Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

The Illinois Tollway says I should give the gift of a road toll transponder. I will not be doing that.

Today's weird clickbait title: "These are the 12 Myths About Cooking Chicken People Don't Know." If people don't know them, how are they myths? Is this really, "We Made Up Some Bogus Stuff That Nobody Thinks is True and Hope You'll Click So We Get That Sweet, Sweet Ad Revenue"?

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59703523

Got a Christmas card from my mother. She usually does boring and sappy, but this year she went with cartoon cats in festive attire, which is a big improvement.

If anybody wanted to start a Takuya Holding Things blog, here's something to start with. #GenshinImpact

Laptop failed to start up multiple times. Systemd won't get me to a login prompt. Dig around as best I can and it looks like a hardware issue. Open the case, remove the dust, fail to find anything in the obvious and easy fix category, try turning it on again before putting the case back, it's working flawlessly. Hopefully that continues to be true once I've finished copying some files off the encrypted drive, turn it off, and put the case back on.

Specialty Coffee Association sent me a new pin as thanks for my work on an education program that I quit the committee making that in protest of the organization's terrible stewardship of that. My name will be in materials I'll never see unless someone leaks it to me because I'm not a "real instructor." These days they just let me make up my own classes independent of that program because my workshops get good reviews and keep selling out. I don't really get it.

I tried the new healer artifact set in #GenshinImpact on my Qiqi and the most common advice about how to build this set on her is wrong (if you main Qiqi).

https://www.hoyolab.com/article/1610218

Woke up to discover some joke comment I made on a web forum blew up and has more likes than the parent post has views. Not sure how that happens, but I suspect it's another case of computers not knowing how to count.

@fribbledom Every so often I get an email asking for MySQL support in software I've written. While the main reason I've resisted is that it would be a lot of added work for absolutely no benefit beyond saving a small number of people the hassle of learning to click Next a few times in a different installer, it's always nice to see people who are more informed reach the same conclusion I did when making the initial decision. (I do, however, think the even bigger PITA of adding SQLite is worthy)

Once again, I need to buy food.

Web site for the shop updated. No longer mentions being closed on Thanksgiving, coffee from Costa Rica available for sale through the web site.

https://wilsonscoffee.com/

Local COVID case numbers bringing the risk level back up to severe. It didn't need to be like this, but I don't think it's surprising to anybody working in retail.

Got a Christmas card from my chocolate and vanilla powdered smoothie mix supplier.

Idea for a new gameshow: Jazz or Cat. Contestants listen to a short passage and need to identify if what they're hearing is a jazz solo or a meowing cat.

New part isn't tuned so initial warm up takes approximately forever. Will need to check the manual and see if it'll let me just outright disable the derivative term.

Right now the old controller is in its pre-hard fail mode just sometimes not bothering to send power to the heating elements where turning it off and then on again usually fixes it, but that means it's only a matter of time before that fails more completely so it's better to just swap the part now.

Received a new part for the heat sealer. What arrived wasn't the cutout size I was expecting, but it is the size of the original panel which I removed a few controllers ago. Dug out the old panel, mounted the new controller in it, and that's ready for installation once the current packing shift is done.