Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Bad instructions aside, it's going together fine and is looking pretty good in its almost finished state. Looking forward to putting stuff on the shelves.

Step 21: Realize before attempting this step that there's a missing step between 20 and 21. It's effectively the same as step 13. Step 22 and later should be delayed until the shelf is moved into position with the exception of steps 32 (which is where I've stopped for tonight) and probably 33 which should be done before then.

Step 4 indicates that 2 more of part 1 should be used than is true. Two of the holes are there to later receive part 3. Step 10 should be completely disassemble the unit because step 1 didn't show proper orientation. Step 13: Discover that there are 3 completely different things labeled part 9. Step 19 has clarifying text that might have been useful to have in step 10 (as written, not the take it apart and try again one).

Today I got a couple new shelves. I'm not going to finish getting the first one put together tonight because the instructions are quite bad.

Spent another $13K on coffee. I was hoping to buy more, but I got the last 400ish pounds of a thing I wanted more like 700ish pounds of. Once that arrives I should have a good set of ingredients to start figuring out this year's Holiday Blend. I'd still like to bring in at least a couple more decafs.

Someone put in a coffee order about 1 minute before close and I'm wondering if they put their phone number in as the name they want the box shipped to because of a browser auto-complete getting confused, if they've let their AI agent buy their coffee, if they've legally changed their name to something that looks like a phone number, or if they just really need the coffee and can't fill out the form right until they get it. Doesn't matter, I'm getting that shipped ASAP regardless.

Got my $500 bribe from the government (which does not come close to covering how much my costs have gone up) and I'll just put it out there that if someone wants to buy my vote I'll expect at least 100x that (after taxes).

Doing some minor dev infra work today. Pretty soon I'll be back to more regularly releasing Mac/Windows builds and I want that to be at least a little more convenient than has historically been the case for me.

I was annoyed by how much legit mail from people who want me to do something for them these days doesn't include who they are (including company or organization name if applicable) and what they want (be explicit), but if the expectation is that recipients aren't bothering to read and understand anymore...

It took 3 attempts to place an order by email recently. Previously I've just placed the order through their web site but that's been broken for months now. The first try, one of the items was correct and the other item was the correct quantity of the wrong item. The 2nd try, the wrong item was unchanged and the correct item now had the wrong quantity. The 3rd try finally got everything right.

Finished* up the report I was working on a couple days ago. In addition to drastically cutting back the number of SQL queries happening behind the scenes, the rest of the code assembling the report is also a lot smaller now. Less network activity if the database is on the other side of a network connection, less memory used, no user appreciable performance difference one way or the other.

* there's one minor feature that I still need to put in, but that'll be a tiny change

My sister has given me some home made jam (raspberry) so I've purchased bread to put that on.

Lots of coffee orders to roast, pack, and ship today.

There probably is some room to clean up the first of the two queries to make that a bit more clear. That might be a useful step toward getting to an understandable 1 query solution and it would give the planner less work to do.

There's a lot of waiting involved in making chai so I decided to work on porting another report from the old Typica code base into the new one. The old code for this one takes a working but naive approach that involves far too many database queries. I've cut that down to 2 queries with a bit of client side processing combining the results. It's likely possible to cut it back to 1 query with exactly what I need, but I'm not confident that I would understand it later.

New coffees are now on the web site. https://wilsonscoffee.com/

Thankfully I don't have to do this very often. Most of my customers are great and I've only needed to ban a small fraction over 1 person per decade. Hopefully the latest one does stay away like he said he would. The last 2 bans have required the police reminding them that they are no longer welcome and I'd rather not have to get them involved.

Had to ban a customer today over inappropriate comments to staff.

Pro tip: if the owner of a business is letting you know that you're being problematic, that's your one chance to apologize and keep future interactions professional. Trying to argue the point will get you banned immediately. I care a lot more about my employees feeling safe and comfortable doing the work I pay them for than about keeping the business of any customer making that not true.

New coffee from Sulawesi is delicious. I have one more coffee from the latest shipment to work out early next week and I'll be updating the web site after that, but locals will be able to come in and grab coffee from the shelf sooner. A lot of the new stuff is going out on the shelves today as I get the labels designed.

Fixed a bug where one of the values in the range stats section doesn't do live updates if it's configured in one not recommended way where the option exists because the people who need it really do need it. Just finding the code that's not being called, seeing where that should be getting called from, and finding where that's not being set up properly. Not difficult but did require a few minutes set aside to focus on that.