busybee fluffy rambles

Publ/IndieWeb stuff

As usual I’ve been working on Publ and its related components, especially Authl. As I mentioned over on the Publ blog, I have released updates that add:

• Bearer authentication (which takes it most of the way there for AutoAuth although there’s still a few more things I need to do, as it turns out)
• A return to stateless authentication (with a later update specific to Twitter), making the authentication stuff work correctly with load balancers and stateless/transitory application servers (e.g. Heroku and Google App Engine)
• Also found a pretty nasty validation bug in Authl that was leaving identity stuff wide-open; I ended up releasing a cleaned-up version of my client validation test so that others have a better chance at getting this right to begin with (also if you found yourself logged out from private entries, I reset my session key out of an abundance of caution)
• Also submitted some proposals for modification to the IndieAuth spec! One to clarify profile forwarding rules and one to improve the security of multi-user IndieAuth, both of which will be very important as IndieAuth gets adopted more places (especially on multi-user sites like tilde.club or whatever).

I also finally set up this site to autoping indieweb.xyz with my entry tags, because I keep forgetting to do that manually and anyway it was easier to just set it up to be like Technorati was back in the day. (Say, isn’t one of the prominent IndieWeb folks formerly one of the prominent Technorati folks?) In any case, I apologize for all of the apparent spam that’s going to happen when I do a webmention backfill.

Oh! And I finally figured out the magic to get GitHub webhooks to work with Publ! Specifically to make deploying Novembeat a lot easier.

Music stuff

Novembeat is in full swing, and amazingly enough a lot more people are participating this year! I’d like to pretend that I had something to do with it (what with finally setting up a website) but realistically it seems like most of the participants have just heard about it as word-of-mouth on the hashtag. That’s fine too though. I love to see this thing that a friend of mine started gain a lot of traction.

Anyway please check out my stuff so far this year, and also submissions from other folks. (And there’s so much stuff on both Twitter and Mastodon that’s not on the site yet!)

I also finally got around to releasing last year’s collection. I wish I’d had the energy to follow through on the whole idea I had for that month but oh well, I still made some neat stuff.

ADHD stuff

Still about a month before my actual appointment with a psychiatrist. The cruel irony is that the diagnosis requires me doing some intake surveys, and I need to be careful not to misplace them. This feels like a classic catch-22; if I lose them, I won’t be taken seriously, and if I manage to not lose them, that proves that I don’t really have ADHD, or something.

I’m also rather upset at someone who I called upon to do one of my third-party surveys; first they denied that I had ADHD because of a surface-level understanding of what ADHD is, then after I talked about the issues I’ve struggled with that are very much ADHD things, they started to tear into me for every single instance of what my ADHD has caused them throughout my life. They also called me a “total disaster” and then lambasted me for my inability to take criticism (which is, of course, an ADHD thing I’d pointed out to them in the first place!), which is so recursive I don’t even know where to begin.

Anyway I’m feeling upset about that, and I’m trying to avoid talking to them anymore. This isn’t the first time I’ve gone through this cycle with them but they just repeatedly refuse to understand how much hurt they cause me, or if they do, they think they can just pick up conversation where it left off or pretend like nothing happened.

When I talked about this with my therapist, she was surprised that me possibly having ADHD was “news,” because she thought I knew I had it because it was, apparently, obvious. I said, “Well, I knew I had ADHD tendencies, but I hadn’t seen the symptoms listed out all in one place before.”

I really hope I can get on medication that helps me with these problems. Wish my parents had decided to actually take me to a behavioral therapist when I was a kid and get me diagnosed, rather than being well aware of there being something wrong with me and treating it like some sort of moral failing that they could yell at me until I just stopped being broken. I try not to imagine how much better my life could have been for the last, oh, 35 years…

In the meantime I’m experimenting with caffeine again, since in retrospect it’s pretty obvious that starting in college I was basically self-medicating and that’s why I was able to at least pretend to be vaguely functional, and when I had to go cold turkey in 2011 because of the onset of panic disorder, that was for some reason about when I stopped being able to focus on work and started making fairly impulsive decisions about, y'know, moving back to Seattle, changing jobs, getting fed up with tech, you know, little things.

AR startup

As if all the above wasn’t enough I’m trying (and failing) to focus on AR startup things.

UPS? I pronounce it “oops”

Trying to get delivery of my GeekGirlCon prints has been quite the ordeal. To summarize:

• On Friday, the delivery person showed up at my door, didn’t try to actually get buzzed in, left a “sorry we missed you!” note, and then marked the package delivered anyway
• So I called UPS, wanting to make sure I actually got the package; they were very confused by it being “marked delivered”
• They sent a message to the local facility, and they called me and said that there was a “bad upload” and that the driver would be right back since he was still in the neighborhood
• The driver never came back
• In the evening I asked where the package was, and they kept on reassuring me it wasn’t lost and that they’d attempt redelivery on Saturday
• They didn’t
• So I requested they deliver it to the UPS store next door to me on Monday
• They didn’t
• So I called UPS again and they said that the sender had called in “requesting a hold” (no they didn’t) and that they were “awaiting further instructions.” They also claimed that there was never an erroneous delivery on Thursday, because they had cleared that from the package log but didn’t mark the failed attempt instead
• They said that they’d ask the local facility to call me
• They didn’t
• At 4:30 PM the tracking page said it was “out for delivery”
• At 6:30 PM it said it was “en route to the requested hold”
• At 7:00 PM the UPS store closed
• At 7:30 PM the tracking page said it would be delivered to the requested hold tomorrow
• Somehow I am not optimistic

I need this package, dangit!

In the meantime I also got fed up with Ting again (for the same reasons I got fed up with them last time) and ordered a SIM on Verizon, since they have a $35/month plan with 6GB of data and unlimited talk/text, and way better coverage here. It was supposed to be delivered Monday.

I was home all day Monday, so of course, much to my surprise, I got a “delivery attempted” notification.

This time, the infonotice tag was actually in my lobby though. I suspect that the driver had actually gotten into the lobby without buzzing me (because of course that makes total sense to do when a signature is required), hung out in the lobby without doing anything to notify me that I needed to meet them there, and then when I didn’t magically appear, left.

And because this is a signature-required delivery, I can’t have them deliver to the UPS store next door – instead I could only request a hold at the UPS facility down in SoDo, which is a pain in the butt. Fortunately I happen to be running a car-required errand tomorrow anyway (specifically, getting my car’s oil changed, which is hard to do without the car) so after I go halfway across town to the North to get that done, I’ll be driving to halfway across town to the South (i.e. one “across town” worth) to stand in line and try not to fucking explode at someone who is a victim of corporate bureaucracy because I know they’re just doing their job and so on but holy crap I feel really, really bitter at UPS right now.

The kicker is that with the prints I had specified USPS on the order, but they decided to “upgrade” me to UPS anyway.

And of course on the Verizon order they made it “signature required” because they don’t want it to be stolen, which makes a lot of sense, but like… can’t I just waive that? My building is ridiculously secure, and I’m willing to absorb what little risk there is as long as the driver just leaves it in the mail room. Which they obviously can do!

Anyway.

Fitness

Oh yeah I got Ring Fit Adventure (affiliate link). It is quite a workout. Doing it for around half an hour every other day still feels like a lot. It’s actually pretty well-designed; it’s basically Pilates interval training, with some fun RPG-esque trappings. It also has some Joy-Con functionality that allows it to be used as a standalone Pilates ring that tracks exercise outside of the game.

Some of the UX is clunky (like it took me forever to figure out how to actually get to the inventory/crafting screen!) and it’s a little fiddly with how it switches control modes, and some of the exercises just plain kill my knees or are difficult to do in my limited available space, but I’m still able to find plenty of stuff to do that works out the parts of my body which benefit the most (primarily my back and my arms).

It also has a fun targeted-exercise mode which I’m probably going to start doing more of.

Cats

Fiona’s doing fine although she’s put on a lot of weight lately. Werner’s very much showing his age and is having trouble getting up the stairs and is also losing weight lately (I suspect he’s not eating as much and Fiona’s being a little opportunist). But they’re both still very playful and snuggly and I love them a lot.

And speaking of which Fiona is now being obnoxiously cuddly in a “please come to bed, I’m going to stop you from typing anymore until you do” way, so I guess that’s a good place to leave this mega-infodump.

Also she seems to be covered in dust that’s making me sneeze a lot. Ugh. Maybe I need to give her a bath. It’s been a few years…