Yesterday and today are one of those meh days. It's becoming obvious that the naproxen isn't doing much to control the inflammatory response as both ankles are still puffing up during the day regardless of whether they get iced to the point where I feel like a snowman. While I welcome downtime on the sofa, I completely dislike being immobilised with my feet higher than my heart and while such periods of below-par health are salutary reminders that one's own sense of omnipotence is entirely imagined, they are also just crap times which suck.
The uncertainty is the toughest to bear: Germany had one thing going for it, and that was an at times hysterical but mostly just super-thorough diagnostic machinery. If you'd presented there with my symptoms, you'd have your temperature taken, your blood tested for every nasty under the sun, heartrate and blood pressure checked, urine analysis, thorough orthopaedic examination, an x-ray or two, then off to the ultrasound or the CT or MRI scanner. The NHS is cheaper and free at the point of use, and while I think that this is one of the best, most humane and most civilised achievements any society has come up with, it's also a bit creaky round the edges, especially in the winter and around the holidays when people with all sorts of seasonal ailments spam the GP waiting rooms. My GP team is managing a heroic workload (our district is both full of old people and young families) but the paranoid Teuton in me does not quite trust the diagnostic rigour of a doc who takes a phone call during my consultation from a carer in a nursing home about two of her elderly patients, then vaguely sticks a finger into the edematous mod podge that are my feet, says "It's not that hot", sends me off to a blood test and throws in a naproxen prescription for a month. OH always laughs at me and thinks I've been hopelessly pampered abroad and that exactly the right thing was done under the circumstances and that all those things I expected last week could still be lined up after the first treatment showed up largely useless.
However, internet diagnostics is my own worst enemy. After just two hours of combining my symptoms in various online symptom libraries yesterday, I am now in full hypochondriac mode and am bound to antagonise the nurse tomorrow, when I'm having the next blood test, with a battery of acronyms denoting rare serious conditions that they absolutely have to remember to test for.
This is what boredom does to me.
It doesn't help that the other outlet of my creativity, games programming, is currently thwarting me left, right and centre. GameMaker has put a 50% off their software package deal on and I pounced, downloading the full-on-with-bells-and-whistles version for very affordable peanuts. Hours and hours of high-end game-making fun awaited me! The install was unproblematic but the problems started upon entering the licence key. I spent all of yesterday trying to get that damn programme to work. I doubted my sanity -- how can it be, am I missing something, a drop-down menu, a configuration, something unintuitive, tucked away in the software documentation, only for the initiated? I showed the problem to OH, who hates it when I swear, but even he couldn't understand why it did what it did. By the evening, it was clear: I'd been given a duff version. One totally wasted day. So I composed a matter-of-fact, faintly irate-sounding email and hope I'm being given some joy in the New Year when the boys and girls roll back in from their Xmas hols.
In any case, the project I'm working on at the moment is puzzling the heck out of me. I've programmed the protagonist of my platform game, a little girl, to jump on top of a lozenge when it's in a particular state. When she does it successfully, the lozenge should explode into a heap, a twangy-boingy sound is then heard to proclaim the girl's triumph over the enemy, and the girl gets 10 points. When she doesn't, i.e. when she stupidly runs into the lozenge, the lozenge should stay where it is, the girl should go "Ooow!", lose 50 points and start the entire room again.
So far, so good. I've more or less copied that sequence from an existing game involving jumping on and squishing monsters. But while my girl gladly jumps and squishes monsters exactly according to the algorithm, the following occurs with my self-created poisonous lozenges: girl jumps on top of the lozenge, gets 10 points, the lozenge goes twangy-boing, but the girl goes "Ooow!" as well. I never told it to go "Ooow!" anywhere in the algorithm. It doesn't make any sense.
Equally, if the girl runs into the lozenge instead of jumping on and squishing it, she goes "Ooow!", as she should, but the lozenge also explodes to the sound of twangy-boing, which it most decisively should not because I didn't programme it to.
I've been staring at this algorithm for ages, comparing it with the monster one, and cannot work out why mine does both even though my programming explicitly tells it to differentiate. I now think the programme is haunted by the Ghosts of Twangy-Boings-Past and Ooow! -- they've long been written out of the algorithm but they keep coming back.
Or maybe I've just not got the touch right now. My external hard drive toppled off the low coffee table in the living room the other day while it was still connected. My entire life from every computer I've ever owned was backed up on that multi-giga hard drive. Now none of our computers can see the drive and there's only a weak ticking from within the case -- no decisive whirring -- so that means it is very probably completely FUBARed. I couldn't believe it when OH said that that was very normal. "How can it be normal! It's the 21st century and you're telling me external hard drives are still as fragile as fricking vinyl? You can put USB sticks through a wash-and-spin cycle without any data loss but a minor fall off a mere 10 inch height is the thump of death?" -- "Yes, when it's still connected."
I read on the internet that sometimes you can save such drives by sticking them in the freezer. I have stuck it in the freezer where it still nestles amongst the home-baked quiches and frozen soft fruit, not because I particularly believe in cryo-treatment for prissy hard drives but because it was the only way to prevent me from taking my zombie axe to this useless piece of expensive, all-promising, nothing-delivering techno crap.
The New Year will provide me with an opportunity for reflection. Maybe I don't need all this old data any more. Maybe it's time for a thorough data decluttering.
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