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January 2024

X-ray confirms what I could have told them: my right hip has been totally destroyed by the inflammatory arthritis.

Severe narrowing of right-sided superior joint space with periarticular sclerosis, bone-on-bone articulation, subchondral cystic changes and osteophytic lipping.

I have to speak to the retentions team for a service I no longer want mid-morning. I am rubbish at these calls. I just want to cancel, OK? Problem is: you say it's price, they lower the price. You say you don't need it, they suggest ways you do. Etc. I find it all v awkward.

The economics of publishing prestige work against the economics of scale. Prestige is conditioned by scarcity of entry - how hard it is to get in as an author - which means that such presses have to publish comparatively little, which works against them in real-world economics.

Today I will travel to London for an important rheumatology appointment. I've had several falls now with my hip and need to discuss a replacement. Dreading hearing the wait time 🙁

/MAESTRO/ was an interesting film, but it had two difficult flaws for me. 1. the sound mixing was atrocious. I often have subtitles on but really needed them 100% in this film. 2. Half-way through, Bradley Cooper suddenly developed an accent that sounded like he had a bad cold.

Of course, the real travesty of that infamous University Challenge question is that drum and bass is a totally correct answer. Even if we do need jungle, I'm afraid.

Lol. I loaded our 900GB Crossref DOI SQLite database into @simonw's Datasette tool for some initial exploratory work. Initial load was a little slow, but it handles the indexed fields very well indeed.

Today features my first conference talk of the year. Speaking to the British Association of American Studies about the changing academic publication landscape and digital practices.

I've come to a new mental imaginative context for my dialysis - it's my Borg regeneration alcove. Janeway: "you'll have to spend several hours each day regenerating". Me: "it's me!"

The basic thing I learned about SQLite over the past two weeks is: if you have a nearly 1TB-size database, and use a text field for a PRIMARY KEY, with many, many, many similar keys, it will crash your program with a hard abort on out of memory errors.

Spending the afternoon tracking down a nasty intermittent bug in the Crossref Labs API annotation system. Time for a cuppa while the test of my fix runs.

I cope relatively well with the psychology of long-term illness. I am fortunate in that. Or so it seems. But I also frequently awake screaming with nightmares about dying in awful pain or having a haemodialysis accident. Brave faces, performed when waking, to myself and others.

Next up is Dark Archives by Megan Rosenbloom - an investigation into anthropodermic bibliopegy - the binding of books in human skin

A fun diversion. Ultimately, this book is about bodily consent, particularly post-mortem consent.

So, when Rust runs out of memory, it calls abort(3) rather than any kind of stack unwinding panic. This is causing me no end of trouble in tracking down _where_ and _why_ it's running out of memory.

OK, I *think* I've found the cause. I believe my program is exhausting the disk sync backlog cache ("dirty" in memproc).

Day 2 of arm butchery is about to begin. Another exciting installment of trying to insert needles so big that they need their own anaesthetic.

Generative AI does somewhat change the process of learning a new programming language for the better - even the more challenging ones like Rust. Generated suggestions help you to discover syntax that you otherwise might have missed.

The Rust programming language pretty much has a learning cliff. Its concept of ownership and the borrow checker are very clever but also very confusing to new coders. The explicit type conversion system is also a total menace. Inter-thread object passing: also a pain.

Rats.

Fistula can't be used today. They tried with 4 large needles and I look like a butcher's block of bruising.

They say this isn't unexpected though. The fistula will now reharden and we'll try again on Friday. Meanwhile, dialysis is underway.

Tomorrow begins the next stage in my dialysis training. I will return to hospital to learn how to needle the mega-vein (fistula) in my arm. I am not looking forward to this. The needles are very large and while I already inject myself subcutaneously, this is a different game.

But it will mean that I can get rid of the tubes in my chest, which are an infection risk and also stop me having a proper shower!