Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

I have no idea how political dark money groups decide which ads to send to which mailboxes, but sending me xenophobic scare mongering against the candidate you want to lose instead of literally anything positive about the candidate you want to win is likely to backfire very badly. Just sayin'

There's a cat on my lap.

2nd day slides have significantly less stuff that's cribbed from me, but a lot of it I know exactly who put those graphics together (because I was peripherally involved). It's really a pretty small group that has historically rolled up our sleeves and slammed out this sort of material for other instructors to use so if I have questions on something I probably have the ability to email/call the person who originated that directly.

Continuing through the slide deck, yep, most of these graphs are things that I put together.

To make it especially obvious that there's a lot of my work in here, one of the slides I've received has a photo of a hand written roasting log that I wrote close to two decades ago. This is something that's always kind of interesting to see because different labs make their own slide decks, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of them have pulled something from materials I developed. It's just a question of which things.

Downloading materials for my next teaching gig. This is a bit of an odd one in that technically I'm teaching a program someone else put together, except that it was put together based in very large part on work that I did a few years ago. I've been told it's fine if I want to add some additional stuff on dark roasting since people think I'm good at that, so I'll be looking over that material, seeing if there's anything I want to update or change up, and talk that over in a week or two.

Took the day off because I hurt my back last night. It still hurts but I think it's getting better. The cat thought this was great as she got extra time to curl up and nap on my lap.

What's up with all these text messages from randos that are just "hello" or similar? I assume it's some fresh wave of scams and am ignoring them all since if they were legit I'd either already have them as a contact or they'd remind me who they are.

There are a couple things going on a truck hopefully today so within a week or so to get those on the shelf. I'm expecting the arrival sample of my next Ethiopian coffee within the next couple weeks and I'll try to get that in as soon as I can. Colombian coffee is expected a week or two after that. Then there are things that I don't have on contract that I'll be watching for SPOT availability and seeing if I can find something nice among those.

There's a thing that I'm doing at the shop right now just because there are enough coffees that I usually have that I can't get right now and I needed something else that could be a dark component in blends. It's half Brazil, half Rwanda roasted together in the same batch and taken quite dark. Turns out just that as espresso is very nice if you like dark roast espresso blends so that's what I'll be selling at least until some of the ingredients I'd normally use become available again.

Email subject: "Solve your {terrible programming thing that I would never use} vs {other terrible programming thing that I would have serious reservations about using} debate". I think I'll continue to go with neither, thanks.

Got a call from my sister this morning because she couldn't get her car to start in the grocery store parking lot. The symptoms sounded suspicious to me so I offered to drive over. Had just pulled into a parking spot and was about to go looking for her when a call came in letting me know that her car started, so apparently the fix was me getting within about 100 feet of the vehicle. It hasn't happened with a car before but that seems to happen with me and technology a lot.

It's been about 25 years since I did anything in Tcl, but it looks like everything I want for that is already installed on this computer so yeah, I guess that's my plan for after dinner. Slam out at least a start for one of the things I want and look up what I need for that as I go. (I probably have a book I can dig out)

(I don't expect any of these things to be particularly useful to others and am unlikely to share them)

Considering relearning enough of Tcl for some simple tools that I'd like to have but don't really want to bother with doing it in C++ and also would like something nicer to iterate on than just a shell script. There are a few small things I want that I think this would be a good fit.

There's a lot of rain. Also the cat is demanding cuddles.

Lined up another teaching gig for a few days next month.

The cat has been lured to my side with the smell of mint ice cream.

The cat is being kind of blobby.

Wearing my raycats baseball shirt today. It glows in the dark, much like the cats who are supposed to warn our distant post-apocalyptic descendants about leaking nuclear waste that they should run away from.