Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Checked using my biggest chai concentrate customer to get a sense of what their rate would end up as and it's not too bad. It looks like the USPS rate came down, FedEx is a little more but not the crazy high rate USPS used to be. UPS is about 50% higher still for this particular thing, but I'm also going to have to sort out making sure I have a good supply of appropriate boxes for this.

The loss of Regional Rate is going to have the biggest impact on chai concentrate customers as the most economical way to ship that has been two half gallons or four quarts in a regional rate B box (regional rate C was a better deal for larger orders but that got axed a long time ago). The use our own box rate for this is usually more than twice as expensive (chai concentrate is heavy) so I'm going to do some research to see if I can find a better deal for my chai customers.

So it turns out that USPS doesn't do regional rate boxes anymore. I've adjusted the web site to not ask for those rates anymore (since I'm not going to get anything useful out of it).

Staying late to get some work done and someone is murdering some kind of brass instrument near by. This is why I like electronic instruments. You can practice them with headphones instead of torturing the neighborhood.

4. Find the problem in my own code. It's been a while since I touched this, but at the same time I only needed to look in 2 fairly small source files and while some might be horrified that I chose C++ for this, it was an easy read. Good job, past me.
5. Found where I was doing a thing that could throw an exception and replaced the calls to that with a new function that wraps that in a try and does something reasonable on a caught exception.
6. Test that it's working again.

The process here was:

1. Replicate the issue. I had enough information in the bug report to do that no problem. This was definitely a real problem.
2. Check the logs. The issue was there in the logs complete with a not working link to API documentation for the upstream provider.
3. Find the real URL for the documentation that I needed to confirm that indeed what has been working just fine for years is indeed still documented as should be working. No changes there.

The logs show that it was just the one customer affected by this issue and as thanks for giving me the information needed to improve my code they're getting some free coffee.

Needed to go and fix a problem with the web shop today. The company we use to deal with calculating shipping rates temporarily broke one of the rates we query in a way that the code I wrote was not sufficiently robust to deal with so I added another function to handle the operation that was failing more robustly and in the meantime the third party also fixed whatever it was that they messed up.

I'm thinking I'll probably go with cup 9 as a first choice because it fills a more distinct role in the product line, but if production testing doesn't go well I can fall back on cup 4 as an alternative which maintains a good flavor balance and has greater intensity compared with its immediate neighbors.

For context, cup 9 is just into the start of 2nd crack.

These all turned out to taste pretty good, with a broad sweet spot ranging from cup 2 (ordered left to right, top to bottom) through cup 9 with a few distinct expressive transformations within the range. (cup 12 has a really nice chocolate note but lacks complexity compared with the lighter cups but I can absolutely see someone tasting that and deciding that's what they want to do with this)

Time for another 12 cups of coffee.

Someone asked how the cat was last night so I may as well post the picture here too.

Cat is demanding hugs.

Tempted to make all of the various settings related to this things that can be updated during a batch. I think that might make it easier for people to tune their setup.

Messing around with the latest hardware arrival for Typica. There are a few details of how to interface with this that I still want to figure out and I'll want to do some tests connected to a coffee roaster to see what the best default values for certain parameters are, but I'm not running into anything surprising yet, so that's good.

Resolved a technical support request for a company running a nearly decade old version of some software I wrote. It's doing what they need so nobody is touching it and honestly, that's fine. I'm hoping that the next version can be set up in a way that the issue they had can't happen, but companies tend to be extremely reluctant to upgrade to the point that I often have conversations where someone will make a feature request and I'll tell them I added that years ago.

Not that it's going to happen but I wonder at what point a few Rs in the house just vote for the D as speaker just to get it over with and move on to anything else while their party tries to remember how to get a deal done.

I'll get over it before too long but videos of humans losing at chess to Mittens the cat bot can be pretty entertaining.

Calculated the food bank donation. We're sending a couple hundred dollars more than last year, though still down a bit from the year before last. This doesn't include whatever customers have tossed in the cash box.