JF.org Blog

3/16/2026 - It's that time again

2026-03-16T04:00:00Z

We started daylight saving time in the US (and Canada) last week. So everybody was understandably grumpy about the sun coming up an hour later.

When I tried to maintain permanent daylight time a few years ago, I felt that it was kind of a wash -- evenings were better but mornings sucked. Everything else was benefits of me being an hour ahead of everybody else around.

Since then I've learned that during the Oil Crisis in the 70s we tried moving to permanent daylight time, and everybody hated it. I get it, those mornings really sucked, and I worked from home. Having to drive to work in the dark probably would have tipped the scales for me.

On the other hand, I absolutely don't want to do permanent standard time. The sun coming up at 4 in the morning would be an absolute waste, and I'd be annoyed at having to buy blackout curtains just to be able to get a good night's sleep.

Which means that the current situation, modulo some nibbling at the edges, is probably the best option. We hate changing the clocks, but we'd hate not changing them more. So I guess we're stuck with out semi-annual jet lag session for the long haul.

2/23/2026 - It's got zippy-zaps

2026-02-23T05:00:00Z

I can't remember if it came up in the home inspection, or if I discovered it shortly after moving in, but the outlets in the master bathroom have been bad since I moved in. No big deal, really; I need the clippers every few months to cut my hair and that's it for my bathroom electricity needs. And there's an outlet in the bedroom right next to the doorway so I just did that for several years.

After a decade or so, I got sick of that. I went to Home Depot and bought myself a new GFCI outlet. And... it didn't work. I double-checked the instructions, made sure there was a load on the outlet, and still: nothing.

Maybe I got line and load reversed? I made sure I was using the conductors from each piece of romex and not crossing them, and swapped line and load. Nope.

Well, at that point I was out of ideas. More importantly, I was also out of fucks. So I just left it as it was for a few more years.

And then I got sick of staring at it again, and I was long-overdue to get the "annual" electrical checkup that I was paying for. Guy comes in, I explain the problem, and he pops the faceplate off the breaker box.

It's kinda bad, y'all. At some point the bathroom outlet breaker failed in rather spectacular fashion, and did some damage to the bus bar it was on. A breaker on the other side apparently needed to be moved, which explains the blanking plate across from the bad breaker. The real solution to this is to replace the breaker box, which as of recent local code changes requires a total of about $14,000 worth of electrical fuckery. On top of the windows and trim that I'm paying for for the next *mumble*.

So, that's getting put off for a bit. The electrical system in the house is fine as far as I can tell; the place has failed to burn down in the 16 years I've been here, which means I'm not too worried about it. Once we're back on daylight time I'm going to go buy myself a new 20-amp breaker and see if that's my only problem; there's a non-zero chance I'll need to move that breaker like the previous owners moved the one that had been across from it. But at least that way I'll have a functional bathroom outlet instead of running the clippers in from the bedroom. And it's something I can afford, which is always a plus.

Fuckin' A, man. By the time I fix all the shit that should have been caught the first time I'll have gone a long way toward buying this place a second time. And that's before we get to all the stuff I've been wanting to do but keeps getting put off for the stuff I have to do.

1/12/2026 - Year in review: 2025

2026-01-12T05:00:00Z

Last year was definitely a thing that happened.

Blogging. For the first time since 2006 I had at least one post in every calendar month. At 40 posts it was the chattiest I'd been on here since 2008. I don't really feel like my writing has gotten any better, but at least I'm getting my thoughts down again. When I have them, anyway.

Health. After getting diagnosed with Type II diabetes in the spring of 2024, I had my first full year of maintaining my blood-sugar levels. That went really well; in October the doctor took me off the Metformin (it can screw up your ability to absorb vitamin B12, which was happening) and I'm just using Trulicity now to browbeat my body into not destroying itself. So far, so good.

On the downside I did something to my arm over the summer -- I have no idea what, I just woke up one morning and it was being pissy -- that hasn't gone away. I kinda feel like the only answer is going to involve an MRI, and possibly some kind of surgery. Which, y'know, I'd kinda rather just not.

Financially. Hoo boy, the universe really decided I go just fuck all the way off on this one. In September I replaced the upstairs windows only to learn my house was built by monkeys, in November the car decided I hadn't spent enough money yet and then just before Christmas the thermostat on the water heater went. And since water heaters only tend to last 10-15 years and mine was 11, it was new water heater time!

And I just learned that I'm going to need to replace the circuit-breaker panel at some point. I'm holding off on that one for now because I've already thrown way too much money around, but it'll have to be done eventually. I think I need to make that one its own post, though.

Work. I'm still with the company down in Jacksonville, and since they bought out Lock Media back in 2016 I've (a) been with them for almost ten years now -- March 1st will be my anniversary with them -- and (b) I've effectively had the same job since 2005, so a couple weeks after my Floridaversarry my employment here in Virginia will be old enough to drink.

I'm in kind of a weird place there. The legacy system is on its way out; by the end of the year there should only be one carrier left on it, and they're not even in the US. Most everything else is in Java and good lord am I bad at Java. The project structure seems convoluted and confusing to me, and every time I try to work on something I end up going in circles for days. Feels bad, man.

They had me architect out a couple small projects and I enjoyed that. But for some reason going from "let's have Jason arch out this project" to "Jason starts arching out the project" takes weeks, and both times they tried to get that to happen I got legacy work in that took priority. And now I haven't gotten a new project in months.

Which would be worse if one of our DBAs hadn't gone on medical leave in the fall. I've been filling in there, and other than the fact that I hate it things are going well. So we'll see where things end up in a couple months when the actual DBA is back and the legacy system is back in maintenance mode.

Adulting. I'm still bad at it. Cooking a big batch of stuff on Monday and eating it the rest of the week still works, but I'm running into a problem of not knowing many recipes. My sister decided to take pity on me and bought a cookbook specifically made for people like me. I'm trying a Thai lentil soup tomorrow (today as of this post going live); wish me luck.

Everything else. I've got a couple more things milling around in my head, I'm not sure I want to put them out there or not. Kind of personal in a different way; I'm still deciding. And then there's all the Everything going on out there, the fewer thoughts about what I want to happen that I put in writing on the internet the better.

So yeah, that was a look back at 2025. Coulda been worse, also coulda been a lot better.

12/12/2025 - Doing things the old-fashioned way

2025-12-12T05:00:00Z

Over the summer I canceled my Amazon Prime subscription. I wasn't buying things terribly often, I wasn't using the streaming, and I wanted to give less of my money to Amazon (and therefore Jeff Bezos) in general. Which meant doing actual Christmas shopping this year, instead of Christmas type-stuff-into-a-box-and-hope-for-the-best.

And it... kinda worked. I don't know if it's just that so much of sales has moved online, or if it's because the bottom is going to fall out of the economy in the new year, or if I just picked opportune times to shop; but nothing was particularly busy when I went. I even found a serendipitous present at the mall that I otherwise wouldn't have while browsing around. In Akron on Black Friday I found a little marketplace with small individual sales booths, like Alexandria's Torpedo Factory.

All-in-all it went better than previous years: I'm only buying gift cards for one person, who I only ever see for a few minutes a year. Everyone else gets all presents with no cards for the first time in I-don't-know-how-long.

So yeah, not only is doing Christmas shopping in person (still) doable, it's probably preferable for a few reasons. It just requires that one get off one's ass before the middle of December.

11/27/2025 - Thanksgiving 2025

2025-11-27T05:00:00Z

I'm writing this ahead of time, which probably counts as tempting fate.

But with the car being recently dealt with I'm thinking (hoping) that this trip goes smoothly aside from the fact that the high temperature will drop 20 degrees on my arrival (forecast of 52 on Wednesday dropping to 32 on Thursday) and then go right back up as soon as I leave on Sunday.

So maybe the car ain't the only thing that didn't want me going to Akron. Anyway, happy Thanksgiving if that's a thing you do. Otherwise... enjoy your Thursday, I guess.

11/21/2025 - Guaranteeing a mild winter

2025-11-21T05:00:00Z

Last year I learned that electric snow shovels exist -- basically small handheld snowblowers. A week or two ago I bought myself one in anticipation of not destroying my back shoveling the driveway this winter.

Let's see if we get any snow at all now that I've done that.

11/14/2025 - My car really hates Akron

2025-11-14T05:00:00Z

My car has taken its hatred of road trips one step farther -- now it's breaking down before I can even leave town.

As I sit here a couple weeks before my Thanksgiving trip to Ohio, my car is at the dealership being diagnosed. It puts up the message "service high voltage charging system" on the dash and refuses to start charging when plugged in. That's... bad.

My assumption is that it's the BECM -- the battery energy control module, which keeps all the battery's cells in good shape and prevents me from overcharging or over-discharging the battery. It's a known failure point, to the degree that GM extended the warranty on that part to something like 15 years and 150,000 miles.

The only difficulty (Assuming I'm right) will potentially getting the part in. GM is really trying to forget that the Volt exists; they stopped making the part for a couple years and it took quite a bit of public outcry to get to the current situation with the longer warranty period. Combine that with the EGR valve fuckery I wrote about last winter and despite it being a good vehicle overall I couldn't recommend it to anybody.

It hasn't soured me on electric vehicles, but I'll never own another GM after this one finally conks out completely.

Now presumably, once they diagnose the problem (and assuming I turn out to be right about it being a warranty repair) I'll presumably get a rental car to cover me while it's in the shop. Meantime I'm stuck in the house because instead of giving out loaners nowadays they call an Uber for you and drop your ass at home.

Yeah, really not liking GM right about now.

Edit, Monday morning: So, looking at Google before I took the car in, there were two possibilities. One was the BECM like I said above, which GM would pay for. The other was the battery pack's coolant loop, which I'd have to pay for as a standard maintenance item. I'll let you guess which one it was.

11/7/2025 - My daily trawl, 2025 edition

2025-11-07T05:00:00Z

Since I mentioned by never-implemented webcomic tracker I figured it'd be worth it to share what I read on a regular basis.

XKCD

Updates: Monday, Wednesday, Friday

Comics for nerds. Randall Monroe has been making his stick-figure comics for quite a while now, and in certain circles posting an XKCD link is the equivalent of "Simpsons did it". It's almost not a comic in a sense; it feels more like Figure 1 illustrating a textual joke sometimes, if that makes sense.

Dumbing of Age

Updates: Monday through Sunday

A slice-of-life comic that takes place at a university. There's a large cast, so the process of following everybody around can take a while. The main couple has finally gotten together, which is a nice but of progression, but now every time they're on screen the plot grinds to a halt. Hopefully Dave Willis has already solved this problem -- he writes a year in advance -- and gotten things rolling again.

The Oatmeal

Updates: Occasionally

It's hard to pin this one down; sometimes it's single-panel comics and sometimes it's long-form storytelling with pictures. And the art style is... unique. But I've kept it in my bookmarks for years because whenever a new comic goes up, I'm going to want to see it.

Gunnerkrigg Court

Updates: Monday, Wednesday, Friday

An interesting mix of sci-fi and fantasy. Mystical stuff is powered by The Aether, which is used (generated?) by godlike creatures from various cultural heritages. The aether also powers (some of) the technology. The artwork has come a long way from the beginning.

Oglaf

Updates: Sunday

As their About page said the last time I looked, it "started as a sex farce." It's still got a good amount of NSFW content, but the comics for the last several years have been more... tame. It's been quite a while since the adventures of the cum sprite.

Cyanide and Happiness

Updates: Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday

More stick figures, but otherwise a more traditional web comic. The artists' humor tends toward the dark, which I can appreciate.

Questionable Content

Updates: Monday through Friday

This is one of the comics I picked up from reading Websnark, back in the days of The Talk: Twenty years ago now. (Holy shit.) Unfortunately, these days I'm reading it more out of habit than anything else. The human characters are boring to me for the most part, and Jeph tends to dwell on the aspects of their lives that interest me the least. The AIs are better, but he has a tendency to make every new AI character fit the "adorably ^{[citation needed]} incompetent" mold. Which also gets tiresome. It hasn't quite gotten to "You Had Me and You Lost Me" territory, to borrow Websnark's term, but it's closing in.

Something Positive

Updates: Occasionally

At the opposite end of the scale is the comic I've been reading the longest: I started reading S*P in 2003. Randy's update schedule has always been... let's call it "fluid", but he's really lost steam over the years. It's understandable, he has a paying gig (see below) and a daughter with special needs. That's a lot of time to spend, and something's gotta give. But I have a sinking feeling that this one's going to go out with a whimper before too long.

(The Legacy of) Dominic Deegan

Updates: Monday, Wednesday, Friday

Dominic Deegan was a daily (depending on time period) comic that I gave up on many years ago due to pacing issues. While I wasn't looking, it ended. When I randomly had the thought to see what Mookie was up to I saw that there was a new comic taking place a few generations later, and with that concluded he's moved on to shorter, more vignette-like comics to fill out the new post-Deegan world.

Popeye

Updates: Sunday

This is technically a newspaper comic, but the number of people who see Popeye in the paper is probably in the dozens -- the online readership is probably a great deal larger. Randy (from S*P, above) has been a fan of old comics and Popeye in particular for quite a while, and it landed him a job writing and drawing new material for Sundays.

Astronomy Photo of the Day

Updates: Monday through Sunday

...at least, when the government isn't shut down to prevent the Epstein Files from being released. A desktop-sized (depending on your desktop) image having to do with astronomy. There's a description to go with each one, as well as links for further reading if you're interested.

10/31/2025 - Recoding some coding toys

2025-10-31T04:00:00Z

A couple of my coding toys go back quite a way, even if they weren't publicly accessible. I'm pretty sure the stardates page goes back to something like 2006. It was just hidden in the site's admin area where only I could see it, because I never bothered making it look like anything. Just a bunch of black text on a white page.

And since some of the toys are so old, they were written in PHP and require a new page load to refresh themselves. In addition to the stardates, the Martian calendar is also an ancient PHP monstrosity from the same era. The site search is also PHP but that one makes a bit more sense. I'd have to use JSON to write that client-side, and JSON is kind of a pain in PHP.

Everything else, thankfully, was done later on and is already in Javascript. The Egyptian fractions , "Byzantine Era" calendar, mini-calendars, Y2k38 page and Swatch Beats pages started life in JS. Which is the way I want all of them (except search) to be.

So I made a JS conversion of the stardates earlier in the month. I even made an update to the JS code that I'd been kicking around for a while: Originally I picked the actual length of a sidereal year (I think that's what it was) which meant that it would go every-so-slightly out of sync with the real calendar over time. When I did the conversion I changed it so 1000 stardates would be equal to 365.2425 days, which is the average length of the year in the Gregorian calendar. It still doesn't (can't) sync perfectly with calendar years over any length of time less that four centuries, and it'll wander a bit since the Gregorian calendar isn't perfectly accurate either, but I'll be dust long before that's a problem.

Which left the Martian calendar. It wasn't too difficult, just tedious. The only way I could originally find to make it work properly was to start from zero and just count up until I hit the date I want. Not great, but running a few thousand iterations of a loop was a Moore's Law problem, and we're well past the point of it being an issue. So once I had the time I sat down and banged it out, now it's pure JS on the toys.

It's just be a matter of time before something else strikes my fancy. Maybe some of the original things I wrote as proofs of concept back in the Brady days will be up for a conversion... I wrote a bug tracker inspired by Bugzilla back in the day and it's been collecting dust for almost a quarter century now. I know for a fact that the SQL in there is terrible, I can't imagine the classic ASP code is much better.

In a similar vein, I made a digital version of the project board, which was a wall-sized board hanging in the break room. Nowadays we'd call it a Kanban board. Same basic idea, just twenty years before I ever heard of Jira.

Like I said... maybe. It's kinda hard to convince myself to rewrite quarter-century-old code in the best of times, and it's not like I'm ever going to look at a bug tracker just to watch time tick away like I do with the 2038 page. But we'll see. Maybe one of these days I'll get really bored.

10/23/2025 - A year of experimentation

2025-10-23T04:00:00Z

Well, I suppose now is as good a time as any to see if Huey Lewis was right. Can it really be hip to be square?

Regardless of the answer, I feel like this time next year I'll be taking the L.