Since Our Last Episode…

On By JohnIn health, tbiLeave a comment

…a great deal has happened. I’ve been to the ER, twice, with an unexplained fever, which absolutely kicked my ass. One easily overlooked and quite small detail led to a few more medical questions, then a few more CT scans and a rather long drive (hey, it’s cheaper than a helicopter flight) to Wenatchee and… I’d be admitted for a week for a rather aggressive treatment of a liver-abscess, which was likely suffered as an extra injury from the fall and had gone almost completely unnoticed until it was nearly too late.

Yes, really, almost too late.

I’m home now, but there’s likely another several weeks of antibiotics an the horizon. On the plus side, I’ve seen the imagery from the latest CT scan and everything else inside appears healthy — except that damned liver. Treatable? Probably. Time-consuming? Yep. It’ll take several months to recover from just the liver injury.

Oh, also, if you’re looking for “the” weight loss program, perhaps I can recommend an ungraceful fall from about 4m high including a liver injury at impact. I’ve lost 12 lbs in about 3 weeks.

On second thought, skip the high altitude fall, the brain injury, and other assorted blunt force trauma to soft tissues.

There are far more effective and healthier ways to lose a few pounds.

…but what do you DO?

On By JohnIn workLeave a comment

While I’ve spent pretty much the entirety of the last five or six months recovering and coping with my severe TBI, I sometimes have questions from people, “…but what do you do for a living?”

[I was a Principal Operations Engineer for Pearson. We were pioneering a legacy integration with an established containerization concept with modern/updated technologies like Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS. There are others of course. And I’d love to talk about the visions we’d had for the future of learning.

In fact, there’s also a Kubernetes case study outlining the figures of how we’ve integrated the Kubernetes orchestration concepts. Give it a read over if you’re curious about where we were.

While I was a principal engineer and lead site reliability engineer, I’m now an architect overseeing the same project sharing the responsibility with Ben, trying to bring our visions into clearer focus for ourselves, our team, Pearson, and the world.] [why the redaction, 2022-06-18]

Modern Problems

On By JohnIn annoying, life, workLeave a comment

So, I’m one of those people with a few credit cards: debit and credit accounts, personal and joint, plus business. Actually, eight of them. I only use two of them regularly…because eight is too much liability to walk around with.

The ones I use, I call “Personal” for regular use and “Business” for obvious reasons.

I also embrace modern technologies and use an iPhone and Apple Watch on which I’ve synchronized those cards with the Wallet app – plus Apple Pay. So that’s three accounts that are at my fingertips for easy use when they’re needed, without putting others at risk unless I intentionally take them out of the desk when needed.

Anyway, I’m shopping online the other day and notice that the proprietor has also added the option to use Apple Pay, so I click through.

After a bit of confusion about the shipping address and email address – they’re correct; still entirely unchanged, in fact, and I only clicked on Save – things processed just fine.

It wasn’t until a few hours later that I received an alert from one of my corporate card saying a purchase was approved. Hmm… I haven’t been on a trip recently… and that was meant to be on my personal card.

What’d I miss?

Turns out that with my state of somewhat unstable manual dexterity, I must’ve swiped on my Apple Watch, and switched to a different payment card.

Perhaps there will be an accessibility option for iOS/Watch/touch devices where we can tune the sensitivity of things like touch/drag/tap to accommodate those whose finger usage isn’t quite perfect.

Maybe some periodic validation of information with computer users when things don’t look quite right. We also need to find out why Apple Pay thinks “United States” doesn’t equal “United States”.

Frustration N+x

On By JohnIn interesting, sociologyLeave a comment

I go out in public every now and again — increasingly in the last few days. One thing I’ve noticed is that either people are more attracted to me in general; or I’ve become more approachable. Or society itself has changed.

The really frustrating thing is that I haven’t the outward appearance of anyone who’s ill or injured or infirm. I look exactly as I always have. No, it’s not my responsibility to explain to everyone; people will need to learn that not everyone looks like their expectations.

TBI Challenge The n-th

On By JohnIn health, tbiLeave a comment

Hearing issues.

Not hearing loss, mind you. But sensitivity to sound along with the inability to distinguish direction of certain sounds.

When I awoke, my hearing was simply gone, which was easy to explain. I couldn’t hear. People understood that.

Yes, it was problem enough. And in a few weeks it became manageable for a time while the problem evolved.

Somewhat later–a few days or weeks–it shifted to the point that I could perceive sounds. I think I then likened it to sounds being somewhat overdriven. The perception was that certain frequencies might be overdriven and yet others were normal, yet difficult to perceive because they’re bracketed by things overdriven.  This, of course, increases difficulty in consciously (subconsciously?) separating sounds for comprehension.

I still lack the ability to readily discern the origin of sounds. Yes, I know the birds are chirping. Yes, I know it’s in the direction of outside. Yes, I know there are loads of them.

But nearby voices, that I know to be at conversational distances, aren’t clear –  drowned out entirely by by background sounds of hundreds of birds, or loads of neighbor dogs barking, or passing trucks and machinery.

This isn’t a problem with my ears.

Not at all – the problem started, both left and right, as I recall – simultaneously. And I was effectively unconscious at the time.

This is a brain problem with interpretation of input data; it’s absolutely not an issue with the inner, middle, or outer ear.