busybee fluffy rambles

Back in the day, independent social media enthusiasts were building their own social spaces on RSS/Atom and self-hosted publishing. There was a huge ecosystem of feed readers and publishing software, where anyone could use their own choice of tools to interact with the space, and it was super cool.

Then Google got into it and made Google Reader, which was a really good feed reader, but they couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable and wanted to shove everyone over to Google+, so they shut Google Reader down, and then the tech press breathlessly claimed that RSS was now dead as a result, and because RSS was (in their eyes) dead, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nowadays, RSS is seen as an obsolete thing only used by diehards, and corporate social media has become the norm, with a relatively tiny faction of people settling on ActivityPub instead, despite it being a poor match for the kinds of things that people used RSS for.

Wellp, the latest bathroom situation is something that could have been a lot less expensive, if I’d been a bit more willing to get some proper diagnosing this time around. I still think it’s a good thing that this work is getting done, but gosh, things didn’t have to go this way.

So, I went to the Kia dealership, and it took them an hour to figure out where my car’s keys were. Also they had trouble finding my customer record, because it turned out the service advisor misspelled my name, and they don’t have a good way to search their system. Disorganized clown-shoes operation.

But, whatever. I finally have my car back. And the click sound was gone at first but it came back halfway home. And according to the tech notes, guess what they did during the month they had my car:

absolutely NOTHING.

They decided that the sound was “normal EV motor noise.”

Why did they need my car for a WHOLE MONTH to tell me that?

The tech notes said (all misspellings theirs):

No abnormal noises were heard fro vehicle. Test drove vehicle and found no abnormal noises heard. Referenced TSB ELE234 and found the noises heard from the vehicle to be constant with the Note: Be careful to not mistake the abnormal noises for the normal noise of the EV motor in the vehicle

Did they also read the part of the tech note that says that the TSB’s clicking noise is intermittent and only occurs at slower speeds? Probably not!

And, I repeat, it took them A GODDAMN MONTH.

But at least I have my car back and a paper trail for what happens when the bearing fails.

There is a really pervasive trend in video these days where people will use (usually auto-generated) open captions (sometimes called “burned captions” or “hard subs”), where the text for the narration or the like is baked into the image of the video. This is sometimes accompanied by some attention-grabbing effects, like making the currently-spoken word jump up in size, often with a very goofy animation.

Please stop doing this.

PSA: If you’re running Komplete on an M1 Mac under a DAW which supports an Intel/Rosetta plugin bridge (such as Logic), DO NOT update Komplete Kontrol to v2.8.0! This WILL break compatibility with any Reaktor or Battery instruments you’re using! (As well as any other legacy Intel VST2s that you’re hosting by Komplete Kontrol for whatever reason.)

Komplete Kontrol 2.7.2 still runs under the Rosetta bridge, but 2.8 has been updated to be M1-compatible — but Battery and Reaktor HAVE NOT yet, and they’re not expecting to have those updated for a few more months.

There are a few workarounds:

1. Launch your DAW under Rosetta (and lose your CPU performance everywhere)
2. Convert the Komplete Kontrol plugin to directly use Reaktor/Battery (and lose NKI and preset browsing)
3. Perish (or, y'know, wait for the plugins to update, same diff really)
4. Update: Native Instruments were kind enough to provide a download of v2.7.2 for those who need it

My week off from work felt great. But I’m still having difficulty actually focusing at work. I have a bunch of paths of exploration to examine but none of them feel, y'know, right right now.

Meanwhile, my house continues to be a bit more work than I expected. On the plus side, I’ve successfully murdered my lawn and vastly improved my garden and started up my nice meadow. On the minus side, my heating bill is through the roof (literally) and I’ve been getting bids for finally improving the house insulation. So far I’ve had three bids which went thusly:

Huh, it’s been a while since I’ve posted a blog entry. So let’s do some catch-up to the present, I guess.

I’ve been on guanfacine for about a month now, and I still haven’t stopped feeling drowsy and tired all day, to the point that I’ll often just fall asleep in the middle of things. Even when I’m doing things like grocery shopping I’ll suddenly feel really tired and need to take a couple moments to brace myself. It’s almost like it’s causing narcolepsy or something.

Last week I talked about this with my psychiatrist and we decided to try combination therapy with strattera, a stimulant-based med, since my ADHD responded well to the Adderall (aside from my blood pressure spiking badly).

So far, it hasn’t been helping at all. I’m getting the panic and anxiety from stimulants, while also being drowsy all day. What’s even worse is I’m also getting frequent muscle spasms, which is apparently a common reaction to some ADHD meds. And ironically, the treatment for that? Guanfacine.

So hey, I thought it was weird that nobody had been posting comments on my blog in a while. Turns out comments were just, like, broken, and nobody told me, for some reason.

The problem turned out to be that Isso currently doesn’t work on Python 3.8 (or at least, the current released version, which is ridiculously outdated, doesn’t), and it was easy to roll it back to Python 3.7, thanks to poetry’s pyenv integration. So, score another one for poetry.

But why don’t people actually tell me when they’re having problems with my site? Do people just assume that if something’s broken it’s broken on purpose? Because I mean… no?

Anyway, comments are fixed now.

I seem to be stuck in an annoying situation.

Short recap: I have both ADHD and fibromyalgia. These two conditions tend to have a lot of overlap (they are both thought to essentially be dopamine dysregulation issues), and both of them have a “let’s try different things out” treatment regimen.

Because of ADHD I have great difficulty in focusing on my work.

Because of fibromyalgia I have great difficulty in focusing on anything other than pain.

The medications which help me with fibromyalgia preclude me from being prescribed medications which help me with ADHD.