scanning ahead

Tomorrow, the regular, three-monthly scan week begins. A brain MRI on Monday, a body PET on Tuesday. Quite good timing...

No great preparation for the MRI. A kidney blood test done a couple of weeks ago them just turn up for the test. The PET scan requires fasting from midnight and no strenuous exercise for 24 hours before the scan. Luckily that's 46 hours after this morning's trail run.

Hmmm... the spell-guesser suggested that I needed to be *farting* from midnight. Far easier but not an acceptable equivalent.

Sunday, today, and a 10km run round Wungong Dam. Including 340m climb. Strenuous exercise? Oh yes :-) If it was PET scan tomorrow I would have had to take a shorter course.

===

There's a bit of pre-scan stress, so I distract myself. Keep my mind otherwise occupied. Other than reading, playing, doing a jigsaw and trying to keep up with Deb, I'm learning Kotlin.

Kotlin is a programming language for mobile (mostly Android) devices. The internet is full of instructions, tutorials, advice on the language. This ranges from the incomprehensibly complex to the simply wrong.

btw: This is nothing to do with cancer. Except that it's what I do to distract myself while waiting to be tested for cancer.

In the "community of Kotlin users" one person will post a question, a dozen people will answer it. A few users will answer with an example using the wrong language. Quite a few will provide an answer which does not work. Several will use techniques which are now no longer possible. (The language develops and changes. Noone every cleans out the outdated rubbish.)

But here's the best: I found an online university course which is at exactly my level. It's reasonably clear, reasonably complete, aimed at people who don't yet code apps but who want to. There are only two problems...

The course users a different -- older -- programming environment. I can't just run the examples, I need to build a program within which I include the sample code. No worries, I learnt enough on another tutorial to do that, I've done it before, the concept is simple, I spent four hours getting it to work again... What a language! One bracket out of place and it fails to compile. Usually with an incomprehensible nerd-style message.

Anyway, that's now working. I now have little apps to solve a quadratic equation, play paper, rock, scissors and generate my own random phrases of jargon.

The second problem with this university course is that it's in Russian.

I copy the lecture transcript, in Russian. Use Google Translate to get English. This is slow because Translate accepts only a few hundred characters at a time. For some reason. I work through the English transcript... slowly... trying to understand what it means. Then I watch the video -- in Russian -- to find the code samples which appear on the video but not in the transcript. And try to match the code to the appropriate spot in the transcript.

At least the code is in English, sort of. No Cyrillic characters, anyway. Though "meaningful names" are less meaningful in Russian.

Despite all this... despite courses by Google and a dozen other companies and individuals... this Russian course is the best that I have been able to find. It's good and i enjoy it.

===

So that's how I pass the time :-)

More excitement next week. Once I have the results of the scans -- no matter what the results -- I expect my stress level will reduce. Ditto, I guess, for Deb.

===

 Very little of this post is specific to my blog purpose, to document my cancer. Which doesn't matter at all, to me. Because already -- having got all that off my chest -- already, I feel better :-)

And now I'll go to a different blog, to post some ranting and raving at the world. Even less relevant, no expectation that my ranting will change the world. Just as effective at making me feel more relaxed...

Nick Lethbridge  /  consulting dexitroboper
===
"I bought shoes from a drug dealer. I don't know what he laced them with, but I've been tripping all day." … Steph on Twitter
===