davidgillon | The joys of midnight cold turkey (Reply)

I deliberately delayed renewing my painkiller patch this week (it was due Friday evening) as one of the side-effects was making itself felt and I figured a couple of days without would reset things. That does seem to have worked, but as it's an opioid with a half-life you need to give it some time to work its way out of your system, and how long that takes is slightly variable, for me at least. I could probably have renewed the patch on Sunday, but deliberately left it until I was clearly getting withdrawal symptoms. That was a mistake, normally I just feel a little flu-ey, but last night I got major cold turkey symptoms just as I went to bed. Itching, aching, nausea/dizziness, the works. It took me a while to realise what was going on, aching joints aren't exactly unusual and itching crops up from time to time, and I put the nausea/dizziness down to the whisky I'd had just before bed. But finally, about 3AM, I realised what was going on.

But of course even after the new patch is on it takes a while for the opioid to build back up to a functional dosage in the body. So there I was at 4AM throwing everything in the kitchen onto a plate and watching youtube videos to distract myself while waiting for things to settle. I think I finally got to sleep sometime after 5AM. I was mostly okay when I woke up, just tired and a touch headachey, but I think I'm going to excuse myself from adulting for the day.

On a completely different topic, can I just note that "Missing '>' on line 2541" is not a particularly helpful error message when every line in the XML file has a ">" and you don't have an editor that'll take you to specific line numbers* There was no way I was pressing down-arrow 2541 times! (And I'm not sure it was counting blank lines).

Yes, I'm hacking game XML files again, or rather someone else's mod files.

Fortunately I found with a little bit of experimentation that if I opened the file in Firefox it would show the entire line with the error, not just report it. That made the line remarkably easier to find, and one missing ">" and a couple of extra "_" in a variable name was a lot fewer errors than I was expecting even if it's really simple stuff.

* Actually I think I do, but I'm damned if I can remember what it's called.