Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

#introduction

I'm part owner and roaster at a little coffee company in Wisconsin. Author of Typica, a popular free program used to capture and work with coffee roasting production records that's used at roasting companies all over the world. Volunteer on the Roasters Guild education committee. Available for paid coffee consulting, training, open source software development. Living with a cat who broke into my house and decided to stay. Likes: cute, travel, food. Dislikes: blinking lights.

Replied to an email that seemed to be legit, but their mail server said unknown user so they're going to need to fix that if they expect replies.

Needed to rework a couple blends now that I'm out of coffee from Sulawesi. The next Breakfast Blend might be my new favorite among the blends. It's using coffees from Mexico, Guatemala, Sumatra, and Papua New Guinea (watch for a roast on date later than today).

Today's coding was mostly just reading documentation that's a bit too diffuse and figuring out what all goes where to make the computer do what I want. There are examples out there that are all not quite what I need, but now that I've sorted out the foundation there's a lot that I can build on top of today's work. I could have taken a few different approaches and not had to go through the hassle, but the end result of today's work seems like it'll be nicer to work with in the long run.

Two coffee orders have been placed and the rest of what I want to buy will have to wait a little.

One coffee order has been placed.

Sorting out coffee purchases. I probably need to spend about $10K now-ish and then more next month. Slim pickings on decafs right now, but there are some interesting things that I think would be fun to bring in as limited edition coffees. I'll need to convince my sister that that's a good idea so we'll see how that goes.

Spent some time automating some server admin stuff.

Found laptop screw but this one doesn't seem to be missing one.

Big Under The Porch Cat is in the back yard today.

Today my sister wanted me to fix a thing because she couldn't find appropriate pliers. I decided that the right tool for the job was a hammer.

Redesigning one of my most used reports. I'm hoping to improve efficiency, add a new feature, and improve the UI. It it works out, a lot of the work going into that will be applicable to other reports as well.

Successful grocery run. Cheese was on sale so I guess I'll be eating more cheese than usual this week.

Got my shots. They were free.

Power went out while I was at work. I know this because there's a lamp that turns itself on when the power comes back on.

Lately I've been taking some time to replicate a big complicated spreadsheet that requires too much manual data entry with a combination of a database (SQLite is fully adequate for what I need out of this) and a quick and dirty program that gives me both a convenient interface for data that needs to be entered manually and a way to fire off a bunch of web API requests to eliminate a lot of that manual entry.

Today's dream was a largely incomprehensible high speed sci fi escape sequence (successful) and a denouement that was a bit too short to be satisfying.

This is in stark contrast to the Department of Transportation which has sent me mail letting me know that I don't need to go to the DMV and can renew my drivers license online. That expires in a couple months so it's been on my mind and now I know what I need to do without even having asked. (You know you're not empowering your customer service people adequately when you compare unfavorably to the DMV.)

Phone company was anti-helpful in helping my mother get a new phone. Apparently she needs a 6 digit code set up by her late husband decades ago because the Apple phones don't just use a SIM card that she could pop out of her old phone and into her new one. Personally, I can't imagine what the threat model even is for stopping someone from buying themselves a new phone and moving the existing service over to that.

My mother was happy to learn that she didn't need to buy a new printer. The problem was she had the printer plugged into a power strip and the power strip was also plugged into itself.

Today I learned that spreadsheets are a deeply offensive topic of conversation for some people, but the person who raised the complaint did so by making an ass of himself so I'm not going to feel bad about that and will not go out of my way to avoid spreadsheet related conversations.