Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Busy day at the shop so very little coding, but what there has been has been mathy stuff trying to improve measurement stability with dodgy hardware that I told the vendor was not actually fit for purpose.

Told an insurance company that their automated email was not helpful and explained in the survey how to fix that. I don't expect they will, but there's a clear, concise, and easy to implement idea if a human ever reads that.

Minor QOL feature work worked on the first try.

Fixed several bugs.

Grocery bill was higher than I'd like but my checker was the best I've had in some time.

Intentionally destroyed a low security lock because if my staff really wanted to steal liquid soap there are easier ways for them to do that than getting it from the wall mounted dispensers (plus they'd need to know where the "key" is anyway so it's not like this would have been doing anything except making refilling the dispenser harder).

Cooking instructions on the bag of frozen gyoza clearly indicated that 12 should be cooked at a time regardless of cooking method so of course the bag contained 32.

Making good progress on the coding front today. Always hand crafted, never AI slop.

Bought more coffee.

Big under the porch cat was hanging out in the back yard this morning.

Today I changed how to remove green coffee items from a new batch to make that more obvious and easier to do. Might change the visual styling later, but for today I just wanted to make the new thing work at all.

Long day. Time for dinner followed by food coma.

If I ever find out who is responsible for adjusting the traffic light programming in the area, I have words for them.

Stalled on trying to pay the medical bill because the bill that showed up in the mail was for twice as much as what the insurance company said I should pay and I was hoping they'd send a corrected bill (that didn't happen). Their online pay has the correct amount, though, so I guess they're only trying to defraud people who want to send a check in the mail.

One of my suppliers is aware of the issue that prevented me from placing an order yesterday and followed up to see if I wanted them to process the order the web site rejected (I do). Unfortunately, I was also able to shoot down their (admittedly reasonable first guess) hypothesis of what went wrong. My guess at this point is their payment processor screwed something up and doesn't want to admit it, but it's also not my job to fix their web site.

Told a chemistry student that I could get him some samples he'd need for a project. He still needs to sort out the specifics of his experimental design, but he'll be in touch once he's ready to start doing the analysis. My condition for providing the samples and presumably some work space was that he needs to send me a copy of the paper once it's done (not for any editorial reason, just personal and professional curiosity).

Time for coffee.

Service is back up. The server claims that it was running fine the whole time so this was probably a network issue at the data center and not anything that I messed up (unless you want to count not having some kind of fail over to a different data center set up, but I don't have the budget or an honest business case to justify the budget for that).

It reminds me of when my family got our first dial up Internet account and the ISP wanted to just email us the settings we would need to set up the computer to be able to do things like dial in and receive the email. (We were able to get them to realize that this obviously wouldn't work and got them to print the info out on paper.)