Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Did a coffee tasting with the latest hire. What I like to do for a first formal tasting is similar roast levels of an African coffee, an American coffee, a coffee from somewhere in the Pacific, and then the same coffee as one of those taken to a darker roast. Future tastings can build on that experience, but the idea is to give people a basic framework for thinking about how coffees taste and get some of the key vocabulary with a sensory experience.

I think I'm done sending thank you notes for a while. Would be glad to be wrong about that.

There's a guy who uses the coin counter at my credit union and I've now seen him break the machine twice because he keeps bringing in a couple thousand dollars in coins and I think the machine just gets full. Where he's routinely getting thousands of dollars in random change, I don't know.

Time to hug the cat

Remember the company I was complaining about their taking stuff out of the manufacturer case packs and sending the product in 4x the packaging materials? They stopped doing that for the latest shipment. Now they're taking the stuff out of the manufacturer case packs, individually bagging the bottles, and putting them in a competing brand's case pack, but splitting it so it's not even full cases but like 10 bottles of one thing, 2 of another, and the reverse in a different box.

Time for some sample roasting

My dentist has added a couple little arcade machines to the lobby. A Pac-Man and an Asteroids/Centipede. Free to play.

cats are shaped like a friend

The 4K remaster of Star Ocean The Last Hope looks really good, but there are a couple areas where I wish they also reconsidered some control choices.

Pay check for the last class I taught arrived in the mail today. Also the water bill which, because it now has something that used to be on the property tax bill, will use most of that.

The batches I roasted during the field trip passed QA. I chose a coffee with wide tolerance because it's hard to control a roast and deliver a lecture at the same time.

Quintessence is just a fancy word for Boron. Send toot.

It won't be available at launch, but I kind of want to do an app version of the book I'm writing in addition to the print and ebook editions. This is exactly the sort of thing that could benefit from interactive elements that shipping it as a program would enable. For example, you could enter data from the machine calibration exercises and be able to see the graphs as they'd appear had the batches been roasted on your machine. There are lots of little things like that to make the case.

Gas came back on a little later than I hoped but everything is re-lit now and I don't have to worry about the cat freezing while I'm at work.

I feel like red is the NES Duck Hunt dog but now it's wearing shades while it laughs at your failure.

Which dog are you?

(okay, technically I tagged along sometimes when I was a little kid and my father was getting his degree but I didn't have email then)

How did I end up on the mailing list for donating money to the local university? I never went there as a student, they never gave me an honorary degree, I've lectured there but not as real staff and it's been a while since the last time I did that anyway.

@sean This is one of my favorite features of Minneapolis. Much appreciated when the weather is terrible as it usually is when I'm there.