[me, tech, psyjob] Update
I feel I owe you guys an update; I mostly fell off the net there for a while.
Health
After the pastie-fueled transatlantic data migration panic on the 13th-14th, I hit the wall physically. Turns out, I am not a spry as once I was, and every single hour of lost sleep I missed needs to get made up before I stop feeling beaten with the exhaustion stick. And I was already dealing with some health issues at that point.
Coming out of that weekend, I had enough spoons for work -- which was a long week (I now have a schedule of alternating long and short weeks) which was also busy -- and trying to do some further debugging, brunch with my mom, and some reading and that was it. Even posting about what I read was too much effort. I wound up having to cancel social engagements due to feeling like crap.
And I have to admit, the stress of the hosting migration really knocked me on my ass, emotionally. Apparently my command-line email setup is my transitional object. Threaten my relationship to procmail+nmh+perl, and I regress to an 18 month old lost in the mall. I've spent much of the last two weeks sublimating, intellectualizing, distracting, and talking myself through bouts of hysteria ("Self, look. See? We can just send attachments through gmail, like we used to." "NOOOO!!!! WANT BUBBEE!!!!!" "Bubbee is right here, honey, see, man mhmail. It's just that Bubbee can't send attachments right now." "*sob* *hiccup* ...'k. *sniffle*") and other cognitive distortions ("No, the Earth is not going to plunge into the Sun." "THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS ATE MY auto_whitelist!! YOU CAN'T SAY IT'S NOT COMING FOR US ALL!!! ASHES TO ASHES AND BITS TO BITS!!!! THE WORLD IS COMING UNDONE!!!" "Yes, eventually. But not this week." "THERE'S NO POINT TO ANYTHING. I'M GOING TO PLAY 500 BOARDS OF SUDOKU TO NUMB MYSELF TO THE INEVITABLE TIDE OF ENTROPY.")
Fortunately, the beginning of this week psyjob was low impact. This isn't good for my income (I had 6 patients scheduled for Tuesday, one showed up), but I was grateful for the timing. And since my first three patients of Tuesday all cancelled the day before, bless 'em, I got to sleep in and mosey in late, which helped a lot.
Wednesday, however, almost made up for the previous two days in terms of hecticness, though not in terms of income. I had five patients scheduled, and I had five patients show up, but the two sets did not have perfect overlap. One Of Those Days. Happily, on Wednesday, my hosting company did some promised critical fixes and my spectacular little bout of Adjustment D/o with Depressed Mood and Anxiety started remitting. ("BUBBEE!!")
Despite Friday being theoretically my day off (being a "short" week) I wound up getting an invitation to go to a treatment team meeting for a patient of mine on a psych ward -- halfway to nowhere. So this involved four hours of transit -- uncompensated! but I wasn't going to miss the opportunity and My Patient Needs Me (*shakes head at self* curiosity+codependence is like my personal chocolate-flavored crack, to say nothing of crunchy cashews of professional identity flattery) -- and ate most of my day.
Worse, I wound up getting a ride out there -- and hour and a quarter all told in the car -- with someone who was a chain smoker.
I'm allergic to smoke. *cries*
So added to yesterday's errands were a side trip to the dry cleaners and an emergency hair wash project. In happy news, I didn't have an asthma attack, though it set my throat on fire and it's still not entirely recovered.
Today, I got to sleep in for real, and feel much improved.
Technology projects
Laptop:
Constant readers will recall that in the midst of trying to get my licensure application done, the computer on which I was doing it died (end of Feb). ron_newman rescued me with a boot disk and I fished preparing the docs, and got them off of it. I mounted the laptop as a drive on my grampa box and backed it up to the NAS, which has saved my bacon. (Thanks to everyone who participated in the original discussion and explained NASes to me, which is why I own one.)
I got the laptop in to the shop in late March. They called shortly thereafter and informed me they'd determined the problem was a faulty video chip, and they'd need to ship it to Apple to fix. I said make it so. I neglected to get an estimated time of return.
It being a while, and my having had a little email outage, later afternoon last Friday, I managed to get around to calling them to ask after my laptop. Their reply: "...oops." Turns out they had never sent it out to Apple for the new chip it needed. They were very apologetic, and got a staff member to grab it and race it to the FedEx depot to get it out that evening.
This Tuesday I got the call that it was back in and ready to pick up, so this Thursday I did; I'm typing this on it now. They knocked some of the price off the repair in apology. Seems like they did a great job on the box, as far as I can tell. Interesting things I learned: they don't believe either overheating, per se, or my monitor ate my video chip: it was a known problem. They told me that NVidia supplied Apple with crappy chips, and when it was discovered how prone to dying they were, Apple got NVidia to pay for replacement. Alas, that deal was in place only for 4 years, and my MacBook is 4.5 yrs old. Oh, well. I'm content with the price of the repair. It included replacing the HD, too, which apparently also got borked, and handled the data migration fine.
Hosting Migration:
Wednesday, my hosting company got around to doing to of the critical upgrades I requested and which they had said they were going to do by last Wednesday, and hadn't responded to any of my intervening emails about. It would have been good for my endocrine system if someone had just said, "We're totally intending to do it, but something else has come up and it will need to wait," somewhere in there, but now Spamassassin is working right and I can read UTF-8 encoded email and maybe even send attachments.
I need to spend some quality time reading the email they sent me (only had time to skim) and adjust my path or something. Apparently they never upgrade anything in /usr/bin and they put all the good stuff in /somethingorother/software/ and I should stop looking anywhere else for it.
I need to review my punch list, but things are looking up. My Gregarius install is still partially borked, but, bizarrely, that seems to have something to do with which computer I use to visit the site -- the brokey bits are less brokey from my laptop. (WTF?) I smell AJAX. Also I assume all my other sites are down and broken. (*sigh*)
NAS:
Still reasonably awesome. I've been using it for swap space in all the chaos, which has been invaluable, but I haven't meaningfully moved in yet. Still need to spend some quality time doing that.
Domesticity
I'd forgotten that I'd not set up auto-bill with my new private mail box. I got an email from my private mail box company that my next 3mo bill was due and to show up in person during business hours to reckon up, so I did, and I set up recurring billing, since I'm very happy with the service there and not planning on leaving.
Now, the owner makes much of, "If there's anything else we can do to make your experience with renting from us better, let us know!" I'd noticed that there are photocopiers on the renter's side of the security partition. "Hey, I was wondering: is there any way to make photocopies after hours?" Of course there is: you can buy an electronic key good for 1,100 copies at $0.05 each (plus sales tax), which mailbox renters, who have 24/7 access to the building, can then use 24/7. OH YES PLEASE. I now have 24/7 cheap photocopying, which is, if I am sufficiently motivated, even walking distance (20min) from my house. Director-arranger Siderea is ecstatic, even though I have no immediate plans for music making.
Health
After the pastie-fueled transatlantic data migration panic on the 13th-14th, I hit the wall physically. Turns out, I am not a spry as once I was, and every single hour of lost sleep I missed needs to get made up before I stop feeling beaten with the exhaustion stick. And I was already dealing with some health issues at that point.
Coming out of that weekend, I had enough spoons for work -- which was a long week (I now have a schedule of alternating long and short weeks) which was also busy -- and trying to do some further debugging, brunch with my mom, and some reading and that was it. Even posting about what I read was too much effort. I wound up having to cancel social engagements due to feeling like crap.
And I have to admit, the stress of the hosting migration really knocked me on my ass, emotionally. Apparently my command-line email setup is my transitional object. Threaten my relationship to procmail+nmh+perl, and I regress to an 18 month old lost in the mall. I've spent much of the last two weeks sublimating, intellectualizing, distracting, and talking myself through bouts of hysteria ("Self, look. See? We can just send attachments through gmail, like we used to." "NOOOO!!!! WANT BUBBEE!!!!!" "Bubbee is right here, honey, see, man mhmail. It's just that Bubbee can't send attachments right now." "*sob* *hiccup* ...'k. *sniffle*") and other cognitive distortions ("No, the Earth is not going to plunge into the Sun." "THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS ATE MY auto_whitelist!! YOU CAN'T SAY IT'S NOT COMING FOR US ALL!!! ASHES TO ASHES AND BITS TO BITS!!!! THE WORLD IS COMING UNDONE!!!" "Yes, eventually. But not this week." "THERE'S NO POINT TO ANYTHING. I'M GOING TO PLAY 500 BOARDS OF SUDOKU TO NUMB MYSELF TO THE INEVITABLE TIDE OF ENTROPY.")
Fortunately, the beginning of this week psyjob was low impact. This isn't good for my income (I had 6 patients scheduled for Tuesday, one showed up), but I was grateful for the timing. And since my first three patients of Tuesday all cancelled the day before, bless 'em, I got to sleep in and mosey in late, which helped a lot.
Wednesday, however, almost made up for the previous two days in terms of hecticness, though not in terms of income. I had five patients scheduled, and I had five patients show up, but the two sets did not have perfect overlap. One Of Those Days. Happily, on Wednesday, my hosting company did some promised critical fixes and my spectacular little bout of Adjustment D/o with Depressed Mood and Anxiety started remitting. ("BUBBEE!!")
Despite Friday being theoretically my day off (being a "short" week) I wound up getting an invitation to go to a treatment team meeting for a patient of mine on a psych ward -- halfway to nowhere. So this involved four hours of transit -- uncompensated! but I wasn't going to miss the opportunity and My Patient Needs Me (*shakes head at self* curiosity+codependence is like my personal chocolate-flavored crack, to say nothing of crunchy cashews of professional identity flattery) -- and ate most of my day.
Worse, I wound up getting a ride out there -- and hour and a quarter all told in the car -- with someone who was a chain smoker.
I'm allergic to smoke. *cries*
So added to yesterday's errands were a side trip to the dry cleaners and an emergency hair wash project. In happy news, I didn't have an asthma attack, though it set my throat on fire and it's still not entirely recovered.
Today, I got to sleep in for real, and feel much improved.
Technology projects
Laptop:
Constant readers will recall that in the midst of trying to get my licensure application done, the computer on which I was doing it died (end of Feb). ron_newman rescued me with a boot disk and I fished preparing the docs, and got them off of it. I mounted the laptop as a drive on my grampa box and backed it up to the NAS, which has saved my bacon. (Thanks to everyone who participated in the original discussion and explained NASes to me, which is why I own one.)
I got the laptop in to the shop in late March. They called shortly thereafter and informed me they'd determined the problem was a faulty video chip, and they'd need to ship it to Apple to fix. I said make it so. I neglected to get an estimated time of return.
It being a while, and my having had a little email outage, later afternoon last Friday, I managed to get around to calling them to ask after my laptop. Their reply: "...oops." Turns out they had never sent it out to Apple for the new chip it needed. They were very apologetic, and got a staff member to grab it and race it to the FedEx depot to get it out that evening.
This Tuesday I got the call that it was back in and ready to pick up, so this Thursday I did; I'm typing this on it now. They knocked some of the price off the repair in apology. Seems like they did a great job on the box, as far as I can tell. Interesting things I learned: they don't believe either overheating, per se, or my monitor ate my video chip: it was a known problem. They told me that NVidia supplied Apple with crappy chips, and when it was discovered how prone to dying they were, Apple got NVidia to pay for replacement. Alas, that deal was in place only for 4 years, and my MacBook is 4.5 yrs old. Oh, well. I'm content with the price of the repair. It included replacing the HD, too, which apparently also got borked, and handled the data migration fine.
Hosting Migration:
Wednesday, my hosting company got around to doing to of the critical upgrades I requested and which they had said they were going to do by last Wednesday, and hadn't responded to any of my intervening emails about. It would have been good for my endocrine system if someone had just said, "We're totally intending to do it, but something else has come up and it will need to wait," somewhere in there, but now Spamassassin is working right and I can read UTF-8 encoded email and maybe even send attachments.
I need to spend some quality time reading the email they sent me (only had time to skim) and adjust my path or something. Apparently they never upgrade anything in /usr/bin and they put all the good stuff in /somethingorother/software/ and I should stop looking anywhere else for it.
I need to review my punch list, but things are looking up. My Gregarius install is still partially borked, but, bizarrely, that seems to have something to do with which computer I use to visit the site -- the brokey bits are less brokey from my laptop. (WTF?) I smell AJAX. Also I assume all my other sites are down and broken. (*sigh*)
NAS:
Still reasonably awesome. I've been using it for swap space in all the chaos, which has been invaluable, but I haven't meaningfully moved in yet. Still need to spend some quality time doing that.
Domesticity
I'd forgotten that I'd not set up auto-bill with my new private mail box. I got an email from my private mail box company that my next 3mo bill was due and to show up in person during business hours to reckon up, so I did, and I set up recurring billing, since I'm very happy with the service there and not planning on leaving.
Now, the owner makes much of, "If there's anything else we can do to make your experience with renting from us better, let us know!" I'd noticed that there are photocopiers on the renter's side of the security partition. "Hey, I was wondering: is there any way to make photocopies after hours?" Of course there is: you can buy an electronic key good for 1,100 copies at $0.05 each (plus sales tax), which mailbox renters, who have 24/7 access to the building, can then use 24/7. OH YES PLEASE. I now have 24/7 cheap photocopying, which is, if I am sufficiently motivated, even walking distance (20min) from my house. Director-arranger Siderea is ecstatic, even though I have no immediate plans for music making.