Thursday, May 9

 Woke up at 7:10 with the alarm. B went ahead and cooked me You-tiao from H-Mart, and I brewed some coffee; rather "poured" some coffee – in a pour-over – that is our coffee fix these days. Omega-3, of course. No, my allergy last week was obviously not from Omega-3 – it's the spring pollen season, apparently.

I worked from home before lunch cause I needed to pick up a paper for DMV after 10. I released PDF Owl in AppStore at 11:58am. Let's see how it goes. Then went for the paper.

The assistant working at the optometrist's office calls me "young man". Another man in his 60s walks in, limping, he calls him "young man" too. "Have a seat, young man!" – he says to the barely walking old guy. He speaks Spanish to another client: obviously joking but also to the point. He tells me to send the note to DMV, but takes another copy; he tells me if they mess up my mail, I'd have a copy. He is bald, with two rings in both ears and a grey goatee beard. He's around 50, maybe? A happy man in his 50 running the office. "Hey, Grigory, why are you not wearing your glasses?" – he asks me. My glasses; he remembers my glasses. "I'm not used to those glasses yet, I don't need them too often," – I say. The prescription glasses take time to get used to, he explains; especially first prescription glasses. 

I got to work by 1:30. The office was empty. I tried to think of Lambdas and SNS, but, somehow, fruitless. I was thinking I needed to learn React Native. That is where it is all going. I step into the territories when Abhi says he doesn't know what's going on there with the client. And I don't wanna bother Will with that. Basically, I need to understand a little bit what are the flows of the client, and nobody around seems to be able to help me with that. I clicked the links around; when was the first time I had heard of React? 2016? 2017? It's been around me but always passed by my side. Not exactly where I'd like it to move. Will said, "it's up to me". Maybe I'm actually interested in the front end, am I not? 

Unable to settle my thoughts, I decided I'd do at least one useful thing – finish signing up for the pension. VDC it is called, and it's one of the plans for State employees. -6% of the salary contribution from me, +8% contribution from them – not too bad. Vesting is just one year. For the alternative, signing up for 10 years minimum service on NYSLRS I'm not ready yet.

News arrived from the SMS spam meeting with the diversity team. It all went well – we are green-lighted on banning abusing SMS countries. Just asked to keep them updated on how it goes. I also read some more on the problem and discovered that Google before October 2013 offered the Firebase identity service for 6 cents per sign-up. But then due to "significant changes in market conditions require more granular and variable pricing" – they started charging one cent per sent SMS, essentially dumping the spam/verification problem on the clients. I'm surprised Google's muscle couldn't deal with the abusing carriers and filter it somehow more meaningfully. They just deferred it to the clients to decide to ditch certain countries. Something smells fishy in this story.

I went back home by 7. Stopped by Trader Joe's and bought goat yogurt – accidentally – no idea what it is like. I will try another morning.