Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

My mother wanted a microwave for Christmas this year so we got that sorted out today. My favorite feature of her new device is that if you don't set the clock (she already has 2 clocks in the room that she's not using) it doesn't show anything on the display. No flashing 12:00, no lights (and certainly no blinking lights).

Personally, I will always prefer a thoughtfully created purpose built interface for anything work related even if only for the massive feature discoverability benefits (rather than asking if the system can do something and then get a lie in reply).

Got an email advertising AI features and I'm looking at their examples and one can be done with a shell script. The next one is a trivial front end feature. The third one is a SQL query (or an automated report built around one). It would take me longer to think up the natural language prompts than to just click on the right thing in a well considered interface built around their pre-AI API. Not sure how their customers would be using them without already having a better integration than this.

I still have a bit of a wait on the Sumatran coffee since we didn't get any of that, but the last batch I roasted of that was on the larger side so hopefully there isn't too much disruption there.

It took a while to get all the paperwork sorted since the last coffee shipment to arrive had everything not quite right and there's a certain level of figuring things out on the business side when that happens, but I can finally start tasting the new coffee and hopefully get Colombian coffee back out for sale.

Got my car emissions tested today. Took it to a place I hadn't been before and got some of the worst driving directions I've ever gotten from Google. Very poor routing throughout with an instruction at the end to I guess jump the median barrier? I didn't follow that last instruction.

Had to leave the house to handle a hospitality emergency. Family is visiting my mother and they brought wine which they couldn't open because my mother apparently doesn't have a corkscrew (she doesn't drink) so she's borrowing one of mine.

Today's work is apparently all about dealing with minor annoyances. While I'm glad that none of the problems that are getting passed to me are critical issues, there certainly are a lot of things going slightly wrong today that involve finding the right person to get stuff fixed.

One of my suppliers sent me a promotional calendar... for the year 2025... in December, 2025.

The manual for the optical drive included a section titled, "Warm Tips"

Finished the family tech support obligation. My sister wanted her computer that didn't come with an optical drive to be able to play her CDs/DVDs, upgrade to some external speakers, and have the ability to recharge a couple phones on a vacation that involves an extended period without mains power so I hooked up her new stuff and made sure she knew how to do what she wants with it.

Got a coffee delivery (about 1200 pounds), but none of it is the coffee I ordered so that's "fun".

Delivery truck got stuck in the snow about a block away from the shop today. Let the driver borrow whatever he wanted to get him unstuck and a neighbor kid helped, too.

Thought up a new feature for Typica while doing some after hours coffee roasting. Will need to mess with that a bit to sort out a couple implementation details, but I think it'll be very useful to have once that's done.

I've left out the mounting screws in hopes that the adhesive strip is enough. The screws are tiny, human necks don't bend the right way to see where the holes are, and my hands are too big to feel those into position. The screws have been moved to a labeled bag in case that turns out to have been a horrible mistake.

It's almost certainly possible to bypass the adapter, run the longer wire of the new part down to whatever that ultimately connects to, and wire it up directly there (ripping out the internal wiring the old part connected to so there would be space to run the new wire through), but that's more refrigerator disassembly than I have any intention of doing.

Needed to swap out a fridge LED because one of them was strobing obnoxiously. Good news, the manufacturer sells a reasonably priced replacement part. Bad news, they changed the part so the new piece is almost but not quite exactly right now. The solution was to remove the old part, hack off the adapter plug the new part no longer comes with, chop off most of the wire on the new part, and splice the adapter onto the new part.

This was at my back door this morning while I was making the big salad. I'm not letting it move into the house.

Thanksgiving lunch was a success. My contribution was a big salad, some fizzy cider, and a tub of ice cream. Need to do a little work at the shop.

Finally got to the bottom of a long standing issue. It would have been nice if the error message had been anything even remotely close to root cause of the issue but now it's fixed and I can move on.