I’ve been experiencing chronic neck/back pain for months. It’s worst in the morning when I first get out of bed. Some mornings I have muscle spasms that require me to do some stretching, often on the floor, before I can even get around.

It’s not (usually!) bad enough to consider medical/surgical intervention. It’s not usually even bad enough to regularly take medication. Occasionally I’ll pop an ibuprofen, or very rarely a prescription muscle relaxer. But it’s been manageable with movement and a cheap impact massage gun.

Lately, I’ve been feeling worse for longer. I’ve been waking up at night because rolling over hurts. I’ve been dreading going to bed. Sometimes stretching doesn’t help. Sometimes I have headaches for days at a time. It’s frustrating and exhausting, and I’m over it.

This week I’ve managed to find at least a little relief. I’m tall and heavy, and I’ve been slouching most of my life. The other morning I forced myself to really stand up straight with my head up and my shoulders back. It felt amazing. So I’ve been trying to keep at it.

I’ve been really working on my posture this week. I’ve been making sure to get up and walk around a couple times an hour. I’ve been working on keeping my head high when I’m seated, and even when I’m lying down. I’m sore from making my back and shoulders work harder, but it’s helping. I’m 10 years and 80 pounds past feeling great when I get out of bed, but I can just get up and start my day instead of building in time for pain management.

It’s enough of a relief that I think it’s time to talk to an ortho and maybe get some imaging done. I’m guessing a nerve in my neck is compressed, and I want to make sure there isn’t anything more serious going on. I’ve been avoiding it because our insurance deductible went up 1000% this year, which means I get to pay through the nose to hopefully find out I’m fine.

But hey. Today I’m feeling pretty good.

I’ve really been digging into horror podcasts lately. I’m a long-time fan of Rusty Quill’s Magnus Archive series, and I’m enjoying the Magnus Protocol spinoff. Archives is finished, and I’m caught up with Protocol for now, so I’ve been searching for more scares to bring with me on long car trips and email clean-ups.

I’ve found a few things I think are promising, and I think writing some reviews would be a good writing exercise, and maybe fun for anyone who happens to read.

Went to our in-laws' house to celebrate Orthodox Easter with my Polish mother-in-law and had a nice time with the extended family. The in-laws are getting ready for a trip to Ireland in a couple weeks, so we spent time making sure they had both Signal and WhatsApp ready to go so they could call us whenever wifi was available.

They’re very excited. They travel a lot, but almost always in a truck with a camper, so a trans-Atlantic trip is a pretty big deal to them.

I sat through two hours of meetings today about increasing insurance costs at my office. It’s pretty standard stuff. Premiums and deductibles went up. Coverage, luckily, stayed roughly the same.

We’re fortunate that our coverage remained both affordable and usable. My wife has had serious health issues and ensuring she isn’t going to die has a significant annual cost. If coverage had taken a serious hit, I would’ve had to find another job or move to a country with a more humane approach to healthcare.

We’re doing okay, but I see the scam for what it is. It makes me so angry. Health insurance is such a late-stage capitalist nightmare. The health and well-being of humans should never have been tied to for-profit business.

VMWare has been in the news recently after their acquisition by Broadcom. The news has been mostly negative. Broadcom announced that they were “simplifying” the organization after their $61bn acquisition went through.

As part of this simplification, VMWare eliminated:

2800 Jobs

One of the first actions Broadcom took was to lay off 2837 people across multiple locations.

Ars Technica article

Their partner program

VMWare claims that all active partners were invited to the new Broadcom partner platform. The total number of partners is ~10,000 less than reported in 2023. Either past VMWare or current VMWare is a liar.

The free ESXi product

This is bad news for hobbyists, but may drive them toward the excellent KVM hypervisor.

Perpetual licensing

They claim subscription is the industry standard, and I sadly agree.

Renewal pricing

The elimination of renewal pricing and the switch to subscription pricing are the changes likely to be felt the most across industries. There have been reports of people seeing 3x-10x increases in prices, though my organization was lucky, in that our pricing only doubled.

tl;dr

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMWare appears to be a bad deal for VMWare’s customers, partners, and staff. We had to eat the cost of three years of support to give us time to move all our systems to another solution, but those are the last dollars Broadcom will see from us.

I picked up a bottle of Lamy’s “re-issued” Dark Lilac ink last week.

tl;dr It’s excellent.

I wasn’t using fountain pens when the original Dark Lilac was released in 2016. I started my collection in 2020 as a way to keep busy and focused on something positive during the COVID pandemic. I missed out on the Dark Lilac craze altogether.

I’ve seen comparisons between the original Dark Lilac and the re-issue and they’re noticeably different inks. The color is similar, but the difference in sheen is night and day from photos of ink samples I’ve seen online. The original Dark Lilac has a gold sheen and the re-issue is a shiny green.

I’ve always liked purple and green together, and I immediately saw a place for a purple ink with a green sheen in my collection. I picked up a bottle for $12 from the excellent Gentleman Stationer and filled a TWISBI ECO.

I love the ink. It’s a gorgeous purple-black with a sheen that is less prominent and more golden than Internet pictures indicated. It’s black enough and well behaved enough that I can, and do, use it daily for office work.

I understand the indignant response from fans of the original limited release. It’s decisively not that ink, and Lamy wasn’t clear enough about that when they released it.

I’m grateful I don’t know what I’m missing with the original. I don’t have $300 to spend on a secondhand bottle. I love this $12 ink as much as anything else I own, and I’m glad Lamy is planning to continue producing it as one of the regular lines.