head around what i'm supposed to be doing) i got another call back to say it wasn't that, but rather a legitimate bug in the code. we hunted it down, and although it did eventually turn out to be the bug, i was mighty suspicious as it's a code path that hasn't been touched since the project inception and the likelihood of it "suddenly" becoming a problem is extremely low.
anyway, i helped out, essentially taking charge, and along with another of his teammates we managed to get it resolved. the boss / my client called me for an update, and once i'd made sure that the junior had it handled i was able to join my family for dinner.
i didn't mention that i'd taken a break earlier to go pick up some stuff from the shops - i made mr smear come out with me on his blades, though i was walking, and he was not in the mood. with that in mind, i think we were both pleasantly surprised by the end of it; not only was i very happy with his progress, but so was he, and he straight-up told me that he was wrong and that i was welcome to lord it over him, and that compared to the hell that is bicycles, rollerblading is heavenly.
so that happened ^_^
i was late to join mr smear and gd for dinner, and i ate arguably more than i needed to, and then mr smear and i ate the oranges i'd picked up earlier. everything was fine until we saw two highly active fruit fly larvae wriggling around the remains of his orange.
he's always had a thing about worms, creepy crawlies in general but worms in particular, and what followed was some serious high drama. and lots of googling to be able to assure him he'd be fine, and then i started feeling uncomfortable so i decided to try and throw up.
any time i successfully throw up "on command" it blows my mind.
anyway, the rest of the evening post emotional-rollercoaster was fine, i read a bit of alice's adventures in wonderland to him at bedtime, and have been slowly gearing down and preparing myself to try and get some sleep since.
in spite of my stress and my lower back (which has been griefing me for quite a few days now in spite of my consistency regarding iron and magnesium supplements), i managed to sleep last night.
i started the day reading more watchmen* (my favorite chapter, where rorschach is caught, also omg my son just read this stuff and i'd forgotten what it included), then sat down at my desk to get productive and realized that my son had left for school having forgotten his sports class shoes. so i jumped to get dressed, caught a bus (traffic lights and bus timing perfect), and dropped off his shoes and grabbed his sandals with literally two minutes to go until the bell rang.
* oh, i totally forgot - on friday evening i discovered a massive collection of books and comics i'd bought over the years from humble bundle, so i've read a couple of battlestar galactica comics (specifically one about time warping into parallel universes) and watched part of a video about the original series, and it's really shed new light on the reboot. i love how it's all canon, while all very different.
i came home and have been struggling to get shit done, though i did managed to put in a claim and complaint for gd's physio sessions.
the tami4 technician arrived, wore his shoes into the kitchen, reconnected the machine and pushed the button. water flowed nicely. it was apparently an "air bubble", and we could have had a slightly easier weekend after all.
i washed the entrance and kitchen floors, and i've made myself a coffee, and in half an hour i have a pre-hackathon meeting. i'm really having trouble getting my head in the game, i hope i "wake up" soon...
i was having a fine evening, and getting stuff done, right until i decided to look at my bank account about ten minutes ago. now i'm enjoying a mild anxiety attack. i feel like i last checked just a few days ago, and a whole bunch of those expenses weren't showing up... i know that a significant chunk of it is for the summer day camp, but still...
...
the rollerblading was fine, mostly positive, but the first, say, fifteen minutes saw me practicing patience in a very deliberate way. once we got to the park, mr smear opened up a bit and we both had a good time.
we started watching grease over leftover dinner, with lots of pausing to provide context 🙄
i think i need to find a way to relax, last night's sleeplessness was bad enough :/
there was a lot of kitchen stress last night, and some very serious (positive) conversations with mr smear about life in general in its wake. gd had ridiculous trouble with the gluten-free dumpling recipe, but the ultimate result was much better than the store-bought frozen ones...
i did nothing of value between late dinner and climbing into bed a bit after midnight. then i woke up, restless and sore, and for about two hours lay in bed, distressed but too tired to give up on trying to fall back to sleep. eventually i got up for a couple of hours of mindlessness, then finally returned to sleep for a couple more hours.
i didn't feel great this morning. i read some watchmen, i napped a little, and then i was going to start getting into the things i'd been intending to do today* when my alarm reminded me that i was going to one of ze germans' daughter's bat mitzvah...
* i'd intended - like most people - to put down money for claude in order to have access to the fable model to do some experimentation. i woke up to the news that that wasn't on the cards any more.
i had a long chat with horseman about AI and middle east politics before and on my walk there, broken only to get dressed and make coffee, and when running into our old neighbors and learning that there're a lot of kids in the building now and they've managed to force the building management to renovate the bomb shelter. too late for us, but i'm very relieved for them!
the bat mitzvah was really simple and tastefully done, all i consumed was liquids (only one alcoholic drink, though) and a little bit of the fruit salad, and i had a good time chatting with ze other germans (irish/swedish + austrian). i got a ride home, realizing only at that point just how late in the day it was.
i'm now having a late coffee, mr smear's just completed a second hour of "productive" screen time (making animations) and is now having a bite to eat, and then we're going to head out for a bit more rollerblading.
we were excited for the end-of-year exhibit, and mr smear was apparently excited too, as evidenced by him phoning us from the secretary's office ten minutes before it started to ask us where we were.
but once there, he wasn't interested in letting us go through the exhibit - which is what we did last time - he tried to rush us through and made it quite unpleasant. eventually, we got to the very, very, very last corner of it and found his works. his class had three pieces up, and mr smear only had two of his on the boards, and of those pieces one of them was upsetting to gd because it involved roblox horror with a rabbit being chopped up.
so... not the greatest morning we could have imagined.
we bussed home, then went out to do the weekend shopping. about halfway through i suddenly felt ill, most likely caused by nerve pressure in my neck. the rest of the expedition was unpleasant to say the least - i despise friday shopping on a good day.
we came home, i lay down for a while, and felt a bit better when i eventually got up again. good enough to try taking apartment the shower head holder that's been bothering gd since we moved in.
it was gross, badly rusted, and it took a while for me to get it off the wall. leaving this:
 |
| but is it art? |
i then returned to the store with mr smear to pick up a sixpack of water that i'd been in too much of a rush for earlier, and gd called me, distressed, because she'd bought the wrong kind of rice flour for the dumplings she and mr smear have been desperate for. a bit later, there were yells from the kitchen, which rapidly made their way into the office - gd had figured out how to turn the rice flour into sweet / sticky rice flour on her own!
and there was much rejoicing.
it's now erev shabbat, and i'm not quite sure what i should be doing, nor what i want to do. but i will post this:
 |
| AI slop, AI slop of horrors, AI slop, AI slop of terror... |
sleep journal entry:
i had four coffees yesterday. prior to my third coffee, i was falling apart, foggy and tired and sleepy and having trouble concentrating, for at least forty five minutes.
i woke up this morning from a dream in which i was arguing with schwarzenegger's terminator over how to approach an accounting problem.
yesterday:
i had some stuff to do in the morning, but i ended up having a long chat with urchin instead. i feel bad, because i think i made her feel bad about her new corporate employer when i talked about the trust issues in our industry that i previously posted about...
...
on my way into the office i had an idea: i think a lot of what's wrong with western society comes down to having been raised to believe that we can be anything and we can do anything, which, when taken literally, ends up with people who cannot bring themselves to accept and deal with reality. it's a societal illness.
...
the team i sit with was off volunteering, to it was a quiet morning in the office. it was still kinda quiet after they came in, so it was mostly a relaxed end to the week and i seem to have gotten a handle on the current phase of my project.
i came home for lunch, ate a couple of lotus cookies and fired off a troll message to mr smear thanking him and implying that i ate them all. when school ended, i received the following response:
we discussed the upcoming exhibit, and he told me he was only missing one piece that got lost a couple of months ago, and i asked him to recreate it when he got home. as much for me and gd as for him.
a while later, i received a picture of his recreation, and it was brilliant ^_^
the office happy hour started less happy because i inadvertently raised the issue of them not having any vegan treats when i, personally, wasn't interested in the temptation. but my boss is also vegan (apparently), so the organizers were quite stressed about it.
i grabbed a beer, and approached one of the AI gurus about my openspec experience (which we'd briefly discussed a couple of months ago), and he offered to sit with me for a bit. we ended up spending most of an hour and a half in a flurry of installations and experiments, and i was pleased to see his enthusiasm when he finally grokked what it is i want to build. i learned a lot from the conversation in general.
i had an awkward interaction with my boss on my way out, he wanted to know my project timeline and i began explaining what i'd already explained to my manager, "assuming no more surprises, and every step along the way we've learned new and surprising things"... and he cut me off: "first the estimate, then the disclaimer" :P
i came home, mr smear and i strapped on our blades, and i took him for a round. he was really nervous and scared, but we got through it and he had some really good moments. we also had two encounters with really sweet dogs; the first, a puppy who was peeing himself constantly with excitement, the second a huge, fluffy, very nosey girl. i very much appreciate the additional positive vibe injection into mr smear's early experiences ^_^
just before we got home, he tried to roll a bit on a downhill and hurt himself as he fell. he was upset and started sulking away, and i caught him and told him he had to show himself he could do it - i'd been telling him the entire ride that his body's capable, it's his brain that needs to be aligned. surprisingly, for the state he was in, he went "fuck it", turned and rolled and t-stopped beautifully!
i was so proud of him, not just for the physical success but for the attitude, and for not ending the ride on a negative note.
we finished watching little shop of horrors over dinner, and got him into bed, and then i sat down with gd and we talked about something that she's always done when we watched tv or movies together that's really unpleasant*. it feels like we got to the bottom of it - it's more a communication thing than anything else - and it was a relief.
* she just fucks off, while we're waiting for her to continue. anyway, it's a little complicated.
i did nothing last night, and went to bed relatively early because my eyelids were feeling particularly heavy.
this morning so far:
i got up late, finished another chapter of watchmen, and finally replaced the UV light and purifier of the tami 4. something went egregiously wrong, though, and now we don't have a tami 4 for the weekend and a technician is (thankfully so quickly) coming in on sunday morning.
now that i've posted this, pausing to tear up at the opening sequence of darwish - desert adventure 2025 (quoting udi kagan's הלם קרב), we're about to leave for the school for the end of year exhibit, very excited to see what mr smear's been up to!
i posted something this morning, and i'm disappointed that it hasn't got much attention:
nobody's talking about something that's really important: regardless of whether you've been retrenched or not, how do you trust an employer that would throw your fellow employees under the bus for the promise of cost cutting AI? how do you return to working for a company that did that to you? where's the incentive to work hard and behave as if you and your employers have a shared stake in the future of your company?
the accepted behavior of our industry leaders is nothing short of psychopathic, and nobody is calling them to account. we've all just accepted that this is what business looks like now, and it's hurting not just the human beings who do the work and have families to provide for, but also the businesses themselves, and also our economies.
...
the pharmacy run was stressful. after waiting about half an hour, listening to music and knowing there were another ten numbers to go, i was suddenly yanked out of my reverie as i registered that my number was suddenly, unexpectedly up. i rushed to the counter, struggling to turn the music off (the button just didn't work) and get my paperwork out, only to find myself standing there waiting for someone who turned out to be a technician and not a pharmacist.
he was trying to fix the queue number system.
what followed was chaos, with a couple of us keeping track of the numbers because nobody - including the pharmacists - understand what was happening. as my meeting time got closer, i was approached by a woman who was also in a hurry and wanted to trade numbers.
anyway, that wasn't the worst of it. the worst of it was my credit card being declined, and having to set up gd's on my phone wallet with her validating it from her phone while the pharmacist became impatient and a large crowd was suddenly behind me. i managed to get it done in record time, but not without a high level of stress.
i managed to catch a bus and get home and join the zoom call one minute late.
...
after the daily, i ate a quick breakfast and headed to the office. it was a complicated day, with me untangling a mess of work that needed to be reverted, then replayed. i thought i'd done a good job of it, but around 5pm i learned that one of the reverts broke the CI pipeline and nobody (least of all me) could figure out how 🤦♂️
at least my sync with my mentor went positively, although a bit later my fellow contractor paid me a visit, distressed, because everyone he's spoken to about the hackathon has given him a different answer and none of them seem fair or right to him. i gave him some advice, but i'm glad i'm not in that position.
during the day it crossed my mind that there's a huge difference between standing on the balcony of a top floor of a very tall tower, and seeing a photo from it, so i walked home, picked up mr smear and walked back to the office to give him a tour of the four corners of our floor. he was thrilled, and it became a powerful lesson in perspective ^_^
we sat down to dinner soon after getting home, and watched the second third of little shop of horrors, which to my delight he's thoroughly enjoying and is completely invested. i must admit, though, i'm finding it more and more amusing that he often pauses to describe what's happening as if he's just had some deep insight or epiphany; like, he's just stopped us to demonstrate, unwittingly, that he understood what just happened on the screen 🤣
...
if this is what's happening to black africans right now, it's not going to be long before it starts happening to white africans. and in the current political climate, it's probably going to begin with the jews :(mozambicans: suffered the highest recent casualties, with at least five citizens killed during violent mob attacks and arson in coastal towns, displacing nearly 600 people.
malawians: hundreds forced from their homes, seeking emergency refuge in community halls and mosques while awaiting state-sponsored evacuation.
ghanaians: hundreds voluntarily repatriating via state-chartered flights out of johannesburg due to severe harassment and safety fears.
zimbabweans: facing intense harassment, unlawful evictions, and workplace discrimination as one of the largest migrant populations.
nigerians: dozens requesting emergency flights home, prompting government airlifts and formal diplomatic interventions.
somalians: small business and shop owners facing widespread looting, vandalism, and economic displacement.
congolese: refugees and asylum seekers experiencing systematic exclusion from public healthcare and targeted harassment.
...
after saying goodnight to my mom, i discussed my fears with gd, which led to a conversation about how she's been handling the years since october 7th and her relationship with the news. along with everything else, i'm glad she's starting to feel a bit of relief and see the light as other nations begin to wake up to what's been going on under their noses all this time.
last dream: track listings on the sides of containers, a shul service with someone i know who'd recently been released from prison (and who was clearly a traitor) being loudly disrespectful, and a container tramsporting a carnival covered in sheets and i could see ninjas (the irony) hiding all across it.
i slept through - minus successfully turning off my alarm - until i was woken up to say goodbye to mr smear. i don't know when last i managed to sleep like that.
gd's back is sprained, so instead of finally getting ready for the hackathon and a pressured day, i'm quickly drinking a coffee then heading off to the pharmacy...
i kinda feel like i'm in a pinball machine, being smacked around by flippers and bouncing off random objects and trying hard to avoid falling into the hole.
it took me too long to get out the house, so i stayed for my morning meeting and then went to the office, leading a lost stranger i encountered along the way to his destination.
in a nutshell, i basically wasted most of today on fixing up a repository in a way that the owners didn't like, and nobody cares enough to just finish the job. i think i handled the discussion at the end of the day appropriately professionally, though it was clearly awkward for both me and the guying reviewing my code.
in the afternoon, someone reached out to me to inform me that some of my earlier changes had broken something - eight days ago. fortunately, it was already a different kind of broken by someone else 🙄
fixing it was quick and easy, but then something in databricks went wrong and i had to manually reset it, which led to another issue with the other code i'd been working on... eeeeeverything is broken....
last week my rollerblading experience was disrupted because i'd consumed dairy, and i wanted to make up for it. i came home, for some reason stewing over something protoplasm and i had had to deal with in goa many years ago, and when i walked into our apartment my son jumped out and yelled namaste!, which he had no idea what it meant, and then when i'd calmed down a little and we went out for a quick walk before dinner, we encountered two indian women in beautiful traditional dress.
so that all happened.
we started watching little shop of horrors at dinner (mr smear grumbled about it being a musical, but calmed down quickly because it's good), then spoke to my mom, and then waited for mr smear to get ready for bed... by which stage i was running late for the rollerblading, and my stomach was doing a thing, and i decided that tonight's not the right kind of night.
so i've done very little of value, it's already late, i'm going to go to bed now. hopefully tomorrow will be more constructive.
six day war... twelve day war... twelve hour war...
bizarrely, yesterday felt like a return to routine.
שמים את השיגורים בשיגרה
we put the rocket launches in the routine
mr smear's biggest lesson for the day was helping gd clean the floors; the first half was a nightmare until i got involved, and once it was done we had to have a family meeting and discuss how we help others (mr smear) and how we handle provocations (gd). we then had a bit of a repeat episode when he was supposed to help her with the dishes before dinner prep, but for a different reason, and i found myself explaining to a ten year old techniques for getting off the toilet quickly 🙄
my workday was alright, and ultimately successful. i'm still really behind - way past deadline - but i'm making some progress and certainly learning things along the way. i don't really have a solid mental model for what i'm doing, though, not yet at least, but a big part of that is how uninvested i am personally.
i also "wrote" (AI) a bunch of bash scripts for a CI workflow, and now i'm thinking i really should rewrite them in python...
i got stuck waiting on others in the evening, and mr smear and i took our fluxx collection upstairs to play a couple of games with our upstairs friends. it was fun, but more than that it was intended to be an educational experience for the kids, and as many annoyances as there may have been, overall it went well.
mr smear and i came back downstairs for dinner and macgyver, and gd's mushroom-soup lemonade (she followed the mushroom soup recipe, it's a terrible recipe), and then a hilarious chat with my mom (cemeteries can be dramatic), and then a night of intentionally doing nothing of value.
this morning we woke up (myself a lot more slowly than everyone else), and sent mr smear off to school, and then i read a little bit (a mix of stranger in a strange land and watchmen), and now i've posted this while singing along to synthknot, and now i guess it's time to get moving and go to work.
...
i've been putting off a bunch of preparation work that i need to do for the upcoming hackathon, it's not feeling good. but having published my extension and the related articles, i feel like a weight has fallen off my shoulders.
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]
after my previous post, i showered, and we sat down to dinner. we finished watching cool runnings, i totally didn't cry.
i was tired.
so i played a little slay the spire 2 while mr smear got ready for bed, said good night, and then made myself a last tea. i thought i'd read a little and then go to bed, but i happened upon an article about publishing vscode extensions, and thought i'd *just* set up my account in preparation.
TWO HOURS LATER...
i now have my extension published on both vscode and open vsx marketplaces! my articles are just about completed, so i was trying to get some good screenshots for them when i encountered a new feature in vscode (i believe it's "github.copilot.chat.copilotDebugCommand.enabled": true) that puts my little extension to shame :P
aaand now it's very late, and i've got a big day ahead of me tomorrow 🤦♂️
"omg you're making a face that looks like putin if he didn't have riz" - my son to me a little while ago, it made me want to die
...
we had a very pleasant evening, dinner and more cool runnings, then a visit from our upstairs friends, and then pure exhaustion and dropping into bed soon after they left.
this morning was chilled. i had a whole lot of stuff i wanted to do, but the thing i started with took hours. i did end up with the first part of a two-part article done and dusted, and i did quite a lot of it on the balcony on a lovely day (right until the sun started shining right on me, it was too hot).
then i got off screens for a while (i restarted reading watchmen again), and then i took mr smear our rollerblading. i was hoping to get to the roller rink at the sportek, but i did have any expectations. we made it though! and, in spite of his protests along the way, he did get on the rink and he did enjoy himself!
he had lots of little challenges to overcome, there and back, and we stopped for quite a lot of rests. at one point, we'd been sitting on a bench under some shady trees for longer than usual, and i suggested we move on; "no, dad, i'm enjoying this. we're very lucky to live here" 🌳 😍 🌳
so he's had a good time, and he's proud of himself, we've both had some exercise and rollerblading practice, and it's a fine end to a lovely day.
i still haven't fully recovered from tuesday and wednesday's dairy incident (i suspect my lactose intolerance has evolved into an actual allergy), so having a beer this afternoon has hit me surprisingly hard...
today got whole lots better. i was still a bit down in the dumps when gd and i left for the morning shopping run, but we found a nice little spot for coffee and relaxed and enjoyed ourselves, and the walk back to the shops and subsequent shopping trip were not unpleasant.
then we came home and had a nice, quiet, relaxing early afternoon as mr smear had gone to one of his friends (one of the two that he got physical with, the south tel aviv one). i was a bit nervous about picking him up and bringing him home on a friday afternoon, but the buses are running until relatively late now that it's summer.
the ride there was a bit stressful - some shitty kids for the first half, and lots of unwashed people for the second - and i was in a mode for the fifteen minute walk from the bus, partially because of the area (though it was fine, chilled, much less aggressive than the time i bladed through on a saturday) and partially because i was listening to slipknot.
i picked him up, and he appears to have been well-behaved and had a good time. we got to the bus stop in time, and everything was going just fine until halfway home he did something shitty and the entire week's issues with him came crashing home. we discussed it, we discussed my feelings and why i feel the way i do, but morale was pretty low for both of us by the time we returned home.
i dove into my AI "harness" - which, since yesterday morning's inspiration, has now been demoted to my MCP eavesdropper - and it's now feature complete and ready to be published. but not without some irritation: i blew through the rest of my github copilot credits and further into an additional budget i approved, and i didn't even have much to show for it.
i've parked the work for the day, and tomorrow i'll set about doing two things: the first, getting a local AI running again, and the second, publishing my extension. once that's done, i'll be more than ready to begin working on the actual harness i now have a design in mind for.
...
shabbat incoming. i feel almost surprised to have made it to this point in the week.
yesterday was fucking hard. i'm so over it right now, over everything to do with parenting and adulting and just getting through a friday fucking morning without having a breakdown.
yesterday continued to be shit. i didn't mention that i woke up yesterday feeling inspired, because i finally figured out the solution to a technical problem that's been causing me no end of consternation over the course of the past couple of weeks: i figured out what we need to gain visibility into our AI usage in general, not just eavesdropping on whatever our technological overlords haven't figured out how to block yet.
but that inspiration quickly faded with mr smear's friend's phone call*, and then i arrived at the office to discover that the previous day's incident was far from over. instead of working on my project - the one i'm past deadline for and drowning in - i spent all day (minus a break for lunch, thank god i took the opportunity to come home for a break) and until 10.30pm grasping at straws in the dark.
* later i'd get a phone call from his teacher, and learn that the situation is worse than we thought. so there's that.
at least i wasn't alone - and, in particular, at least the boss was involved. both because he had a lot of insights and provided a lot of useful guidance, and because he was a witness to why i wasn't working on my own stuff.
having said that, there i was, at night, in a dark client's office because the building's lights went off, instead of being with my family on a day that i really needed to be having a talk with my son. i'm a contractor, i shouldn't be effectively on-call, and i don't know how to navigate this professionally.
i almost sent a message to my mentor now, but i think it can wait until sunday.
as we left the building, the boss asked if i'd enjoyed the experience. the honest answer was that as much as i like the people, and i learned stuff, and i felt useful, and i'm grateful to have a job that pays me a salary, i also really, really don't want to be working long hours on meaningless stuff i don't give a shit about. he put me on the spot, though, and all i could come up with was "it's not all negative with you guys" and an awkward smile.
i arrived home exhausted and unhappy. i initially thought that my "liquid dinner" of a corona (that's the piss-water everyone else was drinking) would be enough, but then i found the sushi gd had left in the fridge.
my family was fast asleep, and i ate and showered and brushed my teeth feeling like a ghost in my own home.
i climbed into bed and fell asleep pretty quickly, and - for the nth day in a row - was woken at 6am by the god-awful sounds of my son spitting out toothpaste. so i woke up pissed off at him and the world in general, and try as i might (for more than an hour) i just couldn't get back to sleep.
we had our talk, albeit a short one, and sent him off to school. when i finally sat down at the computer to take care of what needs taking care of before we leave for the weekend shopping, i ended up having to troubleshoot the network issues again. i really, really shouldn't have returned the network device. when i finally got it all working again, i received an email reminding me that our physio insurance isn't ponying up, and now i'm pissed off and have sent an email to the brokers to ask if there are other companies we can use.
i'm so over these assholes making me work after i've paid them for a service.
...
i'm physically tired, and emotionally drained, and i don't know how i'm going to do the things i have to do today when i don't even have it in me to do the things i want to do.
as tired as i was last night, i dived back in to a refactor for one of my side projects that i'd begun yesterday morning (that's where my token budget went) and finally published the new package around 1.30am.
i slept alright, if not enough.
just after mr smear left the apartment this morning, i received a message from his best friend's mother. during yesterday's incident, he attacked him as well. the gentlest kid you can imagine. during our conversation, i learned more about how messed up my child is than from anyone else, and we're fucking distraught.
so! i have an explanation for yesterday evening, last night, and this morning. also, today, and still now to a degree.
i didn't mention that when i took mr smear out yesterday, my belly was doing a bit of aching. i didn't really think much on it, but in retrospect that was the warning sign. then last night's feeling horrible, and this morning still feeling horrible, primarily with a low-intensity headache and an unusual dizziness.
i was still in post-rollerblade "recovery" mode, and i grabbed a petit beurre from the jar on my way to my desk. i'd had a few yesterday; they don't always have them, but every now and again i help myself to a couple when they do. but yesterday, and today, it tasted a bit different... richer... and while i managed to put that aside yesterday, the way i was feeling today made me suddenly paranoid. enough to go back and look again, more carefully, and realize that unlike the standard petit beurre in israel (osem), this was a different brand. so i looked up the brand's ingredients.
dairy.
in the "vegan"-labelled cookie jar, looking almost identical to the osem one which is legitimately vegan.
so i had my answer - the tale of last night, in its entirety, was me eating a handful of dairy biscuits yesterday afternoon, and then feeling extremely heavy effects all through the night and most of the morning. then there was an hour or so's reprieve, before this morning's biscuit kicked in and set off a pounding headache.
a coworker gave me a couple of headache tablets, which eventually took the edge off but never quite managed to lift the fog.
...
with that all happening, i had some important project work to do today. it took me a while to get into it properly - i had to deal with a few bureaucratic distractions, and i wasn't exactly operating at peak performance - and by the time i got started i was fortunate to realize that some else had overwritten my work yesterday before i triggered a mistake i might not have been able to take back.
i got in touch, and coached him through merge my changes into his (it's quite frustrating to have to guide experienced, intelligent developers through basic git manipulations because they refuse to use graph visualizations), and eventually we managed to get everything in sync.
but by that stage, i'd already been dragged into an investigation for an incident that had begun the night before and hadn't rung any alarm bells. suddenly, me the contractor who's working on a high-pressured over-deadline damage control project, had to take charge of the situation and lead the team through hours of resolution and troubleshooting.
so much for wednesday.
it looks like we did it in the end, and relatively well (i argued for combining mitigation with some elementary protections for the next set of surprises), and while monitoring the fixes not only fixed up the dashboards, but exported them to a versioned repo and demonstrated the advantage (apparently convincingly) to the others.
...
i left the office really late, stopped at the shops to pick up a couple of things, including soy milk for gd. you see, we found out months ago that she's probably celiac, and had some amazing success with her going gluten-free, but recently some of the symptoms have been creeping back. turns out, she's been drinking oat milk this whole time, thinking that it was gluten-free 🙄
...
dinner was excellent - gd made another large round of sushi and we ate the lot - and we watched some more of cool runnings. the evening was feeling like it was going great, so it was a rather undigestible surprise when the mother of one of mr smear's "friends" called to discuss him getting violent with her boy.
gd had suspected something had happened when he'd come home this afternoon, and he'd brushed her off, and it took a lot for us to extract even a little bit of the story from him. when i called the mother back to talk about it, it turned out that there was more to the story, but mr smear swears blind that that was everything. gd and i are extremely concerned, and we're both having trouble dealing with this.
...
oh, yeah - and this morning's AI usage, which was really basic, blew through more than half of my monthly budget. well, i've been complaining about the AI providers putting on the squeeze for a while now...
so all-in-all it's been a bit of a shit day, with only the slightest sprinkling of glitter over the incident resolution and the few minutes where i got to enjoy dinner with my family before everything fell apart for real.
i was somewhat uncomfortable and restless all night, possibly a combination of feeling faint from the rollerblading and still having some caffeine in me.
i have stuff to do before heading to work, so of course, here i am doing a complete overhaul of my encryption tool in response to some security alerts... it's in *these* moments that i'm grateful for the AI assist :P
