Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Decided that between the fall promotion and current content it's fine for me to have a Paramount+ subscription for a little while. Is there a recommended viewing order for all of the Star Trek that came out after Enterprise? (currently going through Lower Decks)

Finishing up payment processing stuff for CRUCS today. I'm going with a pay what you want model for this where you can use it without paying for it, but I'll also accept money.

Taste testing yesterday's production test batches. These were roasted against plans adjusted in CRUCS (I copied in the milestones from the initial exploratory roast and then made adjustments intended to get something easier to do with a larger batch size and based on the initial sensory observations) and the results are quite nice.

Or at least that's what I would be working on, but the cat says no so I guess I'll have to finish that up later. A nice side effect is that the settings fields will start out displaying their current values instead of whatever the browser feels like inappropriately auto-filling (Firefox wants to do crazy things when I change the forms).

Working on adding settings persistence to CRUCS using Window.localStorage. For example, I have graph defaults set to 20 minutes by 500F which is a nice safe default for most of the roasting machines still running, but there are also a lot of faster machines being operated by people who don't need a duration that long or people who prefer °C. They can change their preferred settings once and CRUCS will keep the updated settings. Settings (or anything else) are never sent back to the server.

Left the cat curled up in a blanket when I went in to work. Got home to find her in exactly the same spot. Of course, now that I'm back she wants to sit on me instead.

Tasted the test progression from the new coffee that got delivered the other day. Used the not quite finished yet CRUCS to make a couple tweaks to the plan before doing the production test. This is a lot faster than the old internal tool I made CRUCS to replace (I also wrote the old tool).

Today's coffee delivery contains a claim I haven't seen called out on a bag before. Not sure what it means, but I'm pretty sure most plants are technically solar powered.

me: *trying to do anything*
cat: hello, I sit on you now.

Today's coding seems to be mostly tests.

Out of one of the coffees I've been using for my espresso blend so I spent some time at the shop sorting out a new blend.

Knocked out the platinum trophy in Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster today. Had to go back for 3 treasure chests and 3 enemies that were missed on the first run through.

Looks like I might be seeing a trend on to ship order size again. Prior to taking orders online people would tend to place larger orders so the shipping cost wasn't too bad (I charge whatever USPS charges me). I got online ordering set up a bit before COVID started and average order size went way down (number of orders increased). Over the past month average order size is back up to what it used to be. Haven't looked into this any deeper to gain insight into why, just thought it was interesting.

Room reservations for the event I'm going to have been a lot more hassle than it should be. Resort web site and front desk chat were completely useless. It looks like I might have to make arrangements to stay somewhere else on my last night, but I'll see if the email contact I was given comes up with something useful. Car rental reservation also had a going sideways moment.

The cat has been sitting on me for most of the past 4 hours. I've had to move her a few times but she's quite insistent that my lap is where she wants to be.

I still need to book the room and car, but event and flights are done for a trip next month. I'll be at Coffee Roasters Guild Retreat next month. That's up in the northwest corner of the lower 48. Not teaching anything this year so I'll be there just as a normal attendee for a change.

That seems like a pattern in my work. I don't have the time, budget, or energy to do everything so I try to get the ideas to people who are in a position to make things better, that doesn''t happen, and eventually I get sufficiently frustrated at the state of things that I roll up my sleeves and build the thing myself. Sometimes there's some uptake after that, sometimes not, but at least I end up with better tools for myself.

Anyway, very excited about this. It's already a lot nicer to use than anything I've seen so far (at least for my particular needs) and there's a lot of space for some seriously powerful features that I've been advocating for a long time without much success at convincing others to write this so I didn't have to.

Last night I got through a little more server config and got a good chunk of a user guide written for CRUCS. There's a little more setup that needs to happen around being able to take money from anybody who wants to pay for it and a bit of work on the main application to finish up the initial feature set, and then I want to put together some tutorials covering different use cases to walk people through that. Of course, I also want people to be able to just play with it and figure it out.

Got the crucs.net server set up for the most part. There's still a tiny bit of config tweaking that needs to happen before I put real content there, but things are mostly done now.

Working on the rest of the site that isn't the main program.