I'm doing pretty good!

A few weeks ago I started on an anxiety medication, and it's working really well! Anxiety used to be a huge barrier basically every day. It used to be really bad, but I'd throw myself head first into uncomfortable situations over and over again, and I'd just cope with the effects as they happened. I got a lot of improvement out of doing that, but it certainly wasn't perfect. I finally took the step to get medication, and it's like that last bit of ever present anxiety has just been washed away by it. I still have some anxiety of course, but it's way easier to manage and doesn't come up nearly as often as it used to. So I'm doing pretty good! I've sort of fallen back down in terms of my ability to focus on stuff, and I'm slowly trying to claw that back again. I had it pretty good about a month or two ago and I let it slip away. But once I get that back, I'll have my focus on track AND my anxiety on track together for the first time in like... 3 years? Yay!

What I've been up to

I've kept working on my CD player a bit. I have the body of it printed now, and I've modified the design of some pieces to make it all fit together better in the real world. Here's how it looks so far (with a pair of scissors for scale):

A 3d printed box shape, about the size of a pair of scissors corner to corner. It has volume knobs, buttons, and a switch in the front. It has a slot for accepting a CD.


Annd today I'm working on sending a letter to tabF5 . I'm sending them some pins of their tablings and a and written letter! I made an envelope out of some fancy paper I had lying around and sealed it up my pouring a wax seal that has a crow marking on it:

A white 5x7 envelope made with thin woven linen paper. There is a sage blue wax seal with a crow design on it. There is also washi tape sealing the envelope with tulips on it


Here's the pins I made! The one with the smooth lines I made, the rest I ripped from their website and put a background on. The one I made is supposed to be me as their tabling "Wade". Sometimes I feel like Wade when I'm sitting at the counter at my job, so it's wearing my work t-shirt.

6 pins in total depicting tabf5's tablings


Hopefully they like it!


In a couple of months I'm going to an event called "minnebar", which is a tech event where anyone can host an hour long "session". The event is hosted in the Best Buy corporate headquarters, which has quite a lot of rooms the speakers get to utilize. This year unfortunately a large amount of the talks are centered around AI. Last week I saw someone online who was in the starting stages of making a version of the minnebar session listings, but with all the ai centered talks filtered out. So I decided to lend them a hand! I contributed a script that scrapes all currently submitted sessions from minnebar's site, another script that allows you to tag each session as an "ai" session or a "not ai" session, and a third script that scrapes the session schedule times for when that is posted! I went through all 80 some sessions, read the full description of every single one, and tagged all of them. So I did the data collection, and they did the website it's self. Between us it was done within a few days :). The site is now up and running with current information! I submit changes every night with the latest newly submitted sessions. We still need to get the schedule page going, but that's not actually needed until the day of the event. So I'm taking a short break from writing new code for it, and I'll circle back around to it later if the creator of the project done it on his own yet.


I've been sort of procrastinating doing "real stuff", so I don't really have much crazy to show for my time. Hopefully I can get my focus back into the swing of things :)