SteveStreeting.com

Like most members of the male species, and particularly the geekier types, I love gadgets. Complex ones are great, but sometimes the greatest satisfaction can come from simple things that just work really well. Here’s a couple of recent buys for me that fall into this category that I thought I’d share.

Joby Gorillapod

When we’re on holiday I often spend time trying to find places to put the camera so we can do a timer shot with us both in the picture, and when you’re in forests and up mountains finding a level spot is tough. I’ve gotten quite good at it, squinting at rocky outcrops and tree stumps with an almost film director level of interest, but it’s still awkward and sometimes precarious; this year in the Canadian Rockies I placed the camera on a rocky slope and only realised when I had to charge down again how many rocks were between me and the ‘mark’ I had to be at within 10 seconds, and I almost came a cropper, much to the displeasure of my wife.

I’d seen the Gorillapod before but kept forgetting to buy one before we went on holiday, so this time I bought one as soon as I thought about it, even if it’ll be sitting around unused for a while. Basically it’s just a small tripod made from a series of ball joints, each one perfectly stiff under the weight of a camera but easy enough to move, and with rubber surrounds on every joint and on the ends for grip. It’s very bendy and yet very sturdy once it’s set, so you can use it as a regular mini-tripod (but can adjust for uneven surfaces really easily), or you can suspend it from tree branches and poles, secure it up on top of fences or bollards just by bracing it, and all kinds of things. It just clips on to a small tripod mount and folds up really small.

It’s just an incredibly useful little gadget that I wish I’d had for holidays ages ago, and I imagine regular photographers would find it invaluable too.

Bicycle iPod Mounts (for drum kits)

I don’t ride a bike anymore, but after setting up my drum kit I realised I needed somewhere to mount my iPod if I was going to hook it up for practice, rather than having it on the floor or using gaffer tape or something. Surprisingly there didn’t appear to be any standard accessories to do this (a bit of an oversight on Roland’s part I think since this must be a common requirement), so I was nosing around in the VDrums forum and discovered that most people were just using regular old bicycle mountings, and attaching them to one of the cymbal riser arms (since they’re about the same diameter as bicycle handlebars, compared to the main drum frame which is much thicker).

They were cheap so I gave it a try, and sure enough it works beautifully – you wouldn’t know that the mounting wasn’t made entirely for this specific purpose in fact. Score one for the community

I never seem to have very much luck with couriers. I remember the very first time I ever had to have something delivered by courier, it was in fact my very first PC from a company called Multiplex (long since deceased), in 1991 – the days when you really had no choice but to mail-order to get a PC. It was a searingly sexy 386 33Mhz with 14″ CRT VGA monitor (take that EGA / CGA losers!), 1MB video card (oooh), a massive 100MB hard drive, and dual Soundblaster (the original!) and Roland (for MIDI) sound cards. It cost me something like 2-3 months salary and clearly I was keen to see it arrive in one piece, having paid through the nose for shipping too. It took 2 weeks to arrive, and some of that was it sitting behind a door in a barely watertight hut at a local freight depo because they weren’t sure how to classify it for customs and decided they’d figure it out after a few more (days) cups of tea – without telling me of course. This was before internet tracking of parcels so they could get away with it – I was livid.

Since then I’ve had couriers who have just knocked off early and pretended that they called at the house and ‘carded it’ because no-one was home, despite the fact that I was at home all day and there was no card in the door anyway. I’ve had couriers that delayed a couple of days because they “couldn’t figure out where the house was”, because their clipboard was missing a couple of lines of address – this is despite a) the box itself having the full address perfectly clearly on it, and b) even their badly transcribed clipboard had a postcode and a house name, which even a trained monkey should be able to resolve to a location. Basically, all kinds of silly excuses. I’ve often wondered how couriers can get away with charging the fees they do when they often seem so much more incompetent than regular postal services. The only couriers I’ve found that are actually 100% reliable are FedEx, who are locally served by the post office – whenever I need to send something important for my business, I only ever use them.

It should therefore perhaps have been no surprise that my recent order of musical instruments went somewhat awry because of couriers – there were 5 packages in all, originating in Newcastle, 4 of which arrived on my doorstep on Tuesday, after a 4 working day transit (about average when crossing the Channel is involved). But, just for variety, the courier company decided to route the final package to Birmingham, Huddersfield, and then back to Newcastle over the course of the last week. Thankfully (?!) we do have internet tracking now so I can watch it doing its merry dance while I fume. Apparently there are some ‘paperwork issues’, but quite why it took a week-long circular journey around the country before they figured that out, and why the other 4 packages in the same consignment didn’t have this problem,  is anyone’s guess.

So, I have most of my drums, but I don’t have a kick pedal or stool so I can’t really use them properly yet, and probably won’t be able to until next week sometime. Sigh. At least they work, it’s just annoying not to be able to configure the setup properly yet and just play. The best thing is that my wife has her piano set up now, which was in 2 of the 4 boxes that made it through the transit minefield; it’s really good and she seems most pleased.

The last 12 months have been a big adjustment for me. Just over a year ago, I almost lived at the keyboard of my PC – work, hobbies (mostly Ogre & general coding, but some PC gaming too). It was not unusual for me to spend 12 hours in a day sitting in front of a computer, coding away. I had a bit of RSI (addressed with low-profile keyboards and less mouse use), and some back pain on occasion, but I carried on because I loved what I did, and with always a huge list of things to do (and that I wanted to do!) I felt productive and content. I was the can-do guy. I felt I could take on anything if I wanted to, just by concentrating enough and putting the hours in. That enthusiasm and ability to focus was a blessing, and a curse.

It all came to a crashing end in one week in October 2008, when I spent several nights in a row not being able to sleep because of acute backache, pacing around the house at 4am in a lot of pain, culminating in not being able to get out of bed one morning, and being carried off in an ambulance pumped full of morphine. I hadn’t properly addressed several years of grumbling back problems in favour of getting on with what I loved doing to the exclusion of most other things, and eventually there was a breaking point. I’ve spent the last 12 months recovering from that sudden cliff-dive, and I can truly say it was a life-changing event; not at the level some people have to deal with of course, but still it’s one of those events that, in hindsight, everything can  be described in terms of “before” or “after”.

I’ve scaled back my PC time extensively. I try to work smarter to compensate for it; that means more ruthless prioritisation of things that I want to do, and being far more hard-headed about getting sucked into other people’s priorities (and not putting up with as much bullsh*t as I used to). I think I try to juggle less balls now, and am less worried about letting the occasional one drop. Before, I would have worked my ass off to try to handle all incoming projects and keep all the balls in the air, now, my ‘What’s the worst that could happen’ metric has been completely reset and I’m far more likely to walk away from projects if they’re more hassle than they’re worth, or if I feel my time is being wasted. It also means that with Ogre I appreciate my community even more than before, and am more willing to delegate than I used to be. I don’t feel under the same pressure (which was largely self-inflicted) to be everywhere at once and spearheading everything myself; I’m happier to let others take the lead on many aspects and offer advice instead, on design, API structure and so on. I suspect that I’m probably developing into a better leader for that experience, learning how to loosen my grip a little and do more guiding instead; and I’m really lucky that our team and community seem to grow stronger every year.

I’ve also completely changed my exercise regime, which is to say I have one now I hit the gym a couple of times a week and have a daily routine of home exercises (about an hour a day) which keep me flexible and compensate for the time I do spend at the PC, which is now mostly just office hours and maybe a few extra hours at the weekend and the odd evening. I spend a few hours a week gaming, play my guitar(s), read and socialise.

Strangely, I actually think my back problems have done me good overall, although I can only look at it with that perspective now that I have the situation largely under control. I think my previous level of intense focus, while very productive and hugely satisfying, and ultimately responsible for lots of great things like my career and Ogre, was very unhealthy. It’s hard to step away from when you’re on a roll, but having been forced to do so, I feel much better for it – less stressed, more centered generally. There’s more to life than work, than computers, and yes, even than open source That’s not to say you can’t do those things, I certainly intend to continue to do so, but balance is so important, and yet so easy to lose track of. Society these days is hugely pressurised – you have to compete hard for everything, to earn money, to be more successful, to do things better than the other guy, and so on. Many of us just push ourselves as a matter of course, because we have high or maybe even unrealistic expectations for ourselves, or maybe just out of habit, and we end up sacrificing too much on the altar of progress – for some it’s marriages or relationships, for some it’s moral integrity, for some (including me) it’s health. Sometimes getting sideswiped by events and being shoved off that perpetual better-faster-stronger-harder treadmill can be a good thing long-term, because you get to stop concentrating on just keeping up for a while and take stock of what’s important. I’m certainly going to try to keep that in mind from now on.

Yep, the blissful silence on this blog is now over, because we’re back from our holiday / vacation in the Canadian Rockies. For me, there’s very little that’s more relaxing than traipsing around unspoiled mountain regions enjoying the scenery and the wildlife (and trying not to get eaten by the latter). Some people like laying on beaches, and that’s fine, but there’s only so much of that I can do.

This was our second trip to Canada, and whilst we did a multi-centre trip last time, this time we concentrated on the part we liked best, the Rockies and the associated parks. We had lots more time this trip and so ranged about a lot more, and even came across a grizzly bear at one point – a little more closely than we would have chosen, since it was only about 10-15 meters away on a ridge above us, but luckily it was far less interested in us and it quickly wandered off after giving us a ‘what are you looking at?’ glance. That was cool, once our hearts had returned to their normal rhythm anyway. We got to see a few more animals than last time, which is always our favourite part of this kind of trip. I’d love to spot a wolf one day, but the closest we got were seeing a few tracks.

I find myself liking Canada in general too, even though I’ve only experienced the west so far (the parks and Vancouver a few years back). From my point of view it’s a bit like America but with the volume turned town a notch or two, which when you come from a reserved / borderline emotionally repressed culture like mine can be a little more comfortable to slip into.  The money also comes in different colours for different denominations, which is rather sensible to me (am I the only one to have problems pulling out the right US bills when in a rush or in low light?), and of course has the same Queen printed on it, which is curiously comforting. And in a strange coincidence, many Canadians have a habit of appending ‘eh?’ to the end of sentences, a trait which is very common locally too – although combining the two perhaps has the danger of veering into nudge nudge sketch territory.

In all, it was a great holiday, if a little bit physically tiring – and when you live at almost sea level, hiking at 2000 feet is tough at first just because of the thinner air. The parks are a great place to get away from everything (well, except my most urgent email – but that’s being self-employed for you) and right up our street. We’ve visited mountain regions in Europe but it’s a lot harder to find the wide, unspoiled areas like you can so easily in Canada. I envy people who can just jump in a car / train and get up there for the weekend!

I’m catching up now, bear in mind I’ll be a bit busy in the next couple of weeks with all the things that have been waiting for my return.

Despite my initial positive reaction to working standing up, since I made that post my back has gone steadily downhill again, starting with a dodgy weekend that I hoped was a blip, but grumbled on for pretty much all last week, before taking a rapid decline this week. This morning I’ve been in the kind of pain I haven’t had since late last year. So, coupled with the ogre3d.org hack, colour me extraordinarily pissed off this week.

One aspect is that I hadn’t been out walking this week until this morning, since it’s been icy and since my back was already bad, I didn’t feel it was worth risking a slip. I’ve been out this morning but it hasn’t helped – it was even too painful to do my stretching exercises afterwards. But I know it’s not just that, because it was dodgy last week too and I was going out every day. Still, the steep decline this week clearly indicates I can’t get back to normal work yet, even when an emergency prompts me to try.

So, I dunno. I’m trying to track it, trying to observe cause and effect, but it still seems elusive. I’m just going to have to keep trying (what other option is there?). If there’s one thing I hate, it’s illogical things, and this is like hooking yourself up to a 20,000 volt cable with a random number generator controlling the on switch.

We don’t get ‘proper’ snow very often here (gulf stream, island salt air etc), so it was a surprise to wake up to about 3-4 inches on the ground this morning. Unsurprisingly, our completely unprepared community has ground to a complete halt, in conditions any Russian or Canadian would find laughable.

It doesn’t stop me from going to work of course, or my wife who also only has a short walk to work. Our environmentally friendly lifestyle clearly doesn’t pay dividends in this particular instance.

I’m also now finding that my internet speeds are in post-school molasses mode, I guess because so many people are either home working or just killing time on the net today. So snow clearly clogs up the intertubes too

So, following on from my thoughts last week, I spent a little time today rearranging my main work area to accommodate working standing up. I’m just aiming for a temporary solution for the moment, so I can experiment with it and evaluate whether it’s going to help. Luckily, I have a ton of sturdy boxes left over from various technical purchases, so after trying out various combinations I came up with this:

Thanks go to my MacBook Pro, XBox 360, Pod and Netgear router (among others) for generously donating their boxes to the cause

Actually since that picture was taken I’ve put a couple of books under the keyboard / mouse shelf since my forearms were a little too much below the horizontal. Getting pictures taken of myself at the keyboard was very useful in determining the appropriate setup actually, the first attempt felt right when I was setting it up, but once Marie took a photo, I realised that the monitor was at least 10cm too low (your head is supposed to be pitched slightly downwards, only up to about 30 degrees, when looking at the middle of the screen).

Right now it’s pretty weird, and my feet start hurting far too quickly, but I’m going to stick with it and see how it goes. My back hurts a bit right now, but that may be down to moving stuff about and/or unfamiliarity with sustaining this position. I’ve ordered a Capisco which will allow me to take the weight off my feet while still being out of the demon sitting position, but I’ve been told it’ll take about 4 weeks for delivery, so I’m going to have to manage without it for now, perhaps sitting with the Macbook somewhere if I really need a rest.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

2008 has been a hell of mixed year – ups, downs, odd shimmying movements, it’s had it all. In the grand spirit of catharsis, I decided to pick out a few of the moments that stick in my memory about the year that zipped by when we weren’t looking.

Most Inspirational Moment : Obama winning the US Election

The moment I honestly didn’t think would actually happen for most of 2008. The idea that a young, smart, left-leaning man with a positive message could get the top job in a country that’s been dominated by a grizzled, fear-spreading, right-wing old guard for the best part of the last decade was almost too much to hope for. The fact that he’s also mixed-race, and has an unconventional, cosmopolitan background, brings with it a sense that some things that always should have been possible, but somehow never occurred, could happen after all. It brought a little ray of hope to cynics like me who nevertheless want to believe good things can happen sometimes. Of course, he now has one of the hardest jobs in the world and is not about to walk across water to fix everything, but despite that, I and many others take heart from that November night.

Worst Moment & Most Transformational Moment: Back Trouble

Unsurprisingly the low point of my year was being carted off in an ambulance, pumped full of morphine, due to acute back trouble. However, what it also did was serve as a wake-up call, that after years of simply ‘managing’ my occasional back problems, which amounted to doing the minimum required to keep doing the things I wanted to do (like coding), it was time I actually sat up and took it more seriously, and got my priorities straight. I still love programming, and tinkering on computers generally – I’ll never get that out of my system. But, I can no longer let it dominate my lifestyle to the extent I have in the past. It’s a hard thing to do, because like many people much of my ‘identity’ as I perceive it comes from my work & hobbies, which have always been strongly oriented around computers. I’m having to adjust and reform that identity to a degree, to one that is not so biased in one direction. As well as taking more exercise, I’ve added back previously marginalised hobbies like music and gaming in greater measure, and this blog has evolved along with that. It’s had to happen fast, and I’m still adjusting.

Most Hours Spent Pressing Plastic Buttons: Rock Band 1/2

This game could in fact have qualified under any number of categories, such as ‘Most Money Spent On A Single Game’, ‘Most DLC Purchased’, ‘Best Social Gaming Experience’, ‘Most Wrist / Hand Injuries’, ‘Most Likely To Inspire Delusions of Grandeur’, and many more. But most of all, we’ve sunk hours without measure into the Rock Band experience over the last 8 months, and have loved every minute of it.

One of the few games I have almost never played alone, and all the better for it. Also the game that’s encouraged me to buy more music I hadn’t heard of before, and to take up a real instrument again, almost 20 years after I gave up my fairly considerable extra-curricular music lessons in favour of, you guessed it, computer studies.

Most Effective Practical Lesson in Comradeship: Left 4 Dead

I love this game, no matter how much it frustrates at the higher difficulty levels when that total bastard of an AI Director decides to wear you down, before throwing a Tank and horde wave at you just as you’re mere feet from safety. Gaaah!! But, no other game apart from Rock Band has made co-op so satisfying, and it does it in a completely different way. The game design is quietly masterful, the way they engineer a situation where you play together not because it’s an option, or a neat little add-on, but because your only chance of survival is sticking together and helping one another. And yes, you will scream like a girl when a Hunter leaps on you from a rooftop and your companions are tentatively out of reach. You will want to hug them after they come back to help you before your face is ripped off. You will also genuinely mourn the loss of a player because you just know that you’re more vulnerable as a group with him/her gone. You won’t find any other game that remotely makes you appreciate your companions as much as L4D does.

Most Used Entertainment Device : Xbox 360

It may sound like a small industrial air conditioner. It may have an old-school disc tray. It may be saddled with a higher-than average chance of breakdown. But pound for pound, the 360 has given us the most gaming fun in 2008 by a considerable margin. I always said I would finally buy a ‘next-gen’ console for Rock Band first and foremost, and the unexpected timed exclusivity of the title on 360 in Europe meant that alone would have made it a lucky choice. However, the surprise came from games which I wasn’t necessarily clamouring to buy originally but which in the end proved to be really excellent, like Gears of War, Fable 2, Crackdown, Braid, N+, Skate. Those plus the games which I’d planned to buy (like Mass Effect, Geometry Wars 1/2, Pac Man CE, Rez HD, Halo 3, Rock Band) really made it a crowded year for my 360. I have several games that I’d like to go back to sometime if I get time, like Assassins Creed and Burnout Paradise. I’ve also been really impressed by the completeness of the online experience. A few friends & relatives who hadn’t bought into the current gen of gaming yet also bought one this xmas so I’m expecting more shared fun next year.

Most Enjoyable and Thought-provoking Book : Neverwhere

I’ve been reading a little more now that I’m not staying up to the early hours of the morning on the computer anymore, and this was one of the books I picked up (my wife’s, actually). I like Neil Gaiman, and I also read American Gods this year too, but I particularly liked Neverwhere, for multiple reasons. I really liked the through-the-looking-glass version of London and the dark humour, but I also really liked the message at the end, about normality and how we perceive it. A great book that manages to be both entertaining and thought-provoking.

Best Musical Come-back : Er…

I couldn’t decide on one favourite here, it seems to have been a year for come-backs. Supergrass‘s Diamond Hoo Ha was a feisty, confident, more mature album from a band that got stereotyped too much in the 90′s. It still got largely ignored though, which was very much undeserved. Oasis‘s new album Dig Out Your Soul has a number of tracks I like – a little heavier than their older albums, but once you get used to it it’s very good. The Verve of course famously got back together again for the album ‘Forth’. When I first heard it I was underwhelmed, but I’m starting to like it now, especially since the release of the second single (Rather Be), so I may well buy it. Finally, REM released their first really great album in far too many years, Accelerate, which seemed to throw off some of the cobwebs that had been accumulating on them recently and brought back some of the old spirit. All in all, it’s been a good year for some of my favourite older bands.

There were loads of other moments, such as releasing Ogre 1.6 and OgreSpeedTree, attending Siggraph, going to Sweden for the first time, and more. 2008 was certainly a busy one! I hope 2008 has been good for you, and best of luck for 2009. I think we’re all going to need it!

Keen to ramp up the self-treatment of my recurring back problems, I hunted about for a good book on personal spinal therapy. I picked up a book a little while ago on pilates but found it next to useless, and although I’ve dabbled with yoga, so far I found the results a little random, and with seemingly little focus in these resources on the kinds of back issues I’ve been getting, I came to the conclusion that non-targetted application of these techniques was a very hit-and-miss affair, with potential to injure as well as assist. What I really needed was a resource that helped me deal with the very specific issues I was getting – and with backs, there seem to be a number of different things that can go wrong.

I found Sarah Keys’ book, The Back Sufferers Bible, through various review sites, and found a large number of people with what sounded like much more serious issues than I have highly recommending it. Sarah specialises in backs above all else, and has written a number of books on the subject over the past couple of decades. This book seemed like the ideal self-treatment text, so I ordered a copy, and it arrived a little under a week ago now.

I’m already quite impressed. The book goes into a large amount of detail about how the spine works, what can go wrong, and how to recover from it – more than any other book I’ve read, and contains much more information than I’ve got out of my various physio/osteotherapists in the past. Even better, I found within its various chapters an exact description of the recent problem I had, something she calls an ‘acute locked back’. Having had physios prod me and tell me my (latest, mid-back) problem was fairly unusual and hard to pin down, it was a great relief to see it described in such accurate detail – right down to how it felt immediately before, after, and longer term. Having seen so many articles that just focus on lumbar pain, I was so glad to find an author who clearly understood exactly what I had, and had exercises laid out specifically to deal with it. The text actually agreed with my most recent physio’s eventual recommendations, but what’s nice is that it has a much greater range of exercises to do, with more detail as to the kind of timescales involved, and when it’s safe to graduate from one type of exercise to another, and focussing on long-term recovery. It’s nice to see someone saying that the spine can get better too, and that it’s not inevitable that I’ll be on a downward slide for the rest of my life, provided I tackle it the right way.

One thing that the book also taught me was that dehydration was a risk issue. I’ve never been one to drink as much water as you’re supposed to in a day – for some reason I just don’t get that thirsty, and when we’re on holiday in a hot country my wife is always telling me to drink more, even though I don’t feel like I need it most of the time. Such a metabolism might be efficient in arid countries, but lack of water is one of the things that over a prolonged period of time can cause disc degeneration. So as well as my exercise I’m trying to remember to stay more hydrated.

So far, I feel quite a bit better. I’d dipped last week, which I now believe was mostly down to some over-enthusiastic drumming, but I’ve done some moderate drumming this week too, I’ve just been a little more sensible and combined it with the book’s exercises (as well as my daily walks), and I find that besides a little soreness, I’m able to cope much better and most of the stiffness, tenderness and most importantly the red-hot knifing pains, are gone. The exercises seem to be targeting my specific injury more effectively than other things I’ve tried in the past, and also allow me to start strengthening up my various trunk muscles again without putting adverse pressure on my spine; one of the problems I’ve had in the past.

It’s early days, but so far, so good. If it carries on like this, this book will have been a great investment.

Apologies in advance for another dull post about my varying spinal health. But, I figure friends, family and some people in my various online communites are interested in contextual stuff like this, so here we go. Hit up some other bookmark now if you’re bored

Since my epiphany 6 weeks ago I’ve been on what I realise is going to be a long road to recovery, and generally each week I’ve been improving, barring the odd minor blip. That was, until the middle of last week when I seemed to go backward a couple of steps, ending up with pain and stiffness in the middle back area which I associate with my most recent problem (as compared to the lower lumbar pain associated with my lingering problem from about 4 years ago). This has persisted all week – better some days, worse others – meaning that I’m having to be extra careful. I’m not sure exactly what triggered the relapse – it might be that Rock Band 2 came out and I did 2 hours of solid drumming one evening, it might have been the time we spent playing Left 4 Dead, it might have been that I’ve been playing my new guitar with a strap (extra weight on the shoulders), it might have been that I took a particularly brisk walk last Tuesday as I was in a rush to get back to work (and at that point my back was feeling great) – or something else.

What is frustrating is that the risk of relapse seems connected to almost anything I do. I sometimes feel trapped – that I can’t work as much as I want, can’t do many things I enjoy, can’t be too active, can’t be too inactive – it’s like I have to be afraid of doing anything because of the risk of setting it off again (except that of course doing nothing also makes it worse). Yesterday this really started to depress me a bit, and I’m generally a pretty hard guy to depress, being as defiantly optimistic as I usually am. I got over it, partly because of my wife, partly because we had a social evening last night which cheered me up, and partly because my ever-reliable sense of logic eventually kicked in and pointed out in no uncertain terms that feeling sorry for myself wasn’t going to help, and I was just wasting time.

So, I’m opting for a more scientific approach. I’m starting to keep a weekly record of how well my back is feeling, and noting down relevant events, and how much work/gaming/exercise I get during each week to try to correlate what’s helping, and what’s making it worse. I went back over my diary & blog to add a bit of history (higher numbers are better):

Obviously too much hunching at the desk was bad, as probably were long-haul flights. The games are mostly on there for interest – with the exception of heavy drumming on Rock Band 2 I don’t think any of them put any particular strain on my back, although Left 4 Dead is at the desk so I should keep that fairly light. Trips to the physio/osteo clearly help short-term but the only real way to conquer this long-term is to keep learning how to rehabilitate myself, and quick-fixes aren’t the way.

The positive note to take from this is that despite the last week, I’m still on an overall up since mid-October. As my wife keeps telling me, I need to resign myself to the fact that this is probably going to take a very long time to put right properly. Frustrating when you have a head full of projects (Ogre & otherwise) wanting to see the light of day, and when you just want to lead a ‘normal’ life without being in pain, or feeling afraid of what you can and can’t do. But, as ever there are plenty of people far worse off than I am in the world, and I have the benefit of a very understanding wife and a flexible working environment (I don’t get sick pay, but I can at least take breaks when I want and set my own workload), so I should stop wingeing and get on with it. I’m going to choose to be grateful that my red line is averaging an upward trend, and work on trying to keep it on that course as best I can.