Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Got my car emissions tested today. Took it to a place I hadn't been before and got some of the worst driving directions I've ever gotten from Google. Very poor routing throughout with an instruction at the end to I guess jump the median barrier? I didn't follow that last instruction.

Had to leave the house to handle a hospitality emergency. Family is visiting my mother and they brought wine which they couldn't open because my mother apparently doesn't have a corkscrew (she doesn't drink) so she's borrowing one of mine.

Today's work is apparently all about dealing with minor annoyances. While I'm glad that none of the problems that are getting passed to me are critical issues, there certainly are a lot of things going slightly wrong today that involve finding the right person to get stuff fixed.

One of my suppliers sent me a promotional calendar... for the year 2025... in December, 2025.

The manual for the optical drive included a section titled, "Warm Tips"

Finished the family tech support obligation. My sister wanted her computer that didn't come with an optical drive to be able to play her CDs/DVDs, upgrade to some external speakers, and have the ability to recharge a couple phones on a vacation that involves an extended period without mains power so I hooked up her new stuff and made sure she knew how to do what she wants with it.

Got a coffee delivery (about 1200 pounds), but none of it is the coffee I ordered so that's "fun".

Delivery truck got stuck in the snow about a block away from the shop today. Let the driver borrow whatever he wanted to get him unstuck and a neighbor kid helped, too.

Thought up a new feature for Typica while doing some after hours coffee roasting. Will need to mess with that a bit to sort out a couple implementation details, but I think it'll be very useful to have once that's done.

I've left out the mounting screws in hopes that the adhesive strip is enough. The screws are tiny, human necks don't bend the right way to see where the holes are, and my hands are too big to feel those into position. The screws have been moved to a labeled bag in case that turns out to have been a horrible mistake.

It's almost certainly possible to bypass the adapter, run the longer wire of the new part down to whatever that ultimately connects to, and wire it up directly there (ripping out the internal wiring the old part connected to so there would be space to run the new wire through), but that's more refrigerator disassembly than I have any intention of doing.

Needed to swap out a fridge LED because one of them was strobing obnoxiously. Good news, the manufacturer sells a reasonably priced replacement part. Bad news, they changed the part so the new piece is almost but not quite exactly right now. The solution was to remove the old part, hack off the adapter plug the new part no longer comes with, chop off most of the wire on the new part, and splice the adapter onto the new part.

This was at my back door this morning while I was making the big salad. I'm not letting it move into the house.

Thanksgiving lunch was a success. My contribution was a big salad, some fizzy cider, and a tub of ice cream. Need to do a little work at the shop.

Finally got to the bottom of a long standing issue. It would have been nice if the error message had been anything even remotely close to root cause of the issue but now it's fixed and I can move on.

Finally finished with getting all the new coffees up on the web site.

People keep trying to give me stuff today. I turned down the old dolls (that I do hope find a more appropriate home) but did accept a cactus.

Ordered more coffee. That might be my last coffee order for the year just depending on if I decide to bring in another limited edition coffee or if I start getting a bunch of crazy huge orders that I'm not expecting.

For my birthday I got myself new bedroom furniture. All stuff that I need to assemble myself so I'm still working on that but the new bed is a definite upgrade.

Most of today's work involved drinking coffee, but I got all of that finished. Lots of new stuff will be hitting the shelves tomorrow.