busybee fluffy rambles

I got my lab results back regarding my hormone levels.

Normal estradiol levels are 100-200 pg/mL.

Mine were 31.

So anyway, I’m doubling up on my patches for now, and hopefully my doctor can get me a prescription for higher-strength patches (and proper regular monitoring of my levels) going forward. Fortunately, my new doctor is also a lot easier to get to, as he’s actually in my town and not two towns over, which means I’ll also be able to get there easily by ebike!

Also my new ebike should be arriving Saturday, much earlier than expected. Yay!

Carvana hauled away the Niro today and I am now about $13K richer.

Well, I was, until I then spent $1500 on an extremely well-regarded ebike. Currently it’s on Black Friday sale for $1300 with an incredibly generous bundle of accessories (all things I wanted to get anyway), and I upgraded the seat. Then tax brought it to $1480 all-in.

The specs on this Lectric XPress 750 are amazing, and I haven’t found a single bad thing said about it on the various eBike reddits (and a lot of glowing praise). And then if I want to fit more cargo, it works with a trailer as well.

Depending on how things go I’ll still probably want to consider the e-Rickshaw at some point as a dedicated cargo vehicle, but that’s still based on some extreme hypotheticals. Having just a bike is enough for now.

Carvana’s scheduled to pick up the Niro today. Hopefully that goes well.

I’ve listed my comma3x on eBay, in case someone is interested in buying it. (I genuinely liked this device and I wish I could have used it more than I did!)

I hyperfixated on a bunch of ebikes and conversion kits and so on and then ended up just going with my gut and ordered a cheap one on Aliexpress which actually gets pretty decent reviews in general, and with the Black Friday sale it was under $300 even after shipping, so, cool UPDATE: I came to my senses regarding cheap Chinese bicycles and house fires, and have requested a cancellation of the order. Other recommendations for ebikes that won’t explode while charging would be appreciated.

I have some longer-term bloopibloops under the cut.

I have two pending offers on my car: $13,200 from Carvana for a straight sale, and $14,372 from a local dealership for a tradein. Here’s some of my thought processes about which one to take.

In 2022 I traded in my Mazda3 for a Nissan LEAF, which cost me about $1000 all-in. The LEAF was a pretty great car that I liked a lot, but it had a couple of critical features, namely that the lack of active battery thermal management meant that its range got super low in the winter and the battery was degrading quite quickly, and being stuck on CHAdeMO made it very stressful to find a quick charge the rare times when I needed one (which happened just often enough that I was getting worried).

Amazingly enough, Valve have finally at least made an announcement breaking the “curse of three,” and their third¹ VR headset is actually materializing soon™.

Anyway. Aside from the lack of pricing I’m super optimistic about the Steam Frame. It doesn’t yet hit quite all the marks for me but it’s super close and actually does a lot of stuff that I’d been wanting to see in a headset.

When I was a kid, my mom always insisted on “cleaning” out my ear canals with cotton swabs, usually right after I bathed, and this ended up establishing a bad habit of using cotton swabs on my ears every morning after I shower. I am well aware of the many problems this can cause but I never feel like I’m quite done getting clean until I’ve swabbed my ears out. I’ve tried breaking that habit many times but it’s always come back.

I’ve also found it very difficult to establish a daily habit of flossing my teeth, even though that’s super important to dental hygiene, and arguably even moreso than brushing. I’ve tried things like keeping a bag of daily flossers/floss picks by my computer, which has helped somewhat, but it’s still not gotten to the point where I feel comfortable telling my dentist, “Yeah, I floss!”

So, for the last couple weeks I’ve been trying something: I put a bag of floss picks on top of my box of cotton swabs, and now after I shower, when I reach for the cotton swab, instead I am reminded that I should floss my teeth, not my ears, and so I floss my teeth instead.

As a result I haven’t swabbed out my ears in a while (they still feel “dirty” all morning, unfortunately), and better yet, my teeth have remained consistently flossed. Of course it would be better if I could get myself to floss at bedtime (rather than having dinner stuck between my teeth all night) but any daily flossing is better than no daily flossing, and so this is still a huge improvement.

Remember that idea I came up with a couple months ago and then rambled about a bunch and then stopped talking about it?

I finally had the spoons to write a draft of what I hope will eventually become a specification, which I am (for now) calling Canimus, after the Latin word for “we sing.” It also has a few other meanings, such as “we play an instrument,” “we prophesize,” and “we hoot.”

Or, more broadly, “we make music.”

I’d been with CenturyLink Fiber since I moved into this house in early 2021, and was mostly happy with it. I never had any major outages aside from occasional drops due to their crappy provided router, which I replaced with a Linux SBC running OpenWRT. The only real complaints I had was that they used PPPoE + VLAN tagging (which was annoying to set up) and that for IPv6 they only provided 6rd which is a bit of a half-measure. But I was able to host services to my heart’s content, and they were pretty hands-off with a lot of things.

Unfortunately, a month ago I was switched over to Quantum Fiber, which is sort of a rebrand but sort of a separate company, and I’d heard nothing but horror stories about Quantum, and unfortunately, I experienced two of them myself:

1. When I first switched, my Internet went out for a few days early on, when CenturyLink shut down the old account; apparently this caused a misconfiguration on their end which led to my network being shut off, and it took a few days (and several tech support calls) for them to figure it out.

2. I ended up getting a DMCA notice for some activities on my network, and while normally it’s just a thing you can click through to acknowledge that you received the notice (after which time your service gets immediately restored), this time the notice kept on coming back every 10 minutes (killing all my web connections each time, although thankfully VPN and ssh sessions were mostly unaffected), and it was coming from CenturyLink, not Quantum.

   I spent hours on the phone with both companies' support, each one blaming the other company for the issue, and it took days before my connection was stable again. I had a bodge in place that made it mostly reliable (it was super easy to run a script that would check for the notification and then click the button) but it still made things kind of unreliable, and both companies' tech support was bafflingly awful in ways I can only describe as “Kafka-esque.”

The second issue finally cleared up after about four days, but by that time I decided it was time to try another ISP, and the only other broadband options where I live are Comcast XFinity, who are awful and expensive, and T-Mobile 5G, which costs about the same as Quantum but have other tech concerns to worry about. But I’ve had plenty of experience with T-Mobile as a company and I figured I’d give them a try for this, especially with how many people I know who sing their praises.

The access point arrived today and I’ve been putting the service through its paces. My opinion is… mixed, but generally positive.