Done last week (20160731Su - 0806Sa)

I've already posted about last Sunday's medical adventure, so I won't go into that except to say that the exercises N gave me seem to be helping -- I don't seem to have much pain in my right hand beyond the usual arthritis. It has, however, taken all of the last week to get to that point.

Since the pain was most likely due to my working position, I've put in for an ergonomic evaluation at work. I need to lower my desk at home, too, by about three inches. A leg length of 25 inches should do it. Not looking forward to that, since it will mean taking everything off the top. Fortunately it's possible -- the desk is nothing but a sheet of plywood sitting on a filing cabinet at one end and a pair of 2x2s at the other.

Come to think of it, cleaning off the top of my desk is probably a good thing to do every couple of years.

Tuesday or Wednesday I saw a woman on the bus wearing a T-shirt that read "Open Source and Feelings", and had a bit of a conversation (should have spoken up earlier, because she got off at the first stop downtown). Turns out it's a conference -- I'll try to remember to go next year. The videos from last year are up, and I spent most of Saturday watching them.

A lot of the videos are about empathy, which I'm interested in and I'm told I'm good at (cf. A Talk With the Middle-Sized Bear) in spite of my alexithymia. I realized that my hanging out in a facebook group for people who've lost their cat to FIP is probably good exercise for that particular skill.

I also realized that I could be considered a member of a category -- I hesitate to call it a minority -- that's underrepresented in the tech industry: old people. Whether that insight can be turned into something useful is, at this point, an open question. A quick Google search turned up a lot of links about teaching seniors how to use these scary things called computers -- what used to be called "computer literacy" and maybe still is. I didn't see much about the people like me, who have been working with the things for the last half-century. One of the talks from last year's OSFeels was titled "Back in My Day..." -- by a fifty-year-old. Sheesh! I was working at Zilog making the stuff he talked about using as a kid.

Saw a question go by on Quora to the effect of "what should a fifty-year-old programmer do?" My answer was basically "keep writing programs." Now that I think of it, there's probably a reason why so many of the questions asked there sound naive to me.

( Notes & links, as usual )