Regular check-in

I’m personally physically all right, at least for now. The house guest also made it here safely, right before things got really weird.

I gotta say, getting an urgent group text informing my building of an incoming teargas cloud and “Close your windows” is not a thing I thought I’d ever experience first-hand.

First, some positive things.

Yesterday I had an online appointment with a physical therapist, who quickly figured out what the problem “in my shoulder” is; it’s actually a problem with my neck. He showed me a bunch of exercises that are already helping a lot. I’m still in pain but it’s not nearly as bad.

Also I had an intake appointment with a new sleep doctor and we went over my medical records as well as my CPAP machine’s recordings, and she actually agrees with me that the CPAP machine isn’t doing anything useful for me, my particular apnea was badly misdiagnosed through flawed methodology, and I should have never been on a CPAP machine based on it. In a few weeks I’ll get a proper sleep study with sensible methodology and we’ll figure out if there’s some other treatment I should be doing, but her suspicion is that my fatigue is just, you know, fibro stuff.

The muscle relaxers I was on weren’t helping with the pain but were causing my GERD to come back in a big way, so I’ve stopped taking them. I’ve also reduced my gabapentin back down to 200mg/day since 400mg was (unsurprisingly) making my constipation really bad again.

Oh, and this was a few days ago, but I released another version of Publ which has reduced average page load time by 90% (i.e. it’s now 10x faster) while also decreasing the memory load. So I’m pretty happy about that. I had made a minor change to cache key generation which improves performance on all pages by a constant factor (including cache hits), and also a major change to page rendering which improves render performance by around 15%. Really it’s the cache key generation change that’s responsible for most of the load time improvements (since my site has a very high cache hit rate) but every bit helps.

Negative things I’m mostly posting to Twitter. Here’s some highlights (such as they are).

First of all, this happened three blocks from my home (and was the source of the teargas cloud):

And some of my own commentary:

And, some fun facts for you:

Yesterday our CEO declared that we’re going to cease all non-essential activities for today (presumably to give everyone a mental health break) so I’m going to spend my day trying to tidy up my home, both because I really need it for my own mental health and also because I’d like to be able to offer shelter to more people if the pattern of the last few days repeats itself tonight.

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