It's now been three months post-'rona infection and my health is still garbage from time to time. Went for a bit of a walk on Saturday after an exhaustive Friday, and as a result it's taken me the entire Sunday and Monday to recover. It felt like I had ran a marathon instead of a half hour stroll around the park. It's genuinely demotivating, as I haven't done any form of exercise in the past months and it seems that my intuition that I can't handle more than a ~20 minute bike ride per day was right. There may very well be a compounding factor at play here (stress, weight loss) but I can't shake the feeling that I have not felt healthy this entire year to date.
Everyone's health is garbage right now. Every other pediatrics call to the clinic: "My kid is sick all the time and it's not corona!" "that's because it's every illness all at once attacking your kid's immune system because we're all stressed out and dealing with corona!" It is genuinely demotivating. My yoga instructor flat-out said "you need to acknowledge that 'running' is a part of your life that's over." Nonetheless I ran three times last week. You have to be patient with yourself and acknowledge that any movement is better than no movement, and that if you get out of the house to so much as loop around the block, that's one loop around the block you wouldn't have made otherwise. You have to recognize that your body is dealing with special circumstances and that you need to grade on a curve. You're going to be tempted to judge yourself against yourself at your best. What you need to do is judge yourself against yourself last week, and acknowledge that there will be steps backward due to forces entirely beyond your control.
Thanks, I needed to hear that. I do feel torn between "listen to your body and take it easy / move less" and "keep on moving slowly and steadily", as I don't know what will work best in my recovery. You seem to be suggesting the latter, right? Because my inclination is to do the former.
I'm suggesting both. Do what you can, when you think you can do it, and celebrate that you did it rather than condemning that you didn't do enough. I'm not going to run three times this week. Maybe twice, maybe once. But I'm walking every damn day, often twice a day. Is it enough? not by a long shot. Is it what I got? It's what I can repeat, that improves my health, that's sustainable. Learned something dealing with my mom's bullshit. Medicare uses the acronym "RTB" for "Return To Baseline" to determine when they're kicking you out of physical therapy. For most of us? "Baseline" would be "all better." For Medicare? It means "you're within 20% of the asymptote it looks like you're going to hit." Medicare literally cuts you off from physical therapy as soon as you start to level off. You'd think that'd be a money decision but nah - the way the laws are written Medicare gets to claw back all the money they spent on you within five years of your death, and your heirs can't dispute any prices - now you know why medicine in the US is so expensive, considering 95% of your medical care is in the last six months of your life. There's recovery? And then there's slllllowwwwwwwwwwww recovery. With old people there's "RTB." I'm having to acknowledge that for purposes of Long Covid, I'm "old people" and every minor victory is a major one and it sucks. You? I'll bet you do better. But you gotta give yourself the permission to do it at a sustainable rate.
I have been trying to understand. 60% of my team has kids in 2-4 year old range, and they are constantly sick. Like, much more so than in normal years? The added part to this is that their parents (the people on my team) are now also nearly constantly sick because they keep catching whatever their kids get. It's a giant mess.Everyone's health is garbage right now. Every other pediatrics call to the clinic: "My kid is sick all the time and it's not corona!" "that's because it's every illness all at once attacking your kid's immune system because we're all stressed out and dealing with corona!"
Constantly sick. Combine that with the fact that schools now require you to take three days off if you so much as confess to a cough, that school schedules now have to be written around a dire shortage of staff and teachers and an entire cohort that learned (for two years!) that the Minimum Viable Product for "school" is "watch your teacher on a screen somewhere yammer about stuff that you won't be tested on". It's a shitshow. We'll be feeling the effects for a generation.
If you haven’t already (I’ve suggested this a bit recently, so please forgive me if I brought this up earlier): fill your lungs as much as possible with air, then hold for at least 30s. Repeat 3x daily. It won’t help with fatigue, but dramatically affects ability to regain your breath. Also, saw you’re a proponent of PostGIS in the last pubski. Are you planning on heading to FOSS4G this year? Or have you been to one as of yet? Would love to catch the next one inthe West Hemisphere, and have a few questions if you’ve been.
I haven’t! The only international GIS conference I’ve been to was the Esri UC, once, only because it was on their dime. Did go to a the Dutch equivalent a few weeks ago. I’m curious what the wider GIS community thinks of Felt, which just launched the other day.
How did you enjoy the UC - have any takeaways from it? I only attended the virtual 2021 UC. The workshops I've seen come out of it are invaluable... well, they are probably tangibly valuable to ESRI given they are word-of-mouth ads... other than those, they seem well-made and exciting on the whole. I'm a single part of GIS community, but I was described as wider at my latest doctor visit - so that's gotta count for something. On a surface level, it's a great entry point for GIS. Maybe even a good learning tool for younger audiences or laymen. The customizability is lacking, which can lead more interested users down a loooooooong rabbit hole (that in turn would lead more invested users to ESRI - or worse, opensource). To the creator's point, that's kind of the appeal behind Felt tho, no? Simplicity. Willing to bet there's a fair amount of opensource tech running on the back end. Exciting to see where it goes. Might be a nice tool to send to my brother for easy learning of the basics. My brother and I have had an on-going discussion for the past few years on how cool he believes the GIS work can be based on what I've worked on, plus where there's an theoretically small leap from his skillset (SQL/Datamining) to mine (Cartography). Up until recently, my limited purview - not connecting the dots between PostGIS and our discussions - had me saying: "Take a GIS certificate course I guess?" Which would, what, qualify his "GIS" skills for an imagery analyst at best? With a laaaaaaaaaaaaaarge gap between "I know what vector and raster data are (smiley face)" and "I know how to tinker on the dev-end of a WCS," the question has been whether it’s worth it for an early-30s professional with a masters degree to go back to rudimentary technical schooling for the bare-bones basics of anther profession entirely. Enter: PostGIS. Taking the time off from work to dive deeper into SQL since the progression of learning seems to be “GIS -> PostgreSQL -> PostGIS.” And those are probably medium-level learning curves at best. My hope is I can use this time to learn via Coursera/Udemy, then apply the learnings to some form of passion projects. Either sustainable energy or reviving some of my grad-school projects but taking a different approach. Don’t know how long this will take, but ideally it will be something to showcase to the next employer(s) long term. Visual warning if you’re on a browser: see second graph. This has been on my mind since reading it (grain of salt given for Medium article). Would venture that me applying my GIS knowledge to spatial SQL vs. my brother applying his SQL knowledge to spatial SQL would net him higher pay/title/etc… curious to see how it will turn out.
As a whole the GIS world is...surprisingly shallow. There are some technical niches for sure, but compared to what I've seen in other domains of engineering, one can get incredibly fast to a point where one can do 80% of all GIS work. Really, a basic GIS course combined with a modicum of data-wrangling chops and Google skills can get you very far. To speak from personal experience; I had 2 mandatory GIS courses at uni, took one Python+GIS elective, and learned enough on the job the past 4 years (all of ArcGIS Online + PostGIS + ArcPy) that I can prolly apply for most senior GIS jobs out there. A lot of GIS work is just about getting the right input into the right GIS tool(s) and ✨presenting✨the result. I know people who have done nothing more than "load data into GIS, apply pre-made tools, visualize" for decades. Which for sure is reflected to a degree in salary. A shockingly small niche (over here at least) is the people who are good at writing queries and half-decent at GIS. PostGIS legitimately can replace 95% of the individual pre-made tools QGIS and ArcGIS has to offer. You can do much more complex things much faster. My largest project the past year ended up being 2300 lines of PostGIS/SQL code I wrote on my own. The first 30% is just data prep written in code - "make sure I properly join tables A thru G in the data type I want it to be without ever having to touch Field Mappings ever again". The rest is a bunch of clever geo-joins and a bunch of not clever regular joins of tables and features. Nothing special to anyone who already knows how to handle semi-long SQL queries; PostGIS is really just one new column type and a bunch of functions to do stuff with it. For many in the GIS world, once they start seeing the benefit of PostGIS, they often don't go back. It really is objectively better to get shit done. Which means that a lot of skilled GIS people have made a lot of PostGIS code that only a small subset of GIS people can work with. Which means that if you're the kind of person whose brain can be wrapped around the core concepts of SQL and GIS, it's an easy ticket into advanced GIS work. For me it took a 2-day (intense) course plus a week of actually working with it under a deadline to go from "I can do most anything I want with Arc" to "no wait actually this PostGIS thing rawks". YMMV - I know in the US, the GIS world is much more imagery heavy, and imagery does not gell well with PG. But I can get so* much more work done these days by doing 95% of it in PG from the QGIS Database Manager that it's an easy recommendation.
Hang in there, pal. I started upping my workout routine (which is to say I started working out) because I felt so unhealthy partly due to cover and partly due to being unhealthy. I'm trying to fortify myself. Mostly weight training and some intense cardio. I feel better, no doubt about it. Maybe try some weight training?