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What day is it? What year?

2 June 2009 21:50

For the past few days Edinburgh has been experiencing a mini-heatwave. This is mostly pleasant, but the downside is that I've become sunburnt and bitten by many insects.

Happily I've discovered that the mint plants I've got growing beneath my bedroom window are antipruritic ("anti-itch") which solves both problems.

Aside from the heat I've had a busy weekend wiring up some Lisp code to serve as an XML-RPC server, so that I can carry out some functions remotely.

I'm almost tempted to package the s-xml-rpc library if only locally, but I'm not confident I know what I'm doing. I mostly unpacked the source beneath /usr/share/common-lisp/source/s-xml-rpc and fiddled until things started working by magic.

In addition to getting more hooked upon Lisp I've spent a while tidying up obsolete pages on my websites, unifying services, and giving a minor overhaul to the appearance of things.

ObFilm: Terminator Salvation

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Comments on this entry

icon Robert Freeman-Day at 14:35 on 2 June 2009
I love that I can get horticultural advice from my Linux Tech rss feeds...thanks! Can you elaborate what specific mint you are using for the anti-itch?
icon Steve Kemp at 14:48 on 2 June 2009

Sadly I'm not sure which variety of mint I have - I suspect that it is bog-standard Common Mint (Mentha spicata) but I base that soley on the pictures I've found online matching what my plants look like.

The plants I have were grown from seeds which I found at a local hardware store, and they're only labelled "Mint".

For what it is worth they look like this:

I pull a few leaves off, and rub them on the bites, and the itchy stops. More than that is a mystery to me, though they also taste great ;)