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

Follow jcomeau_ictx on Twitter 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. RSS Feed


2019-08-28-0336Z

my tooth hasn't been hurting much at all, but at dinner tonight, celebrating our ten years together at Cucina Paradiso, I felt a huge swelling in the gum about midway on the lower left jaw. it looks horrible, but amazingly there's no pain worth mentioning. [comment]

2019-08-19-0414Z

an idea I just came up with while drinking another of those St. Joseph's Belgian style Tripel ales I instagrammed a few days ago...

since I want to live as freely as a deer, whom no cop tries to control and no human can willingly kill without legal problems:

how about anyone who declares himself free be treated as a deer: free to live his life as he sees fit most of the year, not being subjected to any arbitrary "laws" unless he infringes the life, liberty, or property of a human. in that respect I'd be less free than a deer, who gets to munch my garden without repercussion, but I can live with that. and for a few weeks each year, I can be hunted. I'd take that deal in a heartbeat. I'd hide out in the mountains and/or forests of California, with my rifle and ammunition, and welcome any and all comers. I believe that, after the first year, very few would leave the comfort of their homes during open season on anarchists, as the reward/risk ratio would be so low, especially for people who aren't into cannibalism. [comment]

2019-08-18-0034Z

my current working theory is that what hit me 3 days or so ago is food poisoning. the toothache is just "icing on the cake", so to speak. but it's tolerable today. whether or not it lets me sleep tonight remains to be seen. [comment]

2019-08-17-0355Z

figured out how to get the clove oil where needed: soak dental floss in it, then floss. not sure how much it helped, because the pain is less anyway, but pretty sure it helped some. [comment]

2019-08-17-0031Z

third day. tooth pain was eclipsed during the night by a splitting headache.

but after that diminished mid-afternoon, I've been relatively pain-free. just a dull reminder of the toothache. [comment]

2019-08-15-2226Z

my tooth pain came back with a vengeance yesterday morning, after eating a whole bag of spicy Bugles the day before. I'm guessing they had sugar in them, never bothered to check. anyway, the pain has either gone from acute to tolerable or I'm just getting accustomed to it. [comment]

2019-08-13-1751Z

there was a lot of the orange vine, Cuscuta salina, growing on and sometimes smothering the pickleweed and Grindelia in the Petaluma marsh. I didn't know what it was until today when someone posted a similar species in the Plant Identification group on Facebook. [comment]

2019-08-11-2256Z

got warned to stop digging in the dumpster at grocery outlet, not by a store employee but by the security guard of the shopping center. damn. that's the end of my free food. not worth risking arrest.

ate a caterpillar-sized chunk of the red resin that comes out of those bitter cherry trees by the patio. didn't have much taste, and probably not much nutrition, but it didn't hurt me. [comment]

2019-08-11-0353Z

watching J. Neil Schulman's Alongside Night on the evening of his death. in tears at the end of the opening scene, which reminds me of that horrible day in November 1971 when my sister and I, on a bus with the band to another city, watched as the bus was pulled over by the Maine State police, who then boarded and asked her and me to come with them. our Dad had died of a heart attack. and unlike in the movie, it was real. [comment]

2019-08-10-2308Z

I recently got some paid work making a web-based forum using open-source software. I thought for sure the state of the art would have improved somewhat in more than 3 decades, but nope. it's still the same old crap, insecure right out of the box, the only supported installation option being right on the public web, allowing any hacker/cracker/script kiddie to intercept it before you even get it online and take it over. and if they know the software well enough (it's open source after all, so why wouldn't they?) there is quite possibly a way to exploit it to open a port on the server itself.

anyway, phpbb, one of the first, still has the above problems plus it wouldn't allow me to log back in as admin after logging out, and wouldn't recognize any of my captcha attempts when trying to create a new username. so I cloned it from github and figured out how to install directly from there, and wrote it up for others.

my client ended up using Simple Machines Forum (smf), an equally-insecure but better-looking software, that also had an installation bug but only cosmetic instead of functional, and that I was able to fix with some SQL queries. [comment]

2019-08-06-0240Z

my backup BLU phone has some adware that keeps popping up my browser to 51happlay.com. sad state of affairs when you can't even trust the operating system. [comment]

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