You Don't Live Like I Do

Today has been a bit of a weird day. Me and cosmolinguist got up at 6am, were out of the house for 6:45am and at the hospital by 7am. The Elective Surgery Unit wasn't "properly" open, so we got let into the reception area and just wandered around until we found some people who told us where to go sit down. By 8am I was on the ward, I'd been briefed on what was happening, and E knew when to come back and collect me. He went and caught the bus home and had a nap, having done the most important job of getting me to the hospital on time. I was visited by the anaesthetist and the surgeon, both of whom were confident in the procedure.

The apprehension of mortality which had ruined my Friday Yoga had pretty much dissolved by this point and I was determined to just get through it. I was second in the queue of six patients, so I got changed straight away into incredibly snug paper pants, and two surgical gowns - one worn with the flap at the back like usual, and a second opening at the front like a dressing gown over the top to protect my modesty as I walked to the operating theatre, literally at the end of the ward. With 6 patients in a ward designed for 24, CO2 levels were low so I didn't have to mask. I dozed for about an hour and a half, using my rucksack and hoodie as a makeshift pillow. By this point, around 9:30am, I was feeling OK, just exhausted. I think I was too tired to be worried.

I had to sit around outside the theatre for a bit, and get fitted with a cannula by an anaesthetist who was rather brusque. Fortunately such things bother me less than others, and he might have been kinder if I'd made more of a fuss beforehand. The nurse weighed me and said I don't look as heavy as I am, and I bit my tongue rather than go on a rant about the BMI bullshit which has denied me this surgery for years. I got asked what I did so I started talking about apprenticeships and how they're useful for people for whom academic paths don't work out - and how many people with dyslexia or other support needs we find once they've been pushed out of traditional schools, because testing for functional skills is mandatory in an apprenticeship. Turns out I'm still pretty passionate about that, even though it's far removed from what my job actually entails.

I went into the theatre, got settled on the table, started breathing in gas while they injected the general anaesthetic... and woke up in recovery, at about 11:30. ( Vague medical details below )

One of the ward nurses brought me tea and toast which was gratefully received and scoffed. I dozed for a bit, but the guy in the bed next to me, who'd had his inguinal hernia surgery (a complication from a hip replacement) before me, was waiting for his wife and bored and chatty. So I talked with him quite a lot, he's in his late 70s / early 80s, retired from doing computer stuff back in the 1970s. We talked about the changing face of technology over the decades, such as how a modern $1 embedded system can emulate an original Mac Classic. He had military tech experience so I talked about some of my programming jobs in the 90s on classified projects, and also about ISO26262 and MISRA, both standards in functional safety which came about from real-world errors such as the fighter plane which flips upside down if it crosses the equator on autopilot. We talked about dogs and horses (he keeps some where he lives in Altrincham). Lovely conversation but utterly knackering when I was a couple of hours behind him on the recovery from anaesthetic.

Just after his wife arrived to collect him, E arrived to collect me. He helped me get changed out of my tiny paper pants and gown, into the clothes I'd arrived in. By that time I'd had my last set of obs and the water had worked its way through my system so I had a successful wee. So the nurse brought over discharge paperwork, went through some of the details with me: no shower or bath today, no baths for a couple of weeks, no driving for at least 48 hours and until I can safely do an emergency stop without pain; no lifting more than 5-8kg for 4-6 weeks. Then we headed out and grabbed a taxi, getting home around 3:30pm, about 9 hours out of the house.

I've spent the afternoon chilling out on the sofa, drinking 2 litres of apple squash and just starting to feel rehydrated. I was too tired to play games or watch much of anything, until I had a little nap while E was out walking the neighbour's dog. E let me sit at his end of the sofa so I could stretch my legs out, and V lent me their weighted capybara plushy which was comforting. This evening we watched Team GB vs USA in the World Baseball Classic, which was an interesting game for the first 4 innings until the Americans woke up and walked all over the Brits. I'm still feeling tired and woozy - clearly too tired to write a concise DW entry, so well done if you've persevered this far. I'm glad the surgery is over; I hope the recovery is mild because I've got a lot of work to get done by the end of next week! I'm not looking forward to going weeks without any gym though...

Today I missed going to the gym because I had a morning hospital appointment. Next Sunday, I'm having surgery on my umbilical hernia, so today I was having bloods taken, being swabbed for MRSA, and having a pre-operative interview to discuss the procedure. This has taken literal years since I was diagnosed with the hernia in 2022 and dismissed for being fat in 2023 so I'm happy it's finally going ahead.

Other than that we didn't have many plans for the day. I finished playing through Control again, in time for the sequel to come out soon. Then I went upstairs and spent a couple of hours blitzing ADHD paperwork. I got so caught up in this that I forgot to come down for dinner and was exhausted by the time I did. We tuned into a Nunkie MR James stream, but I promptly fell asleep!

After that I made myself a snack and watched this week's Starfleet Academy, which was lovely. It has made me simultaneously curious about and terrified of reading / seeing Our Town.

Also, I noticed that iPlayer has the Derek Jacobi teleplay of Breaking the Code, the biographical play about Alan Turing. It's a much better portrayal of Turing (at least according to the biographies I've read) than the terrible "The Imitation Game". Me and cosmolinguist saw it on stage last October, which was a competent enough production.

I've just applied to Companies House to have my Limited Company, of which I am sole director, struck off and dissolved. I founded it years ago as a potential holding organisation for providing IT services to political organisations. But it never really worked out like that - I spent many years providing those services such as mailing lists, chatrooms, wikis, CRM systems, but never got on the "approved suppliers" list. Then 2019 happened and... yeah, I stopped doing that. Part of people fucking me over in politics was making false allegations about me violating data protection laws, and that shit could have damaged my real job, so it was another reason to back away.

I'm feeling bittersweet about it all, but I still have my head held high. I did a better job than many of the people who actually got paid for doing this sort of thing. In retrospect I'm glad I never did manage to get anywhere with it; losing my social life and activism was bad enough, but at least I didn't lose my livelihood at the same time. Still, it's an interesting trouser-leg of time to contemplate.

I guess this is why I do things like read my employer's social impact reports. It's nice to know that the work I'm doing is helping other people make a difference in the world, even if it doesn't feel like I'm doing it myself.

I haven't posted on Facebook for about a year, since they announced that they were no longer even pretending to moderate queerphobia. But I've checked in there about once a week to catch up on close friends, and it's been a useful source of events. Since they've now insisted that users pay or get even more stalked / used to feed the LLM / GenAI machine, I've decided to just download my data (including photos etc.) and delete my account. I'm aware that I'm cutting myself off from some people this way, but most of them I've got other ways to talk to - mostly via Signal or WhatsApp.

This is happening about the same time as Discord are announcing various changes. I'm already using a SOCKS proxy based in Germany to circumvent their age restriction requirements, but that may stop being effective soon, or they may again be feeding everything into the GenAI behemoth. There's a good chance I'm going to have to disengage with Discord in the next few weeks.

I'm worried that this is going to cut me off from some other communities. The Manchester-based Discord has been a bit dead since a big argument a few months ago caused a schism, and neither it nor its supposed replacement managed critical mass. So that's not much of a concern. And I quit the UTAW Discord when I resigned.

But the Doof uses Discord for its Thursday evening stream chat, and I'll really miss that. I've been suggesting to communities that they move to Zulip, who provide a free tier much like Discord, but which is also Free Software, self hostable, and supports migrating between installs. I even set one up for the Doof. But nobody's even interested in trying it out so far. Discord is also a place where some queer and Covid-cautious activism happens and I'll be sad to miss that too.

Still, concentrating on the positives, I have friends from real-life things like Queer Club and the gym, who I talk to over Signal or WhatsApp, and I've just prompted a meetup of local gym buds for brunch in a few weeks. I'm playing a D&D campaign with P and friends every couple of weeks. I chat with people on the Fediverse. Even if I do lose out on communities currently based on Discord, I'm not going to be totally cut off.

(backstory: I asked the GP about an ADHD diagnosis in Spring 2023, got given some forms to fill in, sat on them for about a year, filled them in in March 2024, returned them in April, got rejected by the Adult ADHD service for not talking about my childhood symptoms enough; got given a different survey to fill out, returned that in April 2025, got accepted by the Adult ADHD service in September 2025 and put on a 7+ year waiting list)

Last October, cosmolinguist looked into getting a private ADHD diagnosis and compiled some notes for me. In January I managed to force myself to look through them and do some other research. I asked my GP to refer me to CareADHD for an assessment under NHS Right to Choose. The assessment will cost me about £400, which is a lot cheaper than some of the other providers. About a week ago I heard back from the GP saying that they'd done that. I haven't yet heard from CareADHD and obviously now it's not my turn to do something I'm really impatient about it! But I'll give it a little while longer before getting in touch to establish a timeline - it'll probably be another couple of months before I get the diagnosis appointment.

I'm having a lot of feelings about this. I know that getting ADHD meds has been a literal life saver for friends, and I'm hoping it'll help me with my current situation, where lack of concentration is making me suck at my day job and many other things in life. I'm hoping it'll help complement the therapy work I'm doing, where we've been talking about emotional dysregulation and my anhedonia - if I can't enjoy things, I'm significantly less motivated to do them and seek shiny dopamine diversions.

I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much. This won't be a magic bullet that'll solve everything overnight. It might not even help much at all, or it might be a painstaking process of adjusting medications and dosages (and dealing with ongoing meds shortages in the UK, particularly post-Brexit). In the short term it may even make things worse. But the possibility of breaking the decades-long cycle of overcommitment and burnout is so tantalising...

OggCamp is a long-standing Manchester-based geek "unconference". This basically means that you don't know who's going to talk about what until the start of the day, which is why I've never bothered going before. However, given my dead ends trying to get geek spaces to be serious about Covid safety at FOSDEM and EMF, I wondered if it would be worth a go trying to get OggCamp on board with basic ventilation. I have sent them the following email:

I'm interested in attending OggCamp and also volunteering to help. I'd like to help make OggCamp a safer place with the ongoing pandemic. Geeks are knowledge workers and the impact of Long Covid on memory and "brain fog" are truly horrifying.

I am pleased that the website mentions the pandemic at https://www.oggcamp.org/code-of-conduct/#health--safety but the advice there seems a little out of date - particularly around "rules and guidelines" which haven't been imposed since the UK government decided to "let it rip" through the population.

I'd like to volunteer to help with the listed Covid mitigations - handing out FFP2 masks and lateral flow tests. I'd also like to try and work with the venue in the run-up around the ventilation point. Ideally I'd like to see if Pendulum can achieve 5 or 6 "air changes per hour" (ACPH) in each room through their existing ventilation system, which is the standard recommended by WHO and CDC. If not, I'd like to look at air filtration mechanisms such as Corsi-Rosenthal boxes which could make up the difference. I'm happy to work with other volunteers on this, and to try and bring in other volunteers from organisations like Breathe Easy to help with this and other aspects of OggCamp.

Can I suggest that OggCamp considers offering refunds to people who can't attend due to Covid or other contagious illness? I expect most people wouldn't claim the refund, but it might make the difference to a contagious person staying home.

It might not get anywhere but it's worth continuing trying to chip away improving at pandemic safety in geek spaces. One victory would be a huge difference from the indifference or hostility I've encountered so far.

As per my previous post, the audit went OK and we re-scoped down to two days onsite. There may be a few followup questions on Monday but we're basically done with it. I managed to make it to the office for 8:45 ahead of a 9am start!

The main complication was Storm Goretti, which hit the West Midlands and South-West on Thursday and Friday. I walked back from the office in a torrential downpour after work on Thursday, having been loaned a golf umbrella. The rain racing down the hilly streets and pavements soaked my feet, but it was still preferable to getting a taxi in the stationary central Bristol traffic.

I did think about trying to meet up with any of my Bristol friends but I was exhausted even after a shorter day at work, not least due to the early start. It was also distinctly not sitting outside weather. I crashed out for a couple of hours and decided to eat at the hotel rather than venture further afield. I did manage a brief mooch until my digestive system wanted to have a go at me for the disruption.

We finished early on Friday as well, and my boss and I shared a taxi to Bristol Temple Meads. All the direct services to Manchester were cancelled (as were many others across the country) but I managed to get home via changes in Birmingham and Stafford. I got a seat on each leg of the journey, and at least the stops meant I got brief breaks from masking. The one disruption that significantly impacted me was a vehicle driving into a bridge in Levenshulme, which stopped all trains between Stockport and Manchester Piccadilly - so I jumped out at Stockport and got a taxi home from there. I was very glad to be home, and earlier than planned!

We've so far had one problem identified by the audit - we should have done a risk assessment on our Bristol office, because laptops are stored there overnight. I'd been told that it was only used for meeting space and nothing was stored there, so it's a fair cop. I'll get that sorted tomorrow.

I'm feeling pretty good about the audit - our ISMS is lacking in a lot of ways, not least some overdue document reviews, and I'm glad we didn't get wrapped over the knuckles about that. My boss is happy with me, which is always nice.

I just got back from The Moonwalkers. I didn't know quite what to expect but had a great time. "The Lightbox" is a large dark space which allows a film to be projected onto all 4 walls and the floor. The film was about 45 minutes long, narrated by Tom Hanks.

Factually, I didn't learn that much from it, but again that wasn't the point. It was nice that every Apollo mission that reached the moon was mentioned. Usually people concentrate on 11 (the first landing), 13 (which didn't make it) and maybe 17 (the last one). But this film showed that every mission advanced our knowledge and understanding of the moon with experiments and new equipment, including the Lunar Roving Vehicle used by 15-17 which extended the range at which astronauts could operate away from the lander. cosmolinguist told me afterwards that the Sea of Tranquility was picked for 11 because it was the most boring place they could find to land, and even that was strewn with boulders which Armstrong had to avoid while landing manually.

The sensory experience was interesting - the images were bigger than IMAX but not too bright, and the pitch black of the room meant there was good contrast between the inky black of space and the grey lunar regolith. Annoyingly, where we were sat (in the "reserved seats" for disabled people), we had a projector shining straight into our eyes, and also had to crane our necks to see some of the video on the wall alongside us. We were among the last to enter and didn't get a lot of time to orient ourselves and find seats; the large bank of seating in one corner was a clue to the "correct" place to sit but it was full by the time we got there, largely of wet coats. Still, that was a minor inconvenience. The sound levels were enough to be impressive but not overwhelming. I didn't notice them doing anything particularly clever with the "surround sound" but again maybe we were sat in the wrong place for that.

The overall impression was one of spectacle. The obvious sensory overload was projecting onto four walls (and the floor!) at once. Everywhere you looked there was something to see, usually in the form of collage. Kennedy's speech at Rice University, for example, is shown on the "main" wall while the sides show various footage of the crowd watching the speech. Experiments on the moon are shown through footage, while all the experimental apparatus for each Apollo mission is displayed on the sides. One of the great shots in the film is Armstrong taking the first step on the Moon, shown as a collage of the recorded TV broadcasts from around the world, with captions in different languages stating that the viewers were watching footage direct from the Moon. Obviously you can't take it all in at once, and that's kind of the point - this is a big overwhelming thing.

This is entirely fitting. The Apollo missions were a huge spectacle, and still represent one of the pinnacles of mankind's engineering capabilities. And the narrative recognises this - Hanks talks about how he watched the Apollo missions to the moon as a kid, and couldn't understand why some of his family got bored after a few hours. It features on-mission recordings from the Apollo astronauts, and interviews the astronauts from the upcoming Artemis mission which will see humans reach lunar orbit again this year, for the first time since 1972. During some of amazing wide shots, and soaring music, I felt tears in my eyes. It was a joy to experience.

For 45 minutes I forgot about the world's problems and revisited one of our greatest achievements. Totally worth it.

Urgh, the lack of routine in the Merryneum is knackering my sleep patterns. I didn't get out of bed until nearly 4pm today. I woke up at 10am with my alarm, then fell asleep until my 11:30am Pokemon Sleep alarm, then I stayed up for a bit but dozed off again. Then I got caught up doing Squaredle. I meant to do a couple of hours of day job work today to get ahead of next week's audit but I didn't get round to it.

At least I have the New Year Doof TV show this evening. It's nice to catch up with the Doof regulars and watch lots of cool and silly videos.

Will try again tomorrow...

Just replaced the BIOS battery in mother_bones' laptop. A CR2016 cell costs about 50p and we happened to have a spare one in the battery box; the laptop SKU replacement part is just one of those, with two electrodes attached to a small connector. It's shrink-wrapped so you can't easily replace the battery within. A replacement part costs about £8-20.

So I carefully disassembled the part, cutting open the shrink rap with a craft knife, removing the electrodes from the cell with a spudger, and removing the last of the shrink wrap. I replaced the cell, and reconstructed the part as best I could, sellotaping it back together.

It's a bodge, but it works - no more clock complaints on boot-up. Saved us a few quid, and I got it fixed tonight rather than having to wait for a part to arrive.