Ass

Ass. A royal pain in the ass.

Okay, since the last entry where I called out the bot-masters who have been unsympathetically hopping IP addresses but still with the same spoofed user agent information of ``Chrome 125.0/OS X/800×600'', things have been going all over the place for me.

The most recent pain in the ass (literally), is getting hit with gastroenteritis. Not fun, and not sure why I even got hit with this, but I am assuming that it has something to do with the increased stress levels that have muted my immune response, which resulted in the rise of the effects of the nasty-ass bugs that have always been lurking within the body, ready to strike when the forces that usually keep them at bay have lowered their vigilance.

The previous two nights with respect to gastroenteritis wasn't pleasant. The first night (Thursday night), I had very fitful sleep, having to sprint out of ``bed'' to evacuate my bowels. Then I messed up, having the foresight to wear more pants ``just in case'', but forgetting to realise that I was still sleeping on a mattress on the floor (hence ``bed''). So when I finally got into some semblence of deep sleep, a bad leak occurred, and I ended up having to do late night washing, and subsequent sunning of the very lightly soiled (just fluids that made it through the four layers of cloth) mattress.

Last night, I just slept on the floor hard core, no mattress. Drugged up with the right types of meds, I slept fine, without any embarrassing leakages and what-not. The day between the nights was spent sleeping fitfully on the same floor, in a bid to try and recover whatever missing sleep that I had from the night prior, and to just avoid having to think/be conscious about the bloatedness and discomfort that came from gastroenteritis.

Today, I feel better. Gassy as one can get, burping and farting (I don't trust anything that comes out of that orifice!). Head's feeling less woozy to the point that I can sit here and start writing about the nonsense that I had undergone. It also meant that I had to forego the penultimate rehearsal that was held this week for the upcoming concert on 2025-10-25. That is fine---there's one more rehearsal this upcoming Friday, just before the performance. And considering that I'm playing on Davie, a bass flute, we're good, especially since I had fixed the compacted score for one of the pieces---I had missed out an entire row, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that.

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If one had checked out my domain recently, one would notice that there's a new field that is located in the lower right corner that talks about when the page was ``created''. And a closer look at the usual ``updated'' field on the lower left corner would also reveal that its form has changed somewhat. If the dates look like some ISO-8601 nonsense, it means that the underlying Javascript file is still the very old cached version---it is best to force refresh without using the cache to get the updated version.

Anyway, this is actually part of the mild adjustment of how I handle the ``fuzzification'' of dates, and the realisation that despite having the timestamp of when I updated a page, the provenance (particularly on when the page first came about) was missing. This is something that I had been thinking of doing for some time, but before the changes that I did to conform to the ``new'' security headers, I had no natural space to put that information. With the external validation links for the page with respect to its HTML5/CSS standards conformity having to be retired, I now have the space to put that information, and thus that's where the ``created'' timestamp (with suitable fuzzification) is located.

``But MT, how'd you get these information? Isn't it hard to track when the page is first created?''

See, this is where having my entire website hosted on my own source code repository comes into play. Each page has their own history stored across the commits/revisions/time, and it was just a boring case of finding timestamp of the earliest incarnation of the file. I did that over an evening, and slapped it all together, and finally have what you see today.

And yes, I have this website for at least 17 years as at today. So anyone who claims that they cannot find me on the 'net really hasn't tried hard enough. Hell, this blog has been in existence since 2006, so there's really no excuse whatsoever.

It is the same with finding me by cellphone number---that stupid number has not changed since 2003. So anyone who claims that they cannot find me... haven't really tried.

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``So MT, you were talking about wanting to cry in some recent post, and yet you cannot. How's that going?''

Oh... I still want to cry, don't get me wrong. But it's getting less terrible, at least for now. Some semblence of a direction has been provided, with some form of assurance being made by someone whom we have little reason to distrust. The gears of bureaucracy have finally started grinding, and it is still a matter of time before we truly see what/where we are heading.

Incidentally, I wrote an extractor specifically to pull out Psalms from ESV, and have been reading through it. Psalms is an interesting form of wisdom literature---they are songs that teach us, songs that show the entire range of emotion of the human condition, while at the same time, reminding us of who/how God is to us.

It is comforting in many ways, and I would like to think of Psalms as being less studied as compared to say Isaiah, Luke or even Romans.

Because how does one go about studying 150 seemingly disparate poems that have crappy meter due to the translation from the original Hebrew to English?

And I think that's all that I want to yammer about for today. This weekend is a long one that is supposed to be relaxing, and I fully intend to try and relax in it, despite the ongoing troubles with gastroenteritis.

May God allow me to heal before the next segment where I need to run hard once more. Amen.