Endgame Viable

Contents

Early Morning

I’m up very early again this morning. I got a new memory foam cervical neck pillow which I used for the first time last night and it seemed to work well, but I woke up about 4 feeling like I’d had a full night’s rest and I was ready to rock the day.

Earlier in my life I struggled with getting good sleep but I’m generally on the other side of that. I have a decent mattress now which I think helps tremendously, and a fairly routine sleep schedule, which I also think helps.

One thing I still struggle with, though, is finding good pillows. Every time I think I find a good one, it turns out it only works for a short time before I’m back to a plain old ordinary pillow.

Anyway, the issue with my right thumb and arm seems to have plateaued, for which I’m grateful. It makes me less anxious that something is spiraling out of control.

I’ve adapted to the lack of thumb dexterity, and do more things left-handed. If I’m careful to avoid stretching my right arm out in certain ways, the pain is minimal. I’m still taking Tylenol on a fairly regular basis, though. I’m trying to do back and neck stretches and exercises I’ve done in that past to see if that will help any, but so far nada. Just waiting on the MRI Sunday.

I’ve actually been “training” for lying in an MRI position. I think I mentioned before that lying flat on my back is pretty uncomfortable, so I’ve been practicing that by lying on the floor once or twice a day in the hope that my neck muscles in particular will get used to it before my upcoming neck and brain MRIs. The things you have to do when you get old.

Blaugust Eve

It occurred to me that I hadn’t made a post yet with the obligatory Blaugust 2026 header, so I thought I would do one this morning, on this, the eve of tomorrow’s Blaugust starter gun. In my time zone, at least.

Kudos to whoever made that image. Was it Indiecator? I’ve credited it Indiecator so apologies if that’s incorrect. The transparency is cleverly designed so it seamlessly transforms from light mode to dark mode, a rarity in blog header images.

I didn’t make a Blaugust promotion post because frankly I assumed that my blog would be the very last place anyone would find out about Blaugust. Let’s just say I don’t have a thriving community of followers here. Most everyone I see in the comments would have already been aware of Blaugust long ago.

Zero Hour?

Speaking of time zones, when exactly is the zero hour for Blaugust? Is it 8/1 00:00:00 in your local time zone or is it 8/1 00:00:00 UTC?

I’m a professional software developer and that kind of ambiguous date issue is something that I deal with on a daily basis. For the purposes of my own sanity, I will go with what I have to assume is the only true and correct answer, which is 00:00:00 UTC.

If it’s 00:00:00 in your local time zone, that would make counting posts considerably more difficult.

In any case, I’m of the opinion that most of the administrative effort of Blaugust should be off-loaded to the participants, so that the organizers don’t have to do a lot of math at the end of the event. Things are hard enough in this world without adding math. Participants can self-report the number of posts they did at the end. That makes any ambiguous zero hour timing a moot point. It’s not like there’s going to be a Congressional investigation into the accuracy of these things anyway.

Python Refactoring

Yesterday I continued refactoring my video processing python scripts with Antigravity assistance. This time I was working to clean up all the free-for-all dicts with strictly typed data classes.

I always call python code “scripts” because I fundamentally don’t believe python is a very good language for anything but scripting. It’s not a language I would turn to for e.g. service application development, though unfortunately where I work that seems to be a minority opinion.

One thing that bothers me about python is that every single python repo I encounter has a completely different strategy for package management and linting. There seems to be roughly seventeen different methods for doing those things. I greatly prefer using languages where there is one package manager and one linting tool, like Golang.

Not much else to talk about. Good luck with Blaugust everyone!