bought some ethyl rubbing alcohol to use as stove fuel. works just great in these mid-70s temps. not sure at what temp it would fail due to the flash point of 70% alcohol. at least this is a lot less toxic than the stuff sold as paint stripper. too bad I can't buy just one alcohol to use as fuel, mouthwash, and mixed drinks without paying a hefty overcharge. it's funny, the excise tax is "only" $13.50 per gallon, but you can buy a gallon of denatured (poisoned by law to avoid the excise tax) pure ethanol for $32, but I haven't found any non-denatured for less than $90 a gallon. truly there's no government like no government. in a free market one could probably buy pure ethanol for $5 or $10 a gallon, even with today's highly inflated FRNs.
got another replacement headlamp in the mail today. Rayovac sure is good about their lifetime warranty.
cold hasn't gotten any worse. coughed a few times on my morning jog, that's about it. very minor throat discomfort, no clogged nasal passages. had one somewhat sugary yogurt this morning at the food giveaway at the senior center. and I noticed 5 or 6 loaves of yesterday's Full Circle bread in the trash, so feel fully justified in that 2nd loaf I took yesterday. not going to feel guilty about it next time. I hope.
got a placeholder app pushed to RDS and Elastic Beanstalk, using only Python3 with boto3, nothing done with the online console at all. documentation is spotty and often wrong, with most examples on StackOverflow using the original boto version 2 libraries, so every little gain was hard-won. the last hurdle was authentication: my deploy code got its auth data from $HOME/.aws but what was the EC2 instance created by ElectricBeanstalk going to do? I considered using the IAM services, but it looked like an awful lot more work for only a slight gain in security. so I just appended the ~/.aws folder onto the deployment .zip file, added some container_commands to the .ebextensions/*.config file to move them to the correct location and chown them, and that was that. I still have lots more code to write before I get paid, but it should be downhill from here on out.
last updated 2016-07-26 23:14:44. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com