Samathy @s@social.samathy.space

Dipping into my spare, emergency, stash of Estradiol for the fist time since starting HRT.

Good job I have enough to get by for several weeks if I needed too.

I wish the gender clinic understood that for their patients, time does indeed pass.

Taking the plunge today and starting to actually write parsing code for C.

It is currently 😱.

Mostly because connecting the theory of top-down parsing with actually writing code that does it is hard.
Even when the C standard comes with a grammar!

After practicing bass guitar today I picked up my Les Paul and spent like an hour noodling and practicing sticking notes together and moving up and down the fretboard.

Going to guitar after playing only bass since I bought it last week is weiiirrrddd.
THESE STRINGS ARE TOO THIN!

You think scales and keys are a thing and then Jazz arrives and hey ho, every note is in every key - so long as you put it close to certain other notes 🤷‍♀️

I had a meeting with some other hackspace folks yesterday.

Nottinghack feels in a totally different league to so many other UK spaces.

Like we're doing "Hackspaces at Scale" and have different problems to everyone else, or, we can't use the same solutions to the same problems because of our big membership.

I wasnt expecting to feel so different!

Not-For-Profit business idea ( unrealistic):

Trans people can hire me to keep track of their trans healthcare.

I remind you when to chase gender clinics, GPs, pharmacists and therapists.

I will draft emails to a GIC to chase that letter I know you should have had by now.

I will tell you when you need to order that prescription.

This is all because I really want someone to do this for me, so I can have the brain space to do stuff I actually care about.

@bclindner I hope this isn't too forward.

You boosted photos of very large bunnys. I hope I can improve your day with photos of my very large continental giant rabbit.

Her name is Gwenie (Gwen-ee). She is... 6? I think?

She is bigger than our cats by a large margin and has a heart full of love. She likes to eat cardboard.

She is an adopted bun, I can share the story if you'd like.

Have a great day :D

Letters from the gender clinic take so long that they're out-of-date before they actually get posted lol

I mean, lots of it is simple stuff - like the letter saying "Thanks for prescribing 2mg Estradiol" when I've been on 3mg for months.

But also some of it is less simple - like stating that they havent seen my most recent blood results, despite the GP assuring me that they got sent to the clinic.

A month after my last GIC appointment - I finally got the letter they promised. Only because I chased them by phone and email until they emailed me a copy of it.

I have SO many questions about it and the treatment ( not ) advised.
Its frustrating that it costs so much of my time to chase up letters and make the clinic explain wtf they're doing.

I managed to play through Take My Breath Away on bass with Berlin's recording.

Nice song, chill bass line, I am a human DX7 😄

FWIW, I like Top Gun a lot. I tried to play along to Danger Zone today also, but aside from the memorable intro part, it gets very complicated and fast very quickly.
I can't keep up with slap-bass or playing it without slap 😢

Yesterday I did lot of yak-shaving on my C compiler project.

Mostly implementing a generic tree structure for the AST.
Obviously, I need some way to represent the AST before I can actually parse stuff into it.

Turns out a tree where nodes have N children, but 1 parent is not a thing in standard libraries. It took a while to write it, but wasn't hard.

Living on the edge is doing your Duolingo and Memrise at 11:58pm.

Gotta keep that streak going.

"You are being held in contempt" is such a great way to tell someone "You're a prick"

I'm glad the lawyers invented this phrase for formally telling someone that you dislike them.

The context for this is a hackspace member being an entitled prick toward trustees, repeatedly.

Thinking about journals again -

I've lapsed on my textual journal, wondering how to reduce the effort required to do entries.
Thinking about if audio journals would be easier/better.

Is audio higher bandwidth than text?

What if they got auto-transcribed to text for later reading?

Digital Text journals are certainly easier and higher bandwidth than hand written, mostly because I can type faster than I write.

Can I convey more with less effort through speech? 🤔

One of my favorite things is bringing down a server and watching everything come up happily when it turns back on.

Imagine using a decentralised version control system, and then relying on a centralised proprietary hosting service.

What if that centralised service goes down! You won't be able to get any work done!

Anyway. now I have a dock with litterally only a keyboard and mouse plugged into it.

Because my speakers have to be plugged into the laptop itself, and my usb-c -> DisplayPort cable also has to be plugged into the laptop.
The latter because although the laptop has usb-c, the dock doesnt.

HOW can you assume that everyone using the dock wants to plug a headset, and only a headset, into their laptop.

No one wants to plug in speakers, or headphones into the doc and still use the internal microphone for video calls.

I bought a Thinkpad Ultra Dock recently, and last week found that whenever I dock either of my x270s, the laptop's microphone stops working.

Turns out, either someone at Lenovo decided that the 3.5mm audio output on the dock should be a headphone/microphone combo jack.

So, if you have speakers plugged into the jack on the dock, the laptop assumes that there is also a microphone plugged in there and just mutes the internal microphone. You can't un-mute the internal mic in software.

wtf.