wanna-be-coder's blues

Gareth and I spent a bit of time talking this morning about more Quarto-related bits today.  He was ready to start work on my conversion script for my entries, and me…I was just ready to start.  In other words, no more pseudocode, no more planning, just dig in somewhere and start coding.

But I can't do that.  He's right.  The very fact that I'm antsy probably means that I'm not ready to start coding.  I do, indeed, have a few more kinks to work out, and admittedly, I don't get to work on the good stuff first anyway.  It's all installation and configuration scripts first, before anything else.  No fun stuff, not for quite a while.I wish there was something out there that met my needs.  If anything came close, it would probably be b2.  I was paging through it, and it looked pretty good (far better than anything else I've seen), but at this point I really don't want to run someone else's software.  Period.

Somewhere along the way I seem to have crossed some bizarre little threshold.  It's not that what I'll write will be better.  I can pretty much guarantee that it won't be.  But it's pretty much axiomatic by now:  if I chose someone else's system for running my site, its limitations (whatever they were) would chafe at me after six months and I'd end up right back where I am now. 

Either way, a couple of days away from the [pseudo]code won't hurt me much.  It'll give my left hand a chance to heal up a bit. 

Today's nasty discovery:  sure, the swelling on my left hand is starting to subside, but now that the swelling is going away, I'm starting to understand the extent of the actual injury.  The hand's useless for lifting things.  Typing, even, tires it out after a little while.

I decided, however, that I was thoroughly pathetic when I opened the bathroom cabinet door to get out the food for the catzillas.  Even pulling the little door open made my hand hurt.

So, for now, I'll stick to house chores that don't require lifting.  Like kvetching over code, and convincing my kitties that we don't have any reason to make them take tranquilizers again anytime soon.  Admittedly, sleepy and staggering kitties were amusing for a little while, but I was awfully glad to have my talky Tenzing and catslut Edmund back to their normal selves today.  Made things a little more right with the world.

all tags: 
quarto
coding
injury

Comments

On , jowilson said...
*thwack* Rest your hand, don't use it to type constantly. Typing with injuries leads to more and worse injuries, not just in the bits that got hurt. When part of your body hurts when you do something, you overcompensate and favor that bit, which puts unnatural stresses on the rest of you. When my wrists start hurting, I subconsiously respond by moving into a position which isn't as good for my back, after that starts hurting, I move into this funny position with my knees up under me which just tears the hell out of them. There have been times when I've uncurled myself off my chair and could barely walk to my bed in the next room. Plus, forcing yourself to type with hurt wrists/hands/fingers, can do serious long term damage, even though it's not physically painful. That's how I injured my wrists in the first place, by typing with them when I should have been resting them, even though it didn't really hurt that much. Trust me, it's a downward spiral from there. I'm not telling you what to do or being patronizing -- I'm just trying to save you some of the grief that I went through. I went through weeks where opening doorknobs, turning faucets, or even picking up just about anything was sheer agony. I couldn't write with my right hand (I could barely hold a pencil) and I could barely scratch things out with my left -- I had to borrow tape recorders and get other people to let me photocopy their notes for classes. Just. . . be careful. Because once you start feeling those sharp stabbing pains in your wrists, there's no painkiller you can take, no keyboard you can buy, no amount of changing your posture, no surgery you can get, and no special desk furniture you can pick up at IKEA, that will let you go back to your previous levels of productivity without simply stopping what you're doing and letting your hands rest, sometimes for months at a time. An extra fifteen minutes of typing when your hands are injured can sometimes mean an extra three to four days that you'll have to spend without typing entirely to heal them from it.