Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

A pair of grasshoppers were having sex on the front steps of my porch. Seems like an odd place for that but I just went around them.

A couple of the coffees I've been waiting for are in the country now and should be delivered early enough that I can get them out for sale before my next trip. There's still a coffee on order that hasn't arrived, but I'll take what I can get.

The fourth and final flight deals with dark roasts and different approaches to dealing with the range from around the end of first crack through to the end of the roast.

The third flight is a medium roast where the difference is in time after the coffee changes color from green to yellow, but before the coffee changes from yellow to brown. This usually has a big impact on sweetness.

The 2nd flight deals with overall roasting time in a light roast with a baseline roast, one with all the difference front loaded to before significant roasting chemistry is happening and another where the difference is distributed proportionally through the roast.

I've decided to run 4 flights this time around. The first one is a simplified roast progression. 2 roasts that end between cracks, 1 that ends right at the start of 2nd crack, and 2 that go beyond the start of 2nd crack. I do something like this with every new coffee I bring in, except I'm usually tasting more like 12 roast levels.

Reworked the handout for my upcoming class. Previously this was a simple form for evaluating basic sensory attributes of a brewed coffee and it would have used 5 pages to provide one form per cup that students are tasting. Now it's customized per tasting flight to provide more specific guidance and it's down to 3 pages.

There's a gasoline powered saw cutting into the new sidewalk out front now. They had a smaller saw out for one of the cuts because their cutting line went directly through the middle of a water line and they figured out that they didn't want to cut through that.

*physical Qiqi charge attack personal best. Pyro Qiqi has probably done a larger charge attack since I've done >50K with just the first strke of her normals under pyro infusion.

It's not pyro Qiqi level damage, but 31,653 is a new personal best for a Qiqi charged attack. I think there's a little more I can squeeze out of this build with better execution and a different team composition might also work better.

When I got to the shop today there was someone from one of the utilities out to change a meter at a business, but the owner of that place wasn't in town and the meter was behind a locked fence gate. Their plan was apparently to lift an empty recycling bin over the fence and use it as a platform to hop the fence. I had him explain and then told him I had a key and unlocked the gate so he could do his job without breaking his neck.

Office store was a mess today. They fired all the people who knew anything and the "manager" was MIA so the place is being handled by newbies who are trying their best but just haven't been on the job long enough to know what they're supposed to be doing.

While it's certainly possible to squeeze out more, tonight I set a new personal best for Aquila Favonia weapon passive damage with this hit for 66,860. My previous best for this damage type was a bit over 45K. #GenshinImpact #Qiqi

That gets to the advantage of having the person writing the software doing the work the software is supposed to help with. I have enough data that I can look at production consistency metrics when using different features before inflicting them on others and there are some features in competing programs that I will never implement because they're provably terrible ideas.

In my experience, anything that makes it easier to see what you're doing and how that compares with what you planned on doing makes for a more enjoyable coffee roasting experience with greater batch to batch consistency and fewer mistakes. My software is already very solid in that regard (there are some features that are absent or badly implemented elsewhere that help a lot) but hopefully this is an improvement (if it's not, I can revert the design without too much trouble).

I'll be doing similar things for other kinds of measurements. Kind of excited about this. The design sketches and draft implementations look very good and it seems like an obvious direction for this kind of software to move in, yet at the same time it doesn't look like any of the competing software that's popped up since I first released mine is exploring anything in this space.

Lately I've been getting a good amount of time to work on a rewrite of the software I use at the coffee roaster. Today I'm redesigning the indicators that show timing information to consolidate all the different kinds of timing data into a single display panel while also allowing more options for customization.

Meanwhile my sister has been having the problems of chipmunks deciding to explore her drier vent, getting stuck at the bottom, and then not getting in the live trap so she can let them go back outside. She's installed a mesh to hopefully prevent more from getting in.

Bad cat allergies today. I spent last night fixing up her ear which she managed to rip open. That's healing nicely, but she probably won't learn to be more gentle with stuff.