busybee fluffy rambles

The various responses I’ve gotten to yesterday’s post tell me that I need to be a bit more specific about what I mean by a “project,” because how it relates to my work is very different than how the various project-tracking tools do it.

Project-tracking tools think of a project as being a distinct set of work items, often shared by an entire team, going for a single end-goal deliverable. The tasks for a single project live on the project’s own board, and they do not intermingle.

However, in my situation, I am making music for a whole bunch of separate projects (external to me and my own planning), but which I want to all have visible in a single place. Some of these projects might only need one track. Some of them might need a dozen or so.

Hey! As I’m trying to get more serious about my music contracting stuff, I’m looking for a better way of managing my projects and requests and so on.

Here’s the criteria I’m going for:

• Self-hostable (and ideally free)

  I do not want to be beholden to someone company’s capricious whims about the future of their exponential growth platform.

• Public vs. private vs. shareable items

  It would be super useful for me to be able to link to a page which tells people how much work I have pending and also maybe be able to designate items as whether the public can see the specifics.

  Having a means of letting people also see progress on their specific items would be great, but not a requirement.

  I definitely need to be able to make some specifics or even the project/task names hidden to the public, but I still want people to be able to see that there is something going on even if they don’t know what.

• Nested items and/or project groupings

  When working on music, I want to be able to see what work needs to be done on a per-project basis, but also be able to see what work needs to be done in general. Ideally this would be a “containment” concept (i.e. sub-tasks of a larger task) and not a “relation” concept. Which is to say, there needs to be actual hierarchy.

• Freeform text entry for projects and tasks

  Usually client requests come with a whole bunch of information that needs to be browseable, and keeping it associated with the request itself would be stellar.

• Kanban view

  Being able to see the tasks in terms of a pending/in progress/delivered/complete view where I can move stuff from left to right as it progresses would be super helpful.

  Ideally things in the “complete” column would automatically age out.

• Priorities and due dates

  Sometimes a task has to get done by a certain time. Sometimes a task is a “nice to have.” Sometimes a task is just a placeholder for what work might eventually need to happen.

Hey y'all, just a reminder that I have an upcoming show happening on Friday at around 2:30 PM Pacfic time (5:30 Eastern, 22:30 UTC, etc.).

Hey y'all! February is here! Oh gosh!

My big thing this month will be making as much music as I can for Strawberry Jam. February and November are my two big music-making months (November being when I do Novembeat normally, although this year it was taken up with other things).

I’m also hoping to do a second season of Transformative Meditations, also for Strawberry Jam.

I also have a couple of concerts lined up, one tomorrow and one next Friday.

As I mentioned on Mastodon and Bluesky, my gaming PC got infected by malware/ransomware, particularly Azov and Expiro. I’m not sure how my computer got infected but this was the push I needed to switch it over to Linux, now that VRChat and SteamVR run pretty well on Linux anyway.

I’ve reorganized my bedroom and as part of it I decided to finally address the ongoing issues with my audio setup in there. I have an old AirPort Express which I was using as an AirPlay receiver so that I could play music and podcasts and such on the (rather nice) hi-fi speakers, but it’s been super unreliable as of late, and even when it does remain connected, it generates random popping noises on the speakers — not great when I’m trying to sleep!

So anyway I was looking up various aftermarket AirPlay receivers, and most of them are pretty expensive, but then I realized that there’s probably a way of receiving AirPlay on a Raspberry Pi, and yes, there is, and then just as I was about to look for used Raspberry Pis to install this on, I remembered I already have a Raspberry Pi, in my bedroom, in the very same nightstand I would be putting a new one in: because I have SOMA’s older smart shades which use a rebadged Raspberry Pi as their Bluetooth-to-HomeKit bridge.

And the SOMA Connect image is just running Linux (specifically Rasbian 10) and some proprietary software.

The reports we received had enough information to evaluate your condition.

You said you were unable to work as of 05/15/2022 because of fibromyalgia, chronic pain, arthritis of hands and knees, vertigo, hypermobility spectrum disorder, depression, panic disorder, anxiety, and ADHD.

The evidence shows you have received treatment and assessment for these conditions.

We do not have sufficient vocational information to determine whether you can perform any of your past relevant work. However, based on the evidence in file, we have determined that you can adjust to other work. Because you can still perform some type of work, you are not considered disabled. Therefore, a period of disability cannot be established.

If your condition gets worse and keeps you from working, please contact any Social Security office about filing another application.

Given how many times I had to file a vocational report (at great length, in longhand, which FUCKING HURTS) I’m guessing they just never fucking received it. And of course, I’d love to work, but nobody wants to hire me for the number of hours I can work doing what I’m able to do, and commuting is also quite difficult for me.

I’m still waiting to hear back from my disability attorney but she hasn’t responded to any of my messages over the past couple weeks. Guess I need to send her a text on Monday.

In the meantime I’ve applied for all of the state-level things I can find, and it turns out that they do not require me to be declared disabled federally to be a possibility. Washington Connection is super helpful.