muscling through a minor migraine while staring at a monitor

i woke up with a a headache this morning. what a way to start the day, eh? and it didn't let up when i finally arrived at the office, as late as i already was. what's worse is that any sort of light in my eyes made my head pound more. now, i can't afford to take the day off of work, or even just an extended morning break, i've got deadlines to meet.

here's how i muscled through that mildly malicious migraine:

step 1: treat the damn thing

everything you learned on how to treat a hangover is fair game here. this morning's recipe for success:

• two tabs of tylenol (your preferred headache medicine will do)
• get something to eat, the fattier the better (all i had was a bit of pound cake, but that's better than an empty stomach)
• hydrate hydrate hydrate, and when you're done with that, hydrate some more
• if you drink coffee, by all means chug that coffee!! you can kick that caffeine habit some other day

step 2: take it easy while still being productive

with a headache even thinking hurts, which is a problem if your job relies on brain activity. in my line of work, even the most menial of coding task takes some brain power. the solution: don't think. while you wait for the drugs-food-water-coffee concoction to kick in, do your busy-work tasks. answer some emails. fire off that email to HR that they've been houding you about. make some notes in your pivotal tracker issues. or hell, just catch up on some lifehacker posts. =]

step 3: turn down the lights

i don't know about you, but when that headache kicks in i just can't stand bright light. i'm lucky that the fluorescent tubes in my section of the office have been out for the past two weeks. i still have a big bright iMac monitor i have to stare into, though, and it seems like every application and every web page insists on having a bright white background color. never to fear, there's ways to tame it the beast:

• start with your desktop background. you can go the quick-and-dirty route with simple all back, or go with any dark wallpaper of your choosing (my personal favorite is the cli cheat-sheet useful wallpaper).
• any text editor worth its salt will let you change the font and background color scheme. Some MacOSX favorites: in Xcode head over to Preferences : Fonts and Colors, and go with the Midnight theme
  
  In TextMate try out the Twilight theme (no sparkly vampires here, sorry ladies). While you're at it, try out the Homebrew theme in Terminal
• try out arc90's Readability bookmarklet with the Inverse style to tame website's colors, not to mention make pages more, well, readable with no more cruft and clutter around a page's actual content
  
• if all else fails, invert your screen's colors. this option is usually buried in your computer's accessibility setting, sometimes called "high contrast" mode. If you're on a Mac you can go into inverted color mode with a ctrl-opt-command 8