Tag: rss club

I hate being ill.

Not (just) for the obvious and immediate reasons: (this time around: the nausea, the musculoskeletal aches, the dizziness) the physical symptoms.

It's a psychological issue I get hung up on. It feels wastefully unproductive to put aside time to rest and recover; extravagantly selfish to take care of myself before others: an unearned luxury to lie in bed while the rest of the world works.

Clearly there's a deeper issue here. Feeling (seen as?) underproductive or not pulling my weight is a real hangup for me. I've long established a pecking order of my priorities that puts my self-care... pretty low down.

That turns out to be a general psychological sticking point for me, probably for most of my life. I've been working on it for a few years, though, and I think I'm getting better at it. This morning, I managed to stop myself from staggering downstairs to help ensure the kids got up and ate breakfast, before a bleary-eyed stagger to my desk to check my work email. Instead, I'm still just lying here in bed, an hour after my alarm rang.

I still hate being ill. But maybe I'm getting better (at it)?

Things lost by the eldest child by the end of her first two weeks of secondary school:

• Art sketchpad
• Art apron
• Scientific calculator
• Ruler
• Pair of compasses
• Class timetable (since rediscovered)
• Umbrella
• Shoes 🤯

I can't point fingers: I was at least as absent-minded myself.

I must've driven my parents crazy, too.

By a convenience of dates, I can today count in exact months how long I've spent in each of three phases of my life:

1. A child, with my birth name: 216 months
2. An adult, still with my birth name: 98 month
3. An adult, now with my assumed name: 222 months

(I drew a pretty pie chart but a crash ate it.)

Or in other numbers: I've now spent ~70% of my adult life, or ~41% of my entire life, living by a name I chose for myself.

I used a deed poll to change my name. And nowadays - with several iterations of my personal documentation issued over the 18½ years I've been using my name - it doesn't even come up any more, except when somebody observes "hey, that's an unusual name you've got there!" I haven't even looked at my deed poll in over a decade, for example. My name today is more well-established as the one I was given at birth was by the time I reached adulthood.

---

And so it occurred to me this weekend, while I was reimplementing FreeDeedPoll.org.uk: because I was born in Scotland, there's no reason I can't also get my name changed on the one remaining bit of documentation that still has my birth name: my birth certificate! Scottish law allows me to have this retroactively changed for a modest fee, which would result in a re-issued birth certificate that showed "Dan Q" (with my birth name included as an "also known as").

I'm flip-flopping on whether I should. Want to see my pros/cons lists?

Pros:

• It's the one last (changeable) thing that could reflect my actual name
• It feels a little weird nowadays when I bump into my old name (e.g. on my first degree certificate, which I had to dig out earlier this year for a job application)
• It'd be nice to understand the Scottish process, as (via FreeDeedPoll.org.uk) I end up helping lots of people to change their name

Cons:

• I don't need it; I've got all the documentation I could ever need and much, much more in my name; it'll probably make no material difference to my life
• It seems symbolically like a rejection of the past, or of my family, or of an attempt to rewrite history, all of which feel icky
• It's not free!

---

I don't know which way I'll eventually fall on this. Considering how... inconsequential it'd be, either way, to my day-to-day life... it's surprising how much of an itch it is, at the back of my brain!

Last night, an undermaintained VPS of mine went kaput.

The data's all fine, and most of the services I was running on it came back up in new homes without difficulty, but just a handful of things are still down, including textplain.blog and freedeedpoll.org.uk, ugh.

Not the best start to a Friday when I've got a backlog of day-job work to do.

I spent most of a day getting my new development environment set up, because I kept hitting issues that nobody at my new employer had experienced before. A "perfect storm" of coincidences that conspired together to completely wreck my chance of a simple setup.

The factors?

• Apple's M4 processors remove the SVE architecture and its instruction set, which was present in the M1 through M3
• The Colima dockerisation tool still reports to arm64 containers that SVE is available
• Java < 24 will, by default, use SVE for some functions if it's told that it's available
• Opensearch 2.x will not run on Java > 23

If any one of those statements were not true, I wouldn't have had any trouble. But the combination of all four of them meant that I was getting proper segfault-death crashes.

I blame Apple. Who removes instructions from a processor within the same family‽ (I'm sure that in reality there's probably some important reason for it that's beyond my ken, but still!)