Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Today's coffee delivery contains a claim I haven't seen called out on a bag before. Not sure what it means, but I'm pretty sure most plants are technically solar powered.

me: *trying to do anything*
cat: hello, I sit on you now.

Today's coding seems to be mostly tests.

Out of one of the coffees I've been using for my espresso blend so I spent some time at the shop sorting out a new blend.

Knocked out the platinum trophy in Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster today. Had to go back for 3 treasure chests and 3 enemies that were missed on the first run through.

Looks like I might be seeing a trend on to ship order size again. Prior to taking orders online people would tend to place larger orders so the shipping cost wasn't too bad (I charge whatever USPS charges me). I got online ordering set up a bit before COVID started and average order size went way down (number of orders increased). Over the past month average order size is back up to what it used to be. Haven't looked into this any deeper to gain insight into why, just thought it was interesting.

Room reservations for the event I'm going to have been a lot more hassle than it should be. Resort web site and front desk chat were completely useless. It looks like I might have to make arrangements to stay somewhere else on my last night, but I'll see if the email contact I was given comes up with something useful. Car rental reservation also had a going sideways moment.

The cat has been sitting on me for most of the past 4 hours. I've had to move her a few times but she's quite insistent that my lap is where she wants to be.

I still need to book the room and car, but event and flights are done for a trip next month. I'll be at Coffee Roasters Guild Retreat next month. That's up in the northwest corner of the lower 48. Not teaching anything this year so I'll be there just as a normal attendee for a change.

That seems like a pattern in my work. I don't have the time, budget, or energy to do everything so I try to get the ideas to people who are in a position to make things better, that doesn''t happen, and eventually I get sufficiently frustrated at the state of things that I roll up my sleeves and build the thing myself. Sometimes there's some uptake after that, sometimes not, but at least I end up with better tools for myself.

Anyway, very excited about this. It's already a lot nicer to use than anything I've seen so far (at least for my particular needs) and there's a lot of space for some seriously powerful features that I've been advocating for a long time without much success at convincing others to write this so I didn't have to.

Last night I got through a little more server config and got a good chunk of a user guide written for CRUCS. There's a little more setup that needs to happen around being able to take money from anybody who wants to pay for it and a bit of work on the main application to finish up the initial feature set, and then I want to put together some tutorials covering different use cases to walk people through that. Of course, I also want people to be able to just play with it and figure it out.

Got the crucs.net server set up for the most part. There's still a tiny bit of config tweaking that needs to happen before I put real content there, but things are mostly done now.

Working on the rest of the site that isn't the main program.

Bought a little more coffee. (900 pounds)

The time fields are kind of neat because rather than try to be rigid with the format, if there's no : the number gets interpreted as seconds. If there is a :, everything to the left gets treated as minutes and everything to the right gets treated as seconds, which means if you want to add 30 seconds to a time like 8:47, you could put in 8.5:47 (8 and a half minutes and 47 seconds) and it'll normalize to the right thing, or similarly 8:77 and again it'll do the right thing.

I'm going to add a side bar element to the left of that section listing different data series so it's convenient to switch among multiple curves, but otherwise I think that section is basically finished.

A look at data entry in CRUCS. The top section is for putting in additional control points. There's another section that lets you specify an end point. If you don't do that, the point with the largest time is used as the end point, but you can also extrapolate from the curve or set an earlier end time. The control points section lets you remove points (which sticks the data back into the insert section for ease of undo/editing that point).

It's far enough along that it would be obnoxious to have to re-brand it before launch.

Went ahead and bought the crucs.net domain. I haven't set anything up on it yet, but that's where I'm going to put the project I've been working on lately. I've decided to call it CRUCS - Coffee Roasting Using Cubic Splines.

Continuing to make adjustments to the page I've been working on. It's starting to come together rather nicely now. Maybe I can do some testing to make sure everything is fine in Safari/Edge soon.