While I was making other plans, pars tres

A day or so after the not-so-thrilling last installment of my medical troubles (previous post), I get my hands on a knee scooter. Rented from a local pharmacy.

This is a big improvement over the wheelchair. I’m more mobile on it, and can pee standing up. If you think that last bit doesn’t matter, pray you never find out what an epic getting on and off a toilet seat is when you don’t have the use of your dominant leg.

Unfortunately, life is tradeoffs. You can fall off a knee scooter; I have, twice. No serious harm done, but that kind of thing is another increment of pain and exhaustion in a process with quite a sufficiency of those, thank you.

The ankle started hurting yesterday, seriously enough that I briefly considered actually taking a Percocet, but only when it was horizontal in bed. I think my sensory feed from that extremity must still be a bit disturbed by the aftermath of the nerve block, because it took me almost a day to figure out that the pain was due to external pressure from some of the support scaffolding in the ankle dressing.

I think those rigid parts have shifted around in an unhelpful way due to my crawling around and/or mounting the knee scooter. We’re going to try to get an appointment at the orthopedist’s office today to have someone there inspect and rewrap the thing.

Which means I’m going to have to deal with getting down (and later up) the steps in front of my house. Yeek! Neither scooter nor wheelchair is well adapted to this; I’ll probably have to bust out the kneepads and crawl again.

It hasn’t been all bad. Saturday a couple of my friends from our Friday night game group came over to boardgame with me; Xia: Legends of a Drift System. A good time was had by all.

My far friends on the net have come through as well. My Patreon feed is $356 per month thicker than it was a week ago. And there have been a bunch of one-off donations. John Carmack (yes, the John Carmack) sent $1000, for which I am humbly grateful.

SELF is definitely a scrub, but we’re making plans for me to video in my keynote. Topic change: I’m going to talk about infrastructure sustainability considered as a problem of load-bearing people, and the fact that the hacker culture doesn’t have any customs about how to support our old maintainer/warhorses or arrange an orderly succession when they die in harness.

I’ve actually been worrying about this problem for years, but mostly because of load-bearing people near me who weren’t me. Now my attention is seriously focused. :-)

I am able to work, and a good thing too or I’d be going bonkers. NTPsec is in a bit of a quiet period right now; we’ve delivered NTS, and the next big push I have in mind will have to wait until Go has a TLS 3.0 binding. So I’ve been making progress on the Go port of reposurgeon.

The Patreon is up to $1709 now. At $2000 it would cover monthly mortgage and bills; that’s starting to look attainable, which is a damn good thing given that I still have no clearer idea what the medical stuff will end up costing than “a lot”.

I increasingly think that software users and engineers who care about the infrastructure commons they rely on not collapsing out from under them are going to have to adopt something like the old custom of tithing, in self-defense.

In simpler times, before state-welfare schemes or insurance companies, community citizens in good standing were often religiously required or strongly encouraged to “tithe” – give a small fraction of their income to a church expressly for relief of the poor.

Nowadays we can cut out the middlemen and attendant risk of corruption. We have Patreon and SubscribeStar. Can we grow a social norm that hackers with regular jobs in the profit-making sector should use services like these to split (say) $30 a month among three infrastructure developers of their choice?

Yes, I am asking this for me, now. But I noticed the problem before it was personal. The problem is bigger than me, and the solution should be too.

The point of suggesting a fan-out of three is to avoid a situation where all that goodwill gets captured by a handful of hackers with high visibility (like, er, myself), and people who want to help have a reason to seek out developers who are doing important work in more obscurity.