Tag: health
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The first glimmer
Zach of The One and I wrote earlier this year about 'glimmers', which he describes as the opposite of 'triggers'. I love both the word and its concept, and I'm going to try to cultivate a better personal awareness of the glimmers in my life.
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NHS England rushes to hide software over AI hacking fears
New Scientist reports that the NHS are closed-sourcing a lot of their code, out of fear that AIs like Mythos will facilitate easier exploitation of their systems if they don't. Which is pretty-much... completely backwards thinking.
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Food divided by Distance
In the kind of dream that only happens when I'm ill, I invented an app that would track both your location and your food consumption, and report to social media your journey progress as a proportion of your remaining meal.
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The younger kids' taekwondo school put on a free 'new years workout' class this morning. It was pretty awesome.
My watch says my heart rate averaged 146bpm, peaking at 169bpm. It's possible I'm not as fit as I used to be. 😅
But at least I don't feel like I might die, like I did during the 'dads go free' promotion last year. Progress?
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In a gym environment with punchbags visible in the background Dan, a white man wearing a black t-shirt, throws a right jab, alongside others who are doing the same.
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The Reason I Have 12 Birthdays
The ever-excellent Blackle Mori posted this about 18 months ago but I don't think it got the level of attention it deserves. If if you've never experienced birthday inflammation or known anybody who has, it's an eye-opening experience to hear a first-hand account of this unusual and definitely-real condition.
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In case you weren't already a little nervous or uneasy going in to the dental clinic, the doorstop at my dentist's front door will fix that for you.
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Sculpture of a rock with a zipper mouth behind which can be seen an uncannily-realistic set of teeth.
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After most of four days spent primarily in bed with what's probably a norovirus infection (or something like it), this afternoon I got up and went outside. 🎉
It felt like a huge achievement, even if I ran back in to the warmth the very second that the dog I was supervising had finished her business.
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A white man stands outside a white house, looking cold. His hands are buried in the pockets of his checked pyjama bottoms, and his upper half is wrapped tightly in a Tumblr-branded grey jumper. Various childrens toys litter the garden around him.
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Using WordPress internally at Automattic as a productivity tool is great... until you have to call in sick three days in a row and Jetpack treats your "streak" as an "achievement"! 😅
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Two 'Jetpack' notifications on an Android phone, both at 08:07. The first reads: 'Dan Q posted on Marketplace Engineering: AFK for itsdang -26Feb25'. The second reads: 'New achievement: You're on a 3-day streak on Marketplace Engineering!'
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Third day of being ill with what's probably a winter vomiting bug, with one child home sick from school... and just having had to collect the other kid who started throwing up on his school trip... I finally got back to my bed and picked up the next book on my pile, Becky Chambers' A Psalm for the Willd-Built.
The opening page reads: "For anybody who could use a break."
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Printed serifed text reading: 'For anybody who could use a break.'
Yes. Yes, please.
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Don't remember the last time I felt so run-down. I've been unwell since Sunday with an illness I can only assume I caught from the 11-year-old, who's been unable to keep food down for several days.
In my case, though, I've mostly been full of muscular aches and cramps, ocassionally fits of shivers, and strange dizziness.
I've spent the last day and a bit mostly drifting in and out of sleep, where I've had the weirdest dreams. I just woke from one where I was lost in a sprawling hotel, looking for my room which was number 317 or possibly 305, I couldn't remember. The signage didn't make sense to me and I couldn't read it, and found myself wandering around a sprawling resort, with hot air balloon services connecting different parts. At one point I found myself lost in a library whose winding shelves formed a Escherian maze, and a small child watched me with suspicion as I fumbled around for an exit.
In a disturbing dream from yesterday afternoon, I was lying in a desert of cold sand as the wind gradually piled up more and more sand against me. At first I felt fascinated, thinking I'd learned something about how dunes form, until I discovered that I wasn't able to move. I gradually sunk deeper and deeper underground, in pain except when I lay very still and let it take me, until eventually I started to become the very sand that I was disappearing into. I felt flakes of myself break away and become part of the desert, unable to resist the change nor reconstruct myself, resigned to my fate.
I'm in less pain so far this morning than yesterday, so I think I'm recovering, but man this has been an unpleasant ride. Whatever I'm infected with: do not recommend, would not contract again, one out of five.
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This evening I pushed against my illness-addled brain to try to sit in on the fortnightly Zoom call with the Three Rings dev team. Unfortunately it seems like the primary symptom of my cold is an inability to string words together.
At one point, I apologised to by colleague "Beff" (I meant "Bev", but I had just been talking about "Geoff") that I couldn't work out how to stop "scaring my screen" (well, I suppose Halloween is coming up...). Then, realising my mistake, explained that it was a bit of a "ting-twister".
I should just go to bed, right?
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Calm after the storm
Rosie, who like me never even considered taking Automattic's alignment offer, writes about her experience of this week's meetup.
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I'm back home from Mexico (and feeling a little worse for wear), where this young lady wanted to let me know that I was sorely missed.
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Dan, lying on a sofa under a brown blanket, on top of which is a contented-looking French Bulldog.
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Science Weekend
It was a weekend full of science, starting with a visit to the excellent open day at Harwell Campus and a trip to the Diamond Light Synchrotron, and finishing with a series of medical tests on my lungs and why they're not working as well as they ought to. With graphs!
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Zap
This week, a live-to-earth fault on the grid resulted in me getting zapped with mains electricity. Unfortunately, it didn't give me superpowers, just a mildly-interesting anecdote and a partially-shaved chest.