Notes from the pain management workshop, week 3

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Week 3’s curriculum covered the Moving Easy Program (a simple but effective stretching and minor strength training regimen), pacing and planning, treatment evaluation, and decision making strategies (both for treatment seeking and for other aspects of life).

Last week’s action plan was to do 10 minutes of yoga in the morning, 4 times. I was mostly successful, but only did it 3 times, as today I slept in from having to work late last night (doing a final build of the iOS app for Borealis).

Throughout today’s session we also got some useful affirmations that I can put onto my affirmation board:

  • Practice makes progress
  • You choose
  • Are you choosing pain?

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Oh gosh I’m busy

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Somehow I’ve managed to get really busy doing a lot of things all at once:

  • Scrambling to help get some AR stuff released for the Borealis Festival of Light
  • Working on Publ and Pushl
  • Doing a bunch of cooking? Which feels good?
  • Also I got a new mattress (affiliate link) and it was fun setting that up today I guess
  • Inktober (which oops I didn’t get around to doing for today, guess I’m doing double tomorrow)

For folks in Seattle, I should mention that lately I’ve been doing karaoke on Thursday nights, at Jai Thai. My friend Ed has been running their bar karaoke every Thursday starting at 9:30 and I’m taking a break from my Thursday night drawing group for a little while so it’s fun to just get up on stage and sing it out.

Anyway, Ed’s very friendly and inclusive and the crowd is usually pretty small so the rotation is pretty short. If you’re into singing in a positive, friendly, chill environment, think about coming on by!

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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