Use a bit more sugar

Some pointless refactoring, but the main point is that down on L318, you get this pretty use of the promise sequence method which passes the result of one promise to the argument of the next.  Which makes it easier to understand program flow.  Also, there's an attempt to reduce the function binding noise.

Finally, I had  some character encoding issue with the local cores being passed to Buffer on my macbook.  Typecasting the into to a string seems to have fixed it.