Tried to go for a nice relaxing bike ride today but got jumped by someone's off-leash dog. No injury but came very close to being thrown off the bike. The owner blamed me for not getting off my bike to walk it calmly around his dog even though it was a bike-friendly pathway and was marked as such.

Here's hoping the rest of the week goes a bit smoother.

Had a mental breakdown over the weekend. Ended up spending a day on self care, and I think I'm going to start working towards making some changes in my life, cause this isn't working for me.

Bad, the PVVV, a far-right party, won the elections here in Netherlands. I woke up to the news that they won 37 out of 150 seats (2nd largest has 25 seats). Geert Wilders is such a... nationalistic, short-sighted, opportunistic, loud-mouthed, Putin loving.. asshole! Sorry, I really need to get this out of my system.
Thankfully they'll still have to form a coalition with other parties and I really hope they'll fail. Either that, or they spend a few months in government and show how ridiculously inept they are and let the cabinet fall.

I'm just tired, sad, ill, disappointed, and so very alone. That's all I got this week.

I just worked my last day at a company I have been at for ten years. It's a weird feeling but it has really gone to shit so it was time. Luckily I have a new job starting soon and things are moving along with paper work and other supplies like laptop, monitors, etc. it's a hybrid position, Two days in the office, three working from home. Other than that, Thanksgiving at the SOs parents house. They always make amazing food.

There's way too many similarities between my dead-end call center job, and my new assistant director gig. It's all sales, always has been. This job is better, and I'm happier, I place too much of my self value into jobs and money. I've been learning kotlin for a few months now, and I've created a (buggy) version of pong that runs on my phone! Its only a hundred lines added to the main function, but it (kinda) works and I made it with no tutorial. Ha!

we’re trailer camping in the west virginia mountains for a couple of nights before heading to my sister’s house. my niece is turning thirteen this week, and i’m excited to hang out with her because she thinks i’m the “cool aunt” which is what i always hoped to be.

My week is starting off pretty good. I feel like a different person. I've got new plans for my life and have accepted the world that I live in. After all the hardship I've been through, I think that time has finally passed. I just need to flow with the river of life and see where it takes me.

Still walking with a crutch because of my ankle :/ This whole thing started last week Friday, so I feel like it should be healing faster, thinking about visiting my GP to take a look.

But I must say all the OpenAI Drama (check /c/technology if you missed it) is actually amusing me quite a bit, so that’s helping.

Some great personal news, a project that has been in various stages of planning since early 2020, but until recently never advanced much beyond that is finally happening:

Got the last part for my Alexa-Replacement prototype yesterday, the cheap USB speaker. So now I have a PI Zero 2W with a speaker and a microphone array, streaming audio to my Home Assistant setup, which does wake word detection and everything else.

Right now I can turn the lights on/off (built-in feature), and ask for the weather using my own outdoor sensor (requires only templating), but I’m also currently writing code to enable me to do unit conversions from American fantasy units to real units. I only need a few ingredients for volume to weight, hard and soft cheese, flour, and butter, so it’s not too much work, and other units are then just straight conversions.

I already tested that it can stop playing music upon detecting the wake word. After that I need to set up timers which seems a bit clunky by default, so it might require some custom code as well. Right now, I’m using Nabu Casa cloud (the company for the open source project Home Assistant) for STT, TTI, TTS audio processing (as I’m paying them anyway, mostly to support them), but the J4105 CPU HA is running on should be powerful enough to do all that on device to be completely local and internet independent. I’ll then also experiment with doing wakeword detection on the Pi Zero instead of the main server and see if that improves latency.

Once everything is done, I’ll replace the kitchen echo, and start getting the parts to replace the living room and bedroom echo dot (the bedroom one will also need a time display with auto-brightness, that might take some work), and then I’ll finally have local voice control.

The current look is not amazing, but in the kitchen and living room, I can hide everything but the speaker and microphone, and for the bedroom I’ll need a different solution anyway because of the screen.

It has not been a bad week. It has been over two weeks with no self-harm thoughts and I can’t express how happy I am about it. Of course, my brain still insists on waking me up in the middle of the night to give me a highlight reel of my past fuckups, but I’m coping.

I’ve also been learning to accept that one of the most important persons in my life is now gone and that’s it. It’s okay, though, I’ve been doing fine enough without her and the thought of not talking to her ever again doesn’t terrify anymore.

My deload week at gym has been ok. It’s easy and light, which I’m slowly learning to appreciate. My body feels great when it’s not so fatigued by constantly lifting heavy weights. Keeping tabs on my diet has been paying its dividends as I see my BMI going down week after week. I’m a few pounds away from no longer being considered overweight. Oh yeah, I also managed to do my first pull up!

All in all, it’s been a positive week. I’m hoping that the horrible events that took place earlier this year are now firmly behind me and won’t come back to haunt me. God, I really fucking hope so. It was hard, folks, it was really fucking hard.

I finally got the planned-for-three-straight-weekends-but-always-thwarted strut channel install done on my van today. This means the next project is finally solar, at which point I hit planned baseline for this housing choice. Last day at work was Friday, and I'm taking this week to do van stuff, move out of the warehouse and try to put feelers out for groups aligned with a recent course correction on the career front. Feeling pretty good about my projects and finally admitting to myself in no uncertain terms that I can't do a bullshit job anymore.

Online shopping the last 48 hours has been incredibly productive and money-saving! Aside from B&H, I didn’t use any large retailers either. Pretty happy about that.

It's my birthday tomorrow! A friend just called me: "Someone sent me these weird AI pictures of Jeff Goldblum and for some reason that made me realize that it's your birthday tomorrow. Happy early birthday!" I think that's going to be my favorite birthday greeting from now on.

What happened to your grandparents?

My weekend started with my car battery dying while I was far from home. It was midnight, freezing cold, and I was in shorts and a tee-shirt. Not fun! Apparently my battery hasn't been replaced since 2017, so that's terrific. Thankfully I was able to get a jump (after waiting two hours for a tow truck), and got home safe. Aside from a new battery, I think I'll probably also invest in a portable jumper in the future. Y'know, just in case.

In other fun news, I've got a little over a month to finish three essays and study for a huge test that I've already failed once. Beyond that, though, I'm fine.

It's been a long time since I've commented on these weekly check ups. I'm so sleepy... But for the first time in over a month, I feel caught up in a good chunk of my schoolwork. Can't wait for break!

I accomplished a lot this semester but I just can't process it yet. I'm too much in the thick of things, blinded by stress and exhaustion lol. Overall though, pretty hopeful. Things look bright.

Hope everyone is doing well, and/or things get better soon!

Having an okay holiday with my parents and sister. Had a good talk with my sister about some of our shared frustrations with our parents

Today is my birthday.

My mom has small cell lung cancer and is halfway across the US with my older brother. She has been mentally deteriorating for a while and they forgot my birthday. I get it because there is a lot going on with her disease, it's just hard to see her so broken that she forgot.

My favorite food is artichokes and no store had them in stock, so I'm just gonna have steak and squash instead. Was at least hoping this would be an upside and now it's not lol

IDK. It's been an okay day I guess, I feel bad for my mom mostly. Getting older is hard.

It's kind of nice when a teacher says "in my opinion you've done too much work for this project, don't do anything else other than directing, and make the others finish it." So my job for the next three weeks is literally just directing. If it involves anything to do with my own actual hands, I'm not allowed to do it. If the project doesn't get finished because the rest of the team don't put in their fair share of the work... well, we'll all lose a few marks for that. But some of us have more leeway than others for losing a couple without failing the whole module...

I just told a Catholic coworker that I'm work mentoring that if she ever wants to have weird atheist conversations, I'm here.

In my defense, she reminds me of when I was a weird almost ex-Catholic.

Brilliant. Gave my wife £50 as she was going to do some shopping with her sister and I said I'd pay for lunch.

They didn't have lunch but she spent over £50 on wrapping paper and 'gift bags' even though we have loads at home 😒