Disability tax is real. It’s also both obvious and not obvious at the same time. The tech fail I’m experiencing is in and of itself no different than for anyone trying to do what I am doing. Where the difference lies is the cost in terms of percentage of time and percentage of health and very much as a percentage of pain.
I have only a few hours in a good day to do everything that would otherwise fill the 16 hours of day sans 8 hours of sleep. So take 16 hours and try to do it all in what, 4? You can’t scrimp on health so that 2mins of tooth brushing is now more like 10mins.
So far so easy.
Where things get harder to calculate is pain time. It’s not like 1 hour in pain is like 4 hours otherwise. Or rather it is but then you have a cost for many days after to include “recovery” that is less like recovery and more like recalibration. Sometimes I can do half an hour of pain and it be like 2 hours with no cost days after, but that’s rare now.
So where I’m heading with this post is that I’m in the last few days of time left to know if I can do K’Zoo because I have two days to pay registration fees but the next two weeks might be almost entirely tech rather than actual research (*). If I had 3K spare for a new PC with specs for research (think gaming x data centre) it would be fine. But I don’t. So that cost comes out of my time (remember at least a 4x cost) and health and pain.
It’s close enough that I might have just a day or two in which to really know for sure. And again, that amplitude of cost doesn’t include bad days. I don’t even have space for one (4x) bad days. They tend to have a long tail. So one bad day is more than a week in both actual time and disability time.
(*) I think there is actual memory leak. I turned off all “visual effects” other than thumbnails and yikes. Explorer still ratches up private and working set bytes (because everything works within explorer/desktop) but instead of crashing I’m just not getting pdf thumbnails then no image thumbnails created and instead defaulting to icons. It’s difficult to work with but for what I’ve been doing it’s enough to have made enough progress I might be able to switch different effects back on. But oh boy it also physically hurts my eyes due to font rendering being so messed up. Again, browsers operate within explorer so turning off visual effects messes with that.