X-Miss

Christmas this year was quiet. Some would say lackluster.

Tried to sleep in, but Santa brought me a stuffy nose, which made breathing through my CPAP impossible. So I got up early. Made breakfast. Cleaned the kitchen and took a shower. After dressing, mother called from the family gathering back home. Got to greet everyone through her speakerphone. Short conversation. Hangup, put on boots, go to cafe. Sat to read, and an old friend stopped by; haven’t seen her in forever, and it was good to catch up. Went home, cooked sausages, tortellini with pesto, salad. Put leggings underneath for the night cold and went to the bar. Sat next to a bar friend, but she was busy rolling up D&D character sheets and talking with someone else. Flicked between my phone and the game on the screen, even though I don’t care about football. Joked with the bartenders. They called me “Sleigh bell Shawn” as per the running gag of the night. I spelled it “S-l-a-y B-e-l-l-e Shawn” and double-snapped. “Hey, are you Slay Belle?” “Bitch I might be.” Looked at phones on my phones. Scrolled Mastodon. Now home after a heavy tip, munched on charcuterie, writing a blog.

Today was all touch, no feel.

No gifts. No tree. No luminaria. No contadas. No carols. No dinners. No rosy cheeks next to the fire. All the touchstones of the holiday season are for those who collaborate and plan and care and love and agree to meet. I don’t do that these days. I just walk into a place and see who I can see. This isn’t how adults do things. This is how people of no consequence do things. All the sad Christmas songs of the world, for all the sad sacks of the world.

Happy Holidays to one and….

Always Be Chewing

Talking with a friend tonight about being constantly hungry. I’ve been eating a lot lately. Like, a lot. I keep wondering if I’m going diabetic. Like, am I eating so much that my stomach is just constantly dumping to make room for more?

I mentioned that it’s just not cold enough for my body to behave like this. It doesn’t feel like winter here in Austin. I mean, goddamn, it’s 60F right now at midnight:thirty, 3 days before Christmas. This is not winter.

But it is Solstice. My buddy mentioned that appetite is tied to circadian rhythms, and with the longer nights and shorter days, we’re being triggered to stuff our faces to face the cold months ahead. So I get it. I see that. There are so many cultural festivals and practices that involve food and companionship during these dark nights, and there’s a reason for it.

The only thing that’s saving me from Seasonal Affective Disorder is that I work in front of a large picture window overlooking the Hill Country. The UV coating, though, filters out most of the benefit of sunlight, but I do see it. But my sleep schedule is shifted, so I lose half the daylight by the time I arrive to work, and then I leave the office 3 hours after sunset. It’s a bop.

But winter just doesn’t feel right here. I feel out of step with the change of the seasons. And I’m getting more disconnected thanks to climate change. Sixty degrees!

Should I move to a place that actually experiences seasons? I think so, yes. I miss knowing my place on the calendar (and sometimes I miss Arkansas for only this reason). But if so, how soon? And where?

Wall

Had a dream that the term “anticompetitive practices” was legally expanded to include “things that are free”. So everything offered without a fee, from comics to blogs to crossword puzzles, had to go behind a paywall. And the payment processors capitalized on this with fee structures that made sure nobody small made a profit.

I’ve read “Fahrenheit 451”. I know how this goes.

But now that this is out on the aether, some 7-figure MBA is thinking, “Well goddamn, we gotta sponsor this bill!” So, sorry?

On the Return of the Old Man

Saw Orion tonight for the first time this season.

Hey, Old Man, it’s been a while.

He and I used to walk the night fields north of campus and we’d talk about life. I’d unload all my concerns and toss them to the sky, and he’d do cartwheels over my head as my feet crunched the frosty grass below.

Every reunion stops me in my tracks and fills me with awe. He’s a majestic old friend. It’s too bad we don’t talk more. But I have to go back to my dark sky home town to see him.

And if my thoughts on moving to the Northwest were to become manifest, I’m afraid I’d see him even less, since he’s purely a southern constellation that only comes out in winter.

But that’s an apt allegory for how little I’d see the rest of my friends should I move, isn’t it? Should I chase the sun? Or should I wait for stars?

Time in a Tunnel

For my phone service I use GoogleFi, which rents T-Mobile’s network in the US. I also use OpenVPN at home so I can tunnel traffic from wherever I happen to be to my house so I can either access internal services or to go outbound to the Internet.

That’s all well and good. Or it was, until a year or so ago when traffic would sometimes just get hung or appear to completely drop when using 4G/5G. It would work fine otherwise on Wifi.

I see a ton of entries in the openvpn.log:

MULTI: bad source address from client [192.0.0.4], packet dropped

So I went down this rabbit hole. Turns out 192.0.0.4 is a “private” IP range, and sometimes the Android client says where it’s coming from. But it’s a red herring.

For mobile data, T-Mobile famously uses only IPv6 (an oddity in the mobile space), and 192.0.0.4 is an internal IP, given to every phone, that goes through this IPv4-IPv6-IPv4 translation as it traverses the network, where it then comes out some random gateway IP 172.56.92.x to its destination. Sometimes the client, like, just says it’s coming from 192.0.0.4 because that’s all it knows.

Red herring. So much time wasted.

The solution? The actual solution? It’s found here on a PiVPN (OpenVPN on Pi-Hole) forum. It’s an MTU problem. In server.conf, just set the MTU to an amount lower than the standard Internet packet MTU of 1500, to something like 1400, and also do some mss fixup (not sure about that part).

tun-mtu 1400 
mssfix 1360

Save, restart the service. You’ll still see the 192.0.0.4 warnings, but traffic will flow.

My theory is that the IPv4-6-4 translation is adding extra bytes to the UDP packet as it wraps the packet in a v6 frame, so many bytes that it’s going over the standard MTU of 1500 bytes. If we tell the server to tell the client to keep the MTU size smaller, that allows for plenty of space for the translation to enclose the packet without exceeding 1500.

I’ve wasted so much time today (and the past year) on the wrong things.