Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Started with the dumbest, fastest to write, least efficient implementation of a thing that should work and while in this particular case I know there's no way I'm going to ship this, I suspect that even a 10-15 year old computer would still run this at acceptable speed and I'm half tempted to test that idea.

It's cat o'clock.

You encounter a rubber laptop foot. The side that adheres to the laptop is slightly sticky. You check the bottom of the laptop. It still has all its feet.

The last thing I did at work was sanitizing stuff so of course the cat wants to be all over my bleachy hands.

Fancy eggs were almost 20 cents cheaper than normal eggs today so I got the fancy eggs. A while back the difference was smaller and I saw someone take the broken egg out of the last carton of the cheaper fancy eggs and swap it for an egg from the most expensive eggs the store had. I didn't say anything because it's not like I'm the egg police.

Anyway, I'm taking home a cake.

One of my employees came in with a bunch of cakes to give away (he's going to school for such things)

There's a cat foot on my foot

(don't need to show ID for root beer yet, no matter how insidious you think the beverage is)

Today's grocery shopping experience was a mixed bag. On the plus side, most of what I wanted was on sale, there was a staffed check out lane with a short line, and the checker caught on that I'd arranged things on the belt in a reasonable bagging order. On the minus side, I had to let them know that they didn't need to get a supervisor to card me for the root beer.

For the record, there's only been one instance of the site not taking orders and that was a joint effort between the service used to look up shipping rates changing its behavior when USPS discontinued regional rate boxes and my code not being robust against that change.

Online orders are surprisingly bursty. We can have no orders at all for long enough that I'm starting to wonder if something is broken on the site and nobody is complaining and then a bunch of orders all come in on the same day.

The cat is mashing her face into a pillow.

The cat is requesting belly rubs.

Thanks to whoever out there rolled back the software change to the Aldi self checkout. Today that was back to normal speed instead being way too slow.

Had a customer try to order his very normal drink by ordering a completely different drink plus the modifications that convert that to what he really wanted. I told him what his drink was called and charged him for that instead of ringing up the more expensive combination of things he described. (Please use a third the word count and save 10 cents.) Had another customer I just had to say no, you can't have that (they eventually picked a real thing that exists and is even on the menu).

Considering changing up the design of the thing I've been working on lately. I probably still want all the same pieces but I think there might be significant efficiency gains if I invert the data flow.

I don't know if this is something that hit all locations or if it's just the one I was at today but it looks like there may have been a software update to the self checkouts at Aldi and it now takes 3x as long for me to check out waiting for the computer to process my item scan. On the off chance the person responsible for that sees this, please roll whatever the hell that change was back. Another acceptable resolution would be bringing back more check out lanes and staffing them adequately.

Cat insisted on hugs.

I think I only need to find two more numbers for my accountant to be able to finish my taxes. It seems like I ought to have an electronic copy of one of those numbers but I do not so I think I need to dig out paper for both.