Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

There was a big cat under my porch when I got home from work today. I only know this because it got spooked when I started climbing the steps and ran off to a neighbor's yard.

Today's shop web site update has a brief note calling attention to the fact that the latest addition is the first coffee where we've had a tariff line on the invoice. Coffee prices are also still higher than they were last year which explains why I need to charge what I'm charging for that coffee. The coffee growers and companies in the supply chain at origin aren't going to eat the tariff. They can sell it just as well to Europe or China. Import is so low margin they can't afford to eat it

I will reward myself with cake.

Spent some time working out new database queries to reduce the total number of separate queries needed (fetch all possible values needed after the first selection with the same query that populates the options instead of separate requests for only the data needed after the first selection is made). Most of the time it doesn't matter but this change can make the interface a lot more responsive if the database is accessed over a slow network connection.

Production test batches of new coffee were good. Unfortunately I'm going to have to put a retail price of $25 per pound on this one. If it weren't for tariffs I'd be able to charge $23. And if coffee prices were in line with where they were last year it would be more like $17. I'd like to be able to charge less, but can't afford to.

@stux Make sure the broom is ridden properly.

In better news, my sister gave me cake. It was good.

Hopefully this time I won't have to search SEC records for a CEO's home address and send a nasty letter to get them to fix their mistake (yes, I've had to do this and it worked)

I see medical billing in the USA is still as corrupt as the last time I interacted with that. (sending a bill for an amount that whoever chose that price has earned a place in hell for instead of the still egregious but smaller amount that my insurance company says I actually owe)

The receipt says almost everything was on sale, but today's grocery run was too expensive.

My production database has been growing at a very stable rate of about 1GB per year (over the past 20 years). I have some thoughts about ways to shrink that, but will want to do some testing before rolling any such changes out. Realistically the database is already doing some compression so it's unclear if there are gains that are worth it.

Given that I'm just noticing that it's after 2:30AM and I'm hungry, I should be sure to test tonight's code extra carefully (after I get some food and sleep) as I'm not at all confident that it does what I think it does.

It sounds wet outside.

Have you tested your backups lately?

Someone bought the Fyre Festival brand for about $245K. Pretty sure they overpaid by about half a million.

Today's coding was just finding and fixing bugs as well as identifying some features that don't exist but need to.

This morning's coding session was heavy on bit level operations. The hardware documentation is suggestive (without going so far as actually having coding advice) of just using a lookup table for the command strings, but creating these directly by ORing together the right binary literals saves about 60 bytes in executable size and reads a little more clearly to me. (Clearly the engineer who designed the comms protocol thought about this approach and it just wasn''t put in the documentation)

Trying to buy more coffee. There'll have to be a price increase on the next Guatemalan coffee we bring in and part of that is the 10% tariff (which means a more than 10% increase that needs to be passed along since coffee weighs less after I roast it) while another part of that is just that the coffee is more expensive than usual.

Replaced some networking gear at work. Some strange choices for defaults on the new hardware made this take longer than it should have (and the printers needed extra convincing to go along with the change but that one I'm going to blame on the printers).

Got a lot of code written and debugged today. There are a couple tweaks I'd like to try at some point but I'm going to move on to other features first.