Notes from the pain management workshop, week 2

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This week was a lot more comprehensive than the first week, and it feels like a lot more happened in about the same amount of time.

The major areas of focus were: problem-solving, dealing with difficult emotions (especially useful for me right now), physical activity, relaxation techniques, and dealing with fatigue.

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Notes from the pain management workshop, week 1

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A few months ago I signed up for the “Living Well with Chronic Pain” workshop that’s put on a few times a year by my HMO. It’s a six-week course that meets once a week. I figure it would be helpful to share the key insights from each session here, since I know a lot of my followers have similar issues and would like to benefit as well.

The textbook for the workshop is Living a Healthy Life with Chronic Pain (affiliate link). It also comes with a pain-management exercise audiobook on CD.

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Wanted: Audio interface recommendations

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So, my trusty Presonus Firestudio Project is starting to give up the ghost, and it looks like the new macOS Mojave won’t support it anyway. And it’s my last bit of Firewire hardware so I’d might as well come limping along into the USB era, right?

UPDATE: It looks like I still have some time with this 10-year-old interface. Phew.

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Oh my gosh!

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fluffy enjoying a hot beverage

Hey guess what!

I added a new feature to Publ! It lets you wrap text closely around images that are floated, via a CSS attribute which is pretty widely-supported but kind of annoying to deal with. Which is to say that Publ itself isn’t really doing all that much work here but it was easy to add some plumbing into it to make the browser able to do all the work for you. (So far the only entries on my site using this function are this one and the GRS article which I updated to use it a little bit.)

It’s kind of neat, so please check it out.

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Well that’s one way to do a load test

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So, today my ActivityPub rant made the front page of Hacker News. I’m happy to say that as far as I can tell, Publ didn’t fall over at all, not even during the initial surge of activity (or at least, Apache never recorded any gateway failures or the like).

I mean, it isn’t too surprising, considering that pretty much any “hot” page or asset is going to live in an in-process cache and require basically no processing at all, but it’s still cool to see.

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Linus, empathy, and growth

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So, for those who haven’t seen the news, Linus Torvalds has apologized for his community behavior and is taking steps to be more professional and empathic.

I am very glad to see this change from him, and I really hope that he’s able to take this opportunity to grow and set a new example to the F/OSS community, making it a more welcoming, friendly place.

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Prime Wardrobe: what the heck is the point?

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So, I’ve been trying to find some nice dress shoes. I have pretty big feet for someone of my height and gender, so local shoe stores never actually have anything in my size in a style that I like. So, for this I still use Amazon, since I still have Prime for the next month or so anyway. (I do not plan on renewing after this year.)

One thing that Amazon keeps on pushing is Prime Wardrobe (affiliate link), where they heavily advertise that with a Prime membership you can now try-before-you-buy and have 7 days to decide which things to keep. Which is already a bit silly because with normal Prime you already have something like 30 days to return a thing you don’t want.

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The Legend of Korok: Breath of the Orcastraw

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Of all the streamers I follow on Twitch, my favorite by far is Orcastraw (Kaitlyn). She maintains an amazing community of chill, accepting people, and has the most positive (and well-moderated) Twitch chat I’ve ever seen. She first came to my attention when she was the first to run Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at Games Done Quick, and she had the BotW Any% world record for around a month shortly after that (and even a year later her record-setting run is still 6th place overall). Her attitude is what even got me interested in watching Twitch regularly, running my own occasional stream, and even becoming more confident in my own gender presentation. Basically, she’s pretty neat and is worth watching if you’re into this sort of thing.

Recently she started making streaming her main source of income, meaning that her livelihood depends primarily on viewer donations. As part of her September donation drive, she offered an incentive: at the $250 mark she would do an all-Koroks run of BotW.

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