Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Has anybody written a good book (or series of books) on American history viewed through the lens of our never ending succession of moral panics? This seems like the sort of thing that someone must have written by now.

Did a bunch of document scanning for one of my employees who is trying to become a first time home owner. Her landlord is allegedly trying to do illegal stuff and while there are plenty of politicians and lawyers among our customers willing to help her on that front, it's better for everybody if she can find a house to buy.

When you're buying a couple thousand pounds of coffee at a time, those discounts add up.

Ordered some more coffee. One of them didn't have a published price so I guessed for planning purposes and the sales person came back with exactly what I guessed to the penny. The others had published prices but I was quoted lower so that's always nice.

As for the recruiter spam, if you really want to get my attention, get specific. I'm fine with taking work from other companies, but companies in my industry who want my services already know who I am and how to contact me directly so if a legit opportunity is going through a recruiter you're going to need to put in a little more work to convince me that engaging with you will not be a waste of everybody's time.

For the political text spam the lists do not seem particularly targeted. Some want me to vote aligned with cryptocurrency interests (lol no). Some want me to get worked up about cigarette bans (my lungs got wrecked by 2nd hand smoke as a kid, couldn't smoke those even if I wanted to). Then there's candidate/event stuff, mostly from dems which I guess is fair as long as Rs keep running conspiracy nutters who haven't seen a bigotry they weren't on board with but man, we should be better.

Between election and recruiters the spam filter on my text messages is working overtime, but this does seem to work a lot better than my old phone. I do periodically go through the spam just to make sure nothing important gets misclassified.

Cat says its hugs time.

Got a decent chunk of free (with purchase) food today.

Cat finally made an appearance. I have no idea where she's been hiding all evening.

Reworking more blends today. It's a bit of a challenge because I can't use a lot of my go to coffees since my sister refuses to acknowledge the possibility of planning. Still, what I'm looking at for a new Breakfast Blend is super nice as it cools. A bit heavier than what it's been lately, but with a very subtle fruitiness in the aftertaste that's a nice surprise as you drink it.

Stripe thinks I could "benefit from business insights powered by SQL." I agree, which is why we already have two databases: one on site with all our production stuff, one on the web site with online sales related stuff. Stripe handles such a tiny proportion of the overall business that it's not worth looking at whatever it is they're trying to sell me on.

What's everybody doing for Cirno Day?

(her old system was starting to do things like not accept browser versions new enough for her bank, stopped playing her DVDs, and there was a lot of basic functionality that was too hidden for her to figure out)

Her ancient laptop now has a brand new installation of KDE Neon and it does the stuff she wants her computer to do.

Did some computer help for my sister. Got most of a pizza and a box of fudge.

The cat shoved her head into an empty egg roll bag.

Trying to help someone at another company troubleshoot their database without asking them to give me access to their database (I wrote the query their report is failing on so I'd like to get to the bottom of that and see if I can change things so it can't fail in the way it currently does).

The furniture/appliance moving I agreed to help with went better than anticipated.

I did show one of them how to get into the yard so they could do that and reassured them that I'd far rather they just retrieved their balls on their own than pester me about it, though I can understand not wanting to trespass on stranger neighbor's property, especially if you're a person of color in America not wanting to get shot (I have no intention of owning a gun and wouldn't shoot a kid getting his ball back even if I did, but I know that's not universally true).