Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

The monthly fluff emails from Shippo have always seemed suspect (especially the $ saved), but the latest one seems especially improbable.

My mother got her virus stimulus, but it also included money for my dead father. Have asked an accountant if that's right and advised Mom to not spend half of that in case the IRS decides to claw that back.

The cat has decided to relax on my legs. She's upset that I won't let her shove her head into a bag of day old muffins.

Also, I cleared the Pain Area in Death end re;Quest. I'm doing a NG+ play through to finish up the platinum trophy requirements so I tackled that over-leveled enough that the challenge was only in how tedious the area could be. With the rewards from clearing that, Shina is up at level 176, everybody has equipment upgrades, and I've got enough money to buy my way out of the fetch quests if I'm unlucky with collection points.

My accountant says my personal taxes are finished. I'll be getting over $1000 back from the state and I'm having the federal over-payment applied to the 2020 tax year as usual.

Shop is closed today. I should fire up the home espresso machine.

I've been informed that it is once again time for cat hugs.

I feel like I'm transforming into Dino Mask. That's a bit worrying as people with Mask in their name are never good role models.

The cat has decided my elbow is a pillow.

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.