Inside my own head is one of the most frightening places for me. I do everything to run away from it. I’ve dealt with severe anxiety since I was at least 10 years old. Everything from OCD to panic disorder to generalised anxiety. I can manage it better now, but still I can still have a panic attack by merely taking a shower occasionally.
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The Endless Dream: on Addiction and My Mental Health
I would not call myself a happy or joyful person…I’m cynical, eternally depressed, and generally unhappy. Visually impaired, somewhere on the autism spectrum, transgender, and somewhere between bipolar II and similar mental health problems. Not a good mix for producing someone that can manage to avoid addiction. Doesn’t help that it runs in the family to some extent, either.
Continue readingMusic: What It Means to Me
Music has been a part of my life one way or another for most of it, from playing to making to listening.
When I was young, my grandparents were trying to find hobbies and stuff for me to do. I am low-vision, asthmatic, and somewhat frail in other manners so sports and outdoor activities were generally out. They started introducing me to indoor youth gymnastics but my grandparents ended up pulling me out of that as the instructor wasn’t accommodating my vision issues (I don’t feel this was the case, but I was rather young so just deferred to my family). At least the little pies at a small shop across the street were good, so that wasn’t all bad.
Continue readingThey don’t know it’s the last time when you hold them
I put my cat down today (on the 13th), after almost 13 years of being in my life. It came too soon, but it was the only decision that made sense. She was with me the whole time from my transition from a teenager to an adult, so it was quite hard.
Continue readingMy experience at community college
It feels a lot of developers online either went to a prestigious computer science program in university or are self-taught. However, not many talk about community college in those communities. It’s very much a different experience, and I was in it. I’ll try to cover what it’s like at a high level, and how I thought of it. The actual location isn’t important, but it might not be hard to guess. (And if you were there, you can probably tell who I was.)
Continue readingDelivery? More Like Deliveryn’t: A Lesson in Customer Disservice
This was originally a Twitter thread, but long-form text is way less painful. Tonight’s rant sponsored by lukewarm Thai food that should have been inside me about 3 hours ago.
Continue readingCareful with butter knives, children
I’ve wanted to write for a while about a serious injury I sustained to my finger in October. Finally getting around to it.
Prologue
I’m now week 9 in recovering from severing my FDP tendon in zone II of my little finger with a butter knife. I was separating some chicken with it (trying to use it as a wedge), when my hand slipped down the shaft and the “blade” cut into my little finger in the worst spot. I noticed something was wrong a few days later when I couldn’t move the end of my little finger. It may not sound like a big deal losing the little finger like that, but trust me, it’s worse than you can imagine. Severing this tendon in the little finger also affected the function of the ring finger (the tendons controlling the two come from the same muscle, and the tendons themselves are usually connected in the wrist).
Using EFI labels on FreeBSD
A quick post since this isn’t well covered: FreeBSD on EFI systems still will hard-code the name enumerated at install time (like da0p2). There is a better way than using glabel (which injects itself into the last block of the partition, which can be problematic). Instead, you can use GPT labels, which are cross-platform and well-known.
ARM64 programs built with Visual Studio crash with 0xC000007B
It’s because Visual Studio seems to copy an x86 version of the VC++ runtime into system32 on ARM64 systems. That’ll make it crash with a bad image format error. If you copy the ARM64 version of vcruntime140.dll (for me, found in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\VC\Redist\MSVC\14.28.29325\arm64\Microsoft.VC142.CRT) into the build directory, binaries will work.
Notes with the Parallels Beta on Apple Silicon
QEMU recently gained Apple Silicon hypervisor support. That was pretty damn cool for the first few weeks of M1 in people’s hands. Even without any optimizations, Windows 10 on M1 outclasses the Surface Pro X and even my Ryzen gaming desktop. Unfortunately, that didn’t include 3D acceleration (though virtio-gpu is now a thing for 2D).
Luckily, Parallels has ported their virtualization software to M1. It’s incredibly janky (and certainly deserving of a technical preview because of that!), but shows a lot of promise, complete with D3D11 support for games. Unfortunately, it requires some hacks to get running stable, but it’ll work fine after that.
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