Keyczar Khaos

Back to the day job on Monday. Which was mostly okay. Things are in a bit of disarray after mandatory time off. I’m still holding a half dozens SRs that are now a month old. But I’ve made all the meetings I expected to the last couple of days, and only had one piece of deadline work due thus far, so it’s going.

It was a busy day though, and everything was behind. I didn’t get out of the office until almost 4, which makes robots pretty late. It also means I didn’t get a chance for food. I raided the Starburst stash ¹They keep several candy stashes we’ll-stocked, even though they are rarely in the office. But someone has picked through the Starburst so there’s now a whole bag full of pink and increasingly old candies. My relationship with food is such that color differences are not important to me – it’s all just sugar I reluctantly ingest to avoid … Continue reading on a co-worker’s desk for some sugar but I need a better plan for getting out on time. I imagine that being downtown makes food easier, and it can in some ways, but only when I’ve got a reasonable schedule.

Robots went well. T got an I²C driver going for a little matrix display, which is exciting to see. And after weeks of mucking about and sort of frantic yelling Din got an auto routine working that uses Vuforia as expected – which is to say, drives around blindly and takes fixes at critical points for corrections while standing still. They spent a while trying to reinvent that wheel – staring from a place where they didn’t even understand the color representation – but eventually decided to use what exists and deal with its limitations. I haven’t been involved much on that side (beyond the years of accumulated infrastructure) which is sort of nice – I’m always a fan of independence. But once the deadlines are out I should be sure to connect more directly with Din to be sure they’re getting the most they can out of robots.

Tuesday I thought hard about skipping the morning meeting, but persevered. It made me tried all day but it turns out my day was too full of interruptions for it to matter. I got none SR work done, or at least none of my own, after helping several people with theirs. I somehow had to spend yet another day describing to Support how we definately weren’t vulnerable to a side channel password oracle attack in a client-side library. Some PhD candidate has scanned public software with available source/byte code from big companies to promote their work with a special library that provides constant-time string operations. The attack they describe is a thing the world at large fixed in like 1992, before the Internet, and which they ascribe ²I strongly disagree with this assessment. The problem with Keyczar isn’t side channel leaks, it’s the unrestricted HMAC oracle. It literally has a service that gives you a yes-no answer when you ask it if all the security bits in a message check out, and it lets you ask this same question enough times to do statistics on the answers. But … Continue reading as the flaw in Google’s Keyczar tool.

And then the day got away from me. I did lots of little things, but also had lots of distraction. Got a postcard out, chatted with @RandomTuesday about capes and lights and resin, worked at long standing issues with the Rondo backup stream ³I was hitting CPU limits with xz compression on a tiny VM. I fixed that and now I’m hitting bandwidth limits on the other end, which makes the full backup take more than 24 hours. It’s sort of a hassle, but so is paying them for enough local backup space. Maybe I can get Rondo and Walton to back up to each other, and only pull from there to … Continue reading, replaced a failed disk in the array, ran all the household robots, made some sauces for supper. I had two calls planned for today but got neither. I did get CookieZ to tell me one line of the story ⁴I had to lean on my quiet preacher game to make them comfortable, but it let me see a seam of pain about parents. Just once sentence of substance, but it’s enough to give me perspective on both the current CookieZ plot and the attachment they had decades ago. I have always attracted people who have parental pain, though it was hard for me to see … Continue reading. I also let myself check out for 90 minutes – I stopped looking for my next task while I waited for a call – which was bad in terms of executive control but good as relief from all the bouncing around I did today.

It was a hard day for Shanda. Hard to connect with me, particularly when you see my feel and want to push away. It’s a pattern that’s rough on me, because it reaffirms the abuse I always had – it reminds me that my feels (or at least any request for support about them) are a burden on others. We did good with planning talks last night, on a variety of tricky subjects, but today was… not great. It’s still better than the previous weeks in which nothing could have attention, but there’s still lots of space for improvement.

Got a message from my physican today, offering support for my test results. It’s very foreign to me. No one ever cares much about my physical health, not so long as I can clean myself. Even at home, even on this same topic, it’s hard to get anything other than permission or bland acknowledgement when I talk about it. That feels like a huge improvement from historical experience, which is more like the stories here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/comments/eksc0t/ but I should try to train myself to expect something better.

My brain is full of worries for other people today. Nothing new or urgent. Nothing I am responsible for or in control of. But it’s happening nonetheless. I yelled about it some today, which was good, but there’s a lot built up. Patience and small gestures are a great plan for many things but it’s a hard road to walk sometimes. I rubs up against the patience I had, waiting to be ready to flee out the screen door on the porch where I lived, waiting for me to be old and rich enough to survive alone, to be taken seriously, to become a real boy. It took more than a decade of waiting – I never became a real boy but I did eventually flee. Waiting was the only choice then; I have other choices now and I am not trapped, but the waiting still feels like that terrifying door ⁵I was thinking today about the way other people are often afraid of certain public interactions or locations – like places in town or homeless folks or whatnot – and how I have no scale for it. I know some of it is bigotry and fear mongering, and some of it is just the vaguely anti-social way people imagine their anxiety and fear. In some … Continue reading that offers both freedom and death.

I tweetered today a simplistic reply in a thread about vacancy taxes, which are intended to discourage empty housing – one of the main drivers of high prices and of luxury development. Because it’s Twitter I immediately abandoned the thread to preserve my sanity, but it has several dozen likes from people I don’t know… which motivated me to turn off notifications. Don’t clap for me, bitches. I’m part of the problem. You probably are too. We’re both on Twitter for one thing, which means there’s a goo chance we’re Nazis, and I know for a fact you only only clicked on me because the ad bot told you I was cool. I can assure you a properly functioning ad bot would not understand the way I am cool.

Tomorrow I need to do my MBOs early in the day, and then I’d like to actually write my toddler tales. Then therapy and some work on the cape. Hopefully a call or two in there somewhere. So plenty of things. And I haven’t picked a therapy topic yet. We’ll see how the writing goes – that story could be the topic, depending on where the writing leaves me. Or maybe I can find a tact that lets me drive at my ongoing dissatisfaction with therapy. What I’ve tried to date makes my therapist nervously promise things they aren’t really prepared to follow up on; I’m glad I can make them nervous because that means they’re paying attention, but it’s also a barrier to making things different, and I still need them to be different.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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