The word of the week is indomitable.
Aug 15 – Futures?
It's going to be an interesting next few
months around here.
As it turns out, my sister won't be going back to her government
job, for various reasons I won't get into here, and all of which I agree with -
meaning that other sources of income will have to be substituted forthwith.
That being said, she's been looking at three or
four different types of income, with a few already in the works, so I'm not too
worried. My sister always lands on her feet and knows practically everybody,
everywhere, in terms of networking, so not only does she know people, but
people know her and what she can do - she's quite talented in many disciplines,
in case you didn't know already.
As you may imagine, this situation could be
a major source of stress for us, but I don't foresee it being as such: we
always tend to land on our feet, my sister and I. So the bottom line is that as
long as she's happy and relatively stress-free by not going back to her
government job, then I am fully supportive of whatever she chooses to do
instead to pursue her dreams and passions.
Aug 16 – Bullfrog Dreams
Speaking of dreams: they're the stuff that
videogames are made of.
Back in the day, my Amiga computer was a dream
machine for me. Its graphics and sound were second to none for quite a long
while and I enjoyed collecting what ended up to be a large game library of
several hundred titles to enjoy.
Some of the most enjoyable games were those
produced by a company called Bullfrog, who made iconic games that were
insanely fun to play through and through. The game that started it all was the
incredible god-sim Populous:
The man behind Bullfrog, Peter Molyneux,
is a man of big dreams and big promises... though like many creative types, he
tends to overpromise sometimes when his visions lead him a little further than
might be wise to admit.
If you're not familiar with Bullfrog or Peter,
you should really have a look at this recent interview with the genius behind
so many good games. I found the article enlightening despite my being familiar
with both Bullfrog and Mr. Molyneux, and enchanting in that this man is
obviously one who thinks big and, most times, manages to deliver on his dreams.
I could stand to learn a few things in that
department, in the near future.
PS - apparently there's a freeware PC update of Populous out, called Genesia!
Aug 17 – Back To Ouch
I'm limping again... badly.
I thought after resting my left foot this past
weekend that the worst was over, but apparently my foot is not having any of
it. After only 5 min. of walking, it swells up under the ball of the foot and
that's it: anymore walking and it's ouch-time.
Meaning that's I could barely walk to work
yesterday, and not at all today: I had to take a cab to my workplace and hobble
in with a pair of canes for support. Even with ice under my foot on and off all
day, I couldn't get up from my desk much without the assistance of a handy cart
and by days end, I decided not to come in tomorrow( a rare sick day for me )to
just rest up. Luckily I managed to get a ride home, but my foot felt like
someone was poking it from beneath with a warm stick: not fun.
Ah well - there's not much I can do right now,
save rest. Perhaps in 20 years I might just swap the foot with a different
bionic implant, but that's not going to help me in the present. I spent the
evening rubbing anti-inflammatory cream into it along with a few dips into cool
water to reduce the swelling, which seem to help.
Maybe I should watch My Left Foot for some
pointers?
Aug 18 – Dumpty Fixer-Upper
What else would do my day off, except work on
restoring my computer?
Seeing as I was home all day today, and my new
Mushkin 1 terabyte SSD had arrived in the mail yesterday, you can imagine that
circumstance dictated that I just roll up my sleeves and get to work getting my
computer back to where was before last week's crash.
Even though I had all my data backed up, that
didn't mean most of my installed programs would be recoverable: I lost tons of
FREE programs... argh. Not that I was using too many of them, but still,
it sucks. I am a daily browser of websites like GiveawayOfTheDay.com and
BitsDeJour, which have great freebies and I usually pick up at least one or two
a month that look useful for my.
 |
| I paid closer to 29c/gb, even after taxes - sweet deal! |
It's a slow process, and this recent crash taught
me that I need to actually take an image of my main drive with all my
programs installed, so that if a crash happens again I can simply that image
from the backup and have the drive's state returned to just the way it was. It
sounds simple, but finding a program that will do that reliably AND for
low-cost isn't as easy as you think. Time for that later.
While I was at it, I replaced Mozilla Thunderbird
email with MailBird, as Thundy was getting rather long in the tooth. So
far, so good: MailBird is simpler, faster and cleaner. I never played around
with the message filters in Thunderbird, so I won't miss them, and MailBird
looks to be halfway intelligent about filtering things, though it's not quite
as customizable as Thunderbird.
By days end, I had most of my computers major
programs reinstalled, except for the voice recognition( Dragon Naturally
Speaking )which didn't want to install without the original disk... which
is stored away in my closet somewhere. A task for tomorrow, it looks like;
today's work was quite productive and I'm happy with how things are turning
out, especially since the new drive is both faster and four times as large as
the one that was replacing... both really nice touches, I think.
Aug 19 – Home For a Rest!
It was back into work today for me, briefly
I was only there an hour before I left for my
doctors appointment, where I received a shock: I wasn't to be at work for at
least two weeks, and possibly longer. I have to check in with my doctor again
at that time to see if I need more time off work to recover, and see a
specialist in about a month about possible physiotherapy to restore my ability
to walk normally and without pain.
Definitely NOT what I was expecting....! The
irony is, I was off last summer almost exactly at this time, with a different
illness, so I'm hoping that next year I'll be free and clear to just enjoy the
last of the summertime without injury...
I also wasn't expecting for the temperature to
hit 36.8C here today - WHEW! Thankfully, the temperature inside my ground-floor
apartment was only 27C - so I wasn't sweating over much despite a lack of air
conditioning.
While I was at home, absorbing the fact that I
would be off my feet AND work for two weeks, my sister got some great news:
she'll now be working for a local company planning events full-time as of next
week! This comes on top of the other sources of income that she's
maneuvering into place, so looks like that the only thing she'll be short of
for the next long while it is time.. and stress over money, for which were both
grateful. Amazing how things balance out, y'know?
It was quite an eventful day!
Aug 20 – Pain On The Brain
Bleh.
I've been feeling nauseous and headachy the last
two days - not fun, on top of my foot tweaking me every few minutes. It's
probably due to a combination of the weather change( hot yesterday and today,
then cool winds blowing in on the weekend )and the anti-inflammatory cream I've
been using on my foot. It contains hemp oil, and when I read up on it today,
when you know that nausea is a possible side effect? I've been rubbing it into
my foot like there's no tomorrow and that's probably why my stomach isn't all
that happy with me; oh well.
Also stupid me: I forgot some of how I had set up
my computer viewing comforts!
I had totally forgotten about reinstalling F.lux...
hence the light-induced night-headaches. F.lux is an app that runs on your
computer and automatically adjusts the color spectrum of the screen( and the
brightness too )to lessen the effects of bright blue light on the viewer, which
can affect sleep only a few hours before bed. Once I had F.lux installed and
running again, the difference was substantial: I was no longer squinting at the
TV screen despite having turned down the brightness!
After working all day on my computer again, my
girlfriend came over and we spent the evening watching more episodes of Star
Blazers, to our mutual delight. We are already past the point where I had
to re-watch some of the series back in 2008, so I'm seeing episodes again for
the first time in over 30 years, which is a wonderful feeling... especially
sharing it with someone as wonderful as my lady.
It's like I'm a kid again watching the show after
school!
Aug 21 – A Better Foot, with LOTS of rest?
Here's the plan...
Since I have an unexpected two weeks off, I've
drawn up a list of things that I need to get done along with a list of things I
should get done - note the distinction.
On the Need List is writing my first novel's
fourth draft, of course. I should be able to get a huge chunk of it revised in
the next two weeks, though I can't sit for too long at one time; that's what
caused my foot issue in the first place.
So I'll be getting up and performing a few tasks
around the apartment that had been lingering on the Get To It Soon List for a
while.
As for today, Sunday: most of it was continuing
to fix up my computer. A good chunk of the day was spent combing through my
too-large Google Drive cloud account, copying and pasting files into more
organized folders and getting rid of tons of duplicates - hours later, I was
quite happy to have trimmed over 30 gigabytes, freeing up far more room than I
had thought.
What took up the rest of the evening was
finishing installing and configuring my copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking 11,
which I need to type my blog each week - among other things I use it for. I
finally got the installation working from my CD-ROM( how archaic! )and went
through the 'training' process of teaching the program my voice. What I didn't
anticipate was this around dinnertime, once Dragon had finished looking
through my documents for more words it needed to be trained on:
As you can see, there's over 4000 words I need to
train Dragon on, and at a speed of around 1000 words an hour, I'll be at it for
most of tomorrow, on and off. I could just not bother, but I've been meaning to
train the darn thing for a few years and now is as good a time as any to really
up the accuracy of the program, which has been a source of frustration for me
for years. Fortunately, I was able to temporarily bypass the training module
and use Dragon to write my blog tonight, otherwise I would only be half-done by
now...
It's been an exhausting week; my wrists and upper
body are telling me that they aren't used to doing all the work they've had to
do this week to moving around. I've been careful not to overdo things with my
canes, and the same goes for my leg: I have to be careful not to forget to
properly position things whenever I move so as not to stretch my foot the wrong
way and undo the day's rest effects. I'm excited to have the time off, but wary
of wasting the opportunity, so all the striking a balance each day of work
done versus necessary rest: a good compromise, I think, is the order of
each day.
