Argh, thought I would have dodge the side-effect lottery for the AstraZeneca vaccine, but nope! This morning started OK, with just a headache and a sore arm, but as the day is progressing, the symptoms are slowly becoming more like the cold. I expected this to occur but, yeah, wish it didn’t. In any case, I hope it clears up by tomorrow.
Not helping matters is that my backyard neighbour is using a chainsaw to do goodness knows what 😒
First jab of AstraZeneca booked for today. I will admit, it would have been nice to get one of the mRNA vaccines, new technology and all that, but I didn’t want to wait any longer and who knows when they will actually be available. So I’m going with what’s available now.
I wonder if Apple’s spell checker should start including a reason as to why they are making a particular suggestion. I’d be curious to know why it thinks “weak” is more appropriate than “week” in a sentence that’s mentioning time (the fragment is “day or week”).
The browser I’m using is offering to translate a web-app I’m working on from French to English, even though there aren’t any French words on the page. Turns out it has an issue with the spelling of “Catalogue” and is changing it to “Catalog”.
Currently watching Halt And Catch Fire on SBS On Demand. An enjoyable watch but the the plumber problem is certainly there 📺
I hear rumours of the JS alert() function being deprecated. I hope that it isn’t so. As annoying as it may be for browser vendors to maintain it, that’s a problem they signed up for by being browser vendors. They serve us that build on/use the web, not the other way around.
Throwing a link out to this service for anyone falling into despair about the latest IPCC report and want to do something about it. 60 EUR a month to remove 1,000 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere per year. A bargain considering the costs of the alternative.
This week’s earworm: DiscoVision by Anders Enger Jensen 🎵
I discovered a downside with using a MacBook Pro with an M1 chip: it runs so cool that I can’t use it to warm my hands in cold rooms.
Today I start my new job, and my new commute which, since it’s on the opposite side of the city to me, features a train and a bus. It would be the longest commute I would have had for a while. Hopefully it won’t get too annoying.
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of walking a new rail trail just outside Leongatha, in South-East Gippsland. The rails are completely gone but some of the infrastructure has remained.
Six Weeks Off Twitter
It’s been roughly six weeks since I’ve stopped using Twitter on a daily basis. I initially took a break to stay away from some anxiety inducing news, and I was initially going to return to daily use once that passed. But after hearing others on Micro.blog post about their experience closing their Twitter account, I decided to see how long I can go staying off Twitter myself.
I wouldn’t say that I am a big Twitter user. I don’t have a Twitter audience (I think my follower count is in the single digits), I hardly ever tweet or reply, and although I have a few friends and family on there, I have other means of communicating with them that I tend to use more often. The only thing I would miss are the occasional interesting or amusing tweets from those that I follow, something that is not guaranteed in any particular reading session.
In those six weeks, I notice my reading patterns have change. I’m reading a lot more books and blog posts now. I found that having something to read during the time you’re usually browsing Twitter helps a great deal, so there’s always some long form written piece that I can turn to when I’ve caught up with everything else. And although I wouldn’t say my anxiety has gone, I do think that it’s lower than it was. It’s calming to know that there are no shocking/depressing items that can jump out of me during a particular reading session. I think that mechanic has a lot to do with the addictiveness of Twitter and it’s ilk.
I’m not quite at the point where I will completely close my Twitter account, and there are some users that I may move over to Feedbin (I haven’t done that yet, so I’m not sure how interested in them I really am). But, all in all, I think this break from daily use of Twitter has been good for me, and I found myself having no real urge to going back.
Too much coffee this morning. Feeling a little bit too wired and unfocused. Fortunately I’ve got some mindless housework that needs doing that should burn off this excess energy.
Some significant lifting of restrictions here in Melbourne. Still unable to visit family at their homes, which is a shame. But at least I’ll be able to get out of the city for a few day-trips during my break between jobs.
Second last day at my current job. Most of the coding work was finished about a week ago, and now it’s just making the last few touchups in documentation, and a few final catch-up meetings. Other than that, it’s mostly just counting down the hours.
I don’t know if it’s a weird quirk of mine, but whenever I’m working on a software project, I get more excited about building the supporting tools to aid development than I do working on the actual software product itself.
Seeking Out Bad News
Sometimes I wonder if I’m just going out of the way to seek bad news. Maybe it’s because I think that if I don’t, then a problem will go unaddressed as no-one else is aware of it.
There’s probably some evolutionary trait to this. Being the one that hears a predator, and reacts to it before anyone else, is an advantage. But in this day and age, many of the problems that I have anxiety about is pretty much known by everyone, and addressing it in any meaningful way is beyond my direct control.
So in the interest for my own mental health, I should cut down on seeking out these stories, do what I can to help with the problem, and just hope that someone who does have the ability to do something substantial knows about it, and can address it in some way.
While total ignorance is probably not ideal, being up to speed with the woes of the world is probably not healthy either.
It seems like every time I’m working on something where time is of the essence, a device or operating system decides that now is the perfect time to update. Looking at you, Windows.
There’s exactly one week left in my current job before I leave. An email, which seems to have marked the occasion, has notified me that the induction Trello board, opened when I joined, has just been closed.
I can’t understand how people post to Medium. I’m sure they have nice authoring tools, and you’ll get readers for your work, but the actual reading experience is awful. It’s slow, it’s janky, and just now the page I was reading errored out without me interacting with it.