busybee fluffy rambles

Disability

In the morning I had another disability assessment, this time with a psychologist who actually understands ADHD, anxiety, and the intersection between them and chronic pain. I feel like it went really well. She couldn’t make any promises about what the determination would be but she told me exactly what she was putting in my report and gave me an idea of what the timeline for the next bits would be.

Chimney

Then some workers arrived to do some final bits of repair on my chimney (stuff which had been overlooked during the big repair last year from a different company) and that went really well.

Vertigo

A bit later I had a CT scan for my ongoing vertigo diagnosis stuff. Hopefully that leads to figuring out what’s been going on there. I also have an appointment with an ENT in about a month which will hopefully also be fruitful/useful.

Music site

Then I worked on the music site a bit more, and made a bunch of nice changes. For example, on album pages you can now click on lyrics/info/etc. to get it on the same page, and peruse the whole album’s liner notes that way. (This also paves the way for me to put a printable stylesheet on the site, if I should decide to do that, although that won’t include stuff for hidden/bonus tracks.) There’s been a bunch of other changes as well though, like now the blog section has actual useful stuff in the sidebar.

I also changed the layout of the music player, buy box, and album art. I’m still not super thrilled with it though. Maybe I should just have my own built-in player instead of farming that out to Bandcamp. Bandcrash’s player isn’t quite suitable for Reasons, but I’ve been considering adding functionality to Bandcrash that would make it useful for single-track embeds as well. It’d also be nice to have a mechanism for emitting Publ entries directly from Bandcrash; importing my existing stuff into Publ was a huge pain.

I’m still not sure what should go in the sidebar on individual release pages. (The category pages will get tag browsers there.) Eventually I do want to add a rating system for things (and I have Big Ideas™ for that) but that’s a lot more work than I want to put into it right now. I guess maybe that could just be where I show links to related stuff or my most recent releases (like what Bandcamp does). It’d be a better place for the actual tag links than their current temporary location, anyway.

Brain engagement

I’m a little behind on Advent of Code, which I’m doing for the first time this year. I’m having some amount of fun with it, at least.

I’ve also managed to maintain a streak on the LinkedIn daily puzzles. I’m finding them to be pretty repetitive at this point though.

Anyway with all that I am, of course, having a pain flareup again.

Plans

Tomorrow I’ll be meeting up with some choir friends at Longfellow Creek to see the salmon run. That should be fun.

Sunday I have another disability assessment, which should be less fun.

Home security

Oh also recently I upgraded the security cameras around my house. I’d been using some cheap-ass Boavision outdoor IP webcams from Amazon which worked Okay and which were vaguely supported by the security software on my NAS, but it was getting fussy and unreliable. I ended up going with EufyCam, which is… still fussy, but at least it’s a bit easier to set up. The software is super limited and I can’t figure out how to get it to work well with HomeKit (not that I ever managed that with the Synology-based stuff), and it’s especially annoying that I can have it set to be either geofenced or on a schedule. But it’s nice that it has better (and more useful) motion detection than Synology’s stuff, and also has a whole ecosystem of other security products to consider. And being that they’re battery-powered I can be more versatile about where they go.

I also got little solar panels to charge them passively, although I’ve only installed one of those so far.

I’m still using Synology + Boavision for monitoring my recording studio (since that already works well enough there), but now I have a better view on my carport, and also a camera on my side garden so I can hopefully finally figure out what the heck keeps on digging everything up there. (I suspect coyotes.)

I’m not sure where I’ll put the third Eufy camera just yet. Also I could probably come up with something to do with the Boavision camera I used to have in the carport. Maybe that’ll go in the back yard, since I have a spot where I can get it both power and wired networking, and it’d be fun to capture video of the neighborhood raccoons that like to have parties there at night.

Finances

I had a meeting with my financial advisor yesterday. He thinks I’m in pretty good shape, even if I don’t get on disability, although getting on disability would certainly ease a lot of my anxieties about some stuff.

This has also been my best month by far on Bandcamp, and I feel like things are finally taking off for me in terms of getting people invested in my music. The audience is the really important part, of course. But getting a bit of spending money is a nice bonus too, especially with all of the expenses I just rambled about above.

I’m currently on the fence about whether I really need to upgrade my computer right now. On the one hand it’s a hedge against prices suddenly skyrocketing due to tariffs, but on the other hand the hardware I have right now is still sufficient for what I do, most of the time.

I dunno. I feel like I should be happy with what I have.