When tech and chocolate meet ....

And a bit more too.

I think this week at work showed that last week's chill time let me recover a fair bit of the energy that's been lacking lately. I'm not back up at the level I should be .... but I do have more energy than I had before.

I was a bit worried this week actually because my usual pattern is to heal reasonably over a long time ... and then reset that healing very quickly. And I do have problems with the office at work due to the atmospherics there (it's a very dry atmosphere, more people than me have problems with it). My outsides are doing much better in general, although the healing isn't finished yet and I still attack the healing bits out of just wanting to remove the imperfections.

I think I'm doing better at resisting that. Hopefully it won't be long. It wouldn't be quick enough to support playing cricket, as the April 1st post wishfully looked for. Besides, I have too much pain in my right hip and my reactions are not nearly good enough any more.

About those reactions ....

I got a little scared reading a post on the News about a judo player. She'd been suffering really bad symptoms from repeated head injuries incurred while doing the judo. Her symptoms were worse than mine, with tunnel vision joining the slowed reactions. Different head injuries are different. I get the odd dizzy spell with mine plus my memory is still garbage compared to what it was. But that slowed reactions was a curious correlation. My memory problems started with the Nose Job incident in 2005 but my reactions were ok until I almost ate a cricket ball in ... 2011 ?

That was my last year and the big warning signs from it were 3 dropped catches due to just not reacting fast enough. My hands were ready and in position to take the catch, I saw the ball all the way in but ... I just missed the moment to cushion the ball into my hands. Ok. That's not the whole story ... the one catch I took didn't involve reactions (it was a bob up into the air gentle one) and one of the drops was when my feet literally went out from underneath me due to the ground conditions ! Haha. Plant feet for catch, next thing I know I'm on my bum watching the ball sail above my head.

Oops.

No - the moment for me to be enjoying playing the cricket is past now. Those reactions are too slow, the hip is too far gone and the shoulder was most definitely too damaged !

I do get a little worried though sometimes. Relieved maybe. Definitely thinking I am lucky to have avoided more serious injuries with the running around. I was hit on the head without a helmet twice, which has had long term effects but pretty light ones. Especially compared to the ongoing seclusion of Michael Schumacher, who is still very unwell after bouncing his head off a rock while skiing. (A cricket ball is a different shape but is just as hard as a rock !)

Take head injuries seriously ! If you get a bump on the head that affects your consciousness, even just to the limited extent of getting headaches, see a doctor ! Get checked out. There may be more going on than you know about. I wasn't aware of my memory being damaged, I figured that out after. I didn't connect slowed reactions with the last head injury, I just thought that was old age.

Wait. Chocolate and technology.

When I went up to the Mall on Tuesday evening, I came away with a Thorntons Easter Egg. They're on sale now until the stocks run out. These are £7 250g eggs for £2.50. Bargain ! Or 3 for £5. When I finished it last night, I was immediately sad and regretful that I hadn't taken advantage of the 3 for £5 so I'd have two more.

What does this have to do with technology I hear you wonder ...

I break up my Easter Eggs by dropping them from a suitable height onto a suitably hard surface. Lately, that's my computer desk and the tray the keyboard sits on.

Pick up egg;
Drop egg;
Ponder why the youtube video I was watching went on pause;
Investigate dropping the egg again (it was too solid to break on just one dropping).

Yep. The shock of the egg was activating the microswitches in my keyboard, which made the video pause.

At some point, I must research this .... I need to have something like Notepad open to investigate this shock thing some more. What mysteries will my keyboard write when subjected to more Egg Dropping Shocks ?

I thought I should check this out more. Do research.

And it is for these purposes of research that 3 more Thorntons eggs (other eggs are/were! available but they are nowhere near as solid as what Thorntons do) escaped from town with me today. I'll check that out at some point. Munching my dinner at the moment and I have Mini Eggs to consume as well. Mini Eggs are life.

Oh and I'm also looking into acquiring more tech.

Desktop upgrade - which will be almost certainly to AMD's new Ryzen chip. It'll be either a Ryzen 5 with 6 cpu cores or an Intel i5-Kaby Lake processor. The upgrade would go into a new box with 16GB of memory but would harvest as much as possible from my current machine.

Laptop change - I'm thinking more seriously about this as issues start to mount with my Macbook Air. It's a late 2013 model, so it owes me more life but .... the wifi is ok for home .... but can't support streaming Sky Sports at my mum and dad's place. However, the laptop is how I run my music and I have a lot of investigating to do there before I make any jumps. I'll want something that supports audio streaming to my hifi (might switch to Bluetooth) and the Party Shuffle feature which is the reason why I hang onto iTunes 10.7. Oh and I want it to sync music with either my Android phone or my old iPhone.

Oh and that laptop might well be running Linux after I lose patience with Apple's attitude to customers (you don't own what you buy from Apple, they think you're effectively leasing it) and Microsoft's Creators Update on Windows 10 is showing worrying signs that Microsoft is going the same way. Stability of Windows 10 was good when it came out but .... it's showing bad signs that emergent bugs might be coming in.

Linux is the alternative but there are many software compatibility issues with it.

We shall see !

In the meantime, I am curious as to what masterpiece may emerge from my keyboard when I next subject it to the shock of an Easter Egg bouncing on its tray.