Musings of a network engineer
Been a while since my last blog. Life has certainly kept me busy, 3 kids, ages 5, 8 and 9, full-time job, a merger at work into another company and various other things have taken my time.
In mid July this year that changed abruptly. We were travelling north to visit my mothers side of the family and spend some time in our summer cottage, as we do yearly, and this time all 3 boys and my wife were joining me on the trip. Mid-way we were involved in a head-on collision with a car that suddenly swerved into our lane. Things happened so fast I didn't even have time to react and as a result the car was totalled, we were airlifted to hospital and the time since then has been filled with very slow recovery from post concussion symptoms, whiplash and an injury to my foot that was sustained in the accident.
There have been days where it feels like the progress is backwards rather than forwards, but things are slowly on the mend. I have half-decent days now and I have bad days, I'm going into full-time recovery at a health clinic near Reykjavík in December and early January which involves daily physio, exercises and long walks which I'm sure will do me a world of good and get me to a point where I can return to work, at reduced capacity to start with, and slowly working my way towards being fit for a full-day of work again
It took me a while to realise this, but this thing is a marathon, not a sprint, I don't intend to let this beat me, but I also have to realise that I have to pace myself and set realistic goals and expectations. Thankfully work has been very patient with me and I'm on extended sick leave while I work on getting myself back, that's certainly not something that can be taken for granted and I'm very appreciative of all the support and help I've gotten from there.
To start with all I could realistically do was lie in bed on painkillers and watch something mindless on television. I'm still not able to play any sort of fast paced game, nothing where I have to focus on something on a fast moving background, it just makes me nauseous and gaming at the moment doesn't bring me the same joy it did, I'm sure that will come back, but it's lacking at the moment.
I gave up streaming while this is going on, I have neither the patience nor the ability at this point in time to be able to do that and after watching my favourite shows again and a long backlog of YouTube videos I actively started trying to find some realistic stuff to work on to keep my brain from rotting and keep some semblance of sanity.
When I'm able to focus and the pain is managed, I've been programming in Assembly or Python, those moments generally don't last for very long yet and I tire quickly, but I do enjoy being able to focus my brain on something, even if it's only for a while.
When things aren't as good but not awful enough to take me to bed, I've been working on building reference pages, for myself, and possibly others, using HTML, Bootstrap and a little custom CSS/JS, something which doesn't require much thinking, something I can easily go away from and return to later.
None of these things are done under any sort of pressure, nothing needs to be turned in, there are no deadlines, and if things don't work correctly, that's fine. That's the sort of stuff I can do now. I've been juggling a few of these projects, when I got bored of something, I move on, and then come back to it, or I don't, that's the advantage of not actually having to do something, but rather just doing it for the sake of keeping yourself occupied.
The first completed project is my z80 reference page. I've been wanting to get into z80 assembly for a project I've been working on in my spare time, and I was lacking a single page I could use as a reference. I tend to code with a reference page open, something I've gotten used to doing with 6502 and 68k assembly, and I didn't find one for z80 that fit into my way of working, so I built my own, you can find that below
My z80 reference pageMeanwhile I'm also working on some other reference things, and some programming projects, some of them might get completed, others not, I'll post them here if I think they're useful.
Sigurbjörn