YAB

Today I got my last paycheck for the year – in the last 16 days I brought in $846. Which is about $750 less than I paid for even my own housing during that same period, let alone anything else. In theory I will eventually get some more money from insurance, but we’re 7 weeks in to that process and they’re still just dicking me around. I’m not gonna starve to death before I get back to work, but it’s enough to trigger old poverty feels, which can be intense. It would be hard even if I wasn’t sensitive. This whole process is completely unnecessary – I have a medical certification and they aren’t going to dispute it – but the barriers and delay help the insurance company exclude a few more valid claims and make another $7/year, so we all must suffer ¹On another money note, the local utility silently added more than $200 to my last bill, marked only as a “balance transfer”. I had to notice and contact them to see what it was. Apparently they feel entitled to assign me responsibility for other people’s unpaid bills; without notice they added the last owner’s old bills to mine. This is … Continue reading.

I think my leave is going okay though, even if it is expensive. I finally have space to pay attention to things I want to accomplish, without having spent all my spoons on captialism and survival first. It’s the same as before when I wasn’t working, but I’ve arranged a better way to not worry about it. I am not sure how to fit it back together when I go back but in the mean time I’m glad to be doing things that better suit me.

I got to talk with M, about a thing that’s been pending a long time. It can be hard sometimes, coming back to a thing you’ve been avoiding. I had been not thinking about your box while I wait, and all that deferred anxiety hit when it showed up. And of course it reminds me of how I miss you. But it let us have good talks about the power that comes from controlling how people see you, and the safety of being able to be invisible in the environment you want to be in. And about how it’s impossible – at least when you start – to feel okay about a thing you’ve been trained for 2 decades to feel bad about.

I’ve been able to take up my cloud migration. In practice this means writing a bunch of ansible scripts, the new way we store configuration data. But it’s sort of fun, spinning machines up, watching them march in a line, blowing them up when you discover a typo and starting again. I had the basic config for a disk host up a week ago but now I’ve got actual roles and idempotence and whatnot. I’ve got gluster synced and mgmt TLS working, but I can’t get clients to validate for some reason. Works without TLS though, and while it doesn’t log the error I can probably sniff it out of an strace – once I figure out which progress to strace. It now fails nice and slick though, and I no longer have to look up every single ansible command ²I can handle python and its regrettable whitespace sensitivity, but YAML is too picky for me. Even with text tools I regularly can’t see 3 vs 4 spaces offset by 12 lines. Get better syntax..

You saw in And Now You’re Even Older that I’ve finally CAD’d up a circuit board. Nothing complicated yet, but I walked to through the whole process, into something I could have built. And I’ve made some schematics for a serial shift LED driver system and a buck converter so I can run the power bus at 48V. I need to do something to pick LEDs but I’m not sure yet how to do that. For the power supply TI had a tool that helped me find a good IC from the 400 they make. Maybe there is a similar tool for LEDs from someone. I just want them to be in a specific current range, and where possible to be phosphors for better spectrum. I’m thinking red, green, blue, UV, cool white, warm white for this first round. That and 10-bit PWM for each element is more color space than a cheap LCD, at least in theory. But first I need to source something, even if it’s just for a test and has a horrible spectrum.

Today I put up a practice screen, to get moving on a home theater. I stapled up a piece of rear projection material and put my old projector on Shanda’s adjustable desk and lined it all up. I need a projector with a shorter throw to get the screen size I want, but even this [fig 1] was really good. I had forgotten what a big screen was I like. I had forgotten the liveness of having a bright light in the room with me, casting dynamic shadows, and of the screen’s shimmer. Also I had forgotten how low-res 1080p is at big sizes. I like the rear screen projection. It basically ignores ambient light – this image was taken with with normally overhead room lighting and the lowest brightness setting on the projector. In the dark it’s even better.

After playing with it for a while I think the plan might be a new ultra-short-throw laser projector. I want one anyway and it would be a good fit for this particular application. These are designed to be used just a few inches from the wall, using a mirror to throw up (and the laser tracking mirror to adjust for the huge distortion). It could be hidden above the screen and I could build a fancy acrylic screen frame that didn’t need to be tensioned. I could probably even make it auto-tracking to adjust for variations in geometry. But first I’m going to play with my own mirror – project backward into a mirror and then onto the screen – so I can get some more throw out of my narrow house. That plan is more complicated (and probably lossy) than I want for the final version, but it might be a cool way to use what I have. Or at least a cool thing to do with mirrors and light.

I’ve got Shanda to move too, on at least some of the things you’ve been stuck on. We’ve got new fixtures in the bathroom and a new chair and more things into permanent homes. Some day I might convince you that you like doing things to make your environment better, but for now I’m glad you can feel it, even if you don’t really believe it.

Today was also the day for your FoO holiday roast. The event itself went fairly well, but it did eat your whole day. You were increasingly anxious about it all afternoon and then had to take a nap afterward to recover. You did fine keeping yourself safe, but it was still hard to see them hurt each other, and to see how much distance you had to keep to be safe. Good for you for negotiating it better than before. I hope you can get better again before the next one, because it was still pretty rough for a thing you ostensibly want to do.

This dog I’m housing is for some reason not a self-cleaning model. Dogs are supposed to reduce the amount of food on my floor, not make their own food messes. If I wanted someone to eat half a cookie and then leave it smashed into the rug in the walkway I would have had a toddler. But I like that they will vocalize with me. It was almost impossible to get Dog riled up enough to bark, but this dog will sing with a little encouragement.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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