As I’ve said yesterday:
My software development activities are (now, officially and indefinitely) on hiatus.
The dictionary says:
hiatus | h???d?s | noun (plural hiatuses) [usually in singular] a pause or gap in a sequence, series, or process…
Let me tell you about the “why” first. Thanks to all of you who immediately asked if I’m OK, by the way.
Short answer: yes, I’m OK, though not as OK as in the past — but then, that’s to be expected, with all these anniversaries streaking by. Not helped at all by miscellaneous stresses originating in Real Life™. But: see below. ?
Longer answer: in the past several years, my eyes have been getting progressively worse, to the point that reading on paper now works only with excellent illumination. OK, paper is not something I have to do on a daily basis nowadays, but reading on a screen also no longer works at the — admittedly, very small — font sizes I was used to. Jacking up the font size worked up to a point but my coding habits call for a huge amount of text visible at the same time. Stopping work altogether to wait for an improvement has, retrospectively, killed all my momentum. (I’m still waiting for that improvement, unfortunately.) Also: see below…
Medical answer: during a trip to Bhutan (highly recommended!) in 2014 I suffered a posterior vitreous detachment in my right eye; no doubt due to day-long van trips over their highways-in-progress. A couple of months later, a beginning retinal detachment was fixed by laser surgery, and everything seemed OK for a time. However, visual contrast worsened until, in 2016, I had to have cataract surgery on both eyes; this was when I stopped working altogether, waiting for my eyeglass prescriptions to stabilise. While that took longer than expected, I also found that there seemed to be no combination of monitor brightness/contrast that made working longer periods tolerable. To make things worse, the vitreous detachment seems to have left a scar on the right retina, causing a macular pucker; surgery on that (a vitrectomy, yikes!) is now scheduled to happen before the end of this year. My eye surgeon assures me that should take care of everything… digits crossed!
Needless to say, all this has been somewhat disheartening, and — as far as coding and blogging are concerned — I seem to have joined the Procrastination Monks for a few more years.
In the meantime, other things have happened, some quite positive! Stand by for more news…
