The Week of Ill

Welcome, hopefully healthy reader. This week has been a trial on a few levels, because I've been ill: properly ill, with a fever and stuff. This started last Sunday, where I felt generally weak and achey, through Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday where I had a bit of sore throat, a continuing fever, and some pretty horrible aches and pains. Those have mostly gone by Thursday, Friday and Saturday, but I'm left with a fever that, for the minute, won't shift.

Now you might think this sounds a lot like that virus thingy that's going around, and it seems that way. Over here, there's no recommendation to get tested, but the CDC symptoms checker does tell us to self-isolate. So, we've been investigating the joy of grocery delivery and other bits and pieces, although we get things like meat and coffee delivered separately already, so we're more or less OK anyway.

I'd also like to stress that Helen is just fine. She's made out of sterner stuff. I think we knew this already.

So, what do you do when you're ill? You discover daytime TV and YouTube. At 9am on weekdays here it's Live with Kelly and Ryan, which is a less cringeworthy version of This Morning, with the focus very much on the hosts chatting rather than talking to guests. Ryan is some kind of DJ and does a good job of keeping things moving, and Kelly is a former daytime soap actor and is surprisingly charming. This is the kind of thing which, obviously, I want to hate, but it's actually not that terrible.

At 10am, following Kelly and Ryan, it's The View, which is a sort of intellectual version of Loose Women. It's chaired by Whoopi Goldberg - yes, really - and she leads a panel of 3 others (I don't know the names, but one of them is a lawyer, and one of them is John McCain's daughter I think) through some pretty nuanced topical debate. Yup, it's not the Andrew Marr programme, it's not Newsnight, it's not even Question Time, but again for the the slot and the audience I'm amazed how not-terrible this is.

And let me just highlight a couple of words from the previous paragraph: it is chaired by Whoopi Goldberg. Yes, the Whoopi Goldberg, the genuine Hollywood A-lister. It's the equivalent of Dame Judi Dench taking over from Louise Minchin on BBC Breakfast.

(It's also notable that we have Ice-T advertising extended car warranties on TV, and Snoop Dogg advertising car insurance, which again seems like Freddie Mercury advertising stairlifts or Paul and Ringo getting back together to advise on the merits of equity release)

I've also spent a lot of time watching a very sweary Dutch guy reviewing vintage mechanical keyboards on YouTube. I'm sure all our readers know this, but today's keyboards are typically based on rubber dome switches, which are massively cheap, but feel mushy and require the key to be thumped to register. Mechanical keyboards, on the other hand, have discrete, typically metal switching mechanisms for each key, and actuate long before the key bottoms out. This makes them feel better, and for a good touch typist, it makes them quicker. But it also makes them a lot more expensive.

I've got a thing about keyboards, and I have done for most of my career. I had a particular favourite board, oooh, 20+ years ago now, which I hung onto through thick and thin, and I really wish I still had it. I also thought I knew quite a lot about mechanical keyboards, but it turns out it's all relative: I now know an awful lot more than before I fell ill. So much so that when an 80s computer appeared on the screen in Friday's weekly episode of Morse on PBS, I shouted, "LOOK! LOOK! THAT'S A MODEL M!"

So what else does an engineer need when they're ill? Data of course! Two of my very kind friends in the UK sent me a pulse oximeter and a thermometer so I could track my progress. Now, the thermometer was a meat thermometer, which means it's not entirely suitable for taking one's temperature, but it's better than nothing. Anyway, Nurse Beevers spent some time wondering where to stick the probe:

What else do you need to do with a thermometer? You need to calibrate it. So here's our calibration experiment, showing the thermometer off by 0.3-0.4 degrees at the zero point anyway:

Anyway, hopefully I'll be able to talk about a tale of recovery this time next week. Until then, rest easy noble reader.