Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Yesterday's coffee delivery includes the return of the coffee with the megalomaniacal frog on the bag, a new coffee with a squirrel on the bag, one with mountains and coffee plant parts, and one labeled for delivery to Ukraine which I hope is just a case of someone stenciled all the bags that way and not a case of prior contract cancelled due to war.

Coffee arrived a day earlier than scheduled. Glad I was keeping an eye on the tracking, but the arrival was too late in the day for it to make sense to start on product development work today. I'm instead trying to stay away from people because after moving all that in I'm smelly and in need of a shower, but it's too close to closing so I'm kind of stuck here for a little while.

One of my employees will be heading off for a trade event to hang out with people who do the same sort of work she does and learn some stuff from people who aren't me. She'll also get some first hand experience on significantly worse software than what she gets to use here (by some measures the things that she's likely to see set up have not caught up to the reference implementation I published 2 decades ago and she's been using pre-release stuff with further significant improvements).

There was a rabbit hanging out on my back porch today. It's usually cats but not today.

Roasted the last of my Bolivian coffee and ordered new coffees from El Salvador, Ethiopia, Honduras, Mexico, and Papua New Guinea. Those should arrive some time next week and I'm really looking forward to working on those.

Production test batches of the new Guatemalan coffee were delicious so that's up for sale on the web site now. It's rare for us to sell 3 distinct roasts from a single coffee but I think it's a good call for this one. https://wilsonscoffee.com/

Went to water my mother's indoor plants and discovered that the postal service has failed to pause her mail delivery. It looked like 2 real pieces of mail and then the rest of the box was stuffed with things from places hoping she'll give them money. I guess I should check the mail box at my sister's house to see if that needs to be emptied, too. (They're both on vacation.)

Snagged a free book from a shelf labeled "free books" and now that I'm looking at it a little closer it has at the front what could have been a useful index if only someone had thought to put page numbers next to the entries. Now I have no idea where in the book to look for "how to make water wetter".

The light roast version is very much in line with how a lot of other roasters these days would approach this coffee and I think this coffee takes that sort of approach very well. The medium and dark roasts are more in line with what I was doing with the coffee this is temporarily replacing.

Removed the previous Guatemalan coffee from the web site, made roasting decisions on the next one which is a peaberry version from the same place, but I'm going to do production test roasts tomorrow and make final decisions the day after pretty early in the morning since I'll be baking again that day. If it works in a drip brew I'm thinking that we'll do a light, medium, and dark roast.

I was on baking duty today. I'm 4th in line for that job so it's not something that I need to do very often so it was a surprise when I went to what I thought was the recipe binder and discovered that it now only contained recipes for scones. I was eventually able to locate the recipes I wanted so I didn't have to make all scones.

I wasn't planning on working an open to close shift today but when orders come in I'm inclined to take the money.

Getting bigger bread instead of trying to use my sandwich materials on the previous bread was definitely the right decision.

Today was supposed to be a stay home and write software data, but one of my customers is having a coffee emergency so I'm roasting more coffee instead. Shouldn't take too long to slam out the order.

Sorting out one of those the old unsupported version of the library did it one way and the current version of the library doesn't have that anymore issues. First thing I found to try is almost but not quite viable (I can probably bludgeon it into working but for now I'll keep looking for a better option, there are at least a few things that I can try).

Just got back from a little awards ceremony for people with old buildings. It was interesting. My house was the 2nd oldest (1898) building honored tonight.

Also tested a small code change made last night intended to improve print quality which had significantly regressed compared to the last release version. Documentation suggested that the change I made was a Windows only thing but it fixed things on Linux too. Still need to test that on Mac.

Colombian coffee from the latest delivery is pretty much the same as the previous Colombian coffee to the point that I'm going to keep the same roasting plan and probably don't need to adjust any blend recipes. Of course, I'll verify that with drip brews on the first production batches before selling it. There's a new Guatemalan coffee as well, but I've still got some of the previous shipment to roast through before I move on to that one. Probably 1-2 weeks depending on what customers buy.

It makes me a little sad that part of why users might be impressed with the speed is because of how much the bar has been lowered with modern software.