Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Some time back I was planning to do a train trip instead of flying for a trade show but then COVID hit, the trade show got cancelled, and the trip no longer made any sense. So when my mother said she wanted to do a road trip with me and we started talking about it I tossed out the idea that if I were doing the trip on my own I'd probably take the train. I guess she liked that idea because now we have train tickets.

Buying train tickets with Mom.

I had put a different compatible screw in place of the one that had dropped, but this one was a nicer and visually distinct screw so I've put it back where it was supposed to go.

Found a screw I dropped last week.

Needed to pull into the driveway very slowly to avoid hitting a bird that really wanted to be there.

The cat is not a fan of the storm outside.

Helped a customer pick a way to do what he wanted for about a quarter of what he had in mind for a budget.

Working through the Guatemalan coffee helped me decide on what I'll do with the El Salvador. New Guatemalan was lovely at a pretty light roast while going into the medium and dark roast ranges I could find acceptable but unimpressive representations that frankly aren't worth what I'd need to charge. Assuming production test batches come out as expected based on the cupping, I'll just do the Guatemalan coffee as a light roast and do medium and dark roasts on the El Salvador.

The new coffee from El Salvador turned out very nice across the whole roast spectrum with some interesting shifts in flavor profile as it progresses from light to dark roasts. The medium to dark roast transition is particularly distinct and at a higher temperature than many coffees make that switch. This, of course, makes it harder to decide which I want to try replicating for production, but I can at least confidently recommend it for home roasters as it'll be hard to screw up too badly.

Lots of coffee tasting to do today.

More coffee has arrived. Time to figure out how I want to roast it.

The cat has managed to pull the F9 key off her keyboard. Easy fix.

USPS tracking still claims they'll deliver a box here today, but it's 11:42PM so I don't think that's likely.

The cat is shoving her head into my shoes.

Tasting the roast progression on the decaf Brazil that arrived yesterday. The lightest roast I pulled is a bit brothy, but it's possible to get a decent light roast out if you want that. Really opens up nicely right around the start of 2nd crack. Can also take a dark roast, though I do have a couple samples where that's been pushed too far.

Spent some time working on styling for the videos page being added to CRUCS with the next update. That will collect video tutorials for people who prefer to learn about how to use CRUCS by that sort of example rather than by just messing around with it on their own or reading the text based resources. Text will, of course, continue to be available and updated as new features are added.

Trying out the new Star Ocean 2 remake. I never got to finish the original because there's a section that I assume is near the end of the game with a bunch of boss fights in a row and at least when played on my PS2 the game kept crashing anywhere from at the end of each boss fight to shortly after it and eventually I couldn't manage to get from the fight back to the save point before it went unplayable.

It seems my phone has resumed the whole not bothering to ring when a call comes in thing.

I'll also want to do a video demo explaining the new feature, how to use it. I've written about the analysis technique it exposes in the past but other software writers never really picked up on this and it's enough of a pain to do by hand or in a spreadsheet that I don't think many people look at their coffee roasting data in quite this way (even though they should if they really want to understand what they're doing).

Was able to finish up the last little bit of work I had on the main feature addition for the next version of CRUCS. I want to sit with this for a bit to see if there are any more changes that I want to make (and also do more testing) before rolling that out, but hopefully I'll get that released pretty soon.