Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Mom's cat is helping me help Mom with her taxes.

For the curious, it's this book that's going into the recommended reading at the end of chapter 2. Specifically the chapters on contracts and logistics, but there's a lot of good material on the global coffee trade packed into this.

http://www.intracen.org/The-Coffee-Exporters-Guide---Third-Edition/

Looked up one of the books I wanted to cite in mine. Amazon wanted to sell the paperback for >$100, Barnes and Noble had an ebook version for $30ish, the publisher has a free PDF download on their web site.

When trying to get charitable donations from businesses, being super rude to the person who answers the phone is not a good look for your organization.

Cat litter was on sale half price today.

New company has a new bank accounts. The person setting that up was impressed by how organized I was (I've done this before so I had all my stuff ready) and by my ability to use the tab key on a keyboard.

It's been years since I needed to print anything at home. Today I dusted off an old printer, plugged it into the network, and a few clicks later it worked well enough. Toner cart is dead so print quality is severely degraded, but it worked well enough for what I needed today.

My next teaching gig is at the North Central Roast Summit. Event info at:

https://northcentralcoffeelab.com/pages/north-central-roast-summit

It looks like power went out at my house when I wasn't there. The cat is telling me all about that.

Took some time last night to learn enough of ledger (some of you might know this as the inspiration for hledger) to move my book keeping for the new company out of the ad-hoc spreadsheet I've been using. I'll try using that for the business accounting and see how that goes. So far I like it, but I wouldn't want to use it for the coffee shop. Might switch my personal accounting over to it some day.

It's hard to do anything with city government right now because they got hacked hard and are still trying to get their stuff repaired. That effort does not seem to be going well.

Related: any local politician who wants to lose my vote, the best way to do that is to avoid being seen in public and not return phone calls.

Talked with one of my local politicians (I vote for people I see who are willing to talk to me about stuff like this) who will look into any city licensing I might need for the new publishing company. He suspects (and the limited research I've done also suggests) that the answer there is none but he'll double check that for me, which means I just need to deal with the state DOR and then all the legal crud involved in setting up a new company will be finished.

Received contracts for a few thousand pounds of coffee that I'll need later in the year. One of them is good, the other one leaves me with a couple months gap that I need to figure out how I'm going to fill.

Got back the registration documents for the company I spun up to publish my upcoming books. Roasting Book Press, LLC is now an honest to goodness real company. I was looking at the options for business accounts at the credit union I use for my personal banking and those are actually pretty good so I should be able to get that set up Friday and then have business expenses paid out of that.

Started the day by buying the office computer a new mouse. The old one was one of those Apple bluetooth things with hidden scrolling functionality that broke a long time ago. Today it was fully dead. The new one was the cheapest wired mouse I could buy locally. No batteries, clear indications of the interactive parts, no batteries, no waiting for it to connect (and reconnect). I think the cheap USB mouse is the better product.

The cat has declared it is now hug time.

It's 2:08AM. The cat is requesting cuddles.

Put together a new figure for chapter 2. This takes screenshots from two batches on the IKAWA: one with control based on exhaust temperature, the other controlled by inlet temperature. The plans are such that on one coffee it resulted in my color change and crack events happening at the same time, same overall roasting time, same whole bean and ground degree of roast measurements. Under the screenshots are graphs of the heater setting through each roast (which the app doesn't show).

Accountant was out today to work on my tax stuff. Asked her if there was a sales level for the book where we should review my tax situation. Got an answer.