This Space for Rent

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri Nov 7 23:56:01 2025

The OHSU aerial tramway on a cloudy day

—orc Wed Nov 5 19:01:15 2025

Almost the golden hour

Julie & I rode out to Multnomah Falls to could catch some fall colo(u)rs on a sunny sunday afternoon, and it did not disappoint. When we were coming back, the sun was shining up the gorge and in person (plus cataracts) it was pretty spectacular when we reached Crown Point for the second time. (The iphone – I forgot to bring my good camera, alas – did a pretty good job of capturing it, though it wasn’t quite the same.)

—orc Sun Nov 2 22:42:45 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri Oct 31 23:59:10 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri Oct 24 20:59:30 2025

Cappuccino

I stopped by a coffeehouse on the way home from a (routine! No medical emergencies today, thank goodness!) medical appointment and ordered this coffee. It was very cozy to curl up in a comfy chair and sip this while reading social media fluff on my phone.

(Not to be all mystical or anything, but since transitioning moments like this feel much more intensely proper. Nature is healing for me, I guess, thanks to modern medicine and – at least briefly – a government that wasn’t invested in trans genocide.)

—orc Tue Oct 21 17:53:04 2025

(Approximately) Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

It’s been a week. I was discharged from the (Big Yeet)hospital Monday afternoon (suck it, fash, you didn’t make me illegal soon enough!) and not more than 10 hours later I was back in the ER with the first of two gallbladder attacks. I came home on Tuesday, but by wednesday the second round of gallstones was rolling down that pipe and it was off to the ER again, followed this time by being admitted to the hospital to have my gallbladder yanked out on thursday AM, and then after an overnight stay (half on a broken hospital bed that kept triggering bed pump errors EVERY HOUR ON THE HOUR, and then after I got up and was wandering the halls to stay away from the thing, on a replacement bed that didn’t, thankfully, throw loud errors every hour, I was finally discharged from this (different) hospital on Friday afternoon.

Eventually I remembered that it was friday, but before I got Dust Mite (shown frowning disapprovingly at my discharge paperwork) photographed and onto the web friday was but a fresh memory.

(not one I’m likely to forget soon, given that the surgeon has punched 5 holes in my abdomen to get at and remove the offending gallbladder and they keep very pointedly remind me that I use my abdomen whenever I want to get out of bed or stand up out of a chair.

At least my repaired genitalia haven’t decided to fall out. Yet.

—orc Sat Oct 18 00:26:25 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite & I went to the hospital on Wednesday; me for The Big Yeet, dust mite to chaperone me. And here we sit two days later waiting for my remanufactured bits to heal up to the point where I can walk without them falling out :-)

And; best decision, no regrets, probably should have done this a decade ago but the best time to do it was when I got it done.

—orc Fri Oct 10 17:41:20 2025

There’s a moon in the sky

—orc Tue Oct 7 22:13:54 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri Oct 3 23:25:21 2025

It’s winter squash pie season!

A vegan pumpkin pie, based on a recipe from the internet and the pumpkin pie recipe in the joy of cooking. It uses coconut milk, so it’s got approximately 10,000 grams of fat :-)

—orc Thu Oct 2 22:19:24 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri Sep 26 23:57:59 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

I had my flu & pneumonia vaccines on Tuesday, then the latest round of Covid vaccine on Thursday, and they all caught up to my on Thursday night, leaving me laid out all today. I finally got enough energy to make up some pie crust at about 11:30, and Dust Mite is standing guard while it chills so I can make a(nother) peach pie tomorrow.

—orc Sat Sep 20 00:01:02 2025

Railroad picture of the day

A short P&W freight led by one of their GP38s – running long hood first – comes screaming by me at 12th & just south of Clinton. This train must have been going about 40mph (running ahead of a southbound Cascades, maybe?) and after I took this picture I had to clamp down on my rando bag to keep everything from being sucked out by the slipstream.

(I was outside of the loading gauge, but in all honesty not far enough. I should have been north of that spraypainted line on the street, but I am old and foolish now and stopped in my tracks to take pictures when I saw the headlight pop into sight at the curve west of the ORHF’s shop/museum facility.)

—orc Thu Sep 18 22:36:44 2025

There are still a few Type 1 interurbans in service today.

One of three that I saw when I was going out to St Vincents & the Beaverton branch of the portland clinic today.

(After several days of climbing the eastern side of the West Hills, dying repeatedly on the climb, I decided that since I was going to St Vincents as well as TPC I’d ride up to Lloyd Center, take the trolley under the West Hills, and proceed from there. Less riding (27 miles today) but more trolleys.)

—orc Wed Sep 17 22:01:42 2025

Stopped by a train during errands last week

—orc Mon Sep 15 23:33:21 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri Sep 12 23:56:13 2025

Second patch of the week!

Adding extended attributes and percentage widths & heights to image links exposed a delightful Discount bug that’s been there since I put amalloc in 17 years ago.

The problem was that the amalloc() function (#defined to just malloc() in amalloc.h) was using the libc calloc() to grab memory, and calloc() helpfully by design initializes the memory to nulls, which just happens to be what I need to null terminate strings by default.

This was “great” for me, and I probably had a reason for doing it, but there exist malloc implementations (which are exposed if you built discount w/o amalloc) that don’t initialize the memory unless you ask for it, and which often aggressively initialize that memory to something other than null.

So I changed amalloc to initialize the new buffer to 0x8fs and boy did the discount test suite have things to say about this!

It’s allegedly fixed now (I try to explicitly null-terminate Cstrings and to explicitly use calloc() when I need a buffer for structures) and it out there as Discount 3.0.1.2.

I’m sure I’ll find some other places where I was making assumptions about amalloc, but the obvious ci-killing places seem to be gone for now.

—orc Mon Sep 8 11:33:50 2025

A dyke & her bike, explosively

—orc Sun Sep 7 17:46:44 2025

First patch of the week

After releasing Discount 3.0.1 it didn’t take more than 3 days for someone to discover that I’d forgotten to null terminate three strings, and their cc + libc ended up being far less forgiving of that than the various cc + libc collabos I had were.

So Discount is now at version 3.0.1.1, which is identical to 3.0.1 except for three new null terminations.

Sigh.

—orc Sun Sep 7 16:31:34 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri Sep 5 23:55:25 2025