blog of Intrepid Wanderer

This is the weblog of Intrepid Wanderer. You never know what you might find here; graphic descriptions of bodily functions, computer programming secrets, proselytizing for the antichrist, miscellaneous ranting and kvetching, valuable information on living off the land... if you don't share my rather weird interests you may want to try slashdot instead.

You can consider my Del.icio.us links an extension to my blog, as are my LifeTango goals and my other to-do items. My to-buy list is also public, but only for sharing any useful ideas that might be there; I'm not requesting charity, neither do I offer it.

You can find me easily in google searches, as jcomeau, jcomeau_ictx, or jcomeauictx. There are lots of other jcomeaus, but AFAIK I'm the only jcomeau_ictx out there so far.

If you want to comment on anything you see here, try the new Facebook comments, reachable by clicking the "[comment]" link at the end of each post. If for some reason that isn't working, go ahead and email me, jc.unternet.net. You know what to do with the first dot. Make the 'subject' line something reasonably intelligent-looking or it goes plunk! into the spambasket unread.

This RSS feed may or may not work. Haven't fiddled with it in forever.

2025-05-27-1228Z

I think it was last Wednesday, May 21, that I was yanking poison oak up by the roots. Once I had gotten into it anyway, figured I might as well induce a systemic reaction and increase my chances of building immune tolerance to the urushiol (assuming it even works that way). By Friday I had liquid collecting under my eyes, and slightly swollen gonads. And now, this morning, May 27, 0533 PDT, my upper arms and shoulders are itchy as hell, after the rash has appeared at various points over the last few days.

On top of that, two of my bad teeth have gotten very sensitive over the last few days. I wonder if it's related to the Toxicodendron exposure.

The ladies at the Washington and Wilson Starbucks told me yesterday that headquarters repudiated their previous decision to deep-six the brownies. But it might take some time to get them back in inventory. Also yesterday, or early this morning, I got an email saying that the reward for using a personal cup will now be double stars, which I took to mean no longer will I be getting 25 stars for every coffee order. Yet, I got my 25 stars this morning, so who knows. If the points don't rack up as quickly, no big deal for me, I still only allow myself one sweet treat a month, normally. I was offered a homemade brownie two weeks ago, and took it, so technically I've already used it up, but I might indulge again today for the new moon anyway.

Finally found my jcomeauictx Google archive and re-uploaded the videos to YouTube, including the Video Focus documenting the 3547 project. Feels good to have that back up there. Also put the source code up on github.

Also went back to the server where I had stopped trying to run monerod from systemd, and tried running it manually from the command line. It started syncing the blockchain this time! And continued once I enabled the service file again. No idea what I was doing wrong before, or what fixed it. And yet, it's really slow. It went from 3.5 days to catch up, down to about 2, and is now back up to 11. I even stopped clamd and simpleminer to free up some CPU, but it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference.

Anyway, enough rambling for now. Got a paid job, scraping Facebook Marketplace cars for sale, for a client. Hung up on how to switch between locations; element.clear() followed by element.send_keys(...) inserts the new location, but the clear seems to have no effect; and using javascript to setAttribute puts the new value into the element's value, but it doesn't show up on the page. Weird. This may be a job for Grok or Claude. [comment]

jc blog - tales of a modern-day nomadic hunter-gatherer

2025-05-27-1228Z