Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Tasting production test batches of new coffees. One of these is delicious and requires no change to the label from the last time I had a similar coffee. The other is also delicious and requires a label change (I knew this would need that because of at least a product name change).

After about 24 hours of random shutdowns, loud noises, and severe vibrations, the wonky fan has switched back near normal noise levels and the computer no longer feels like it's trying to shake itself apart. There's still a low level noise that's not normally there, but hopefully I'll be able to get some work done.

http://www.thisisinsider.com/a-flock-of-drunk-birds-is-terrorizing-a-small-town-in-minnesota-2018-10

alternating between using my hand to eat and petting the cat.

Set up a 2nd email account on the phone so I don't need to leave the computer on just for that. It's probably best if I just let it rest as much as possible.

but not enough. maybe I can rig an external fan?

So I guess the plan for today is to keep a temperature monitor up and if I see it spike, hit save really fast.

Placing a pitcher of ice in the air intake path (lowering the temperature of the reduced air coming in) seems to help a bit

It seems the defective fan is also not moving enough air to prevent thermal shutdown. That's going to make me substantially less productive.

Hmm... the preview image is kind of messed up. https://video.typica.us/videos/watch/d67c7949-bcc2-4ec5-92ce-302c32372c85

No, I didn't mean "blast cherry". Who would even intentionally search for that?

This morning one of the fans in my laptop started making bad noises. Called System76 support and they're going to send me a replacement fan to swap in. I was really surprised at how little information (they asked 0 questions about that) they needed to pull up my order info.

The cat keeps trying to sit on my shoulder.

I have no idea why spammers think I might be in the market for a machine that makes polystyrene food containers.

Coffee smells good.

So that presidential alert test? Based on what happened at my shop it seems to have taken about an hour for everybody to get the alert. Those came in one phone at a time several minutes apart for different customers.

My latest coffee order arrived today. Now that my afternoon crew is here I can work on figuring out how I want to roast the new coffees. For today that's a coffee from Papua New Guinea, a coffee from India, and a decaffeinated coffee from Mexico. I also have a different lot of a coffee from Kenya, but I still have one or two batches of the previous lot to roast before I need to worry about that.

I want to get all of this sorted before I go on vacation in a couple weeks.

I guess the lesson of that story is always have your passport handy because you never know when you might unexpectedly need it.

The shortest notice I've ever seen, though, was the instructor didn't have his passport and there just happened to be a big group of instructors gathered together to work on curriculum development so someone came into the room and shouted the question if anybody had a visa/passport and could go teach those classes now. I didn't go for that one, but that was about the best timing possible to have that sort of disaster.