Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Adding some new functionality to the shop's web site on the staff facing side of things. Since USPS is threatening to get rid of the interface we use to ship orders that don't come in through the web site and the replacement is terrible, I'm adding a page where staff can just get shipping quotes and generate labels through our own site instead. That's shaping up to be faster and simpler for staff than even USPS's old thing since it's tailored exactly to my company's needs.

Today's work seems to be all phone calls and emails and similar. Fortunately I have other staff who can do the production line work that I'd rather be doing and the communications side of things needed doing.

I've been trying to spread out the vacation related purchases, but I think I've now covered everything the cat will need so my sister shouldn't have to buy anything for the cat while I'm out of town. Also started on the supply of travel snacks, but I'll want a little more variety on those.

This morning the cat let it be known that she didn't want the food in her bowl. She wanted me to open the new bag of food instead.

Forgot to set a timer and accidentally burned part of dinner. Most of the meal was salvageable at least.

Paying some bills sooner than I would ordinarily. I've got a few weeks of vacation coming up and will not be in town, so I need to take care of anything that would be coming due while I'm out of town before I leave.

Checked and discovered that some of today's bug fixing are also issues in the current release version. That adds a bit of incentive to get a new release out sooner rather than later.

Got far enough into the implementation to start finding the bugs that would have shown up as errors sooner in a more sensible language.

Continuing work on the next CRUCS update. While the feature I'm working on is pretty invasive in the number of places where changes are needed, I've put in some helpers that make the new code in those places shorter and easier to read.

The situation with the fireworks is particularly bad entirely because the police always try to direct traffic and they don't do this enough to be good at it so it's quite a bit faster for me to just walk. (Seriously cops, stop it, there'd be way less congestion if you just let people take the routes they want instead of funneling everybody out to the other side of town before letting them turn around and get back to where they're trying to go)

While I'm not glad that my mother isn't feeling well, I am glad that she doesn't want me over for the 4th since I live in between the parade and the fireworks, meaning getting most anywhere that I can't just walk tomorrow requires large detours, delays, and the risk that someone blocks my driveway.

USPS keeps trying to sell me on "enhanced" click-n-ship. The problem is that it's a massive usability downgrade from the non-enhanced version, at least when it comes to my primary use case. So much so that I'll probably end up writing my own thing instead of trying to train people on the mess USPS made.

Every time walnuts end up on the Aldi list I get confused by those not being in the nuts section. You'd think I would have figured it out by now, but apparently not.

I think I overdid it a little on the ginger in today's lunch. I'll finish eating it anyway, but I should cut that back a little if I make this again.

I'm missing the allen wrench I need.

The cat was mad at me for coming home from work late, but I've put her in my lap and now she's calmed down.

Ignoring a wholesale request email for several red flags: No business name provided, residential address, lack of familiarity with offerings listed on web site, request for samples before seeing pricing, "lost" their previous coffee supplier, far enough away that they should really be trying to find someone closer to them anyway. Could be legit, but they're making themselves look like a scammer.

I don't know if anything is going to come out of it, but I seem to have started working on something that's sort of a hybrid between old style community forum software and long form blogging platform with specific affordances for communicating with data relevant to professional coffee roasters. Worst case I have some fun, learn some things, and toss the result, but even if all I really get out of it is a weird CMS for my other projects that might be useful enough.

For those wondering, the side jobs I pick are all cases where the company or non-profit or whatever organization is contacting me directly because they either already know who I am and what I can do or they've called around to people they know and got referred to me that way. (I've also done the you don't want to bring me on to this, because so and so is better on that thing.) A general recruiter isn't going to know enough to correctly identify anything I'd be interested in.

Anyway, I've been doing the report spam and block thing on those.