Downtime

I woke up feeling awful today, and ended up taking the day off and staying in bed.  This was probably the wise choice; I'd spent the previous evening stumbled around, struggling with mundane tasks like talking to people, eating noodles and not dribbling out the side of my mouth.  When I get ill, even with something like a bad cold, I'm a menace to myself and those around me, so after five days of what sounded like a 40-a-day smoker's cough, it was time to isolate myself.
So I stayed in the apartment most of the day, lying on the sofa or on the bed, attempting to not do anything to slow down my recovery.  I listlessly read a motorcycling magazine, and when that was done, ventured over to see the doctor, who diagnosed a slight infection and gave me five different kinds of medicine to take.  There's antibiotics, and there's anti-phlegm pills, and there's painkillers, and there's anti-inflammatories, and there's a bottle of suspicious brown cough syrup that's full of codeine and will likely leave me on my back for another week if I drink it.

My girlfriend has had the codiene brown sauce of delight and says that it gave her night terrors where she thought somebody was climbing out of her closet.  We've only got a precarious Ikea wardrobe that hasn't been properly assembled, so if I had hallucinations and got in a fight with our furniture, it wouldn't be a very happy ending.  Maybe I'll just stick to the antibiotics and eating 'soft food'.

Having the day to do nothing should have left me with lots of opportunity to improve myself, but I spent most of it comatose, or trying to hack together a widget for Blogger.  I managed it eventually, but the documentation Google give is somewhat frustrating; you'll get one or two examples that don't do what you want, a mass of references that are very, very dry, and ... and nothing else.  I now have a gibberish generator which does roughly what I want, but that doesn't play nicely with Firefox (the page never stops loading) or Chrome (it's invisible).  But it works just fine and dandy in Internet Explorer.  So much for Microsoft always being the evil one.

More positively, I've got a way to submit tweets to Twitter from the command line in linux.

And I've got a random language generator that's beginning to take shape.  Perhaps you can see what's coming...