Jan 27

 Inching towards being better each day. Super slow progress. And a cough that wont go away.

Spoke to the GP today. She is indeed a lovely GP. Smart. Cares. Listens. Helpful. Honestly, she makes me feel better just talking to her. No surprise I guess, duh, you feel better when you're actually cared for ?

We talked it through, gonna go back on some of my old stomach meds for a while, then step down and see how we do. A first step. She seems to think my digestion could be sensitive from the nutcase meds. Uh huh. I doubt it. But. Possible. And. Something I haven't tracked - when I take my meds, does it fuck with feeling sick ? Good question !

Also still got a peg in the ground to get ENT check me out further.

Talked about possible reasons and yada. It was good. A plan. First step. Yada. Excellent. As she put it - a check in with how I was doing. By gosh. You remember. Or read your notes. Or both. Amazing.

Work today has been satisfying. Fixing others .. rather nasty bugs in a live system. Eh. It happens. I didn't spot the error in the devs work. And. This is quite bad. They didn't test it either. It should have been tested. I had told them how to test it. The dev and the client between them decided not to bother. Without my knowledge. Because Andy was managing it and "left it to them".

Conclusion ?

Bang.

Ha. Such is the way of things.

I have it in mind to come up with a foolproof way to test such things in future - it's not entirely straight forward involving scheduled tasks and some complex processes. It's often the case that I have to simplify things down to black boxes with single red buttons, so that all involved can just happily push the button and see the light go on. Like watching a crow hit a button to get some birdseed.

If you don't do this, people tend to get lost in the weeds. And not just non technical clients. But professionals too. Eh. Meh. Varying levels of expertise and experience. Varying levels of competence. This is why my absolute cornerstone of all IT work, I think the fundamental thing that it is, is the reduction of the complex into the simple. Nuclear physics... for 5 year olds. Do that. And you're golden.

Everything in IT is, imo, about that process. And where that's ignored, or forgotten, or not even realised, shit happens. I don't think it's a widely held understanding. I think at best it's a sideshow for some people. The managing complexity bit. Particularly newbies who entirely miss the point and go ahead and paint themselves into a corner ( death by complexity ). Or gatekeeping pros that love to have overly complex things that only they can understand ( for the next 5 minutes anyway ) to keep the riff raff out ( the secret being that 99.9% of all that "complicated" stuff can actually be explained easily if you care to ). But to my mind. Having many decades in the biz. Complexity management is everything. The art of making something difficult appear easy is the be all and end all. Not entirely dis-similar from teaching. If you do that, your life will be happy and easy. In theory. In practice, everyone just relies on you to then make idiot boxes with no true realisation of the magnitude of task they ask for. "Can you make me a box that does everything in my life and also feeds me treats on demand ? If not, why not. You've done it before !".

Heh.

Positives

Feeling slightly better again today. Weekend starts now. That's enough of a positive for today I think ! I want to cook something nice for the weekend. Not sure what. I eyed up some le creuset dutch ovens for some slow cooking malarkey. Oh boy are they expensive. Of course. It's le creuset. And. When I think about it, how often do I slow cook on top of a hob. Rare. I'll stick with my multiple casserole dishes. For not clear reasons I have 3. Of slightly varying sizes. I don't know. Still. I don't have an actual dutch oven. And there are some times when one would be really useful. Instead I use your general use pot. With a mismatched lid. Close. Enough.

*anyway*. What to cook. Slow. Another chicken casserole ? Something. Pulled ? Eh. I don't know.

I suspect I should get back into the habit of properly cooking regularly. I always love my own cooking ( hnnnnggg super good ), but, eh, time. Energy. Being ill. All those things stop me. I think I do a lot better when I am eating "properly" as well. Despite eating healthy, I am not sure the processed shit you get out of supermarkets is, beyond on paper, as healthy as they reckon it is. I always do better when I am at my brothers - and part of this could be, its home cooked, non processed food every day, every meal.

Uh huh.

I would also like to investigate smoke simulation this weekend. In javascript. Of all things. This quite intrigues me, is interesting, slightly exciting. I know this makes me something of a freak.

But we know this.

As my friend said of me this week.

".. but the thing is, you're not normal"

Uh huh. A summary of my strengths and weaknesses. Not normal. Oh. Well. Yeah. That'll be it. Eh. But then again. Who of us is normal.