Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

There's a glut of 1000 piece puzzles now after someone dropped off a lot of those. This eco-friendly bird puzzle looks like a good one to try.

Between phone calls of varying importance (some not at all, others extremely) and working with a new person who started training today, I've done far too much talking.

Getting a visit from a professional colleague tomorrow. We've cupped coffees together in Ethiopia and she's good at finding nice African coffees that I want to buy. It's been a while since our last chat so it'll be nice to catch up.

Pitched the idea of another company paying me to take a road trip and setting up free software at a bunch of coffee roasting facilities. I don't know if they'll go for it, but that would be fun.

(psst. you can totally hire me to take a road trip to all your stores and do free software stuff and/or roaster training)

From another company I picked some good new Halloween stuff. I wish they'd sell the hedgehog chocolates separately instead of bundling those with others but they don't so I skipped those. Also did a hard pass on shelf elf.

I like the new Chistmas packaging. Critters in sweaters is a much better choice than what Seattle has done the past couple years. I ordered a lot. Hope it sells.

Rugrats video game: putting the crawl in dungeon crawl.

Lightning Returns... for Roy Cleveland Sullivan

Grocery store has locally grown cherry cider. So good.

Spending quality time with the cat.

How to be a good son when you live alone: cook yourself a dinner and text a photo of it to your mother so she knows you're eating something decent. You don't have to do it often.

Staff facing stuff for the web shop is basically done now.

There's a little more than a week before my next trip and I have too many projects.

Other things on the list of things to do today: ongoing training for new staff, finishing up the staff facing side of the web store (should just be sending the customers an email with their receipt and tracking number), and maybe if I have time for it getting more product pages put together and making those not look awful.

Reply spam? On my posts? That's a suspension.

Fixed the bugs in the shipping label generation for boxes that aren't a regional/flat rate box and had a very good committee meeting talking about coffee roast profile deconstruction research. Also confirmed availability to crash at a friend's place on the drive to my next event so I don't need to do the whole 13 hours in one stretch.

*sigh* another email from some confused person who thinks they've purchased enema coffee from me in the past. While I'm certainly not one to kink shame (or at least I try not to), I put a lot of work into trying to make the coffee taste good and it would be a waste to bypass the mouth like that.

There's nothing inherently challenging about the current project but it is kind of tedious. It's getting difficult to resist the urge to over-engineer things, but knowing that nobody else is ever going to see or touch this code helps. The priority now needs to be on just getting it done so I can flip it live and see what I screwed up. I can over-engineer version 2.0 some day if I end up without too many projects.