kasia in a nutshell

I have a coworker who sometimes likes to spray air freshener in the office. It really bothers me. I'm sensitive to chemicals and it always gives me a headache and causes eye irritation. Today, after another 'spraying', I had a headache, so i took some advil and went home.

When I got home I noticed there was something odd with my vision. Couldn't quite put my finger on it, but it was definitely not right. In about fives minutes, it deteriorated to serious blurriness, then it got weird. Jaggedy, colourful images dancing in front of my eyes with surrounded blurriness. I was practically blind for about 5-10 minutes and had serious spatial disorientation when I could see my surroundings. Closing eyes did not help, could still see the same hallucinations and no blackness. The feeling was very much like after a small dose of hallucinogenic drugs.

The whole episode ended in about 15 minutes and via the magic of google, I found the symptoms were very consistent with a migraine aura. I have had migraines before, but the precursor was usually blurry vision and nausea. I didn't even know migraines could cause hallucinations.

More google magic and turns out that air fresheners are pretty nasty stuff and one of the known triggers of migraines. Tomorrow, i'll have a conversation with my co-workers, but in the meantime, if you get migraines, something to think about.

Posted by kasia at 09:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

While in the process of looking through code to see what I need to change for my current project I decided to clean up our somewhat bloated constants file. You know, do the thing nobody else ever does? Remove unused constants!

While removing the lonely, unused constants and getting rid of some duplicates (user_id vs userid vs user_identifier that all point to the same string.. and so on..) I decided to remove a constants that will probably return to hunt me at some point. I've decided to live with the consequences of the change. It was either change mucho code to use the constant and be (that dirty word..) consistent or remove it. So I decided to remove it. If we have to change the value in the future, it'll be a lot of work, I admit it, but I'm willing to live with that result of my actions.

Today, I removed..

public static final int ZERO = 0;

RIP, leftovers of NSBCs.

Posted by kasia at 09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)