Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

The fictional work space on the cover of the latest batch of office depot coupons looks like a horribly soul crushing place to be.

(the only reason I got that was because it was made from leftover parts that weren't needed for a project to take donated machines and set up a program for one of the local schools where students could borrow the machines and a tiny printer so they could take those home and type up their papers. I was one of the kids doing the repair and setup work and we got to keep the spares as sort of a thank you gift)

My first laptop computer was an already then obsolete thing with a 286 processor, a 3 color screen, something like 10 or 20 MB of hard drive space, and 3.5 inch floppy drive. The thing weighed quite a lot and was at least an inch thick. I would happily give back some of the reductions in weight and thickness if it meant getting a keyboard that doesn't wear out before the rest of the computer does.

Downside of nobody making good laptop keyboards: I end up needing to leave external keyboards scattered about in the places I use my laptop. Upside of nobody making good laptop keyboards: random people walk up to me to tell me my keyboard is cool.

The cat wants yogurt.

Just in time for the dual holidays of Black Friday and Small Business Saturday, there's now two way traffic in front of my shop, hopefully marking the end of the two years of road construction. It'll still take a few months for people's driving habits to get back to normal, but we shouldn't have a big project out front for a couple decades now.

Got paid for the last class I taught. It was a bit odd in that the check was made out to my shop but mailed to my home and included an amount equal to the invoice from the shop to cover materials plus the separate amount to cover my teaching which should be a separate check made out to me personally, but it's not a big deal for me to split that up on my end. Last time it was two separate checks each mailed to the correct address.

Costa Rican coffee just got delivered. I'll need to spend some time to decide on roasting plans for that, but I should have that available after Thanksgiving. Special thanks to my salesperson who found a company long on their contract willing to let me take it off their hands.

The birthday scotch is pretty good. I will be enjoying that for a while.

Starting to use C++20 features in code other people might some day actually use. Aside from some initial fighting with the build system to let me, that's going okay. Also found a couple places where I could use slightly clever arithmetic to optimize away some code I didn't like.

Got a surprise present on my birthday: a big bottle of scotch (a brand that I haven't had yet) and a tie with cups of coffee on it. She said she thought I could use a drink. Not sure how I feel about that, but I'll enjoy the booze anyway.

Some time I should try to map that all out. I feel like it could potentially be adapted into a little point and click adventure style game.

I don't think I've ever written about one of my recurring dreams that's most like a visual novel (no text boxes, but limited opportunities to change how it plays out and fully deterministic based on those choices). The scenario is that you're part of a small group captured by comic book nazis and your goal is to escape their base. The best ending involves disguising yourself as a robot to move and be moved around the base while tricking the nazis into fighting themselves.

Now that I'm turning 40, what should I do for my mid-life crisis?

When I was younger she would do things like take me with her to a department store, send me into the toy aisle with a budget to pick something out, and then when we got back to the car she'd tell me that was my birthday present.

My mother is continuing her tradition of being particularly bad at birthdays. This year she decided to make a cake (it's a very good cake), but instead of having the whole cake available, she cut one slice for everybody who is showing up for dinner and put the rest of the cake out for sale.

This was a case of an external hardware failure triggering something unexpected on a different piece of external hardware which caused a bug in a third party library (which exists as free open source software on Linux, but is proprietary and unfixable on Windows) to crash the thread using it, but all the other threads were continuing to work just fine and the system could have kept running had Windows not decided it needed to kill the whole process.

TFW Windows pops up a crash message for your program specifying one of Microsoft's libraries but you can see your program very obviously continuing to work behind it despite whatever problem the system thinks it has.

The cat is requesting belly rubs.

Updated the shop's web site. Holiday Blend is now available to buy there.