Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Also got through to a human at the Internet company who was able to verify that our connectivity issue is, in fact, something to do with their equipment so they're going to send a technician out to deal with that soon. It would have been nice if the robot lady could have looked at the same diagnostic yesterday instead of making me act angry to get through to a human who could actually be helpful.

Got a coffee sample of something I might be interested in buying. Shortly after that arrived I got an email with the tracking number for that.

The people in front of me at the 1 staffed check out lane of the grocery store were packing their own groceries, but I guess the very unmotivated looking kid at the checkout decided I looked like I didn't know how to pack my own groceries because they took care of that for me.

Moving past the light roasts, it's pretty good across the whole rest of the range, though at the very darkest roasts there's no compelling reason to choose the last couple samples over something a bit lighter. I'll go with both a medium and a dark roast where the acidity is massively tamped down, but the sweetness is still there and the body is great.

Some new coffee from El Salvador arrived at the shop yesterday so today I'm tasting for product development. I wasn't planning to sell this as a light roast, but I taste things there anyway just in case I find something outstanding. Here I got by far the most interesting fragrance/aroma of the series, but that just didn't come through in the flavor. Straight up sour bomb on the first sip, moderates a bit as it cools but that's not what I bought the coffee for.

Internet at the shop is down. Wasted too much time trying to make sure the problem wasn't on my end before calling only for the robot lady on the phone to promptly tell me that they're aware of an issue and are working on fixing it. Unfortunately, we'll be closed for the day before their repair estimate. At least everything on the local network works so production operations aren't affected and I can tether the office computer over my phone while I'm here so emails can go through that.

There was a cat in my yard this morning. At least I think it was a cat. It might have been a really fat bunny. Cat seems more likely.

Ordered some new hardware. I want to add support for some different input types in Typica and I always feel better about that kind of work when I have real hardware to test against instead of trusting that the documentation is correct and that I'm understanding what's important in that documentation as I have experience in both failing to understand correct documentation and discovering that the documentation is wrong.

Updated the shop's web site. Some stuff got removed, some stuff got added.

Political text message spam (which my spam filter is catching all of) has shifted to mainly alleging to be Trump begging for my money (not gonna happen). I honestly wonder how much of that is totally unrelated grifters who intend to just pocket the money from people who have self-identified as being bad at fact checking.

The cat is requesting belly rubs.

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.