Reality check

Short life update and what happened in the last ten days or so.

Human malware

I felt very ill on the last Sunday. The day ended with me going to bed very early and waking up during the night. I noticed that my body temperature was higher than normal, but I ignored it. Fast forward few hours, and things got much worse.

Not only was I having a really bad headache, but I was also having a 38.9°C fever. After not being able to think clearly and endure the pain, like I often do, I took some medication and things got slightly easier to handle. This repeated for two days, which had me resting in bed the entire time.

Whether or not this was COVID-19, which I think it was, is hard to tell for certain. My relative, that was the first one to go through similar symptoms, didn’t get tested. The timeline and many symptoms match, so I can only assume at this point.

I’m not sure if it’s too late now to do a test, but regardless I’ll be continuing with self-isolation. It’s interesting how I had next to no social interaction, yet I was likely infected by close family members that also did their best to keep themselves protected.

In the end, I’ve learned a lot from the experience. The lack of responsibility is really, really awful. Looking at statistics for third wave in my country is best described as horrifying, if the reported numbers are actually real.

Hardware failure

As I was recovering from whatever happened, I was mostly in bed because it was hard to sit and/or focus for more than 15 minutes. That confused me a lot.

Since I have a laptop for university, I’ve been playing around with my OS/Editor configurations while in bed, but this was the first time in over two years that I took this long of a break.

Anyhow, on Friday I was able to do some work for one of my userstyles. It didn’t last for very long, but at least I was back at it after a little pause.

I planned to do more work for the said userstyle on Saturday. It sort of went according to plans until the evening: my graphics card failed on me. This is something that was anticipated, but the timing is certainly something else.

After doing a tiny amount of troubleshooting, I went to rest and left more troubleshooting for Sunday. Unfortunately, the more troubleshooting I did, the more I realized that the damage is permanent. There are artifacts on my monitors during boot sequence, and the monitors turn off completely during loading screen, as well as various other things.

There’s not much to say here. I wanted to get a new graphics card because this one gave me multiple headaches over the last few months due to similar problems: monitors turning off at random, display server crashing entire system, screens freezing during long/intense video playback, etc.

The plan

Well, it will take some time until I’m able to get my workstation back up and running. In the meantime, I’ll be working on my OS/Editor configurations that I neglected for so very long. That’s pretty much all I can do right now.

Lately I’ve been also thinking about time. A lot, actually. I’ve come to realization that I’ve been putting off other things in order to work on my open-source projects. It’s just a hobby of mine, and it’s kinda enjoyable, but it barely brings me any value these days. Long-term, the future doesn’t look all that bright.

I’ve been also looking for an internship or a junior position in programming, system administration, or DevOps. I haven’t had any luck at all, so I’ll be taking the necessary steps to get a job after my workstation is fixed.

That will also be the point of no return for my userstyles: I’m looking forward to finishing color generator and stepping aside, though I will likely be the one doing maintenance releases. If you’d like to become a maintainer, do let me know because any and all help will be very appreciated.

Thanks for reading, and please stay safe out there.