Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

It looks like the 1.5 days of spring a couple weeks ago are all we're getting here. Now it's summer and I'm over-dressed for it.

Had a chat about how roasting classes went at Expo. There was some good feedback in from attendees (yes, I read the feedback forms) and some things that weren't captured in the forms that I noticed. While the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, there are certainly some things that can be done to make these go even better at retreat.

Loaded a new roll of paper in the batch tag printer at the roaster.

Every so often I think it might be a good idea to bridge a coffee roaster to a MIDI control surface. (Fortunately?), I don't have a machine where this wouldn't be entirely too much work.

Ethiopian coffee samples are on the way. It's been a while since I brought in a Harar so I'm hoping to find something nice from there.

I visited the city at about the same time as the coffee industry was finding out that coffees from that region would also be going through the ECX right away while they'd previously expected a more gradual phase in. This was also one of the few trips where my high school French classes were useful.

@quad Tyria

The cat has decided to add "alarm clock" to her duties. Unfortunately, she's lousy at deciding when I should wake up.

USPS has a big red banner warning that old browsers won't be supported soon and I'm just over here wondering if they ever got around to sending label PDFs with the correct MIME type. For a long time they didn't.

Just noticed that I have two scales in my roasting area, exactly the same model, and their beep sounds are 1 semitone apart. Have they always made different sounds? A third supposedly identical scale in the kitchen plays the same higher note.

@quad Oh look, it's me.

He did it for the vine.

He also died young, probably from doing this so often.

Each bag weighs approximately 60Kg (132Lb).

@vkess I'd think that whatever control scheme keeps you closer to your plan is the right way to go. Sometimes that means a gas adjustment, sometimes it doesn't.

There was a class at MICE and Expo (and retreat next) that so far has been building up a good set of data in support of the view that as long as you're hitting your development milestones and end at the same times and matching your end colors, people can't reliably distinguish between even very different machines in a blind triangle.

People are always surprised when they find out just how little money comes in to support ongoing development of Typica (so far this year it's $125 from 2 people).

People hear that, say that it seems like we should be able to do better, that it's such a great resource, but then they don't send money.

Yeah. Some day it would be nice to be able to take an extended period of time to work on that full time. Development pace could be a lot faster. But I like to eat.

https://typica.us/payment.html

Made my last car payment today. It'll be nice not sending off a few hundred per month for that.

Today's spam included, "It will be a competitive feature help you attract more customer and get more business."

The product? Turnstiles. <sarcasm>Because when I'm out looking for a coffee shop, this is exactly the feature that I look for.</sarcasm>

My old passport has come back. This time around it had two holes punched from the front cover through to the ID page. The passport before that got punched once through the whole book. This time around I went for the big book so I probably have another decade before I find out how they punch the next one.

Lavender flavored lattes are weird, excessively obscure the espresso, not sufficiently purple.

Perhaps the class that I'm most excited by that I'm not teaching is an update to the sample roasting class. Jim Brady has taken a lead on modernizing this and has recruited Karl Schmidt, Olivia Miles, and myself to rework this with the realities of modern sample roasting technology in mind.