dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

#health Articles


Brain fog

The brain fog is real. You know that feeling, when you have a cold or the flue, and aside from the incessant sniffling (or just total lack of air), you are aware that you are a magnitude less clever than your regular self? I call that brain fog. Fog messes …
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Reading challenge: a start

I have a problem. I have too many hobbies. Thankfully, that's actually a pretty good problem to have, and it is not even the actual issue. The matter at hand is the limited time in a typical day. This is nothing new, but it provides certain... challenges when wanting to …
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Why You Should Stop Reading News

News is, by definition, something that doesn’t last. It exists for only a moment before it changes. As news has become easier to distribute and cheaper to produce, the quality has decreased, and the quantity has increased, making it nearly impossible to find the signal in the noise. So …
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Attention attenti-oh look, shiny

I have things to say about our attention spans, about how they are getting influenced by certain things, but I can't currently focus on typing a blog post so I guess it will be done later. Adds to todo list

I run on solar energy

The dark days of the year I'm always reminded by my body that I really prefer brighter days over the gloomy ones. I don't mind the dark per se, but my energy level goes down noticeably when the gloom continues for too long. A day with sun really helps my …
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Fall dawn in 2021

One of the ways I am attempting to keep my sanity, is by taking morning walks. Those walks serve both as some light exercise when working from home, and as a way of waking up and resetting my head by submitting myself to the fractals of nature, found in the …
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Get dressed to work

Draft has been collecting dust for a while, but I'd like to present you this from the COVID archives. This is a bit of an odd one. I normally do not write or even talk much about clothing, but something jumped to me: the sheer amount of sweatpants I notice …

Morning walks

Morning walks are my way of staying sane(ish) in these times. Good for recharging and stretching the legs, starting the day by waking up with some fresh air in my face, maybe even some sun, or - even better - a lovely blanket of fog.
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In need of recharging

It's easy to have the blues and be out of energy in these times. Being confined to our homes, changing our ways and lives; not all bad, but a challenge to juggle young kids, work from home and other things. On the other hand, one might find more free time …
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Hello 2021

The plague year 2020 has passed. It has been a wild ride, and not all of it bad. Working from home want pretty well, I upgraded my nerdcave quite a bit in the progress, cleaning up a lot of the mess of stuff I assembled there, and even started a …

Seventeen years of dammIT

Well, that experiment obviously didn't work out as planned. I'm not even going to pretend I posted something in between the Wintergatan link and this post1, but I am going to celebrate this little platform of mine. It has been serving me for seventeen years now, and my use …

Goodbye grandma

Today the sad news of the passing of my second grandma didn't quite hit me like a brick - she already wasn't going well - but it brought home the reality of this plague year again. Her husband - grandpa - passed away around the start of this whole circus in February of this …

Morning stroll through frozen fog

This morning I took a stroll through a park nearby in the kind of weather that is on my little list of favourites: foggy (and cold). The cold part became a hindrance when my fingers started freezing taking pictures, but it sure was refreshing. Swan eating in freezing water Colour …
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Tired, or not enough time

So I'm chronically tired for a while now. It is mainly my own fault, not going to bed early enough. This has a whole spectrum of reasons, some of which hobby-related (evenings are for doing stuff, right?), others kids-related ("go to sleep already"), and there are work emergencies that occur …

Running keeps me sane

I tend to use computers a lot. This leads to having a not-so-great posture, to limbs that could use a bit more variety of movements, and a mind that's getting foggier the more things needing to be done. Years back, I found out that running (jogging) is not as bad …

December 2020 blog spree

Today I had a conversation with an internet friend of mine (on Riot^H^H^H^HElement), and they confessed hating to blog. To me, that was interesting, as apparently they felt a pressure to write, but would very much prefer not to. Which I think is totally sane …

Uncluttering my wife's brain

I am digitally pretty well organised. I keep notes in places I can actually find them back, I use proper ways of keeping the codebases and projects I work on maintainable not only for myself, but for others (quite a fascinating thought), photo archives are sorted by date, subject, I …

COVID-19: day 3 of working from home

We live in interesting times. Countries are in a situation they have not been for multiple decades, if at all. Lots of people will not even remember the last time a situation like this happened. Our prime minister had a historic speech on television (a good one, in my opinion …

Battling tiredness with drugs

It might be the time of the year, with its short days and long, dark nights, it might be kids causing us to pull our hair out, taking their emotional toll and sipping energy, and work is also a big energy sink (thankfully mostly a gratifying one), but I have …
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Sweet Sixteen

Today this little web corner has existed for sixteen years. Funny thing is that 'sixteen years' does not even sound that long anymore in my ears, while it is enough for a newborn to grow into a person nearing maturity. While I would not say this weblog is really mature …
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