Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Got a surprise present on my birthday: a big bottle of scotch (a brand that I haven't had yet) and a tie with cups of coffee on it. She said she thought I could use a drink. Not sure how I feel about that, but I'll enjoy the booze anyway.

Some time I should try to map that all out. I feel like it could potentially be adapted into a little point and click adventure style game.

I don't think I've ever written about one of my recurring dreams that's most like a visual novel (no text boxes, but limited opportunities to change how it plays out and fully deterministic based on those choices). The scenario is that you're part of a small group captured by comic book nazis and your goal is to escape their base. The best ending involves disguising yourself as a robot to move and be moved around the base while tricking the nazis into fighting themselves.

Now that I'm turning 40, what should I do for my mid-life crisis?

When I was younger she would do things like take me with her to a department store, send me into the toy aisle with a budget to pick something out, and then when we got back to the car she'd tell me that was my birthday present.

My mother is continuing her tradition of being particularly bad at birthdays. This year she decided to make a cake (it's a very good cake), but instead of having the whole cake available, she cut one slice for everybody who is showing up for dinner and put the rest of the cake out for sale.

This was a case of an external hardware failure triggering something unexpected on a different piece of external hardware which caused a bug in a third party library (which exists as free open source software on Linux, but is proprietary and unfixable on Windows) to crash the thread using it, but all the other threads were continuing to work just fine and the system could have kept running had Windows not decided it needed to kill the whole process.

TFW Windows pops up a crash message for your program specifying one of Microsoft's libraries but you can see your program very obviously continuing to work behind it despite whatever problem the system thinks it has.

The cat is requesting belly rubs.

Updated the shop's web site. Holiday Blend is now available to buy there.

We used to do single pot packets where it was the right amount of coffee that you could just open the packet, dump it into your filter for a 10 cup auto drip pot, and get a good pot of coffee out of it, but 10 cup auto drip isn't as dominant a format as it used to be and the packaging got so expensive that I couldn't in good conscience sell that for what I'd need to charge. Given the public embrace of pod based coffees, however, there's apparently a market for obscenely overpriced coffee.

Was a little surprised when updating prices for the quarter pound coffees (we only carry a limited selection of these around this time of year for gifts). None of them are the same price as the last time they were offered, but about half went up in price while the rest went down. Most are within 15 cents.

Random subject line from some junk email, "What would cause you to move out of your neighborhood?" My answer, "a sufficiently generous offer to buy my house."

Got my booster.

It would be an inconvenient and unfriendly approach to e-commerce that people might just try for the novelty aspect.

The hagglebot should have a variety of colorful phrases and under certain circumstances be willing to counter with a price higher than one it previously suggested or take insult at an offer and turn customers away.

Random thought: an online store for items of questionable value that doesn't show you the price of anything, but does let you haggle.

The company that used to handle my mother's retirement account noticed that they owed her a small but not insignificant pile of money. One of the nice things about my having bought my parent's old house is that stuff like this where the error is old enough (most of the money owed is interest on their initial mistake) that the company wouldn't have gotten an updated address, I can just make sure she gets the check. Had she sold it to someone else, who knows if she'd ever see that.

I've been invited over to my mother's house for my birthday dinner not on my birthday. I wonder what we're having. She asked me what I wanted earlier and I told her that I hadn't given it any thought and that I'd be fine with just tossing a burrito in the oven and hanging out with my cat. My preferred birthday celebration, though, is just arranging to be out of the country somewhere nobody knows it's my birthday. That's obviously not happening this year.