Big Scary Doggo

I got sent a message and some pictures today, of a timid rescue dog that has, after a couple of weeks I believe, taken ownership of the bed that was presented to them when they were rehomed.

It's a nice tale. One of happiness. Of a good ending. Of interaction with a cheeky little rescue pupper.

So why is my chest crushed and why am I crying?

Well, the story talks about the timid dog not taking up the bed, implied in part because it's scared of its own shadow, the pupper only being scared of the garage door, and the potential big scary dog that might own the bed and how it might come back to bite the new guy. As, if the pupper is *only* scared of the garage door and the pupper hasn't taken the bed then, the big scary doggo has to be very scary.

Except there is no big scary dog, the previous incumbent was also timid, and deaf, near blind, and a practically mute little critter. My last memory of him is him 'sniffing' back at me as I said goodbye at the airport.

This little guy never really gave up his bed, more sort of lost it when he went for a wander around the mountains without his owner and never found his way back.

So no, new little wonderful occupant, there's no scary doggo coming to take your bed away, and if the previous doggo ever comes back well there's plenty of room to share.

Living 1 To 9 In A 9 To 5 Society

If you normally wake up at around 7:30 am or 8:00 am and start work at 9 am...

Imagine if every regular job started at 5 am and an early meeting started at 4:30 am or earlier.

Imagine regularly getting a phone call from a client at 5 am who needs you to jump on something immediately.

Imagine if almost every shop closed at 1 pm apart from some supermarkets which close at 4 pm.

Imagine if every doctor closed at 1 pm apart from on 'special days' when they close at 4 pm.

Imagine if every service you have to interact with closed at 1 pm.

Imagine if every restaurant or takeaway closed at 7 pm and last bookings were 6 pm.

Imagine if every pub closed at 7 pm.

Imagine if every nightclub closed at 9 pm or 10 pm.

Imagine if all your friends regularly went to bed at 7 pm.

Imagine that's every day of every year.

Now imagine almost no-one cares or understands. Not your friends, not your partner, not your family, not your doctor.

I'm pretty sure you actually can't. I'm pretty sure you think you can but try it.

You have to wake yourself up at 4 am at the latest every morning and get to work for 5 am (hey you'll love the traffic, but I'm afraid there are likely no buses running).

Try to convince your boss that you need to start at 5 am and finish at 1:30 pm.

If you don't manage to make it to work for 5 am then get your boss to give you a quick meeting about your time keeping and how you need to improve it.

Try for a month to eat breakfast at 4 am, lunch at 8 am, and dinner at 1 pm or 2 pm. You're not allowed to eat anything after 3 pm.

Try for a month to not go to a high street shop or contact any business that you need to interact with after 1 pm (You'll just have to do it tomorrow).

Try for a month to not go food shopping after 4 pm. If it's after 4 pm you can buy from a shop that stays open till 11 pm up until 7 pm in the evening (local co-op/tesco express/corner shop).

Try for a month to not do anything social of an evening after 7 pm.

If you've got a social event that starts at 6 pm try getting there for 2 pm and leave at 7 pm.

After 7 pm, go home and sit alone and don't interact with anyone in your social circle. You're not allowed to talk to your partner, kids, friends, anyone.

Go to bed at 7:30 pm or earlier. Try and sleep.

You can't phone any friends or family after 5 pm. You can't SMS them, email them, or interact with them on social media.

Go on try it, just for a month. Now imagine doing it for over 20 years.

This is an approximation of chronic Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder in a 9 to 5 society. I cannot stress enough how this is just an approximation and not the actual reality.

This is every day of every year in my adult life. This is not considered to be a disability. This is mostly considered to be "you are lazy". Get at least one of your acquaintances, colleagues, or even friends, to tell you that you are lazy or you just need to go to bed earlier at least once a week. Try going to bed earlier as they suggest. Try removing caffeine and/or sugar. Try not using technology. Try closing the curtains and not having any lights on of an afternoon/evening.

Now imagine that on top of this you've been mentally abused, had a breakdown leading to physical disorders, are suffering from anxiety and depression disorders, and are trying to get your life back together.

No, I'm not sure what to do either but I'm still working on it.

(If you normally wake up earlier than 8:00 am then take whatever the difference is away from all the times here. If you normally wake at 7:00 am then every 4 pm becomes 3 pm, every 1 pm becomes midday and so on. If you manage to shift to waking up at 4 am then take another hour off of everything and wake up at 3 am.)

Can I Go Back To Bed Now

Anxiety is pounding away at me. I'm shaking. I'm trying to not give up or give in.

I need to login to file my tax return. I've got 9 tabs for HMRC open at the moment trying to find out how to reset 2fa security after having lost my phone. This is before I even get near to filling in my first ever tax return, which will itself be a stressful encounter of "And what do they mean by that".

The only way I can reset my security is to "contact an admin user and ask them to remove extra security from your account" and how exactly do I contact an admin user? No, no info on that. I click "Still need help?", yep, I definitely need help.

Please call us if:
You need to reset extra security

Before you call
Make sure you have your Self Assessment Unique Taxpayer Reference (UTR)

UTR found. So what's the phone number. No phone number. Okay I'll go find the phone number then.

The deadline and a £100 fine is looming closer.

I'm already confused by what I've read online. I have to report my business income and my personal income. When you're a sole trader what's the difference?

And how does the government scheme for live-in landlords tie into this? I don't normally have to claim the rent from the lodger as it is tax free when under a certain amount. But do I need to claim that for a self assessment? I haven't even started and I already have questions. Hopefully some of them will be answered when I actually get through to the form. Past experience says this will not be the case but I'm going to keep an open mind.

That I can only make phone calls from one room of the house (If I want to hear anything without it breaking up constantly) and that the room happens to be next to one of the busiest roads in the city makes any call awkward at best.

I'd use WiFi calling but for some reason that doesn't work anymore and many attempts at investigating why it doesn't work have failed. It doesn't help that I have a phobia of phone calls.

At the same time there are many other things vying for my attention.

I need to design the next stage of the architecture for a system I'm building for a customer. Then I need to implement that architecture. Preferably before tomorrow. I need to get a quote done. Also preferably before tomorrow. Both activities are highly technical and require focus to be held for a long time.

I need to do something about the old washing machine (the lodger broke it) to get it out of the way. I've taken it apart so that I can manhandle it into my car but since the council changed the parking around here I'm looking at lugging it all to two roads away or risk getting a parking ticket. This will take physical energy I don't really have. If I'm going to take the time and effort to drag a bunch of stuff to the recycling centre (The map was wrong but I found it anyway) then I should probably find a few of the other bits of junk that are lying around in the backyard and take them too. It's not going to happen today. That's now a Saturday job.

I need to finish off cleaning the kitchen because the lodger thinks that it cleans itself....

...Stop that, this is not important you can deal with these things later.

These are all minimal things but they all add stress to an already stressful situation. My teeth are grinding, I'm nauseous, and I'm panting, so I'll spend a few minutes now controlling my breathing and relaxing my jaw.

Nothing moves forward and I'm almost in tears at my perceived failure. You can't give in. You need to do this. You've got a mask you need to wear.

My brain chimes in "You need to eat". I don't have time to eat. I'm not hungry and I have no appetite anyway. Shut up.

Timing is everything. My reminder to eat pops up just as I'm thinking this (Yes, I have to remind myself to eat because my body doesn't do it for me).

The hot drink I made (I'm cold and shaking) has already gone cold. I'm thinking about making another one but that just feels like procrastination and it makes my heart pound harder and faster.

So one step at a time. Find the phone number needed. When I've found the phone number then I can think about what I need to do next.

I'm exhausted by the thoughts. I could quite literally crawl back into bed and never wake up again, but I won't.

The shame of it is that it's a beautiful day and I really hoped I'd get out for a brief walk while the sun was as high as it gets in the sky. That time has passed, it will be cold and dark soon.

Title Undecided

I regularly suffer from Executive Dysfunction.

Executive Dysfunction seems to be a rather ambiguous term and I don't wish to appropriate it if I'm applying it incorrectly. It's not a disease per se but more a symptom of other functionality.

Like a lot of people with mental health problems I am comorbid, I could spend a fair amount of time listing the various things that ail me on both the physical and mental side. I'm going to try and focus on the mental activity side and how it has an impact on the physical side.

I've been fighting Executive Dysfunction for a couple of years now as an almost constant thing. Some days are much better than the average and some are much worse. The average, once combined with mental and physical exhaustion, is really taking a toll.

Constant stress, and the anxiety that goes along with it, causes most of my mental and physical exhaustion. Stress leads to hormonal release and eventually your body gets topped out on adrenalin and other self-made stimulants. When this goes away, particularly after an anxiety attack, you can be left sat in a mental slump, a physical one, or both. Just as in the physical world of material science we can only take excessive stress for so long before we break.

My intentions always start out well. I just about keep on top of things that need doing. Just about. I organise my priorities based on needing to earn enough of an income to not go under completely, basic health, and then other stuff. There are days when I don't even manage the first of those priorities. There are days when those priorities invert. But those are the general rules in order to keep having a chance to get out of this.

Earning enough income means paying the mortgage and other bills that I will ultimately be taken to court for non payment of.

Basic health means eating, cleaning, and rest.

Other stuff means socialising, personal projects, sorting the house out, exercise, photography, guitar... and the income to support them.

I'm writing this because I've failed again today and I'm hoping I'll see writing this as something positive about today, it also forces me to think about how and why my head works as it does.

I've failed to move any work forward (though I probably will later), other than answer some support queries, which means I'm repeatedly clock watching as the hours of the day tick by (ooh look notable number, it's 13:37). I've looked at todo lists (I wrote my own task list software that has a "Go to hell" button as well as a "Like" button, to help me prioritise), I've looked at code, I've looked at infrastructure. I've not been able to find an avenue forward.

I've failed to do much productive in my personal life; still nothing significant organised, still nothing on any of my projects moved forward. I had a new washing machine delivered yesterday which I've sort of manhandled into an okay place for now and hooked up. Therefore, I've managed to reduce the washing pile that has built up since the old one broke. Finding a laundrette that I could park near and wasn't busy whenever I could get the energy to leave the house seemed to be an impossible task, so I've been washing small batches of clothes in the bath.

I'm finding it hard to see anything about today as a success (more washing to do, still need to dispose of the old washing machine [tick: added to ToDo list]).

This is about as far as I can write at the moment. My eyes are weeping, my arms are aching, I'm yawning, and I'm panting.

I am now in Executive Dysfunction.

I stop writing.

My mind fills with half whispered thoughts. Not direct stresses, just ghosts of all the things that need doing. I can't form a complete thought.

I cannot make a decision on what to do (continue writing, sort life problem A out, sort life problem B out, sort life problem...) or even the simplest thing (do I want a coffee? My lips and mouth are dry, I'm tired, I'm thirsty. Nope, I don't know). I cannot find the energy to stand up.

I want to keep on writing but the thoughts invading my mind won't let me focus. I fight to blank it all out and with a temporary reprieve and screaming at myself to "fuck off and leave me alone" I manage to write another sentence. After four or five, the effort is overwhelming. My arms ache even more, my eyes are now dripping and I keep closing them, I've gone from panting to full hyperventilation, I can feel my pulse throughout my whole body. I keep on fighting to write.

It will be at least an hour before I recover enough to post this. Time to go back to staring and stressing about working out how to log in to fill in my tax assessment. Maybe this time trying to reset my gov.uk 2factor auth will not error and I will be able to login.

...And this is why I love FreeBSD

Just installed next cloud to try it out.

Simple enough. Just type `sudo pkg install nextcloud`

When it finishes installing the software this is the output.

Message from nextcloud-11.0.3:
***********************************************************************
*                         MIGRATION FROM OWNCLOUD                     *
***********************************************************************

If you are migrating from existing owncloud instance, you should do
the following steps:

- Copy/Move owncloud/data directory to nextcloud/data (don't forget
        hidden files)
- Copy/Move owncloud/config/config.php to nextcloud/config/config.php
- Change the datadirectory in nextcloud/config/config.php
- Ensure nextcloud/data and nextcloud/config/config.php are owned by
        www user and group


***********************************************************************
*                         POST INSTALL CONFIGURATION                  *
***********************************************************************

Please note that everything has been installed in /usr/local/www/nextcloud.

You will probably want to add an alias to your httpd.conf file, something
like this:

        Alias /nextcloud /usr/local/www/nextcloud
        AcceptPathInfo On
        <Directory /usr/local/www/nextcloud>
            AllowOverride All
            Require all granted
        </Directory>

And restart Apache.

***********************************************************************
*                       NEXTCLOUD VERSION UPGRADE                     *
***********************************************************************

After a version migration you should upgrade your nextcloud instance
using command line:

* cd /usr/local/www/nextcloud
* su -m www -c "php ./occ upgrade"

Cooking For One Or More - Lamb Red Wine Roast

Take a small rolled shoulder joint and place it in a suitable porcelain oven dish.

Stab or slice into the top of the lamb and push chopped garlic into the holes you've made.

Liberally cover with herbs, seeds, and corns to suit your taste and then pour over around 250 ml of a rich red wine. I used a nice Malbec, ground mustard seed, rosemary, thyme, ground szechuan peppercorns, and a sprinkling of garlic salt and chilli powder.

Cover with foil and leave on a low heat (Gas mark 1) for a couple of hours, this allows the wine time to soak up some of the fat and seasoning while keeping the meat moist.

Up the heat (gas mark 6 or 7) and remove the foil, cook for a further 40 minutes or until browned. The outer layer of garlic, fat, and herbs should crisp up nicely and the wine should reduce down a little.

Make some gravy using the juices in the oven dish. Serve with duck fat roasted maris piper potatoes and some vegetables of your choosing.

The pooch I am currently fostering for a few days went back to check his bowl was actually definitely really absolutely empty three times. I'll take that as a sign of his approval.

Random Electrical Fiddling - Part 3

I made a new LED strip light for the kitchen.

First I grabbed one of the pieces of wood I've recovered from a recycled pallet and placed a centre mark. From this mark I marked off 2cm intervals. I cut 30 or so short strips of 3 LEDs from an LED ribbon purchased on eBay for a couple of quid. You can find such strips here http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_nkw=5050+300+LED+warm+white

I laid each of the small strips out on the piece of wood, removed the backing tape that covers the adhesive, and stuck them down using a fingernail to apply pressure around the edges.

Each strip of three LEDs has a positive and negative connection at each end of the strip. The intention was to connect all the positive contacts down one side to what would become the positive rail and all the negative contacts down the other side to what would become the negative rail. I therefore needed two power rails.


I added a strip of self adhesive copper tape along each edge of the wood. The copper strips were laid close to, but not touching, the LED power contacts.

To connect the power rails to the LEDS I soldered a small bare copper bridging wire between each of the power contacts on the LEDS and the appropriate polarity rail.

I screwed on a terminal block and created some connecting wires to be soldered on the the rails. This aids easy fitting and removal of the light.

The only thing left was to add a couple of eye screws on the back to mount the light to the ceiling and to run the power feed from the transistor connected to the PIR that controls the existing lights.

And test in place.

Pretty happy with how this prototype turned out. It can be used connected directly to a 12v power source (as seen here), in which case it's super bright, or it can be controlled by the automatic circuit where it gives a good glow and only draws 1 watt.

Cooking For One Or More - Bacon Wrapped Chicken

Chop half a medium sized red onion into thin slices and scatter it across the bottom of an oven proof dish.

Grind some mustard seed over the onion base and add a small amount of any other seasoning that goes well with chicken gravy.

Lay a few sticks of frozen asparagus over the top of the onion and generously add some chopped garlic.

Wrap some frozen mini chicken breasts in streaky bacon and lay them over the top of the asparagus sticks.

Place a small knob of butter on each wrap and season them. I used more ground mustard seed, a little ground szechuan pepper, some garlic salt, and ground black pepper.

Place in the middle of the oven for 30 minutes around gas mark six. Carefully take the dish out of the oven and sprinkle some finely grated mature cheddar over the chicken wraps. Return to the oven for another 10 minutes or until the cheese starts to brown.

Put the oven on its lowest setting and remove the dish. Carefully pour off the run off from the roast chicken breasts and butter into a measuring jug. Return the dish to the oven while you make some chicken gravy using the juices in the measuring jug.

Serve with crispy and fluffy roast potatoes and the tasty gravy.

Human After All

I don't know the origin of the original meme, frankly I can't be bothered to waste the time looking for the source, but I've corrected it.

Not a single one of us is pedigree. How black is black? How white is white? How yellow is yellow? 

What exact genome means you are any one of them? What genome variation means you are not one of them? What about mutant variations within standard patterns?

Why does a race definition fall down once you start to try and apply it to different human collectives around the planet?

Race is a social construct not an actual thing. It's most often used to give a prejudice a name so that it can be excused.

The colour of someone's skin has everything to do with the evolutionary environment a particular localised variant of human grew up in and nothing to do with a label we made up somewhere along the way.

Our species is human and race as a label serves no constructive purpose. It does not define the culture you choose to subscribe to, it does not define your chosen tribal rituals. This is the same sort of crap that divides humans at a border level. 

If there is such as thing as race then every country border defines a different race and there is by definition no possibility of there being a race of Europeans, or Asians, or Africans because they would already be divided into races of Scottish, Welsh, English, French, German, Spanish, etc... How could there be a German race when Germany has only existed for such a short period of time?

This is the path to eugenics by another name.

Cooking For One Or More - Peppered Chicken Breasts

Cut a red bell pepper into slices and spread them on the base of an oven proof dish.

Skin and slice some shallots and spread them amongst the peppers to cover the base of the dish. Grind some szechuan pepper corns and mustard seeds liberally.

Slather with several teaspoons of chopped garlic.

Smooth some greek yoghurt over the base ingredients.

Finally place some mini chicken breast fillets on top of the yoghurt and cover with a steak or chicken seasoning.

Cover with tin foil and place in the oven at gas mark 6 for at least 30 minutes. 40-45 if the mini chicken breasts are frozen.

Nom

Cooking For One Or More - Peppered Meatballs

Take a long sweet pepper and cut it into four pieces. Lay them over the bottom of an oven proof dish.

Add some frozen meatballs, some shallots, and grind some szechuan peppercorns and mustard seeds.

Squirt half a tube of tomato puree and mix in some chopped garlic and greek yoghurt (or sour cream) and a dash of olive oil. Sprinkle some ground salt, ground coriander and anything else that takes your fancy.

Cover with foil and place in the oven at gas mark 5 for 50 minutes. Uncover for the last ten minutes or so.

Random Electrical Fiddling - Part 2

I got a new charge controller yesterday so I rewired the solar array to use it and changed the fuse box for one that had a common positive and built a new negative rail.

I'd also picked up some 6 metre 900 amp jump leads from eBay for £16 and I intended to use them to enable me to move the fuse box into the kitchen and reduce the losses over the multiple cables that were currently feeding various 12v toys in the kitchen.

The jumper cables were perfectly designed for what I have in mind so I didn't have to try and find some crimp terminals suitable to fit the rather large cables. I just needed to unbolt the existing crimp terminals from the clamps, which involved the use of a lump hammer.

It did however mean I needed to make some terminal blocks to hook the load lines of the charge controller up to the cables and then also to terminate them in the kitchen.

A bit of bolt and washer hunting later I managed to put together some very suitable terminals. I just need some way of safely mounting them. This was achieved with a small bit of MDF and various drill bits and we end up with a pretty neat terminal block with wing nuts.

And on the underside we have the counter sunk heads.

These were easily mounted on to the existing board and a couple of crimped cables later the battery end of things was nicely wired up.

Then I had to build a new board for holding the fuse box in the kitchen and mount it on to a hollow wall. A little hunting turned up a couple of suitable medium weight hollow wall fixtures. The new board was drilled in the same way as the cable mount board and I made a couple more terminals to be mounted directly on it.

Now all that was needed was to wire in the fuse box, negative rail and test.

The voltage drop across the new cables is now not measurable with any meter I have and once I sort out the battery connection cables it will now be possible to wire up the 300w inverter in the kitchen directly to the solar array.

This also means I'll be able to run a 12v feed up to my bedroom and to the hallway without significant losses being incurred.

Now I just need the finance to afford a bunch more solar panels and some proper batteries. This setup is pretty close to being capable of safely supplying 360 watts. Almost 10 times more than the power of my solar panels at full blast and 30 times more than they typically provide.

The batteries I have (assuming they were in good condition) could only supply 360 watts for a couple of hours but this still makes it a nice little backup power supply for when the power occasionally dies (like the time a quadcopter accidentally flew into the local power distribution center and took out one of the large transformers).

Realistically I can get many hours of light and a couple or so hours of laptop usage out of it as it stands.

Why I Try To Buy Repairable Things

My oscillating fan stopped working a while ago. Today's heat made me investigate what the cause might be.

It turns out that at some point the two bolts that held the speed controller in place had vibrated free and I hadn't noticed.

This of course leaves the problem of where do I get two suitable bolts at 1am. Luckily I have a stack of various fixings and bits of hardware that I've salvaged from other things. Looking at the two nuts that I found rattling around inside the fan I had a feeling that I quite possibly had some bolts that may have the right screw thread and indeed I did.

I also recently bought a small vice that can attach to my kitchen table (A.K.A "The Workshop") and I've somehow collected a number of hacksaws over the years so finding one wasn't hard.

A short while later and a bit of "by eye" measuring I had two shorter bolts suitable for my needs.

A little bit of filing rough edges and screwing and the speed controller is firmly locked in place again. 

And the oscillating fan is operational once more.

I'm pretty sure the guest dog is going to appreciate this tomorrow when the heat will be slightly more intense than it was today.

Random Electrical Fiddling - Part 1

I moved my 20 watt 12 volt solar panels (x2) and the charge controller downstairs yesterday.

This enabled me to hook up the old car battery I salvaged from my MR2; before it sadly went to the breakers.

This let me release one of the two Ultramax batteries. Which means I can now use one for when I'm building other projects and testing them and just cycle the two batteries when one gets a little low. :)

While I was fiddling with the solar setup I noticed that in the new position when the sun really shines down and there's no haze they get up to their full 17 volt output and the charge controller doesn't like this and stops charging the batteries. So I've added one of the two DC-DC converters I got off of eBay a while back. This restricts the voltage quite nicely to a maximum of 14 volts, but also means that the normal output has dropped to just over 12 volt.

I may have to come up with a better way of clamping the output from the solar panels without having to sacrifice 3 volts on the DC-DC converter. I'd prefer a solution that didn't kick in until the output from the panels went over 14 volts. I shall have to do some investigation. I'm sure once my copy of The Art of Electronics turns up I shall have some example circuits I can build to do the job nicely. :)

This still seems to be charging the batteries fine and if I'm reading this meter right I seem to have gathered 42 watt hours of power today. I also want to change this so it's inline with the batteries (rather than recording the raw output from the panels) and has bypass diodes to cover the batteries going back to the charge controller.

Happy the solar charger was working well enough, I dug out the other DC-DC converter to investigate why it wasn't working and it seems to be fine now. I'm guessing it must have been something to do with how it was hooked up to the solar system that was causing the problem and we had a loose connection somewhere.

It's now working fine to charge my phone off of the spare 14Ah ultramax battery.

And while I was monitoring the charging and because the soldering iron was already on I decided to hook up a couple of the little solar toy panels and see if I could power a small motor from them. By the time I'd finished the sun had disappeared behind the cottages behind me. So I'll have to wait till tomorrow (assuming it's sunny) to try it out and see if I need to hook more panels up.