busybee fluffy rambles

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.

got another rejection for disability

this time it came with a 20-odd page document explaining in great detail where this decision came from, and while I didn’t have the spoons to read the whole thing, the parts I did read boiled down to:

• We didn’t see anything in your medical record that says the things you said about your inability to work
• Because your medical records don’t say that we believe that you can do work that requires standing 6 hours a day
• You are totally qualified to do menial, repetitive tasks all day long and so surely you could do that for a career

And then there was a bizarre tangent about my HRT that I had no idea how it connected to my claim but felt vaguely transphobic, and also an insistence that I’d “rejected treatment” for my conditions, which is complete bullcrap; I tried so many different treatments but their side effects were much worse. I wanted them to work, it’s not like I chose for them to make my blood pressure skyrocket to 180/120 or give me days-long insomnia or give me fucking seizures.

As always the thing that upsets me the most is people asking me questions then either not believing or completely misinterpreting my response.

Oh and on top of that they used the fact that I’m able to manage my finances well enough to get by as proof that I’m not really disabled, either.

I’m so tired of this nonsense.

Since my last post about this I have obtained a Leap Motion 1 and have experimented with it a whole bunch, and unfortunately, it’s just not quite there for what I need out of it.

Hey! How’s it going? I think things are fairly okay on my end.

Now that I’m doing even more performing in VRChat and also making use of occasional backing tracks (instead of just doing everything totally live), it’s time for me to improve my audio setup. But Windows audio is super tricky and annoying, so it took me a bunch of iteration to figure out how I want to make it work now.