Rick's b.log - entry 2018/03/10

Is this what depression is?

A few weeks back, I caught a cold. No big deal, but it was the sort of cold that decided to trade the usual snotty nose for an exploded sinus (translation: really nasty headaches). This coming on top of a spell of particularly cold weather, a general feeling of malaise, and - of course - the knowing sod all about my future "as a European" thanks to the never-ending flow of bullshit and contra-bullshit from Westminster. So I'd go to work and do my job mostly on auto-pilot, a state somewhere between zombie and dead. I'd come home, go sit on my bed, and pretty much just stare at the wall. A little later I'd think "this sucks, I ought to make something to eat" and realise that it was half ten at night. I'd been doing nothing at all for some four hours.

At the end of February, another cold spell came along. A really serious dose of cold, and with it some snow. Mom looked out the window and said "I'm not driving in that". I phoned up work and said "mom's not driving in that". Then I went back to bed.
And slept the entire day.

I'm feeling better now, thankfully. There are still problems (Rees-Mogg being one of them), but I feel more like doing stuff. I don't know what that was that was going on earlier. Maybe something between melancholia and an existential crisis? I don't know. It was certainly unpleasant.

So in response I've been throwing myself into things that I'm supposed to find more pleasurable. It turned out that just afterwards my Manga reader had started failing as the host had switched to use SSL and my fetcher only dealt with plain HTTP fetches. Fixing that was an interesting learning exercise, but thankfully the RISC OS community has the SecureSockets module from R-Comp so it can be done programatically. It isn't actually that hard, you basically need to establish the physical socket connection and then pass everything through the SSL interface. The harder part is that the responses are a opaque series of mostly unknown result codes. The API doesn't define them, and the SSL module is 869K so I don't fancy looking through the source to try to work out what the responses mean.
Well, after several revisions and ideas, I've finally released a beta version 0.20 which will hopefully work reliably and well, just as before.

I have also entirely designed and created a new application. I'm testing it now and it looks good. More info soon - I'm awaiting a name allocation from ROOL.

I've also eaten obscene numbers of innocent little Maltesers. Unfortunately France doesn't really do "comfort food" because I don't like Nutella, I'm not big on ice cream, and most of the things I've want to pig out on to feel better are fairly uniquely British. Beef stew and dumplings? Lamb hotpot? Apple pie (with a lid and NO rind)? A decent fluffy Victoria sponge and not those awful bricks that the French try to pass off as "gateau". Oh, and for a country that seems obsessed with sticking garlic in just about everything, there's not one single solitary Chicken Kiev in any of the three major supermarkets around here. And as for biscuits - the local delicacy is the "palette" (palet?), a hard, round, semi-burnt offering that is probably only edible if dunked into coffee. What the hell, France? I bet you could make a wicked Garibaldi if you put your mind to it......
So, Maltesers it is.

Anyway - if you have sent me an email and had no reply, or if you were expecting some articles on my blog last month - this is why.

I'm not going to talk about May's incoherence, or Trump's desire to trigger a global trade war for the lulz; or I'd become proper depressed. What I will say is that it seems that Mr. Tusk and the EU27 are losing their patience as much as is diplomatically permitted. They have my backing, because on one side is rationality and common sense, on the other side is Britain. The first three questions have still not been resolved, the negotiations are supposed to conclude within months, and still May/Mogg contradict each other and Davis doesn't bother to turn up to meetings.
It's going to be a rude awakening, that Britain no longer owns all the pink bits on the maps, and being colonial bullies just doesn't cut it any more.
This week came the EU's assertion that London will likely lose the financial services by virtue of the bloody obvious factors of no longer being in the EU nor intending to follow any EU regulatory bodies whatsoever - what right does Britain have to think that it will have anything more to do with Europe's finances? Of course, you can imagine how the Telegraph, Mail, and Express reacted to this. Foaming at the mouth like rabid babies, along with their equally head-in-their-asses commentors following the same stupid rhetoric. Yup, it's going to be a rude awakening.

I took a randomly chosen personality test a few days ago. I'm an introvert. Gee, who would have guessed? The most memorable thing was the end of the test had optional questions to help refine the test. You know, age group, ethicity, gender... The gender had three options: Male, Female, Other.

Hmmm...

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Gavin Wraith, 11th March 2018, 08:44

Glad you are feeling better. We all underestimate the power of our bodies to alter our mood. It is understandable, as it is a scary topic, and our illusion of invulnerability is quite useful. It tends to wane with age. As for the affairs of the wider world, it shows that the solar system is passing through a dense cloud of silliness; perhaps that is what dark matter is?

Gavin Wraith, 11th March 2018, 13:01

'Gender' was solely a grammatical term when I was young. Only words had a gender. People had a sex. Ho hum language changes. Nobody said different to, until recently, only different from. But then my grandmother pronounced soldier as sojer, girl as gel, waistcoat as weskit.

Zerosquare, 11th March 2018, 20:43

I don't know why, but "winter blues" seems especially bad this year ; a handful of my friends have reported similar symptoms at around the same time.

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