Bullets on Chemo and InoReader and DCC

Oof. It’s really hitting me today that some mornings you really don’t feel like writing. This is why daily blogging is so challenging, and why I’m practicing before Blaugust arrives.

I wrote down three bullet points last night to expand this morning, and I’m looking at them now like a complete stranger wrote them. They were fascinating topics yesterday, but this morning they sound like … like … some phrase that’s a funny indication of how much they don’t sound fascinating.

My sluggishness this morning could be from two things: One, it’s been storming and raining all night, and still is, and the morning air is just thick and heavy and dark, and two, physical effects of chemo drugs from yesterday, though they don’t usually start to hit me until tomorrow.

Okay, now to expand on the bullet points.

Bullet 1

Yesterday’s chemo treatment was one of the fastest since I started. I arrived at 9:30 and I left about 12:00. Normally there’s much more waiting around than that.

The process normally is:

• Check in
• wait
• check vitals
• draw blood
• go upstairs to the oncologist’s office
• check in
• wait
• sometimes check vitals again for some reason
• talk to oncologist for 15-20 minutes
• leave
• wait for blood test results, usually the longest wait that can take hours, sometimes get something to eat, sometimes just hang around the hospital
• check back into infusion center (I go back to the infusion center when I receive both notifications that both blood test results are done on my health portal app)
• wait
• go back to a room
• get hooked up to the IV thingy
• get non-chemo drugs like steroid or B12 shot or bone strenghener, anywhere from 1 to 20 minutes depending on the week
• potentially wait for chemo drugs from pharmacy
• get chemo drug (pemetrexid) for 10 minutes
• unhook from IV
• go home

Anyway yesterday the waiting times were minimal. I didn’t get much opportunity to read Dungeon Crawler Carl after all. And I was actually able to get some day job work done when I got home for a change. Fascinating stuff.

Bullet 2

Next bullet point.

I was looking over my InoReader RSS subscriptions yesterday and noticing an annoying issue that I’ve never figured out: Sometimes blogs show two copies of every post in the feed, even though there are definitely not two copies of every post in the actual rss feed.

I started asking ChatGPT for explanations and it gave me a bunch of suggestions that were completely wrong. “The most likely reason is you’ve subscribed to the blog twice.” Yeah that is probably the most likely reason but obviously I’ve checked and double-checked and triple-checked that a million times over the years. So it’s not that.

But upon further investigation, it turns out I did have two subscriptions to the offending blogs. One subscription was to the blog.com/feed/ url and the other was to the blog.com/feed url. For unknown reasons, InoReader shows duplicate posts in the folders where I was subscribed to the non-canonical blog.com/feed url.

Bullet 3

And the last bullet point: While pondering the amount of manual effort it would take to fix the above url conflicts, I decided instead to purge all the old subscriptions and start again.

Especially the Blaugust folders. I’ve got folders for Blaugust 2018, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024, all filled with idle and defunct blogs and a bunch with mismatched feed urls and duplicate posts. For some reason the 2024 folder especially has a bunch of non-canonical feed urls.

So the plan is to purge all those folders and all the other folders I never read anymore and re-import a new Blaugust 2026 folder whenever there’s a 2026 OPML available.

Bonus Unplanned Bullet

Last night I actually sat down and read a book, something I haven’t really done for a long time. And I can see why, too. It’s actually difficult for me to just sit and read for long periods of time anymore. My eyes just aren’t used to it, and after two cataract surgeries, it takes a lot of correction to even see the text. At least on an e-reader. I kept trying different glasses to see which worked best and I settled on some 3x magnifying readers from a drugstore.

I got up to about 50% of Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s a dern quick read, especially when you realize you can pretty much just skip all the extremely lengthy descriptions of video game mechanics and itemizations and fighting mobs and bosses over and over again.

That’s it. I’m done. Good luck reading that. I’m not editing it.

P.S. I did edit it a little. I commented out some pretty critical DCC talk to save it for Blaugust. It’s hidden in plain sight, but if you really like DCC you probably would want to skip it.