Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Took another crack at some code I wasn't happy with. I can't test it until tomorrow, but the new code should behave nicer, is significantly smaller, and is a lot easier to read.

Particularly glad to be bringing back a particular coffee I like from El Salvador. Should have that available some time week after next.

Ordered more coffee. Everything came in a little under where I estimated prices. We're only talking 1 to a few cents per pound, but when you're buying a couple thousand pounds it adds up.

Now that I've kludged around all the new issues I've been looking at and taken a good look to see which changes I could remove, I'm left with the conclusion that not my code just changed in a way that my code was not compatible with and there are things that just need to be inexplicably different to get the right behavior. I hate that conclusion, but I think I've ruled out the other possibilities.

Found the bug, but this leaves me with the mystery of how the code ever previously worked correctly.

The cat's insistence on sitting on me continued this morning. I had to ooze her off me when I woke up and she was back in my lap during breakfast instead of eating her own breakfast.

Cat says don't sleep, just pet the cat.

Cat wants chin rubs.

Kludged a fix for one problem, failed to solve a probably related one. Pretty sure the real problem is in not my code.

The cat thinks I should change my working position to make more space for the cat to sit in my lap. I suppose it's fine to accommodate that request.

Decided to get a pizza since I'll be at work until late enough that it will become difficult to acquire food.

Got an email asking me to "share my experience as a postdoctoral researcher" and while I have contributed to a number of scientific endeavors, I'm no where close to have even gotten a doctorate (I've been getting good job offers since I was like 12, my experience with formal education was not great, and I decided not to take on soul crushing student debt).

Also, the bakery had the large loaf of the bread I like. Normally that's sold out and I have to get the small loaf instead.

At the shop briefly today. All I need to get done there is tasting some production test batches and getting a few orders shipped out. Then I can do the rest of the work day at home, writing software with the cat (who will no doubt want to sit in my lap while I'm doing it).

In unrelated news I seem to be getting an uptick in catfishing texts. Ignoring all of those, though I did enjoy the cat pic one of them sent.

The problem with what I did seems obvious in hindsight and there's a pretty straightforward fix, but I need to be working on other areas today.

A bit of code I wrote recently in an attempt to make a program not use 100% of a CPU core ended up slowing down data propagation in such a way that everything looks like it works until you try to use it for real, at which point it quickly becomes apparent that it's become useless. I have a few ideas for how to really fix it, but for now I'll take useful operation at higher than needed CPU utilization over honestly still higher utilization than I'd like but not being useful.

Pulled out some old training material KSAs because one of my employees is getting school credit for the job (may as well if you're doing the job anyway) but one of the things I'm supposed to sign off on is so far outside sanity (crap rich people like that nobody else cares about) that I've made the allowable substitution coffee and barista skills, pulling key points from a recognized certification in the industry (I helped define those cert requirements, I may as well reuse the resources)

Did a big pile of refactoring in preparation for the next chunk of new functionality I want to add. I'm going to need to rewrite all of that again later, but I don't have the time right now to jump straight to what the implementation is going to be at release as that's a lot of additional work mostly unrelated to my current train of thought and I'd rather get the thing I'm working on up and running so I can make sure that's working properly while the relevant details are still in my head.

Stayed too late at work so dinner was a tub of ice cream and watching the Star Trek Voyager channel with the cat. Good night.