Samathy @s@social.samathy.space

It's probably just a breast bud, and it's fine.
But my mum's status is making being on HRT kinda terrifying.

My mum is recovering from breast cancer. Her cancer was fueled by Estrogen.

My left breast has a hard lump under the nipple which appeared since taking HRT.

Its either a breast bud (fine, expected, good!) , or it could be breast cancer, depending on how I bias my Internet searches.
The former if biased as teenage girl puberty advice, the latter as a man.

I have a Doctors appointment on the 22nd where I will ask about this. But, its scary as heck. 😬

This a regular-scheduled toot telling you that the UK's shared-care model for trans people is rubbish.

It involves too many moving parts with the patient connecting them all.

Lots of the NHS works flawlessly, if you drive it. You can't rely on NHS staff to actually do anything, unless you're in their face, asking them to do the thing.

I managed to convince the GIC to give me an unsigned copy of the letter, in person.
Which I took to my GP surgery.

This morning, my fantastic GP read the letter, increased my dose, ordered a blood test for me, AND sent a new prescription to my pharmacy.

The pharmacy, in what is surely a one-off situation, can fulfill my prescription TODAY. Wild.

Maybe the GIC will post that letter at some point. Excited to write a complaint.

In class GIC-is-rubbish style, I had an appointment on the 22nd October and was told to double my Estrogen dose. The clinician said she would write a letter that day telling my GP to prescribe a higher dose

I went in to the GIC yesterday to find out where this letter was, because I needed more tablets ( and cant get them without a letter ).

The letter was written on the 25th October - but hasn't been signed, or posted yet! 🤯

1/2

In thinking about buying some more equipment I've basically decided I'm gonna sell my Nikon 18-105mm, and my Tamron 70-300.

Ive...never used the 300mm lens.
And the 105mm is quite awful.

I mean, the 105 is a good focal range, but it's kit-lens quality. Plastic, weird aberration, rough AutoFocus.

Ooooo Nikon 50mm f1.8g lenses are £125 in CeX 👀

Thats not too bad, but I WOULD also like to get a D7100 body some time soon. Money money 🤷‍♀️

@s The 50mm F1.8D suffers from some chromatic aberration sometimes too. It IS a super nice lens, but it's not as good as the new Nikkor primes like my 35mm.

@s So, yesterday I was using my Nikon 50mm F1.8D - a nice prime lens which doesn't have an AutoFocus motor.
Its fine, because my D7100 SLR has an AutoFocus motor in the body.

But shooting in a fairly dark venue yesterday and the focus was doing a lot of hunting, and often failing to get a good focus on poorly lit subjects.

My much more modern 35mm lens was totally fine, as was my 85mm, and those have AutoFocus though.

I might finally try and get a 50mm f1.8G and retire the old one. 📷

Yesterday I did some paid photography work for the first time in a while.
It was exhausting, mostly because the location is a single large room containing children and lots and lots of videogames. Thus, a bombardment to the ears for 6 hours. 🙉

It was good though, but I'd certainly appreciate a faster focusing 50mm lens 🙄 More in thread on that.

In the evening we went to the Hackspace's Hackoween event. That was super chill. Good chats and company 😊

I'm internally giggling on a train because after setting up OpenVPN on my home network, I am administering my home server, on my phone, over ssh, on train wifi.

Next steps for this I think is having the OpenVPN server run on my network's router, rather than my server box. But seems to work well so far!

Today I finally got around to setting up OpenVPN on my home-network 🎉

Mostly to be able to access my home server, without exposing it to the Internet - but with the secondary bonus of having a less snoopy experience on Coffeeshop and hotel WiFi networks.

I used the Digital Ocean guide for Ubuntu 16.04 (but on Debian 9) and it was _fairly_ easy.

@s Hockley Hustle was pretty good too! Saw several different genres of amateur music.
Enjoyed the jazz most.

@s The talk went really well, and I really enjoyed it.
It was well populated and plenty of people said it was good, and it received 7 Green, 9 Amber and 2 Red votes on the feedback system.

Its probably my best talk yet, maybe 🤷‍♀️

The rest of the conference was of general high quality and a good day out with @iguana 😊

This weekend was a busy one!

On Saturday I gave my first 60 min conference talk at DDD East Midlands entitled "This is a Talk about Nothing" about representing nothingness in Programming languages. It ended up being more like 50 mins due to 2 consecutive fire alarms earlier in the day.
Later, went to PubConf Nottingham.

Sunday started with the dismantling of a hair dryer, and ended with an afternoon at the very Nottingham event, Hockley Hustle. A music festival in the city center.

Yesterday I started 2mg ( twice daily) of Estrogen! Woo! Feels like 3 months on 1mg went fast as anything.

Some physical changes so far, softer skin, slower hair growth, some chest tenderness.

I'm on track to be on blockers in another 3 months.

Had significantly less trouble getting my tablets this time, because I ordered them into the pharmacy instead of just trying to find one which had some.

#transition

Writing my talk for DDD East Midlands on Saturday has been fantastic - I've learnt a lot about how different languages represent references to nothing.

This is precisely why I wanted to do this talk - to encourage me to learn more about a topic.

I think thats a 100% valid way to write a talk!

I've been stacking up a long list of guitar pedals I want to try and make: Reverb/delay, Op-amp overdrive, low/high pass filters, tremolo, ring-mod. 🎸

Its quite a list!

None of them are hugely complex, electronically. At least, making something that works isnt hard, I'm not saying that it'll sound great though.

I need to do a big components order to get hold of some ICs, transistors and stomp-switches.

There are probably ways to do this - I believe Dreamwidth has functionality to show posts to a specific sub-group.
Mastodon& Facebook also has this to some extent.
But they miss the 'Show me only updates from _these_ people' part.