Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Today I got an answer about why one of the grocery stores in the area has a family of giant inflatable lions. The owner of the store is on some board for the local zoo and the lions are decorations for one of their no doubt cancelled or postponed fundraisers. The grocery store is just storing the lions until they're needed.

Probably for the best that what I finished wasn't what I started working on since that's projected to be about 5x longer.

It's taking longer than I hoped for the technical review on my book to be completed. I've sent some gentle prodding, but as one reviewer put it, "The length and details of your work are daunting." So that's where the delay is coming from now. I'm going to continue waiting on that feedback because as much as I'd like to start getting some income from the book, I asked for the review because I think that's going to result in a better book going out.

Mom's cat was pretending to help me scan documents, but she really just wanted to eat tissues.

morning meeting with the cat

Credit union just sent out word that there's a smishing scam happening in the area. I was unaware that smishing was a word.

Needed to shut down the coffee roaster for unscheduled maintenance because it's better to do that as soon as a problem starts rather than wait for thing to catch on fire.

I heard someone on the radio say pandademic and I think that would be better.

Decided to not go with a 100% shell implementation for server side on selling the ebook. For logging purchases to the database I've decided to go with C++ so I don't need to figure out how to avoid shell quoting problems while preventing injection attacks. That program, of course, is still called from a shell script.

CGI in bash: Let's be real, you don't need to scale.

Despite efforts by state politicians to suppress the vote, I voted. One of the options is drive through voting, but I opted to get out of the car and use the single outdoor voting booth that was getting sanitized between each vote.

Wore the mask while out at the post office and grocery store. I'm going to act as though this changes nothing for risk profiles and will treat it as a fashion accessory. If it does offer protection for anybody, that's just a bonus.

Some of the coffee going out in the mail today was also roasted today and is going to an address close enough that I wouldn't be surprised if they got it tomorrow. Then I'm out of milk at home so I guess I'll try out the new dinosaur mask.

My sister made me a dinosaur topography mask.

Nope, it was pretty random, usually fixed within a few hours. When it was my own sites some would work and not others even for things living in the same datacenter.

Firefox's DNS over HTTPS has been causing random breakage for random sites (can't find the server). Turning it off, everything works again.

So much paperwork today. Payroll for Friday done, bills paid, sent unemployment corrections for another person who got laid off from a job they got after leaving my shop (nothing that would mess up their claim), sent money to the food bank, &c.

Dinner was extra spicy.

My sister is making masks out of leftover fabric scraps, mostly from skirts. The first one has bats on it. She's a big fan of bats.