Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

@Gargron Right, that's probably not the method you'd use.

@Gargron There are statistical methods dating back to World War 2 that can likely be applied. Mathematicians came up with much better estimates of things like tank production compared with spies trying to figure out the same thing.

SCA is still sending out email advertising the sold out workshop I'm teaching. We're doing a 2nd one a month later but I don't think registration for that one is available yet.

It looks like a company might be sending me a free prototype of their next thing to get design validation. I'm not going to get more specific than that because I don't want to spoil their product launch, but I'm excited to see what they've come up with. I think it's a thing that we chatted about a couple years ago.

Laundry is in the wash, dinner is in the oven, hanging out with the cat.

Today's boxes of coffee going in the mail previously contained raisins (10 pounds) and packets of artificial sweetener (1000).

@stux Didn't find it. Installed the software on a server myself.

Looks like I get another trip to the post office tomorrow.

Can gas prices crash again? My tank is almost empty again.

You can't charge a convenience fee without a CON.

Writing lots of personal checks this month. License plate renewal (went up), water bill (had yet another fee tacked onto it), property tax. Anybody who wants to charge a "convenience fee" for taking payment in a way that ought to be cheaper and easier for them gets stuck with paper checks in the mail.

@hellcp Pretty easy, really. I use curl to talk to the payment processor, jq does the heavy lifting of letting me create and process the JSON, mail to send the email. I have a tiny bit of C++ the couple places I need to deal with a database because I couldn't figure out a way to handle that securely any faster than just slamming out a couple little utility programs, but those are called from the shell scripts which just get run through CGI. It's maybe a couple hundred LoC total server side.

@dansup Meanwhile I'm over here setting up a new web store implemented mainly in bash (which is a terrible idea in general, but surprisingly not awful for the specific use here).

Got word that another employee is coming back to work soon. That just leaves one part timer whose parents aren't letting her out of the house.

Shippo fluff stats email is weird again. It says my boxes travelled 23 miles in April... to reach 9 states. That's so far off that it doesn't even make sense as a per shipment mean. It could /maybe/ be a median distance, but I think they're just making numbers up instead of bothering to do the sums.

Another event I normally teach at got cancelled.

Started playing Gris last night (it's on sale). I don't expect it'll have a lot of replay value for me, but I'm enjoying it so far. I've gotten far enough in that it's building dramatic tension but doing it without presenting the player with risk of punishment (no death traps, no game overs, failed attempts at solving the puzzles don't require tons of backtracking).