Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Yesterday's one line fix did, in fact, work. While testing that I decided on another half dozen or so small changes to work on next. I can probably slam all those out before end of day tomorrow.

Spent some time looking at the thing that wasn't working earlier today and I think I found the one simple line of code I forgot to put in. I'll pop into the shop briefly just to do a quick test on real hardware tomorrow. If it works, I can start using the new version on the production machine maybe starting Sunday.

Apparently it's a mistake to max out the stiff-o-meter for the flips challenge on the scared stiff table unless you're almost out of flips. The game is counting all the flips that the machine does without player input against you so it's pretty much game over if you make that shot. Seems unfair.

I was hoping to run the new code at the roaster today, but the last piece that I need before rolling that out wasn't quite doing everything it needs to be doing. I've got a couple work from home days scheduled so I'll see if I can get it figured out over the next couple days.

Someone today asked me how long it took to write some software that I'd written and it's kind of a hard question to answer. I slammed out something useful within a day, but I'm still working on it a couple decades later, but that time period has some pretty long stretches where I wasn't regularly working on it and it's not like I tracked hours on any of this.

Roasted the last of my Ethiopian coffee today. The next one will be different in part because Ethiopia produces a lot of coffees that are very different from each other that I enjoy so I change it up from year to year since I don't have the market to buy everything I like at the same time. The other reason it'll be different is because my supplier on that one has decided to become too difficult for me to buy from so I'm not going to try until/unless they get their act together.

I guess it's mini task day. I'm getting close to where it'll be worth pushing a new version to the production roaster.

Today's work day is expected to be highly fragmented (lots of covering gaps and coordinating with what others are doing), but I was able to sit down for half an hour to slam out and test a small improvement to the roasting software.

Multi-tasked continuing on with the chunk of code I've been working on lately in the parts of chai concentrate production that just involve waiting. I might want to adjust one aspect of the design and there's a bit of polish to add along with some debug output to remove now that the relevant information is shown on screen, but it's basically working now. Maybe I'll come back to this after dinner, but I need to move on to roasting coffee now.

One of my employees got themselves a new espresso machine (some DeLonghi model that was on sale at a good price) for home and wanted me to do the initial dial in. She totally could have taken care of that on her own and will have no trouble doing adjustments as needed going forward. I'm just faster at bringing new machines up and today's staffing level is good enough that it's no trouble for me to help with that.

Evening coding session fixed 2 bugs and 1 performance issue.

Did family tech support today. It involved a tool, but I knew both which one would be needed and where mine was.

Today was decently productive. Other people had already taken care of most of what I thought was on today's to do list so I finished filling in the details of some code that I'd previously only stubbed out the outline and will be able to move on to the next thing tomorrow.

Anyway, sorry to any customers who have been trying to call while we've been trying to convince the phone company that this was an issue that they needed to fix. I believe everything should be back to working properly again.

Finally got an in person phone technician out who could call his support number and get the phone company to fix things on their end where I told them the problem was 3 over the phone support techs prior (I mean, I get why they can't just believe everybody who thinks they know what they're talking about). Also, there's now one fewer piece of telecom gear in the chain so that's a win. Don't know why they set it up the way they did last time they changed the hardware.

Most of today's work was driving around and running errands. Not how I generally like to spend my days but not a bad day for it at least.

Emailed the food bank today to let them know they can pick up the stuff from my shop today. Our annual New Year's weekend fundraiser got the food donation box completely full, we wrote a $700 check, and there's whatever customers put in the cash donation box (don't know how much that is, but it's not nothing).

Today's web site updates include lowering the price of our Guatemalan coffee (supplier error in our favor and me passing the savings along) and changing pretty much everything on the tea list (3 package sizes got bigger, 1 package size got smaller, most of them got more expensive, but quite a few went down in price).

This is one of those feature areas that's really been kind of stagnant even among competing programs over the past couple decades. I think other devs just haven't been putting any thought into how something that on the surface seems obvious and boring could be a lot better.