Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

The cat thinks I should skip dinner and burn down the kitchen so she can keep sitting on me, but she would regret that since her food stuff is also in the kitchen.

Continuing to taste production test batches. The new coffee from Java is right on the edge between what I'd consider medium and dark roasts. I'll label it as a dark roast because the sensory cue I use to make that determination is present, but it's present at a low enough intensity that someone not sensitive to that could easily miss it. That's also the safer call because I do skew darker than a lot of places. Nice body, slightly sweet, probably a good blender.

Got a box I was expecting yesterday. It has an assortment of hardware that I want Typica to work with and I'm more confident that I'll get the code right if I can just plug in the hardware and see it working.

Windows: "Could not print"
Printer: *successfully prints*

Tasting the lighter of the two roasts now, this is really a pretty interesting coffee. Conventional wisdom is that the lighter you roast a coffee the more you're tasting origin character rather than tasting the roast and the opposite as you go darker. While I've never subscribed to that line of thinking, this coffee is really a direct refutation. The darker you go, the more it tastes like what you'd expect from the origin/drying.

For coffee, I've got a production test batch of the darker of the two roasts of a new coffee from El Salvador that I did yesterday. It's a little fruitier than I expected based on yesterday's cupping, but really nice.

Shop Internet is back up. They did some line checking stuff and replaced an ancient modem (that was old enough that they didn't even know what it was) with something newer, one of their cables is a centimeter or two shorter now and has a new connector on the end of it. As soon as they had the new thing in all of my stuff noticed and popped right back online.

I did a fake rage when the bot asked me to answer yes or no to what was not a yes or no question.

I kind of wonder if call center people would have less rage to deal with if rage weren't apparently needed to get past the bot.

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.