Notices by Don Romano 🍹 (thj@mastodon.cloud), page 22

Is it just me, or is Google Search getting worse and worse?

Back in the day, you'd type in what you were looking for, and as if by magic, it understood what you were looking for, and gave it to you.

These days, you can try a million different queries and all it gives you is blog spam and sites that are trying to sell you things, and are only related to your queries in a very general way.

I tried upping the dosage, but if it weren't for the side effects, which have been very off today, you'd think I've been taking a placebo pill. Thinking it might be a bit of sleep deprivation, I compensated with coffee, which had worked nicely the day before, but only made me jittery and cranky today. I'm completely and utterly at a loss.

Profoundly confused with the effects of Ritalin at the moment. It's not behaving predictably at all. There is no rhyme or reason to when and how much it works, and the side effects are very odd. It felt like I had a good start to the day, but when I later looked back at what I had logged, it was a mess, and I clearly hadn't been thinking straight. I then spent most of the day in complete confusion, irritation and was completely distracted from work, because nothing seemed right anymore.

@professor_stoke I didn't take it into account at first, but I have since started gathering samples of good time intervals into a separate sheet with a few scatter plots in it to look for patterns or trends.

The fuuu...

Someone created a Simplenote account with my email address. This seems to have happened without any verification.

It always creeps me out a little when stuff like this happens.

Going a bit back to square one today when it comes to Ritalin. Many of my assumptions were right, but not all of them. I'm systematically testing these assumptions to check them.

In the beginning, I tried to keep numerical scores for various states of mind, but that was difficult, so I've been logging in free text recently.

Today, I decided that I needed to use a template with a list of essential questions which gathers information I'm likely to need later on when I assess the dosages.

https://wordsandbuttons.online/so_you_think_you_know_c.html

I did not pass this test.

Had it been about how a typical C compiler on a typical workstation behaves in 2019, I would've passed.

Instead, it's about the C standard itself, which hardly anyone has read. If you haven't actually read the standard, you're going to fail the test.

Mr. Potus had a bomb
I.A.E.A. aye
And it contained plutonium
I.A.E.A. aye

And another one
And another one
Nuclear arms race,
here we come

Mr. Potus had a bomb
I.A.E.A. aye

While it isn't pleasant to feel grief over the terminal illness of a loved one, it is reassuring to see that my emotions are normal, despite taking these medications that flatten them to some degree.

@FiXato It also offers a sense of community and a deep common yet also personal purpose. You are on a mission for God, and so forth.

@FiXato The thing about religion has occurred to me before, yes. It can serve as an a tool; an anchor or framework to hold on to. It explains why we're here and what our purpose is.

I'm still trying to understand why we do all the things and then we are gone. Maybe it would make more sense to me if I was married or had children at this point. At the moment, I'm just a person attempting to maintain and improve upon my own existence, but I have no deeper purpose. I do all the right things, but where is it all going? What's the destination? I feel like I have all the means, but no ends. I feel fine, but I keep asking these questions, without finding an answer.

2/2 Simultaneously, the world I have known is falling apart. My mother is gravely ill and likely to pass away. My father is also getting old, and so are all my uncles and aunts. Soon, there won't be anyone to visit back home. Only the places will be left.

It saddens me that I'll probably never go on another car trip with my mother again. She's been admitted to a nursing home already.

I don't feel at home here and the home I used to know is disappearing. It's fightening.

1/2

Objectively speaking, my life is rapidly improving. I'm doing all the right things. Subjectively speaking, there is a sense that something is off.

I come from a small Arctic town 1300 km north-northeast of the city I've lived in for the past decade.

The older I get, the weirder it feels to be down here. I walk, talk and dress like a city person, but I also feel like I don't belong here, and that the culture of this city, albeit Norwegian, isn't my own.

@FiXato Well, thank you for not conforming to stereotypes, I guess. I was getting a little worried here. The world was getting a little too neat.

I bought a milk frother to keep at the office. When my boss saw it, he asked for a receipt so he could pay for it.

When the designers saw it, they asked if they could borrow it.

As for the techies? The only techie who seems to like lattes around here is me. The rest of them want black coffee.

Why are people so stereotypical? I mean, we're all individuals? Why doesn't a single one of the UNIX graybeards happen to like lattes? Why do all the designers insist on eating trendy foods?

Isn't it typical when reading articles about music that when you go and actually check out what the critic or music journalist is writing about, you don't agree with it at all? You see what made them describe it that way, but all the value judgements they made, which is what made the thing seem interesting (or not) in the first place, were off. You can't really write an interesting piece about music without being at least a litte bit subjective, and thus less informative to the reader.

ADHD medication 2/2

Why small and frequent doses?

Well...

If my blood concentration gets too low, it doesn't work. If it gets too high, there are too many side effects.

According to my plasma level simulator spreadsheet (which I have finally fine-tuned to the point where it always agrees with what I feel at any given half-hour of the day) I have to stay within a 12% range of blood levels to function optimally.

You can't get that kind of precision unless you take it every 1.5 - 2 hours.