So I picked up my prescription for the nasal spray antihistamine and with much in the way of nervousness took my first dose this morning exactly as recommended, with the bend over gently inhale gently, tasted nightmare (this shit is foul) and then sat back in calm resignation to feeling sleepy and icky. Then--

To digress briefly to add drama: the major side effect listed is somnolence, as most antihistamines are, so I'd warned my manager I'd probably need about a week to adjust my timing etc and get used to it. Also, I determined to do it on full stomach.

I did not eat though, and to start, somnolence is not the word I'd use. More like--okay, somewhat warm, yes. And--how to put this--sort of pleasantly lethargic like after half a joint and kind-of sort-of, well, high, like mildly stoned, like dopamine which is my favorite brain chemical of all and really should be everyone's.

So short version: I had a super good day at work, where I slowly and happily did my tasks, slowly and happily wandered to the bathroom on breaks, slowly and happily ate microwave popcorn one lingering kernel at a time, and felt overwhelming affection for my co-workers, their chairs, and the floor and even mankind itself, which is pretty new for me.

When I came down a bit, I also realized there was like ninety percent less sniffling and nose blowing and felt overwhelming affection for my allergist, the medication, allergies, pollen, and weather. And somewhat more quickly took my afternoon dose.

Like I get the window for 'my wonderful new antihistamine that tastes like evil but I would die for it as it gets me high at work' is probably pretty small but I'm on this train with no regrets so wheeeee.

And also importantly, it really works which I totally appreciate but for the record: God bless that deviated septum for its help in getting me to this place.

(Azelastine hcl: you're welcome.)

It's now sleeting. I know this because this shit bounces, which is creepy as fuck. It's confusing to me, as it is not in its natural habitat aka a snowcone or ice chest surrounding some sort of beer and/or coke.

Side effect of living in central Texas; we are baffled by ice.

I mean, not ice where it belongs--see above, or within an ice maker or ice bag or environment in which ice forms (freezer)--but like, from the sky. It's fucking witchcraft, is what I'm saying. Like, this is the only time I sort of understand witch hunts, because there's a part of me that is extremely suspicious of this nonsense because it's just not right.

Chicago, Helsinki, New York = ice from sky.
Central Texas = months long fires and air conditioner use in early March.

February + Central Texas + ice from sky <> anything good or wholesome.

This has been a baffled weather report while all of us look suspiciously outside every so often.

(sleet falls in cleavage = holy fuck what elemental did I piss off?????)

Testing Barley, Oat, and Wheat Hay with rabbits. At minimum, it does not make me sneeze and they seem to like it. Comments stated it was the one hay that someone could use that they weren't allergic to, so here's to hoping after a few days of exposure.

I see the allergist on Monday, which will hopefully give me an idea of what I should be avoiding from now on. I would like to know what life is like when one is not constantly blowing one's nose. V. exciting.

So I've had non-stop allergies for roughly the last six months. The last month it got worse; the last week was just shitty. Being mature and responsible, I adulted the fuck out of yesterday: I made a doctor's appointment because grown-ups do that all the time and not just when they run out of oxygen and need an ambulance.

...I mean, so I've heard--never mind, yeah, I do that. Or my mother gives me a long look and shamefaced I adult-child my way to the doctor feeling resentful of my lungs. Fine.

Quick aside:

So last month I talked about the entire Thing That Happened With Anxiety and Asthma and Crazy. Now, my regular doctor at the time said it was definitely anxiety and not asthma, and the last almost-two years have sort of confirmed that. I still had my inhaler, but the only time I ever used it was when I was having very severe allergies, because albuterol is awesome, and anyway, why not split the difference? In general, it did help; it would loosen up my breathing and I'd feel about a hundred times better. So there's that.

Back to the story:

However, starting on Thursday, things got much weirder. When I say my allergies were bad, we added in not just coughing, but an unproductive one, and I was constantly coughing. It was also getting harder to catch my breath on my walk to and from work, as in, it took way too much effort to get a deep breath. So the inhaler came out and long story short, Monday, I was in 'fuck it'--which is totally the same thing as adulting--and called for a refill of my inhaler and then an appointment.

(Note: no fever, no borderline fever, not even a fake almost-fever. I was a cool 98.6 like some sort of--it was mocking me, the thermometer, I mean. It was bullshit.)

The CMA was awesome and was super concerned about my blood oxygen (which was really worrying because I actually felt like I was fine there??? Oh God am I adapting to a low oxygen environment???? In my lungs?????) Then he gave me this long tube with numbers and told me to blow into it, and recorded best of three.

...and as we all know, best of three indicates this is a score. I'll get back to that.

Anyway, my new doctor (in Austin) was also concerned, listened to my lungs, concerned some more, and gave me a breathing treatment, which I love (my mouth always feels so clean). It wasn't the dramatic improvement I expected, but as I realized while writing about this on twitter, the last time I had one of these I was in the middle of a literal asthma?/?allergy attack and of fucking course it felt like magic, I had gone from 'not very much air here' to 'like three times as much air, not all the air but boy it felt like it'. I had steady improvement almost as I finished the appointment for several hours, but that's when the tube became a problem.

I really, really needed to beat the clinic score, and set myself of in a coughing fit every time. cathyw assures me this is the correct behavior, so yay! So far, added 50 to that bad boy, and I have no idea how terrible my score really is, I am in the zone of breathing.

My doctor has taken a threefold approach to this. 1.) Allergist on the 11th. 2.) five days of steroids. If those don't work, 3.) a week of antibiotics. My guess is going to be steroids. I almost asked in the office for getting shot up with the high dose, but a.) honestly, I'm nowhere near needing my steroids delivered by needle for urgency-purposes, and two, they always knock me out in a weird way where I don't really feel tired but become prone and unconscious when offered some sort of relatively stable surface, not necessarily flat.

So that was the saga of how I adult. Also, I am officially to take Flonase twice a day (I stopped because I thought it wasn't working, which in retrospect might have partially led to these events but spilled milk).

I am so looking forward to the allergist, but I have realized something; about a decade ago, I was in Chicago and got this hat and scarf, which were a gorgeous mix of cashmere and angora. So, long story short, a few short hours later, I had a burn line across my forehead with welts because I'm allergic to angora.

Angora is a type of rabbit.

Now granted, that's an entirely different type of fur, and yeah, I had rabbits after that, but allergies grow, like my one to nickel where I can't even wear surgical steel or anything that may have slept with nickel's mother's sister or knew it in high school. Also, this is why you have allergy meds and everything, but. That does mean I may need to actively look to rehome maybe one or two and reduce the population at least. BUT THAT IS FOR LATER.

...so, roughly eighteen years or so after first hearing of it, I am finally going to escapade_con!!!!! aerialiste graciously offered to let me room with her and holy shit it's been like, eight years since I went to a con!

Escapade, 2/22/2019-2/24/2019

So I will be in LA 2/21-2/26 if anyone wants to hang out or organize some erudite discourse on the nature of textual pornography over jello shots and cheese sticks. I do not insist on discourse or cheese sticks. Erudite jello shots are fine. I've actually never had one.

So, the last part of my week:

Wednesday - got home at six and found a notice from the manager that apartments would be inspected the next day.

Wednesday 7:00 PM - Thursday 8:00 AM - CLEANING

You are saying to yourself HOLY SHIT WHAT KIND OF NIGHTMARE STY DO YOU WALLOW IN? I make no excuse for my sheer lack of caring but not at the level of health violations or bugs. However, this wasn't the best time, it being All the Christmas Stuff Still Being Organized and Packed, Many Piles of Laundry Sorted For the Washer (I tend to do it in en masse when underwear becomes a concern), and the oven had recently undergone a gooey experience that was now char. Also, might have been a few dishes and...things.

(There was also Child's room, which the less spoken of, the better.)

There's also my totally-okay and electrically sound and somewhat sort of authorized kinda modifications to the light situation, which is uh, the addition of about twelve or maybe fourteen (fifteenish?) extra light fixtures because apartments just simply do not have enough lights for me, the only window in the living room is a giant sliding door where anyone can look inside from the road (you can look in and see my bedroom from the right angle) and my living room is painted a pale beige, which means there's literally no reflection and in fact sucks in light and I need light.

(I have three other windows: my room, Child's room, and the laundry nook. Not helpful.)

...and switching out two switches for wi-fi enabled so I could control them and the ceiling fan with SmartThings and Alexa.

(Because if it can be controlled by voice, I will make it happen.)

They showed up at 9:30 AM while I tried to look casual and immediately noted the rabbit house.

Questions about rabbits, feeding, and housing took longer than the goddamn inspection. Not gonna lie, it's a cool house but I hand-cleaned the baseboards (that maybe didn't need it) and no one even questioned the switch box or commented on the coolness of motion sensors in my closet, the hall closet, and the bathroom.

Or--you know, all the pendant lights and the sconce light and puck lights and LED light strip running an inch from the ceiling on a platform made out of hard plastic cord covers because I got creative or the routers installed at key points (because concrete and signal strength) or ethernet cable running everywhere or...you know, normal things.

Like, yay rabbits? I'm not disappointed or anything, obviously, but I have to admit, of all the things you'd think someone coming in here would notice, all they saw were my rabbits.

OTOH, this does bode well if I say, decide to repaint this beige nightmare room white. So overall, I'm encouraged.

Allergies have decided I will never know joy again or an unstuffed nose. If anyone wants me, it is either at work half-conscious from non-working allergy medicine or on the couch, very unconscious from non-working allergy medicine.

Between this and my period, homicide might be on the table if I could like, move. Hating everything is so much less effective when it's punctuated with sneezing. It's terribly lowering.

The mental illness cute/real contrast/compare post got me thinking about the other side of that. In general, media has two modes when depicting mental illness: cute and fucking tragic (and Monk, which is kind of both). There's a real lack of 'mundane reality' aka 'living with mental illness is actually pretty fucking boring'. Yeah, there's the drama, but most of it is basically you and your best buddy, 'coping mechanisms'.

( yeah, it just goes on for a while here. unless you're super into whatever this is, you can safely skip )

I forgot: this is the result of my second resolution, along with pork pie: I will actually talk about mental illness. I will also remember to laugh more about it.

Note to self: if the most popular reblog you ever make on tumblr compares men unfavorably to cats and vibrators, it's pretty much what you deserve.

So my phone pinged me eight times for the same tornado watch, all notifications from SmartThings and the Storm App. Like maybe I wasn't paying close attention to the weather, which actually is true. I'm on the bottom floor and my front door is technically one floor below the parking lot, while my porch on the other side is two-thirds of a floor above the main road in the complex, so what the highway doesn't drown out, the cocoon around this floor of solid concrete takes care of.

So yes, it's actually possible I could be hit by a tornado and wouldn't notice until I got wet or--more likely--I saw a drop of water on my laptop and panicked, went for a towel and noticed the lack of a building no longer around me. For reference, it was a couple of minutes ago I went outside to note hey, it's raining. From the look of outside, for some time, yeah.

News

The Magicians, Season Four, starts January 23, 2019. The first three seasons are available on Netflix for those who need an easy to fulfill New Year's resolution that rewards you with Eliot and Penny, who I should mention is another excellent to watch and is ungodly hot. If you're into hot guys who do magic and sometimes forget to wear a shirt; it may be an acquired taste, idk.

I'm going to tell you now; this is going to be the most boring post you can imagine. Just warning you; if you're out of valium, keep reading, I'm here for you.

I'm about to do my semi-annual update of my Pandora playlists, which is always fraught and weird, because in general, I have to make a new playlist entirely and that means starting with a new base. Eventually, each playlist hardens, and I may love most of the songs there now, for reasons every new song they play on one of those I will now hate.

So: new playlist, new base, and the old way--not efficient--was to go through my bought music (and...not so very bought), find the ones that combine showing up on mulitple writing playlists, grab the last five I downloaded from my Amazon subscription, and create the base from those. In general, this meant Pandora would get me new music that matched my taste, but burnout still happened; eventually, it would harden and stop giving me anything.

Which makes no sense: this is a meticulously self-curated list by me combined with an algorithm by experience I know works. And yet, the hardening, every time. Which means I have to retire a playlist--not delete--for a while before I can listen it for anything but long walks.

But here's the thing: about two thirds of the songs I don't like as it turns out I love and will die for, but not if I hear them on one of those playlists. I have to hear them somewhere else.

Examples: I hated Mumford and Sons, every song, and yet, at this moment, I have the better part of an album of them and the gold standard is four songs from an artist. Same with Florence and the Machine, Broods, Metric, Imagine Dragons, Andrew McMahon: all of them, at one time or another, got thumb-the-fuck-down in Pandora--I checked this--until I heard them in a different context. Vids are a really good way but a goddamn trailer or commercial or in a store or the mall or while surfing youtube when I am bored enough to hate myself.

There are some obvious explanations--vidding, for example, is a translation, and some songs just work by association even if they're not generally to my taste. Which I think is the explanation: for reasons unclear, this song is outside my hardened playlist, and that means my taste has hardened unacceptably and it's time for a full reboot.

This is why the playlist update has to happen, no exceptions. Hardened taste atrophies your ear; you only hear noise. That way ends with hating everything not made after 1979 or 1989 (...please tell me those people don't exist) or 1999, pick a year. Which is ridiculous because who the fuck wants to miss My Chemical Romance and the Dixie Chicks and Beyonce, are you crazy? It blows my mind; no, I don't love everything in the top one hundred, but I never loved everything in the top 100, but I guarantee you thirty I won't mind listening to, ten I like and one I will love. I honestly have yet to find a genre I hate; I may not love it, but there is always several that I like, and one thing I love.

You know that feeling you get with some songs; it's like getting a hard hit of something seriously good and likely illegal except it's better. It almost hurts; you put it on repeat one and play it forever, you hear it when you're going to sleep, your walk matches the beat. No song can do it forever, but that's the point; if I want it, I have to chase it.

It's not just music, though; it's everywhere, but it's not something you get sitting still; you have to chase it and sometimes, you have to be willing to run. It's when I'm coding and suddenly, all the pieces come together and I compile and run and it's perfect; when I'm writing and the words I was fighting flow together and become a scene, a story; when I read something--it can be the whole book, a page, a paragraph, a single line, and it stops me short because I forgot to breathe; a speech I heard once did it, that was weird; when I was lead in two plays, and the second one, at the end, everyone stood up; every basketball game I ever played and the time I got second in the four hundred that I didn't even know I was supposed to run and I almost blacked out when I reached the finish line.

Like, for that second, I get what it must have been like at the cusp of Creation, the vastness of infinite nothing. One command, given to infinity, and the first light to exist illuminated the universe in the form of newborn stars across an infant universe; this is everything. What a fucking rush.

The universe is in infinite expansion and everything is out there and we have so little time; you can't stop, not for a second. You're going to have to chase it down, and sometimes, you're going to have to run.

Thirty minutes ago I got off work early, excited for five day vacation for Christmas, listing in my head on my walk home ALL THE THINGS I could do today.

I have now spent ten minutes staring blankly at my laptop, my tv, and my phone in turn unable to decide what to do.

This is going to end with me surfing wikipedia, I just know it. Somehow.

So for years I adamantly and totally refused to watch Parks and Recreation because by policy, I don't watch shows about people in public service for any reason, especially comedies. I have yet to see one that wasn't baseline mean.

(Though honestly, dramas are worse.)

Not by design, either; that's what made it frustrating, because public service is absurd. They just didn't get why. It's like someone who wanted to make a good cake but hasn't seen one and only had a list of ingredients and a blurry picture to work from. And they didn't know how to bake but had once heard their mom talk about an oven and though she meant the microwave type.

So imagine my shock when I was in Netflix and flipped it on for background noise and then accidentally six of seven seasons. Truthfully, I can't tell you what this did differently except maybe everything?

( parks and recreation more meta than spoilery )

Personal Note: The story of the TANF workers above? This actually ended up super-personal.

( oh the tangled webs we weave when we don't lie and are kind of excitable )

Creating your smarthome is somewhat like embracing our eventual rule by robots in the most fun possible way while Skynet smiles in anticipation. Let's not pretend this isn't exactly where it's going and we're actually kind of okay with it.

It's also baffling as fuck combined with so easy it's almost uncanny. Right now, the biggest problem is quite literally it's updating and generationing like fruit flies and there are so many systems and so many protocols.

I took the easiest route; my laptops are Dell because they're locally founded and owned, my BFFs brother works there along with some of my friends, and I will be with them probably until the bitter crashing end, and my smarthome controller of choice is Samsung, which has a local headquarters and my ex-BIL and his son--my son's BFF--works there. Yes, Samsung makes phones that on occasion are known to abruptly explode; no one's perfect.

To break this down into pieces, I'm going to start with my smartlight review. All of these option require home wifi and a working router, and we'll get more into the router part later.

( your hub light ecosystem )

( your non-hub light ecosystem )

I started this entry last week and left in draft. Then I discovered on Tuesday, routers can be a problem and so held this entry until I'd solved it. It has to do specifically with wifi networks in general.

( so about those routers )

So last night, the following occurred:

1.) A young adolescent cat leaps onto my porch where I am innocently reading.
2.) Child--sensing a disturbance in the Force--comes down the hall from his bedroom.
3.) Cat for no reason plasters itself against glass door.
4.) Door opens and I watch a Disney romantic comedy in progress as two--beings?--find each other like there should be a goddamn soundtrack playing featuring Mariah Carey.

( a cat's tale )

Glad I got that off my chest.

Apartmenting

1.) Got my bed set up finally, directly under the ceiling fan because it was the only way to keep my posts and holy shit recommended.

2.) My porch now boasts a rug, a patio table, and a patio loveseat. I feel very--like I have a small plastic outdoor living room?

3.) Got a wifi doorbell. Because why the hell not?

4.) Acquired a Samsung SmarthThings hub with two (2) multipurpose sensors, one (1) motion sensor, and one (1) arrival sensor because I'm not sure really and we'll get to that now.

This was going to happen from the moment I got the Echo and realized I could live in Star Trek. So let's just go with it.

( home automation: the adventure continues )

Currently on day five of the new apartment, in which about two thirds of the lights are wifi controlled and so is the thermostat. My bed is in pieces, but I can control light and weather with my voice. And when my new doorbell is installed, I can watch people outside my door from the comfort of my phone like a creep.

I think that makes me a god. Like, a really discount one, but you take what you can get.

So, two weeks with new mattress, review for first few nights here.

( mattress oh mattress )

Dear internet (and ellixis): I bought a mattress online.

Just now, half of you flinched; I know. The problem is, a 512 G solid state Samsung PCIe hard drive went on sale for $99.00 and it was buy a damn mattress or resign myself to sleeping on a bed of old hard drives with an (awesome) upgraded server. Or possibly a new server: it needs refurbishing, now that I think about it.

This is my story.

( and other things )

On a guess, this would be the best place to post this, but I'll copy to Tumblr later:

Dear Mystery Person Who Sent Me These For My Birthday,

(Could be two of you, but my money's on one or affiliated.)

Thank you very much for the ninja swords and Kindle bookcover. I will honestly state I did not at any point see those coming (especially the swords), but I have swished those swords allll around, no lie. They are as awesome as they appeared in Amazon. I have a black leather trenchcoat my grandmother got me with her magical garage sale skills and seriously, I feel like I should star in my own anime and defeat some sort of Eldritch tentacle monster.

Really (really) don't know what to say but thank you. The last few months have not been among the best for me due to work, but there is nothing--and I do mean nothing--like swishing a sword and having small children (related to you) squeal in terror to really upgrade your mood.

(Also, the cover is already on my kindle and God it looks classy.)

(I HAVE NINJA SWORDS.)

--jenn

So the Rain

Well, it hasn't rained in a few days, so there's that. The entire backyard is all visibly soaked dirt, and I won't talk about the patio because it's beyond words. Last week we had a lot of people out of the office literally due to rain, and this week (and next) being the graduation for most of the state, it's been--well, wetly triumphant, maybe?

So More Things

So you may not know that guinea pigs have entered my life. Apparently, this has been a thing for a while, I just didn't know.

Let me explain.

They weren't mine, I want that clear. My youngest sister purchased them some number of years greater than two and less than five ago, and they came to her as small and are now super-sized guinea hogs, if you will. They were given a standard cage and toys and being low maintenance and fucking hateful--they make my former rabbit warren look loving and kind--we all just sort of existed in a detente where we moved them around as needed and fed them while they pretended we didn't exist or attacked whoever was foolish enough to try to keep their cage clean and them healthy, because they're malicious.

Here's where this gets weird.

At some point in the last eighteen months--and I can't tell you how or when, it just happened--I began buying all their food, snacks, and litter, feeding and bathing them (bathing. them.) and had been for quite a while because my sister isn't actually anywhere near them (ie, no longer lives here) and somehow, I...took over, like some kind of unholy geas and I don't know how or why.

I'm bathing them. Let me clarify this, because this is where I'm convinced I pissed off a sorcerer or a wizard and this is actually a curse.

I actually get a giant towel and Child (to distract them from going for my throat), grab each one and put them in a box (with minimal bloodshed), carry them to the bathroom, fill a tub--my bathtub--with water (not too warm, not too cold, I test this) until it reaches just their bellies and set them in there to swim and glare at them hatefully before shampooing them one by one, risking my fingers, or at least bits of them, because guinea pigs can't be fucked to do the minimum amount of work to keep themselves clean no matter how often I clean out their truly nightmarish cage and if they weren't bathed, they'd be quite literally made of fur and their own excretions. Then I rinse them, check their fur for issues--risking so much finger-flesh--towel-dry their ungrateful asses (now with shiny fur), and take them back to their fresh cage where they immediately create more filth to wallow in while I return to my bathtub and stare in horror at what I have to clean up (and that shit is deliberate, and I do mean shit. What is wrong with them?).

A couple of times a month, I do this.

I'm doing this of my own free will, and I honestly can't tell you why because I hate them, they hate me, and it makes no sense and I can't emphasize this enough, I can't work out when this started. However, I had a revelation this week while miserably cleaning out their hideous cage and resenting the fuck out of anything with fur; I don't have to live like this, this is bullshit.

Time to deal.

I hate them but at this point it can't be denied they're mine--once you carry the scars of their tiny teeth, someone is owned and it's not gonna be me--so they're going to live to a standard by which my rabbits once lived, because no pet of mine (fuck my life, I have guinea pigs) is going to look like their owner isn't creepily overinvested in their lifestyle and living accommodations.

Midwest Interactive Guinea Habitat Plus - that's eight to nine square fucking feet lined with PVC canvas containing a ramp, a care area, and is recommended by veterinarians. I'm throwing out everything they're using now; their resentful little asses are gonna experience a lifestyle upgrade. They are getting a new grass house, a grass ball, new chewtoys, a new feeder, and fuck my life, I went shopping for absorbent pads used on people beds for those who need such things for night accidents to line this sucker with and I also got them treats and snacks because reasons. I googled guinea pig food type for the most nutritious and evaluating if it would be in their best interests to start them on a Central Market and Whole Foods diet of overpriced organic vegetables and greens.

You know what guinea pigs do? They wallow. That's it. They lay there, resenting the effort it takes them to eat their own food because that requires movement. They bore the cat. You can't get lower than the cat thinking you aren't even worth watching hungrily. They're like furry rocks made of hate and a lack of motivation. They are a literal rebuttal of the theory of evolution, because selection should have wiped them out and yet, here they are, alive and forcing me to re-evaluate how trustworthy science really is.

It gets worse.

While shopping I learned; guinea pigs are neglected as hell when it comes to fun pet shit. Hamsters and ferrets, mice and rats, toys and pipes and hammocks and awesome playscapes, but guinea pigs? Do they get giant-ass playscapes I'd like in human-size? Nope. Do they get tubular extravaganzas? No. I admit, furry hate-rocks wouldn't use them, but that's not the point; this should be equal opportunity and guinea pigs are getting the short end of the stick here.

...I hate them, they loathe me, they are furry hate rocks who I genuinely think would kill me if they were less fucking lazy, but on their behalf I've been hating the entire pet industry and googling PVC piping to see if it comes in transparent so I can build them a playscape so as not to be inferior to fucking hamsters that they'll never use because they are furry rocks of hate. And I gotta bathe them tomorrow because the cage should be here when I get home from work and they are gonna go into their new home clean and this isn't happening, it can't be.

Wizard curse, it's gotta be.

Okay, I give up: I need someone who knows geometry.

I'm trying to enclose a rectangle of known dimensions within an ellipse and expand the ellipse thirty feet from each angle. No, Pythagorean theorum didn't work (why????????), I tried expanding the rectangle theoretically by thirty feet at all diagonals, I tried magic.

I have Pythagged, sined, cosined, tangented and right now I could pass my junior trig and geometry with a A, but I cannot make a fucking ellipse that's perimeter entirely encloses a rectangle of known dimensions that is at least one hundred feet from the closest point in the rectangle.

What. Do. I. Need. To. Do?

Assume all measurements in feet, m is the multiplier to get the ratio to recalculate w, h to a, b for second rectangle and expanded ellipse.

Formula to calculate an ellipse: https://www.mathsisfun.com/geometry/ellipse-perimeter.html <--approximation 3

Current Rectangle:
w = 2640
h = 450
d = Sqr(x) = (w ^ 2) + (h ^ 2) = 2678.0776
p of rec = 6180
p of ellipse = 5487.4475

Increasing the diagonal by 100 at all angles
d2 = 2678.0776 + (100*4) = 3078.0776

(Corrected 30 to 100; I couldn't make thirty work at all).

I thought it was working with this formula:
New Rectangle:
m = d2/d = 3078.0776/2678.0776 = 1.1493
a = w * m = 2640 * 1.1403 = 3034.3126
b = h * m = 450 * 1.1403 = 517.2123
p of new rect: 7.103.0501
p of new ellipse = 6304.7578

It could work, but I'm not sure, because when I start expanding the rectangle itself and apply the formula to get real ellipse and new ellipse, it doesn't work and I don't know why. The only explanation I have is that I'm changing the height and width too much, but the same results occur no matter what I do.

Second group:
w = 10560
h = 24390
d = Sqr(x) = (w ^ 2) + (h ^ 2) = 26,577.9175
p of rect = 69,900
p of ellipse = 57,070.34402

Increasing the diagonal by 100 at all angles
d2 = 26577.9175 + (100*4) = 26977.9175

I thought it was working with this formula:
m = d2/d = 26977.9175/26577.9175 = 1.015
a = w * m = 10560 * 1.015 = 10718.92893
b = h * m = 24390 * 1.015 = 24757.07165
p of rect: 70952.00116
p of new ellipse = 57,747.0583

What is wrong with my brain that this isn't working? I verified my results with google and it agrees something is wrong with either a.) my brain or b.) geometry. I think it's geometry. I get ellipse calculations are complicated, but I double checked that part a few times and it's working, I think. At least, google thinks so when I enter my numbers to get the smallest ellipse but this is making no sense why I can't get that second one to work.

I'm listening to country music and not like, Girl in a Country Song but stuff like The Dance and The Thunder Rolls and Straight Tequila Night and The Bluest Eyes in Texas and I'd Be Better Off (In a Pine Box) (On a Slow Train Down to Georgia) (this is the South; we like to be detailed about how you are breaking our hearts, fucker). This is Southern wake after the death of grandma level shit here; this is when we drink Southern Comfort and Wild Turkey and a metric ton of margaritas (if your Southern is Texan), eat potato salad and fried anything, and everyone gets drunk, talks about their rifles and family scandals and at some point one to three parents have a knock-down drag out among the funeral flowers and someone hides in the closet with a brownie and...we're not talking about my childhood, right.

...this is where I am right now. Fix my geometry or I won't be understandable when I talk to anyone not in a central Texas bar; I already have too many vowels in my words and all my gerunds are missing a very important ending 'g'. I will write all my entries in the dialect of a central Texas rural farmer if I have to, and don't think I won't.

This has been a mathematical cry for help.

ETA: Oh God, I Want to Be Loved Like That just came up on rotation. Help.

ETA 2: If you saw an ealirer version, I was using '30 feet' not '100 feet'; I switched when testing the formuals to 100 because thirty simply didn't work and I wanted a dramatic change. All math here is based on an increase of 100 from all angles, or an increase of 200 of each diagonal.

ETA 3: Aded figures worked out in pencil, verified in excel and google, cited my formulas, and still WHAT.

---

Answered by edgewitch: Link to solution with proof!.

Fortunately, my job and how television portrays it (Quality control, aka program testing) isn't a subject for television because generally one hour drama doesn't focus on the minutia of a company building a program step by step because come on, that can be a multi-year process.

....with one exception.

I once ran across the dramatization of the dev process (montage-like) on TV and watched because it's kind of soothing to watch developers suffering (they're like a floor away from me and I've had a bad week, okay?) until we got back to real time and I promptly lost my mind.

A Summary of the Horror:
They're like "almost there after weeks of (montage) work, oh noes there's a null character mcguffin plot reason thing must get it out like right now tonight no waiting!" or something like that, how do you even know this you just finished the last line and haven't compiled it...hold up, where are the design docs, I haven't seen any since this started, how are they--and they're all scanning the source code--scanning a million lines of source code with their eyes ON SINGLE MONITOR WHY, not even using a search algorithm--who does that, what kind of fucking IDE are you using, why don't you have color enabled to make this easier, wait, that looks like microsoft notepad with the background painted black-- "OH FOUND IT FIXING IT NOW" wait, no, did you erase something and then hit enter that's a new line, but go back, problem, the mcguffin wouldn't be in there, that's in a class file, why are you--hold up, what language is this-- "Okay, compiling now!" holy shit did you just-- "Almost done!" wait, what, no, you can't do that, you don't fly edit your code (that did like magic or word processing, they weren't clear) have you ever heard of debug or like-- "Okay, done, send it--" IN TEN SECONDS REAL TIME THAT WASN'T A MONTAGE "--to whothefuckever we can start distribution like next week awesome going to hawaii!" WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING YOU DIDN'T EVEN RUN IT-- "Everyone go on vacation now bye!" NO NO YOU UNIT TEST SYSTEM TEST USER ACCEPTANCE LAST HAS TO CHECK FOR MEMORY LEAKS AND LOAD AT LEAST RUN SOME AUTOMATED SCRIPTS WHAT ARE YOU DOING DID YOU EVEN CHECK TO SEE IF IT EVER WORKED IN A REAL-TIME ENVIRONMENT BECAUSE YOU MACHINES ARE SET TO IDEAL CONDITIONS NOT THE WILDS OF PRODUCTION--

I'll spare you the rest--they say when the trauma becomes too much, the memory's blocked so sanity can be retained--but one thing's really just bothering me here.

In this ultra-tech, totally pro too many coffee cups suspiciously unstained and without chips or being shattered against the wall and no crumpled up design documents because the analysts are sadistic fucks and will give you three contradictory rules and don't understand how to use Visio or the concept of driver flow...all the super-cool computers only had one monitor each.

I get it now.

This is about a desperate dev team torpedoing the project due to hideous working conditions, inadequate equipment, lack of support personnel, and no design documents because they were set up to fail by an evil CEO who wanted to cut corners and get rid of the entire dev department to bring in an alien design team from Mars (who secretly plan to conquer the world because even aliens wouldn't agree to this nightmare unless they had another motive entirely) and now it all makes sense!

( this is totally what happens next )

I just want to say, as a Texan, we already had Rick Perry. Ebola is just salt in the wound here.

In related news:

I have never spent so much time having to fact check people on ebola and google on my phone what it does, is, and how you get it. I have never spent time fact checking anyone, to be honest--generally, listening to other people be paranoid or wrong is an enjoyable hobby and one that requires minimal effort on my part, that being "staying awake", which gotta admit can be hard. Yet I do it, because not only is it bad information and wrong information, even when it's right conversation is drifting dangerously close to "And Obama will use this to take my guns so I cant' shoot ebola when it shows up" or so I assume; I'm telling you, it's getting very weird.

I get this is a horrible disease, I do. And I get that people are afraid, which makes sense: see "horrible disease". However, I'm also lazy; I don't get having to expend effort in feeling terror before we're at minimum out of single digits for the entire US. I don't even get out of bed for a tornado warning unless something achieves three feet levitation in my vicinity. How do people have this kind of energy?

Between Wikipedia's wealth of information on the cat genome, Cracked teaching me about the pros and cons of being a pickpocket or running Afghanistan as military governor, and trying to decide if I really need to go to the bathroom now (standing up?) or can wait (no standing up!) it's like--dude. You could right now be finding out all the forms aphasia can take and how many cities in India have a population greater than 1 million. And you are spending it on a disease in single digit numbers in the US. *

You could be on reddit reading in nosleep and realizing far, far too late what a terrible idea that was, but at least your irrational fear would be of cameras and eyedroppers--seriously, that was creepy.

This has been a message from me, as it's been a very long week.

* this applies to US citizens only, especially those on talk radio who really, desperately need naps or possibly muzzles.

Apparently, Polar Vortices (I had to look up the plural, yes) cause amnesia, because I don't remember being allergic to everything, ever. I think I'm allergic to water.

...this is going to be a very long summer, with much sneezing and eucalyptus oil, per a coworker who swears this will cure all things. When I can smell it--once, twice between sneezes--it does have a pleasant fragrance.

So last night, I finally got around to changing my yahoo and gmail passwords and set up two factor authentication. This sounds like a very boring story, and it is, trust me, but it's also an example of the password equivalent of completionist doctrine: it must all be done.

Because Heartbleed, and why not.

I have a locked and secured doc that has a full list of all my accounts and passwords because you get to the point in your online life where everything can't be happy1 or you end up writing an article about how your iPad was bricked because someone wanted your twitter name and infiltrated your entire Apple ecosystem (that article was nightmare fuel and I don't have an iPad). One of the few useful tips I got from the article is having an account that has no purpose but to be a secondary email on all my accounts; it literally does nothing but receive email about my password changes or activities on my account. I call it my keysmash yahoo account that is the recovery backup for every single account I have. The password is a modified keysmash of thirty-two characters, the username isn't much better, and I don't even know it without looking it up.

This is significant because my master doc is huge--I made an effort with anything important to make a strong password that I could also, at least nominally remember. I added app passwords eventually, so it's ridic long. I started off fixing my gmail first and then my yahoo's--each has a specific type of email it receives (one devoted entirely to Facebook and Harrods, because why not), and setting up two factor authentication (kind of fun) on everything and getting more text messages than I ever have in my life.

Here's the thing; online security was not designed for the human brain, or at least not my brain. I honestly don't know who it was designed for except someone who gets off on calculating pi for days on end or has a hardon for prime number memorization, who can think like that.

At work, I have to change the password (upper case, lower case, number, special character) every three months for my computer, PPM (for looking up defects and modifications for program testing), and my HR login to see my leave and etc. All have a two to three year password memory. My Groove messenger--like AIM, but for work--has another one that can be permanent, thank God. My secure email with Vontage--as opposed to regular email--has to have another one, and I think it has to be changed once a year. Seeing Middleware queues--where webservice calls go to die--needs to be updated every six months. For SQL queries in Oracle, the connection descriptors, usernames, and passwords for six different programs in four environments are each updated four times a year and each program has two to four users. I also have a weird encryption program on my work computer but it changes with my windows login. Oh, and VPN access so I can log in to my work computer from home, Jesus.

In a year as a tester, I will have to create or get updates for about one hundred and thirty two passwords just to log into my computer and do my job.

Online in my regular life, it's more flexible, but to secure my most important accounts, I have to have at least twenty high-security passwords with uppercase, lowercase, special character, number that I can remember off the top of my head and that doesn't count the login for my phone, tablet, laptop, my router login, my wifi login, and my server.

Facebook has an impossible one--I rarely use it, so I don't care that i have to look it up but I do care if someone hijacks it--Apple, Google Every Fucking Thing, Tumblr, DW, LJ, JF, Twitter, AO3, Hulu, Netflix, Roku, Dropbox, Evernote, Trillian, my bank app, my health insurance app, Paypal, Ebay, Sharebuilder, Newegg, my website bank login, cable, utilities, my phone, Amazon, my credit card, my retirement account at work, my health savings account through work, avast mobile security so if my phone is stolen I can erase it, McAfee, okay, I'm getting a headache. All of these have various levels of importance and security, right, because who compares your social media to your bank?

So when i was done with my password changes--smooth segue here--I was looking at my list and started working out how they were connected for vulnerabilities--remember that article I mentioned about the guy and his bricked iPad?--to see which could be considered major keys to everything.

Getting my google, I'm dead in the water, no lie; google infrastructure is like that, so that's a strong memorable password plus two factor authentication. Cracking my trillian gets you my fandom yahoo and google passwords, right, two factor the yahoos, already doing that. Which at this point, I sat down and diagrammed my online life by email address and account and how to limit the damage if one was hacked. The keysmash email seems relatively safe--you know, until fucking Heartbleed--but I ran into a problem here: I'm not a goddamn wizard. Mapping possibilities here in worst case scenario, there's no way I can do a separation that would limit hacking damage to my life to less than 20 percent without magic. For my online life--and real non-work life--I have right now eighty-nine separate passwords that are between medium and high-security needed password levels, and about twenty of them I have to be able to remember off the top of my head because I use them every day.

Modern world, I get that, but every time I read a smug security expert talking about how people are just stupid because they don't choose high security passwords for all five hundred of their online accounts and it's their fault they were hacked I want to destroy worlds or at least explain using small words this isn't (always) an issue of being stupid or lazy; the entire online ecosystem is working against you on this one.

Google alone terrifies me on a theoretical level, because it's linked to so much; Apple, same thing; Amazon, Jesus, it's growing in leaps and bounds; Yahoo, fuck my life; Microsoft, urgh; and I hate to point this out, but there's only so much separation possible. While diagramming my future hacked life, the safest measure seemed to be create a new email account for every single important account (bank, credit card, paypal, etc) to deliver to and secure each one to limit how much information a single hack can get, and it's not like there are a lot of secure online places to set up email accounts, and even if there were, we can't remember that many passwords.

I get--because it's all I know--that this is how it is, that there's no way to be invulnerable, but completionist doctrine: I spent most of last night changing all my major and medium passwords because for the life of me, I spreadsheeted my online ecosystem to figure out a way to be a smart user and limit the damage if I was hacked and I couldn't get it below compromising twenty percent of my accounts with one successful hack. I'd get notified fast--I think I got that much from keysmash yahoo account and two factor authentication--and some of the accounts are pretty minor so it wouldn't matter, but--twenty percent. I'm still working on a security model via staring at my spreadsheet and hating everything, but I keep hitting things i never thought of--my student loan account, places I shopped once or twice where I used Paypal or Google Wallet, and thought about how many places I thoughtlessly and crazily used my credit card and how they link into the ecosystem of online life and what else am I forgetting? And how many passwords I changed yesterday that I still need to memorize because sure, firefox saves passwords, Chrome saves password, IE saves passwords, but if I get hacked, those are the first against the wall, and what if my laptop is stolen or hacked?

Or I take it to a repair shop and completely didn't think about any of that because apparently in the back of my mind repair guy/customer privilege, like lawyer/client privilege, and its not he knew that file existed, or the random name, or feel any need to open it out of the thousands of files on my computer and be curious why it was protected and crack the password. Because God knows, that was a very stupid user mistake, and for four days I didn't know I was 100% vulnerable in my entire online life.

I can't tell if I'm overreacting yet. I also have five passwords >= 20 characters to memorize, which isn't helping my mood at all. Paranoia: it's totally a thing.

Further Reading
Yes, I Was Hacked Hard - welcome to my nightmare

My life, now:

1.) Teaching Child the Finer Points of Do Not Engage.

He's a Sterek shipper but loves the whole cast--seriously, even the annoying ones, it's weird--and a hardcore Destiel shipper who likes Sam, and Tumblr is a daily test of his ability to not get his ass doxxed before he's legally no longer my responsibility. It's a countdown to eighteen, when he can play the youtube, instagram, and facebook personal humiliation angle to his heart's content. Per usual, he finds this completely unfair; this would be, he explains, a learning experience for me as a parent; how to deal with your fanboy kid when he becomes the subject of a massive fandom-wide wank. I reminded him I've been here longer and I have an army and I will troll his ass into the ground, because that too, is a learning experience; do not stress your parent during weirdness at work.

BTW, I need an army, just in case. Anyone got one I could borrow? No reason.


2.) So That Family Legend Thing Was Like, Real?

A couple of months ago, we got a random letter from a firm in Colorado or Oklahoma--I should know this, but it's just so weird--to the estate of my grandfather, who died twenty-one years ago, so passing to my Dad, who died almost two years ago, to us, check enclosed. Not much here, but thing; we own mineral rights somewhere since like, my great-grandpa's time (who died before I was born), or possibly my great-great-grandfather (eighteen freaking hundreds, folks), or so we were told. Much like the Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster and the theory of trickle-down economics, it was told over campfires (barbecues and polish sausage?) as a thing that no one actually believed because seriously, who believes trickle-down works?

Right, I digressed, and here's another one; I come from a long, long, Jesus long line of sharecroppers, semi-subsistence farmer, serfs, and ethnic Wends Lutherans running away from religious persecution due to a union between two disparate versions of Protestantism in Bavaria (I looked this up and I still can't tell the difference, but all of them were going to hell from what I understand) while also failing to get anywhere above 'growing enough food to continue the family line, and how'. Which let me say is an accomplishment and possibly a miracle. Some of us live in the Rockies and don't talk to people or possibly shoot at strangers, it's a thing we do. I've heard bears are involved.

So you see why our first reaction was hysterical laughter followed by wtf followed by calling and being genuinely surprised this wasn't a poor British widow whose colonel/general husband died in India (to this day, I still think it was an email from Victorian England; there's no other explanation) but an actual lawyer--seriously, passed the bar and everything--and so many years ago, some great (-great?) grandparent split up shares between their kids and lo, for the first time ever, that shit was 1.) a real thing that was real and 2.) produced (a very small) amount of money that was actually real and came in legal tender form to be--not kidding--deposited in an actual account without anyone (FBI?) muttering "suckers" like those poor people who thought the fake Publisher's Clearinghouse check was real.

Again, very small amount (somewhat more if I kill all the other heirs, the math is very interesting if my how serendipitous genealogy information is accurate but depends on if this is great or great-great-grandpa as origin (if it's great-great-grandpa, I may need a professional consultation for the number I'm getting on the number of direct descendents, because huh, calculators don't lie)), and this proves 1.) wow, so evil really is a light-switch, who knew and 2.) these things actually happen?

The universe moves in mysterious ways. My entire worldview is in revolution, or something.

3.) So That's a Much Better Interpretation Than Mine and I Wrote It.

I read a fantastic review of one of my fic and it was both surreal and gratifying beyond words, but what really got me thinking was reading it again out of the context of the fandom at the time.

It's not just author death in this case; it's well over a decade, the fandom has progressed past all recognition, but far more interesting to me is that it still works, just in a completely different way than it did then, and in some ways much better because it can stand alone like this. To get my intention in the fic--and the readers at the time picked it up immediately--you had to have read not just several other fic in the fandom, but been in the fandom and subject to the atmosphere at the time, enough that you were--if you were me--deeply committed to being very tired of it all.

The thing is--and I say this with mixed feelings--I'm torn on Death of the Author. I don't necessarily believe it, but I'm a massive fan of people who are and practice it, and the reason is why I'm in fandom in the first place. A text is static--it's words on the page, they can't change--but people do, over a week, a year, a lifetime, an age, a millennia. The idea that we are reading Homer exactly the same way as the Greeks did the odd thousands of years ago would imply we've managed, quite literally, to have progressed absolutely nowhere except invented flight and cellphones. What we read, how we read, how we process it, what we see in the text and what we take away from it better be subject to change.

I remember high school and college English as a dark period of my existence--I've never gotten over how I couldn't get the teacher to debate The Lady or the Tiger in eighth grade and I will take that to my grave--and the noble papers I wrote on the real meaning of The Yellow Wallpaper (ghost, obviously) and A Good Man Is Hard to Find (why am I reading this, two thousand goddamn words of making up shit; Man Is Fucked Up, what do you want from me?) and a plethora of forgettable short stories and novels where I was asked to describe what I got out of it and how that was very wrong because reasons (unknown, but definitely there). If there's one defining characteristic of fandom, it's that we all care deeply about the one true interpretation as meant by the author/writer/producer right up until we disagree with them and kill them immediately and write the one true true interpretation their blood, and you get this is metaphorical, right? I can see how that'd be a concern after point two. Metaphor, promise.

Text doesn't change, it can't; it's words. People should. I will happily take a thousand Moby Dick as unsettling psychosexual drama with man/boat/whale threesome on a semen sea--I'll need therapy, but whatever, I'll take one for the team--than risk the stagnation, however small, however irrelevant it may seem, of human thought in which we cannot comprehend the idea of seeing something new, a thought that didn't exist when Homer wrote it that exists now. Anyone who tells you there's nothing new under the sun's never seen anything but a single candle in a dark room.

*****

Brief afterward; it has been a very unsettling work week and insomnia is apparently a feature. I'm kind of looking forward to reading this when I'm rested and relatively sane again. In that way I will never be able to mock Child's tumblr posts again from any kind of high ground, but hey, he won't know that.