A fun new symptom

I got a much better night’s sleep last night, with the throat being a lot less sore, and more nose being less clogged. But I woke up a few times with coughing fits still.

But there’s a new problem. Yesterday I noticed my right eye was feeling a bit sore, and looking a bit bloodshot, which I figured was just tiredness. But this morning it was obvious that it was some sort of eye infection, a lot worse, with puffiness around the eye, and the left eye was starting to show the same thing.

My normal GP isn’t open on Sundays. I didn’t want to wait any longer than absolutely necessary, so I searched around for other options, and found a medical centre not far away that was open on Sundays. They had walk-in appointments without needing to book ahead, so I went over there as soon as I’d finished breakfast and my wife returned home after walking Scully. They said it would be about an hour wait to see a doctor, but it was more like 90 minutes. The doctor I saw confirmed my suspicions of an eye infection and prescribed me antibiotic eye drops, which I picked up from a nearby pharmacy on the way back home.

Apart from that, my throat and sinuses are improving, and I felt like I could return to teaching ethics classes online. I had three this afternoon/evening, picking up the Advertising topic for younger kids and The End of The World for the older ones. I managed the first two okay, but was starting to cough considerably during the third one, and had to mute myself and cough it out a few times during the class.

Oh, another entry in the things that broke when my webhost upgraded from PHP 7.4 to 8.1: mezzacotta. The auto-generated comic code was already broken by a previous webhost upgrade, and despite spending days trying to debug it I could never get it working again. But now this upgrade has messed up the underlying WordPress installation as well. I think it’s time to throw in the towel and declare that the old mezzacotta auto-generated comic is dead, and won’t be resurrected. When I have time, I’ll probably just uninstall the WordPress and replace it with a static page linking to the mezzacotta subsites.

This shows an important difference between making traditional style static comic images, versus being clever and making programmatic comics. It was fun while it lasted.

That was pretty much my day, really.

New content today:

Announcing mezzacotta Café v2.0

It’s Wednesday, Ethics teaching day. I walked to the school, taught my class, and walked home – a total walk of 8 kilometres. Well, I took a slightly indirect route home because it’s a more pleasant walk than along the main road.

Back home, I did a bunch of work for the ISO Photography standards committee that I’m still on. I started on this committee back with my old job at Canon Information Systems Research Australia. When the company decided to close down, I decided to continue working on the committee, since it’s a good way to keep up with professional photographic technology research, and I wanted to make sure Australia maintained its role in the international committee. Anyway, I had a bunch of documents to go through, so that took some time.

Then I spent time solving puzzles from the 2019 MUMS Puzzle Hunt, which started today. I’m part of the team “mezzacotta” with some of my friends.

In between I worked on integrating HTML/CSS to make the new mezzacotta Café look nice. Here’s the old original version. And here’s the new updated version made with our new mezzacotta Random Generator technology. The new version began with the same vocabulary a few days ago, but has had a few new additions made to it already. And it looks nicer!