Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Tried to order some spices and got a message letting me know that that "all circuits are busy". I haven't heard a message like that in a long time.

The morning wasn't completely wasted at least. I got some tidying done around the house and extra cat hugging.

Calling the plumber's office was apparently a mistake. The person who answered there took my information, said she'd try to contact a plumber and call me back. That call back never happened.

What I should have done is call my sister who has the plumber's direct number. Once I called him, he immediately knew what I was talking about and could let me know when he'd be able to get over to fix it.

Will nead to replace the furnace filter. That got wrecked. It was about time to do that anyway.

I have cold water in the house again. The valve at the water heater turns easier if it's not wet. I should make coffee.

Waiting to find out when a plumber might be able to show up. I should try using my half broken shut off valve to isolate the water heater now that I wouldn't be getting sprayed with water while trying to turn that so the rest of the house could at least still have cold water. Otherwise I've already used my 1 toilet flush and I'd need to bring home water from somewhere else for the cat.

Played some Timespinner since I have pre-release access to that (not posting screenshots until after it's really out). Before I get too much farther I'm tempted to start over and explore the areas more completely. I feel a bit under-leveled (granted, most games with a leveling system I tend to clear massively under-leveled, relying on mastery instead of just grinding out a more powerful character).

So, I guess I need to call a plumber in the morning.

Went into the basement to find that the hose coming out of the water heater sprung a couple tiny holes and were misting my basement for who knows how long. I tried to cut off water just to the heater, but the valve is high up and hard enough to turn that I ended up breaking off parts of the knob instead of closing the valve (commercial shutoffs are so much nicer than residential ones) so I gave the cat an early water refresh before closing the main. I'm wet.

Based on the comments I get from staff at other places about how easy it is to help me, this is apparently a rare behavior, but if you do this you'll find your interactions with service workers more efficient, suffer fewer "mistakes", and everybody involved will be happier at the end of it.

Pro tip: If you're in a restaurant or a coffee shop or any other place with a menu of products or services, you're more likely to get what you want if you use words that appear on the menu instead of trying to make stuff up (for example, if the sizes are called 8, 12, 16, and 20 ounce, asking for the "medium" is asking for trouble).

If you're not sure about something, it's always fine to ask questions to get you to a confident order for the thing you want.

The cat is yelling at me. She thinks I should skip eating the dinner I've just prepared and instead move directly to a couple hours of cat hugs.

meow

First file synced through

Since #dropbox decided to not support my new laptop starting in November for technically incomprehensible reasons (in other words, wait for the other shoe to drop on that story, in the mean time I'll keep my full disk encryption thank you very much) I didn't bother setting it up and went looking for alternatives.

This appears to be working. It took a bit of searching around for extra documentation since I opted for #nginx and #PostgreSQL instead of Apache and MySQL. #NextCloud

Still haven't seen the piece that I sent in photos for in Fresh Cup. The physical version is supposedly out but I don't seem to have a subscription and the online version lags a month.

A couple copies of Roast arrived in the mail. I've already read the piece that I was interviewed for in the digital version, but it's nice of them to send dead tree copies anyway.

Trying this out on Wine, it looks even worse than it already did on Windows but it seems to be as functional as it ever was (the SD card reader apparently maps to G: on this machine) and much faster.

Good to have as an option so I don't need to remember to bring a Windows machine into work any time I need to change PLU settings.

(moving to a POS is not a good option because as near as I can tell the non-retail reading of that also generally applies but maybe I can do something that works better in the specific case of my own company)

Why are ECR programming tools all such utter garbage? This is the thing that will eventually push me to just build my own register (with proper documentation and sane design decisions).