12/20/2023 0 Comments Dragthing alternative![]() We’ve all been in fight-or-flight mode for around 18 months. I think in both cases, it’s my body trying to tell me something, in the only language it thinks I will understand – by breaking. But progress is also the thing I’ve not really been able to make for the last month either. ![]() Hopefully that will be improve over the next few weeks. It took another three weeks to end up with a new prescription which only now gives me mild headaches and nausea. Anyway, I expected my eyesight to decline slowly as I got older, but not overnight… So, I couldn’t actually look at any screens without my reading glasses, but even then I got massive headaches. As an aside, I really hate that phrase somebody your age, and it is not as reassuring as you think it is, medical practitioners. The ophthalmologist was not particularly sympathetic, saying my eyesight was actually still very good for somebody my age, and there wasn’t anything obviously wrong with my eye. But this time, it improved a little bit, and then stopped. Usually, they healed up in a couple of days, and all was good. No, not like the stuff that comes out of your eyes when you are sad. I’d had some problems like this before – I will spare you the details, but it involves tears. The morning after a first particularly unsuccessful real-world test of the multiplayer code, I woke up to find that I could not focus my left eye – my one actually good eye. But I could still be a productive worker, which was the important thing. I did lots of experiments in AR and networking – some of which worked, and some of which very much did not. So, I might not have been making much progress on the code that actually paid the bills, but at least I could keep myself mostly sane and distracted. After the PCalc About screen, Dice had become my new happy place, where I could explore new technology, and do something fun to take my mind off the fact that I was going to live with this increased pain going forward, and realistically, it would probably continue to get worse for the rest of my life. I did a lot of updates to Dice by PCalc after that. “We don’t know” was a common refrain when I asked questions. You might think there’s lots of medical research around this stuff, but there really isn’t. It’s just my nervous system misfiring in variety of new ways. I got poked and prodded and scanned, and everybody could agree that there was no actual identifiable cause to the pain – just as there wasn’t 20 years ago when it started. “Have you tried mindfulness?”, the pain doctors asked, as I started to exhaust the limited number of medical options available. I was determined to show the pain who was boss, and released a big Mac update to PCalc in January. The side effects were mostly around my vision – losing my vision being one of my biggest fears, he foreshadowed. I kept working as I could, while I tested a variety of new drugs with increasingly awful side effects and no actual benefits. Of course, my back didn’t like me standing for more than a couple of hours either, so I had to cycle between a variety of positions. As a result, I couldn’t actually sit at my desk for more than an hour without discomfort, which would quickly turn to stabbing pain if I kept going. Instead of that needed break, my chronic neuropathic pain – a condition I’ve dealt with ok using medication for twenty years – decided it would turn things up to eleven. That year, I wasn’t even happy to leave my house. In a normal year, by around the end of November, I’d go on vacation somewhere sunny to recharge my batteries. But I kept pushing myself, and worked really long days and evenings to get everything ready for day one, as I usually do. I had a long list of features I wanted to get done, but most of it hadn’t come together at all. Last year, around this point, I’d had a very frustrating summer – lots of Apple’s beta stuff didn’t work well, my motivation was at rock bottom, and I was even fed up with playing Animal Crossing, a game that got me through more of the early stages of lockdown than I’d care to admit. But the other thing is, we’re still in the middle of a global pandemic, and I’m just really tired of everything. SharePlay was going to be that for many, and even that’s been delayed now. For me, one is there aren’t a lot of obvious hooks in this year’s OS releases that developers can build big new features around. I know a lot of people who are in the same boat, and there are a variety of reasons. ![]() Not nothing, but not anything I would consider actually substantial. I tell this story, not to gain your sympathy, but more to be a cautionary tale.Īs we head into Apple’s OS release cycle, I don’t have a lot to show for it this year.
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