Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Sometimes I wonder how people manage to use computers without programming them at least a little. Everything is awful in its own way (different people will have different ideas about what awful is) and a little scripting can go a long way toward making things nicer.

Solving minor annoyances with shell scripts.

The voting van is out in front of my shop today and seems to be good for business. I will, as usual, be waiting for election day and voting at my usual place, but I'm glad stuff like this exists for people who have trouble with that.

The cat will be so confused when I go back to work.

Got an alert that someone got shot multiple times at the corner nearest my shop a little after midnight. For some reason the local newspaper's web site decided to follow the 6 sentence story with 8 photos of politicians in my shop over the years. I'm assuming they've farmed this sort of decision out to some tasteless algorithm what with print newspapers dying and all. Shooting victim expected to survive.

I should double check if L3+R2 really is the control for that. It would make a lot more sense if it were just R2 and a direction to dodge in (which my hands still won't like), but the icon in the tutorial looked like it indicated pressing L3 to me.

Started on Tales of Arise. Combat is going to take some getting used to. The L3+R2 combo for dodge is especially not what my hands want to do for that, but there's always something with that series. I think the only one that felt completely fluid to me was Sophie from Tales of Graces (fortunately I could just put her in lead for almost all of that game and yes, my skill level went way down when the game forced me to play a different character because I went all in on her early).

Also started playing Manifold Garden. I've gotten through Red and so far the main challenge seems to be finding the puzzle more than solving it, but I'm not really up for anything too mentally taxing so that's fine.

Still home sick. Very bored. Just to see what it would say I checked the leaderboard on one of those tile matching games and discovered that it didn't bother to upload scores for all of the levels that I've completed, but of the ones that it had (and a replayed one that I did just to make sure this was working) it had my rank at usually 74 or 85 (yes, just those repeatedly) but my best rank at 35. Kind of think the game is lying with these top 100 scores but it could be super small player base.

I've turned a covid test positive so I'll be off work for a bit, or more realistically, doing work that I can do at home. Fortunately I have a good supply of food, liquids, and medications. Fortunately I'm not noticing any difference in my sense of taste.

Reminder that this was music for a boss fight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDMP7-nlOnQ

The cat is staying with my mom while I'm out of town. The latest update is that the cat decided mom should wake up at 1AM to pet the cat.

Realized that my long distance driving playlist doesn't have any Ar Tonelico in it. Correcting that now.

I miss Hypercard. Computers should go back to including something like that.

The drive was uneventful.

The cat was relatively cooperative with being moved to a different house while I'm out of town. I hung out with her long enough that she went into nap mode before oozing her into the travel box. One sad meow at the front door, but then there were economists on the radio and she was good with listening to that instead of throwing a fit.

Got a follow up email from the company that sold me the new computer. Not sure how I ended up getting the attention of an "Enterprise Account Executive" but I used the opportunity to mention a couple things that should be better which can hopefully get passed on to the right people.

I think the postage rate may have gone down a little. This is not a surprise as I got an email from the company that does the labels for my web shop (USPS has an API but it's awful enough to be worth having another company in the middle to make that sane) letting me know that most packages will be getting cheaper to ship. They of course framed that in terms of their mad negotiating skillz but it seems the truth is just that USPS is charging less.

Most of my out of state customers are people who used to be local, moved somewhere else, and failed to find an equivalent local source for what they liked (which I'd always recommend trying first because you'll get both fresher and cheaper not paying me for the postage). Today I learned that my newest out of state customer bought their new place from one of my older out of state customers and they buy exactly the same the same thing from me.

Noticed an odd thing about the political ads I'm getting this cycle. The ads from Ds have been 100% text messages on my phone that name the candidate and say something good about them. The ads for Rs have been 100% postal mail that name the D instead of their (unpopular incumbent) guy and are scare mongering on non-issues. Not a single R ad I've received names their candidate.