busybee fluffy rambles

Just when I was worried that reinstalling the OS on my iMac once again fixed its many stability problems, it’s started randomly killing Sublime Text and occasionally kernel panicking for no particular reason again. And now the kernel panic backtrace involves an entirely different subsystem, and is for things that shouldn’t have even been in use when the machine crashed! (Heck, I wasn’t even at my machine at the time!)

Fortunately the M1 mini is arriving on Wednesday and hopefully then things will actually work for a while. Who knows.

Oh also happy new year etc.etc., no comic this year I can’t be bothered¹

I’ve been on Wellbutrin for a couple of weeks now and the effect has been interesting. I’m definitely finding it easier to focus on things like chores (and heck, my kitchen is the cleanest it’s been since the remodel got finished, and my dining room is well on its way to not being a disaster), but on the other hand it’s disrupting my sleep a lot and I end up feeling tired throughout the day. My dreams have also been way more intense.

Right now I’m feeling sick with my usual winter sinus crap, so I’m a bit wobbly and a lot nauseous.

Between the Wellbutrin and playing DDR my pain levels are a bit lower but still not amazing, and I’m still finding it easy to hit a fibro wall™. Tomorrow I have a followup with my pain doctor to try to finally get on low-dose naltrexone. I also have the next two weeks off from work and hopefully I won’t end up just working too hard on personal projects instead. (That said, I have a couple of creative output gift swaps with deadlines coming up that I really should start on at some point.)

Anwyay I guess I don’t have a lot else to say. Oh well.

Had an appointment with my psychiatrist today. Turns out I was supposed to get a drug screen some time ago, oops. But I’m not that interested in stimulant-based meds anyway. For now we’re going to try Wellbutrin, which is I think what we were talking about last time anyway and it doesn’t need a drug screening. So that starts tomorrow morning.

DDR pad arrives sometime tomorrow as well. Just in time, too, the pad I’m borrowing from Spud has decided that the down button doesn’t really need to work right.

I hope all this stuff helps me to get motivated at work, because holy crap I am having a hard time finding the energy to actually, y'know, work.

I ended up just ordering one of the pads from Poland, with the intention of modding it to work with the PS2, and then I ended up installing Stepmania on my old, generally-useless Mac mini and downloading all of the songs from the PS2 games that I’d rebought, making the PS2 entirely redundant anyway. Rumor has it that the Polish pad manufacturer is working on a native PS2 control box and when that comes out I guess I could buy one but jeeze, Stepmania on the Mini looks and plays so much better than the real thing on the PS2 anyway, so why even bother?

Plus, Stepmania has a huge community of people adding more music all the time, and maybe this’ll encourage me to make some packs of my own stuff. I bet Sliced by a Mandolin would make a great DDR track.

Oh, and even after shipping, the pad from Poland still ended up cheaper than any of the domestic options I could find, DIY kits included.

I just upgraded to Native Instruments Komplete 13 Ultimate, which means that I now have redundant licenses for a number of NI products which I’d bought individually while trying to justify not upgrading to Ultimate (spending much more than the upgrade differential in the process, of course). Fortunately, NI makes license transfers really easy.

So, if anyone’s interested in any of the following pieces of software, let me know:

• Retro Machines MK2
• The Mouth
• Session Guitarist - Electric Sunburst
• Session Guitarist - Strummed Acoustic 2
• Session Strings Pro 2
• Symphony Essentials Collection Crossgrade (requires owning Komplete 2-11 or Komplete 8-11 Ultimate)

I also have a license for NI Akoustik Piano which takes some doing to get it to work in a modern environment, but is still pretty darn good. It’s basically the predecessor to the definitive piano collection. (Although honestly the Definitive Piano Collection is well worth the $100 if you’re looking for some virtual pianos, and is my go-to piano selection these days.)

Oh yeah it all fit in my freezer without a problem. Also dry ice carbonation is scary, so I’m just gonna stick to my sodastream for that.

So far the only thing I’ve cooked from the box is a salmon portion, which turns out to be something that they carry at QFC for the exact same price, so, gonna skip that on future boxes (if any).

For Thanksgiving I’m probably going to make ground turkey and kale meatloaf wrapped in prosciutto. (The prosciutto came from QFC, full disclosure. And the ground turkey was just a thing I added to the box to push it over the free shipping threshold, although it was cheaper to get it that way than at QFC, to be fair!)

Thanks to seeing one too many YouTube videos where people talk about expensive, high-end meat, I decided to order a box of meat on Crowd Cow. And, wouldn’t you know it, they managed to get me to buy around $100 worth ($80 after all the piles of discounts though). It’s ostensibly a subscription box but given my usual level of meat consumption this is going to last me… well, a few months at least. So I guess I’m going to have to be very careful about making sure that I don’t end up with another big pile of meat in a month.

I have no idea if this is going to fit in my freezer. It arrives tomorrow. I also have a contractor (hopefully) finishing up my kitchen remodel. This will be interesting.

Anyway, with this Crowd Cow link you, too, can get $25 off your first box of high-end meat.

My last full day in Port Angeles was just like… okay I guess. I went out for breakfast and got a decent eggs benedict at a café in the industrial district. The weather was pretty nice so I started looking into other hikes I could do but all of the trails that were both open and not expert-level were a two-hour drive away, and I was feeling pretty tired, so I took a nap to mull it over.

When I woke up it was raining, so I just stayed at the AirBnB and worked on some more music and just generally hung out and relaxed. Then for dinner I went to a barbecue place (the one I had planned on going to turns out to be only open for lunch) which was pretty decent. There was also a huge print of their “mascot” on the wall, which looked suspiciously furry. I posted a photo of it to my Discord and right away a friend recognized the original art. (Update: For once, it turns out it was properly licensed. Good on them!)

Anyway. Tomorrow I check out and head back to Seattle. I’m not sure I feel substantially better than when I left, but at least it was nice to get away for the first time in well over a year, and to have my first actual not-actually-an-unpaid-job-in-disguise, not-a-family-disaster vacation in a long time.

Last night a couple of my projects got messed up by a bad interaction between Nextcloud and the macOS auto-save mechanism. In particular, I was working on a couple of projects that were stored in Nextcloud, and due to the way that they both work, macOS kept on seeing Nextcloud as having changed the files, so it would save out a backup copy, and then Nextcloud would see macOS as having changed the files, so it would issue a sync. At one point things got out of sync and led to a bunch of conflicts, which then in turn resulted in things getting into a very weird state where many of the files were just plain not syncing, and others were replaced with older versions.

I think to complicate matters, one of the projects may have also been open on my machine at home, judging by how the Logic project file had been spammed/overwritten with backup versions that reflected the project state before I left home, so while all my recordings were still present, they weren’t on my timeline at all. Nope, I just managed (after a lot of finagling) to get my VPN back home working, and Logic wasn’t open at all. This was purely a problem with sync between my laptop and the server, with no remote meddling taking place.

Fortunately they were just rough recordings that I was planning on replacing anyway, but if I’d lost some actual work I’d have been rather upset.

Presumably this would happen with any filesystem-based sync mechanism (such as Dropbox or Google Drive). So, if you’re going to work on bundle-style projects from apps which use macOS version management (such as Logic, Final Cut Pro, and probably a bunch of others), it’s best to move or copy them outside of your sync folder when you work on them, and only move/copy them back in when you want the saved version to actually synchronize to your other computers.

I’ve done a bunch of refactoring/simplification on my website templates. I think everything still works but if you see something funky, please let me know.

There’s also a lot more I need to fix, especially redoing the CSS to be cleaner and on the comics subsection (which has an entirely different set of templates that aren’t built on HTML5 semantic containers at all), but that can definitely wait.

(I also really want to redo novembeat at some point since I have a better idea of how to structure it now, but that also will wait.)

Nortriptyline helps me with pain and brain stuff but it also has been making my blood pressure steadily go up. These problems I’m having are a repeat of why I tried getting off of it the last time around. Constant dizziness and headaches and tinnitus and feeling like crap.

I appreciate how much it helps me with my anxiety and my insomnia and pain, but I need something else.

So, this isn’t a spoilers post at all, it’s just some gushing about how amazing the final season of Kipo was. It’s a perfect ending to the series, and I’m glad that Kipo was able to tie everything up so well.

What’s frustrating about it was apparently the showrunners had to guess about Netflix’s intentions and, as such, they decided to make the first three seasons as a self-contained arc rather than risk cancellation in the middle. Which Netflix ended up doing anyway.

If Netflix would just like say “Hey, your show is great but we’re not going to keep it going past this next season, so please wrap it up,” like, okay, that still sucks, but at least it lets the shows end properly. Unlike so many of their other shows where they take a wait-and-see approach and then cancel it after leading the show creators along about whether there’s a future for it.

Anyway. Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is not a show that’s going to disappoint by being cut off before it gets a chance to end. So, if you were enjoying it, please finish enjoying it.

Meanwhile, tthe creators' hope is that if the show gets enough attention, Netflix will bring it back for a second arc because they have many ideas for future stories in the setting, and that would be fabulous.

Also, I had no idea it was originally a webcomic; from the archive.org mirror it looks like it originally got two chapters before it was picked up by Dreamworks. And it was also rather different! I hope Sechrist picks it up again.

Today i had a followup appointment with the pain clinic. Unfortunately, as soon as I started working again my pain flareups came right back. But the doctor was able to pinpoint a few things which are probably the underlying causes, and gave me some more exercises to try. We also decided to try increasing my nortriptyline dose again; I’m on 30mg for the next week then going up to 35 after that (update: and mentioned an eventual target of 40-50, forgot to mention that).

It’s also pretty clear that stress is a huge factor, and boy howdy have I been under a lot of it. Fortunately my new workplace is hugely into giving generous vacation benefits and making sure people actually use them, so in a couple weeks I’m taking a trip out to Port Angeles and staying in a tiny house for a week. I’ll probably bring a guitar and my iPad and try to just, like, decompress, and Be, and spend a bunch if time in the olympic peninsula and enjoy the small town vibe.

Everything I’ve seen about Port Angeles indicates it is a pretty good place with a lot of comfort potential. Maybe even the sort of town I’d want to retire to. And apparently it’s even pretty trans-friendly! I look forward to seeing this year’s Clellam county election results.

So the nice thing about cleansing fire is it makes me realize that I had a lot of websites that I didn’t really need to keep going, just because I, like, never touch any of them or they’re just for fun.

For example, I was the only user of Reminder Me, and I’ve been moving all of my chore reminders over to the iOS Reminders app anyway, now that it does a better job of it than my crappy little RSS “app.” Given that it was one of the first Python things I wrote (and was a Python CGI, no less) and I’d been planning on rewriting it entirely if I decided I needed it anymore anyway, it doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort of getting it working with nginx. Plus, it was on Python 2, which is a major pain to even deploy anymore.

It was fun having a “band” website but I hadn’t substantially updated it since the release of Refactor back in 2015. So, I’ll just make it redirect to my bandcamp. I’ll probably want to get my static large-file storage bit up separately though.

Similarly, I don’t really see any point in putting my professional audio portfolio back online at this time; it was woefully outdated and never got a lot of traffic from people looking for what I was offering anyway. So, meh to that one.

I was hosting a couple of small websites for my parents and another for a friend, and I unfortunately didn’t think to back them up in advance. It would have made my life a lot easier if I’d not been going so impulsively. Impulse control, what even is it? Anyway, hopefully all that content still exists elsewhere.

Mostly I’m just noticing just how many heckin' domains I have and how pointless most of them are. Especially now that most browsers don’t allow emoji domains anymore.

On IndieWeb Chat, the topic of conference swag came up, in the context of a bigger discussion about freebie giveaways and the apparently unending demand for free t-shirts.

I have multiple drawers stuffed full of free t-shirts that I have no intention of wearing. And I can’t imagine anyone else wanting to wear them, either, and donating them to thrift shops just feels like it’s offloading my problems onto someone else.

Much of the swag that places hand out (be it at conferences, first days of work, awareness campaigns, or whatever else) seems like it’s at best well-intentioned but at worst a gigantic environmental burden, both in terms of peoples' environments and the environment of the planet as a whole (materials, energy expenditure, landfill, etc.).

So here’s some thoughts on common bits of swag that I’ve received and my personal usage of it. This applies both to conference swag (provided by conferences and vendors thereof) and employee swag (i.e. given out on employees' first days or during internal events or the like).

Writing stuff (pens, notebooks, etc.)

I am in favor of things like this. I’m always losing pens, and taking notes on things is a lot easier if I have notebooks to take the notes in. So, I generally do use this stuff. But I preferentially use ones that are on the nicer end of things; spiral-bound notebooks with hard covers, pens which aren’t just crappy ballpoint pens, that sort of thing.

I definitely prefer paper that is either unlined or gridded/graph paper. I’ll use lined notebook paper but it’s not as useful to me as a sketchbook or something with grids.

And of course, some people don’t care for this stuff and won’t use it. So, make it opt-in.

Clothing items

Clothes almost never come in a size or style which is comfortable for me. I hate wearing shirts with large swaths of non-breathable logo printed on them. I also hate wearing shirts that are just plain advertising for other things.

I also do not wear polo shirts. Even when I was male-presenting I didn’t care for that style.

Also, “unisex” t-shirts really mean “men’s.” Worse, if I show up at a place and people tell me the shirts are “unisex” (and don’t tell that to other people in line) I just feel called out for being visibly trans. You might think you’re being inclusive, but you’re not.

If you’re going to have t-shirts as a thing to give out, please make sure to have both crewneck and scoop-neck styles; crewneck are more masculine, scoop-neck are more feminine. And provide a complete range of sizes for both styles; there are small men, and there are large women. And make the shirt something that people want to wear on its own, rather than being purely a marketing vessel for your thing.

Like seriously have you ever seen some random person on the street wearing a t-shirt saying “Do everything, believe more! IT IS WHAT WE BELIEVE” and then decide to look into rackmount server hardware or whatever?

Hats are similar; some people love baseball caps, others can’t stand them. Same goes for knit caps, beanies, trilbies, fedoras, and so on.

Also, in this day and age, it seems likely that going forward a lot of places are going to be handing out face masks. In addition to the t-shirt issues (especially regarding breathability — that is obviously way more important here!) you’ll also probably want to make it obvious that they’ve not been handled directly by people at the conference (for example, being in a sterile plastic bag), and of course different people have different head sizes/shapes and material preferences. They should also probably have flexible metal for shaping around the nose, and a pocket for a removable filter.

So basically: give people choice, make it something that people would want to wear, and make it opt-in.

Water bottles

Oh my god I have so many reusable water bottles that I never use. These seem to be especially favored by companies where they have disposable paper cups and want to discourage people from using them. When I worked at HBO we got a new reusable water bottle pretty much every month. Some of them were nice, some of them were crap.

All of them go unused.

Like, I get the intention behind reusable water bottles: Hey, let’s be good to the environment, let’s not use single-use drink containers like disposable cups or single-use water bottles.

But look at it this way: anyone who’s going to not use disposable drink containers probably already has a reusable drink container they really like. And unless this drink container is better than an average one, it’s probably just going to take up space in a cabinet or landfill. This is especially true for low-grade “sports” bottles where they aren’t even usable in a sports context (for example, being made of a rigid, thin plastic but having a squeeze-bottle top).

Like, don’t try to replace single-use bottles with never-used ones. That’s not actually helping anything.

And I don’t know about other people, but if I’m in a situation that I’m using a disposable container, it’s because I don’t have my reusable container with me. Giving me another one to not have with me isn’t going to solve the problem. If I’m visiting an office I won’t have my own personal coffee cup. Maybe just have reusable drinkware available for visitors to use, or something?

As far as bottles go, different people have different tastes for what sort of material and shape and so on makes for an acceptable experience. Especially among folks with various sensory sensitivity issues and so on.

Basically: make it opt-in.

Stickers

Some people love stickers. Some people don’t. Some people will take the stickers and never have any idea of where to put them and they just accumulate in a drawer somewhere until the backing falls off and they make a big mess and oh god why didn’t I just throw them out oh no now there’s gunk all over the place

Make it opt-in.

Random cosmetic items

There’s a tendency at women-focused conferences especially to provide random “girly” things. They seem to always focus on the audience being women, and not aspects of the audience itself. I’ve been to women in tech conferences where the swag bag is full of things like press-on fingernails, makeup mirrors, nail polish (usually in gaudy, branded colors), and so on, never anything to do with the audience of the conference.

What’s even worse is when someone makes a gendered comment when they hand me the bag, in a way which implies that I wouldn’t want this stuff because I’m not a “real” woman. (Which also implies that men shouldn’t want these things, either.)

So, basically: make it opt-in.

Pronoun pins

I love pronoun pins. They’re great. I especially like ones with a write-in spot and which can be rewritten (such as being able to write on them with a “permanent” marker and then erase that with an alcohol wipe or something).

These go into a bigger category of thing but it’s good to at least consider the following things:

• Make the pronoun itself the central focus
• Make it easy to read at a distance
• If you use color as a shorthand, don’t use commonly-gendered colors (e.g. pink or blue), and also consider colorblindness for readability
• Offer at least he/him, she/her, they/them, and “ask.”
• DO NOT PROVIDE A JOKE PRONOUN OPTION. I cannot stress this enough. Joke pronouns as an option only serve to delegitimize the entire thing (although it’s handy to see who to avoid by who’s wearing the joke pronoun badges, I suppose).
• Also, it’s nice to let people take more than one, as a shorthand for “these options are all fine.”

And make it clear that this isn’t just for trans people! Encourage everyone to have one. But encourage, don’t force — some people are still in the closet or otherwise aren’t comfortable disclosing.

Basically, do what you can to normalize the idea of cis people declaring their pronouns, and to make the pronoun declaration obvious, but also accept that people might have reasons not to declare them, and at least make allowances for the fact that not everyone’s pronouns are going to be in the set that you consider.

(This obviously applies more to conferences themselves than about individual vendors at conferences.)

Overall

So, the summary I have on marketing swag in general:

1. Make it opt-in
2. Make it opt-in
3. Provide utility
4. Provide choices
5. Don’t treat everyone as an external marketing vessel, especially when your goal is just to market to the recipient
6. Make it opt-in

The plus side of using sqlite for everything: all my site data is just stored in files that are easy to recover!

The minus side of using sqlite for everything: way too easy to clobber newer content while incrementally restoring backups.

Hey y'all! Song Fight! Live(stream) has gone really well. A bunch of us learned a lot about live streaming online and I’ve picked up many more tricks for the future. And maybe we’ll be doing more of this stuff!

In the meantime: tonight is going to be the live fight (where people can vote in real time for their favorite new song), and I have a song in it. ANd it starts in about 20 minutes from the time of this post! Please show up and show your support.

I also had a lot of fun being background support on night 4, and it was also a thrill to be involved in the Seth Gibbs tribute and for my set to be so well-received on night 3.

It’s actually pretty cool how this whole thing is accessible to everyone in the world (who’s awake at this time, anyway) and not just being limited to people who could physically come, and I hope even post-pandemic we’ll keep doing online events like these.

But anyway. All that said I’m glad this event is soon to be over with: I need some heckin' sleep tonight. (And I start my new job tomorrow!)

Here’s the things that happened earlier today. First, the quiz show:

and here’s the Song Fight! stream:

And if you want to just watch my set on its own in cleanest quality, that’s over yonder.

Two major things happening Song Fight!-wise:

1. At 10 AM PDT today (that’s in about two hours!) I’ll be participating in a game show called Masoquiztic; the contestants will be me, Glenn Case, and Spud, and the host is a songfighter from days of yore who’s recently returned to the community
2. Tonight’s livestream is at 5 PM PDT; tune in on YouTube for the full live chat experience.

Every year, Song Fight! does a live show where a bunch of folks come from all around the world to perform for a couple of nights. Of course, because of current events this year’s show had to get canceled.

But this was the 20th year, so we couldn’t let such an important milestone go. So instead we’re doing it online.

I didn’t perform on night 1 but I was interviewed by Glenn Case, which was a lot of fun.

On night 2, I produced the stream and video (and did a bunch of simple bumper animations, which was fun!) and also one of my music videos got played. And it was cool to see responses to it from people who hadn’t seen it before!

Anyway, I have recorded a live set along with most of the other members of Sockpuppet, and hopefully that’ll get broadcast this week on night 3. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

Today I had a followup with my doctor after the cessation of gabapentin. My blood pressure is the lowest it’s been in years (118/75!) and she was really happy to see how much less stress I’m under. After discussing the current medication status we agree that I should stay on the nortriptyline for now, and she’s glad that physical therapy has been helping me a lot, as well as me getting better at mindfulness and other stress reduction things.

She also encouraged me to get going with a psychiatrist again so that I can possibly get back on Adderall or to try something else. I think before I do that I’ll see how well I tolerate caffeine. Which I’ve had a bit of over the past few days and it’s not been hecking me up at all, so this seems really promising.

Anyway she gave me a lot of words of encouragement and is also grateful that I’m taking such an active role in trying to make my own life better on multiple fronts. Hopefully this trajectory can continue.

Thursday night was my last dose of gabapentin; I am now off it entirely.

Today I mostly just napped a lot, and had occasional dizzy spells when I was active. I feel no different in terms of pain levels. My blood pressure seems to reliably hover around 120/80. Hopefully it’ll stay that way.

Between the physical therapy I’ve been doing and some lifestyle stress-reduction stuff I’m feeling pretty good. I need to just keep remembering to do my stretches and not let work affect me emotionally.

There’s new versions of Publ and Authl in town, and they support some fun stuff with user profiles. Go and check it out!

I’m starting to suspect that I’ve actually had mice all these years, and Fiona just made sure I didn’t know about it.

So I learned two things about Werner today.

First, it turns out he was born either in early 2002 or late 2001, making him at least 18 years old, not 17 as I previously thought.

Secondly, the person I adopted him from is named Maelyn Dean. Congratulations, Maelyn! I’m so happy for you. I’ve been reading Real Life Comics since pretty close to the beginning, and could never bring myself to remove the RSS feed from my reader. Now I’m really glad for that.

I love how far the world of webcomics has come when it comes to trans acceptance, too. Back when I was starting out around 20 years ago, any time I brought up trans stuff in my deeply-personal comics I’d just get trolls shouting “NOBODY CARES!” at me, and I felt more comfortable just withdrawing and being evasive and metaphorical about it all. But since then, especially in the last few years, it’s become such a joyous world of acceptance and loveliness, and it’s amazing to see so many stories being told by people who are finally feeling comfortable being themselves after so long.

Comics are such a great medium for storytelling and I really want to get back into it at some point. Hopefully soon.

I’m planning on attending IndieWebCamp West 2020, an online version of IndieWeb Summit that was originally going to be in Portland in just a few weeks. For anyone who’s interested in working towards an open, personal web, this is a pretty good place to do it.

Current state of affairs: the opioid painkillers have stopped being effective, so I’m gonna stop taking them for now. My doctor prescribed me a rather aggressive regimen of Tylenol (4000mg/day! holy crap) and some muscle relaxants, the latter of which help a little but not very much. She also increased my daily dose of gabapentin from 200mg to 400mg, and that isn’t helping much either.

I did finally get one of those old-school hot water bottles (the rubber kind which fill like a balloon and have a screw-in cork) and it turns out that this is a really good use for my sous vide machine, so that’s cool. The hot compress seems to do more for my pain than any of the meds do. Not enough to be, like, productive, but enough that I’m not screaming in pain. But maybe I can get back to work.

Anyway, on the plus side I finally got set up with a new rheumatologist, and I’m also starting physical therapy, so maybe those things will help with my ongoing fibro issues (which this could very well be yet another expression of, for that matter).

Got an appointment with my GP today. She understands my frustration at how the ER went, and she did a brief physical exam, in which she saw that my muscles are… very, very tense.

She prescribed me muscle relaxants and increased my dose of gabapentin. Hopefully that’ll help. I took my first dose of relaxants about three and a half hours ago and I’m not in as much agony but things still hurt. But it’s an improvement. Hopefully this continues.

Colin has a pretty neat implementation of a javascript-free lightbox gallery, which works by using the :checked attribute on a radio select and making the image a label for it. I think it could also be taken a bit further:

1. Use <img srcset> to serve up alternate renditions for the thumbnails; for example:

   <label for="gallery-2020-2-0">
       <img class="thumbnail"
           src="image-fullres.jpg" srcset="image-fullres.jpg 2048w, image-halfres.jpg 1024w, image-retinathumb 320w, image-smallthumb.jpg 160w"
           alt="Steampunk explorer" />
   </label>
   

2. Use CSS transitions to provide nice opacity and position animations for the items

1 in particular can save a lot of bandwidth, as the browser will only fetch the high-resolution renditions as they become visible. (And providing half-resolution renditions will also help on mobile clients.)

I mentioned my crappy approach to using multiple GitHub accounts on a Slack I’m on, and someone else pointed out there’s a much easier approach: Instead of using wrapper scripts to set up different environments, you can fake it using .ssh/config and .gitconfig rules.

First, set up key rules with .ssh/config:

Host  github-work
  Hostname github.com
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_work
Host github-personal
  Hostname github.com
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_personal

Next, set your origin based on whether the workspace is work or personal; for example, git clone git@github-work:work-org/project.git (and of course you can git remote set-url origin for existing workspaces).

Finally, to handle the different author name and email, git 2.15 and later support conditional includes. If you keep all of your work projects in a separate directory, you can put this into your .gitconfig:

[includeIf "gitdir:~/wfh"]
path = ~/.gitconfig-work

then .gitconfig-work includes your work-specific configuration, e.g.:

[user]
name = Boring Legal Name
email = work-email@example.com

Thanks, Silas!

Oops, I guess I haven’t been posting here as often as I’d like. I guess I’ve mostly been using Discord to keep in touch with folks.

I’m fairly busy at the day job. I’ve already rolled out a few important features for our websites and soon I’ll be ramping up on another project. So far everyone there has been super great and I’m glad I lucked out with this job, even without the societal/financial catastrope that happened shortly after I started.

Isolation hasn’t been great for me. I’ve been having a pretty bad fibro flareup lately, and I still haven’t quite shaken whatever this dang thing I have is. It’s not gotten severe enough to require medical attention but at the same time I’d love to not be missing occasional workdays when I’m feeling especially lousy. It might also just be part of the fibro flare, too. Fortunately the new job has unlimited sick days, because dang I’ve been taking a lot of them this past month.

I’ve had to switch back to decaf because it turns out having even half-caf espresso every day has gotten me sensitized to caffeine again, and I was starting to have panic attacks again. Phooey. I still love my Flair though. I’ve also had a couple of people ask me about selling my custom tampers so I should see about, like, doing that.

So, because I’ve changed insurance plans, I need to change my specialists as well. One of those is my sleep specialist, which I mostly want to get a DME provider set up with my insurance, which requires a screening in order to get DME approval.

Because of COVID-19, appointments are limited, and they can’t see me until June 1, which means if I need to refresh my mask et al I’ll have to go out-of-pocket until then. Not the worst thing in the world (and honestly I found out-of-pocket to be cheaper than the copay on my previous DME anyway), but annoying.

But there’s a bit more that this leads to which is a little wonky… because of COVID-19 they had to ask me the usual appointment pre-screening questions regarding SARS-NCoV-2 symptoms and exposure. But those questions are based on right now, and probably won’t be valid in three months. Like, one of them was “have you traveled in the last 14 days or been exposed to someone known to have the virus in that time?” and regardless of how I answer now that has no bearing on how it’ll be on June 1. Similarly, just because I have no symptoms or fever right now doesn’t mean anything about how I’ll be in June.

If the appointment were within two weeks I’d say this was reasonable, but… it’s two months away. How does that make any sense?

So, I am using way more soap than usual when washing my hands, which has been drying out the skin a lot. To try to counteract that I’ve been using lotion a lot more. But it turns out that this leads to more tactile stimulation on my fingers (basically I constantly feel like I’ve just been soaking in the bathtub for an hour) which in turn leads to a sensory overload/pain flare, and it doesn’t even help with the dry skin anyway, and the dry skin also leads to its own level of sensory issues too. And Fiona’s insistence on sitting on my lap while I work isn’t helping at all. Just before lunch I had a bit of a meltdown because of it.

I guess I need to figure out a better way to periodically clean my hands without leading to other issues.

I could also really use a haircut, because my wild scraggly hair getting in my face is making this worse. Of course all the hair stylists are (rightfully) closed right now. I suppose I could break out my Flowbee but that feels like it’s taking the “mental stress due to isolation” look a bit too far. (Plus I don’t want my hair to be that short right now. I need every femininity cue I can get these days.) Maybe it’s time to finally learn how to use hair clips, but I suspect feeling them bouncing against my face would make me flare too.

Why is my brain like this? Ugh.

Just as a reminder, if you’re bored and want to chat with other bored people about geeky things, I have a small but friendly Discord community. We mostly talk about the sorts of stuff I talk about here, but lots of hobbies are welcome.

I’m trying to keep it cozy and comfortable, so if you need somewhere that’s cozy and comfortable, hopefully this is a reasonable place for you!

iOS and watchOS have a great little remote control app for iTunes, which lets you control iTunes playback. It’s useful when I need to play or pause music during a typing break, or if I get a phone call while I’m in another room from my computer or whatever.

It’s supposed to work with Music.app.

It doesn’t.

I mean, it’ll pretend to connect just fine, but it never actually shows any of the playback information, and the controls do nothing.

Bonus fuckery: iTunes Match completely messed up the Fingertips suite on They Might Be Giants' Apollo 18. Tracks were out of order (yeah, yeah, I know it’s supposed to be shuffled but my brain has a thing) and half of them were glitched out and truncated.

Right now a whole bunch of people are starting to teleconference without having done such a thing before, and some of the hardware setup is a little bit unexpected. So speaking as someone who’s been doing teleconferencing for a while, here’s some tips to help everyone get along better:

1. Please use headphones! If you do nothing else in this list, please do this. Headphone use alone will make the biggest difference. The reason for this is that your microphone will pick up sound from the speakers as well, and using headphones means that your audio won’t feed back into the microphone, so you won’t have feedback loops or echoes, and it will cut down on how much the software needs to do “echo cancellation” which is a big part of why you talking makes everyone else cut off.

2. Also mute your speakers, if your headphones don’t do this automatically. If you’re using a laptop/tablet/phone this probably won’t be an issue, but on a desktop computer this might still be something you have to do yourself.

3. If you’re not speaking, mute your microphone. Especially if there’s background noise (kids, cats, music, etc.) or if you have a cough or cold.

4. Please try to limit the amount of background noise, as well; if you have a very meowy cat or barky dog, close your door with them on the other side (if possible). Turn off your radio or TV.

5. Only connect/listen with one device at a time; this is sort of an extended version of point 1 above, but if you are listening in on a speakerphone or radio or TV or the like, using your headphones won’t prevent feedback from happening. Any noise that someone in the room can hear, your microphone can hear, and anything your microphone can hear gets broadcast back to the conference. You really don’t want your microphone to hear the other participants of the teleconference.

6. If you’re on a laptop and don’t need to type during the conference, use the microphone on the laptop, which is almost certainly going to sound better than whatever’s on your headset. However, if you need to type, please use a headset with a built-in microphone instead; most laptops these days accept a 2.5mm telephone headset (the kind with four metal “rings” on the plug) and this will reduce the amount of keyboard noise that the microphone picks up.

7. If you’re using a headset with a built-in microphone, make sure the microphone is clipped to your shirt rather than hanging loose. If it hangs loose it might brush against your shirt (which makes noise) or knock against your desk (which makes noise). These noises can be very distracting and disruptive to others on the conference.

8. Similarly, please, please, please don’t join in while outdoors if you can help it; even the slightest breeze will also be picked up as a noisy rumble. (As will all background noise.)

9. Finally: Most teleconferencing systems will show you if the microphone is picking up and sending your audio, or will have a test mechanism where you can check to see if it’s working. Please test this before joining in on the call, which will cut down on the amount of time you have to spend asking, “Can you hear me?” or having others ask, “Are you muted?”

With a little bit of effort we can all make our newly-found virtual presences go a lot more smoothly and less aggravating for everyone.

My symptoms have mostly cleared up, so I went out to get some cat food and cat litter. At the store everything seemed like it was back to normal; the crowd wasn’t quite as massive as usual for a Sunday afternoon, but the shelves were, for the most part, well-stocked. The canned beans section was still somewhat depleted (but there was still plenty to go around), and paper products and bottled water were back to normal stock levels. Hand soap was a bit scarce (and there was a “limit 5 per order” sign prominently placed there) and hand sanitizer and rubbing alcohol were completely out. I didn’t think to check the rice section, though. Anyway I did end up buying some more hand soap since I’m running low. Just the usual amount¹ I’d need for a reasonable amount of time, of course.

And while I was feeling up to it I finally got around to doing a Sodastream canister exchange at Bartell’s. I only went to the Sodastream section and also picked up some of their actually-sugar-based-we-mean-it raspberry mint syrup² so I didn’t check their product availability myself, but while checking out the cashier handled a phone call and said, “Sorry, we’re out,” and then after hanging up said, “If I had a dime…”

This morning my prescriptions finally came through (I don’t know why they weren’t available same-day as they were filled, but whatever). So I donned one of my N95 masks (which I happened to have on-hand from years of preparedness around summer wildfires) and headed over to the drug store next door, to pick those up as well as some other medical things.

Unsurprisingly, the pharmacy didn’t have up-to-date insurance information in their system, and my prescriptions — a short course of prednisone, a prescription cough suppressant, and a steroid inhaler — came to around $450! When they updated with my new insurance it came down to $50, mostly for the inhaler. Even that’s a lot for a lot of people to handle, and I can’t imagine trying to afford these things without insurance. We need universal healthcare, already.

Also I dislike wearing the mask in public. People look at me like I’m either a paranoiac or like I’m one of the people who’s been hoarding necessary medical supplies that could better go to others. But I am very specifically in the category of people who are supposed to have and wear masks — people who are symptomatic and/or high-risk for infection! (I happen to be both.)

The pharmacist was completely okay, but I also went to get a few other things (cough syrup, thermometer probe covers¹, nasal rinse saline², stuff like that) and the cashier was a bit… weird to me about the mask.

Yesterday when I was walking to the doctor and back I made extra-sure to cough audibly whenever people looked at me funny.

Which reminds me, I still need to get a cane for when I’m having a pain flareup and want people to not give me dirty looks when I sit in the priority seats on the bus.

I hate that so much of illness has to be performative. Can’t people just, like, assume that people only take what they need? Then again, the massive hoarding of masks and hand sanitizer just indicates that people generally don’t, and that’s a big part of the problem.

But, whatever. I have my meds and I have no real reason to leave the house for a while. Well, except I need to buy more cat litter and I have a bunch of coupons that expire tomorrow anyway. Maybe I’ll just go maskless and cough on everyone. That’ll learn ‘em.

Ironically, when I wear the mask outside I don’t need to cough as much, because the air inside it is warm and moist.

So part of whatever this is I have is muscle pain, and my doctor directed me to take 1000mg of acetaminophen up to 4x daily. So I bought acetaminophen at the drug store just now, and the only non-expensive version they had was these “cool capsule” versions with an “instant cooling sensation.”

Which is to say they are cloyingly sweet and have a hint of mint flavor.

Of course the sweetness comes from an artificial zero-calorie sweetener which will probably end up giving me a headache.

Why the heck does everything have to be super-sweet? Maybe we wouldn’t need artificial zero-calorie sweeteners in pretty much everything if we didn’t have this expectation that everything taste like candy all the time.

I don’t know how it is in other countries but at least in the US we seem to have forgotten how to taste things. Everything’s loaded up with sugar and super-sweet. And so we have zero-calorie sweeteners to reduce the amount of sugar (instead of just reducing the amount of sugar in things that didn’t need sugar in the first place), and then we have sugar taxes to incentivize people away from sugar.

When I want to reduce my sugar intake, I generally do so by not eating sugary things. Yeah, I have a tendency to keep too much candy and snacks and so on around and I could stand to remove more from my diet. But it’s hard to avoid sweets when everything is sweet. And now I’m left with the horrible aftertaste of acesulfame potassium in my throat, this pernicious coating of not-sugar that just feels gross.

I just wanted some fucking Tylenol, man.

Just got back from the doctor. She says I definitely have a virus but it’s probably not COVID-19; I probably have one of the many other emergent respiratory viruses that’s going around, many of which also cause the symptoms I’m feeling. Notably I’m not having any signs of pneumonia, which is what I really need to look out for.

She prescribed me prednisone and inhaled steroids and says I should continue to self-isolate (of course) but otherwise I don’t really have anything to worry about. Of course I should go back if things get worse and keep her in the loop about any changes.

Incidentally, I am quite pleased with One Medical so far. They were super-friendly and compassionate, and they asked my pronouns and are elated to call me “fluffy.” It’s annoying that this kind of healthcare is only really available if you’re able to spend $200/year for concierge care, but I’m glad to be in a position where I can.

I mean, Kaiser was pretty okay! But they still felt bureaucratic and, well, HMO-ish. (And they were still better than any of the major care clinics/hospitals in Seattle, like Swedish or, worse yet, Virginia Mason…)

Anyway. Folks were asking for updates so here’s the update.

Ugh, I really want to support dark mode (it’s a big accessibility win!) but right now my stylesheets are such a mess and Isso does a couple of aggravating things that makes it hard to correctly do dark mode themes. Namely that it provides its own inline stylesheet that is difficult to override correctly (without just throwing the whole thing out and remaking it from the ground up).

I wish more things used CSS variables by default – they’re very well-supported now and make it a lot easier to reason around themes. One of these days I’m going to get around to redoing all my stylesheets and use them for all colors and probably for most of my sizing.

I’ve mentioned before how I used to self-medicate my undiagnosed ADHD with a trickle of caffeine until I started getting anxiety problems from it. I’ve also mentioned how post-diagnosis I’ve had trouble finding a medication which has worked for me, and I’ve tried slowly reacclimating myself to caffeine during periods between medications.

At my new job we have a pretty decent automatic espresso-drink maker, and out of curiosity I’ve tried slowly consuming one coffee drink over the course of each morning, and so far that’s actually working pretty well for me. Inasmuch as it’s not giving me a panic attack. It hasn’t really helped me with my focus, but maybe this is a sign I can try having more and maybe it won’t make me feel like I’m going to die!

I’m not about to start slamming the energy drinks or anything, but still, I’m glad that I’ve at least been able to get back a thing that’s been missing for the past decade.

Remember the AR startup? I’m still involved enough to be happy that our latest app, powAR, is out, and ready to possibly educate and entertain you about hydroelectric dams.

This was a fun project to work on. My main contributions were animating and educating the fish. And editing some drone footage. That was fun too.

Unlike our other AR apps, it does require an ARKit or ARCore-compatible device, so on iOS it needs iOS 12 and at least an A9 CPU (so at least an iPhone 6S, iPad Pro, 5th-gen/2019 iPad mini, or 7th-gen/mid-2019 iPod Touch), and on Android it needs… whatever the confusing device matrix works out to be there.

Anyway. I won’t be as involved with WORKSHOP 3D going forward (at least, I’m hoping my new job does well for me!), but I’ll still be around to give them advice from time to time and I am looking forward to seeing what else they make.

I finally got around to making a better store page. It’s still not great but it’s better than just linking to either my Threadless or Storenvy or whatever, and I’ll be able to backfill a bunch more of my items into it eventually.

There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to change of course, but this at least gives me a hook to setting up my own PayPal/Stripe/etc. cart as well.

Anyway I’m glad that Publ is in a state where it’s gotten easier and easier for me to make new sites from scratch with it. And I also released a new version of Publ with some shiny new features.

I finally got around to trying out the OBi WiFi adapter today, and while I had great difficulty getting it to connect to the network, once I did, it worked like a charm.

Then out of curiosity I tried connecting it back to my regular landline and… it was able to work just fine, and it saw no backfeed at all. Meaning it was probably just having trouble due to moisture from all the rain or something, and the OBi WiFi wasn’t necessary after all.

So, I tried out the HT502, and that was also able to work just fine, and was able to make an outgoing call via pulse dialing!

Incoming calls still don’t ring quite right because as far as I can tell there’s no way to configure it with a 30Hz ring, but setting it to 25Hz gets the clapper to vibrate enough that I could theoretically tune the bells to work well enough (just more quietly). That’ll have to wait until sometime tomorrow when I’m not likely to wake up neighbors with the sound, though.

Of course if I could get the HT502 to ring at 30Hz that would be even better… I did finally find someone selling what purports to be a standard AE90 ringer and I’ve asked them for more information (like a specific part number) to see if that’d work for me. I’m not holding my breath for a response but it’d be really cool if that ends up working.

Update: The seller got back to me and confirmed that it is an AE90 ringer at the standard 20Hz. So I’ve ordered it. Another $40 spent on this silly project, oh well! It’s fun.

I used to get a pretty steady stream of offers for “featured guest posts” on my website, but then that tapered off, and I figured it was just because those spammers found something better to do for their SEO. But that was also around when I stopped posting to my own site regularly and was mostly blogging on Tumblr or posting to Twitter.

But ever since I moved back to this site as my primary posting destination, the emails have started to come back, which makes me think they never really left – they just stopped asking me.

It’s weirdly validating, in a way.

I mean, I’m still not going to accept any of their offers (this is my site, not some random free-for-all, dangit!) but it’s nice to be wanted all the same.

(That said I do post guest art, so if you want to get something featured on this site, draw a picture of one of my characters. I’m pretty easy to please in that regard.)

So, on the plus side, Adderall XR has been helping me quite a lot with my focus and executive functioning.

On the minus side, I’m having several of the unpleasant side effects: greatly increased blood pressure, numb toes, migraines/nausea (starting yesterday or so), and constipation.

I was really hoping I finally found something that works for me. Maybe I should stop taking it for a couple days and see how I feel. Because right now I just feel bad.

Sorry about the sudden backfill of entries; I was posting progress photos on Facebook (mostly for my mom’s benefit) but the response to them has been positive enough that I figured I’d also post them here. Some of the text might be redundant as a result with other things I posted about here already.

I also did my best to merge the Facebook version of the day 5 demi-disaster with this one but it ends up a little weird. Anyway there’s photos now in case you already read that entry.

Took delivery of the new cabinets. Actual install work hasn’t been scheduled; maybe Monday, maybe tomorrow, maybe in two weeks, who knows! Also this is real-life Sokoban. My little temporary kitchen becomes even more unwieldy. Guess I’ll be eating out for the next little while.

So I was taking 18mg of Concerta for about a month and found that I tolerated it well, although it wasn’t helping my focus any (and if anything it made me drowsy). So I asked to go up to the next dosage.

So, yesterday I took 27mg for the first time (at 8:30 AM as usual), and it didn’t help me with my focus, but it sure as hell made me feel irritable all day, and my heart rate just progressively went higher and higher throughout the day. At 9 PM it suddenly went up to 130BPM while I was sitting down, and I could feel it pounding too. I finally fell asleep at around 2 AM, and my bed said my heart rate pretty quickly went back down to normal.

Today I opted not to take it at all and I emailed my psychiatrist saying I was going to discontinue it, and I’ll just try self-medicating with caffeine until my next psych appointment in a few weeks, unless she has a specific recommendation for a different thing to try.

Sure would be nice if brains came with user manuals.