Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

#introduction

I'm part owner and roaster at a little coffee company in Wisconsin. Author of Typica, a popular free program used to capture and work with coffee roasting production records that's used at roasting companies all over the world. Volunteer on the Roasters Guild education committee. Available for paid coffee consulting, training, open source software development. Living with a cat who broke into my house and decided to stay. Likes: cute, travel, food. Dislikes: blinking lights.

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.

New coffee from East Timor has a ton of sweetness to it. Very dark roasts don't taste as dark as they are, and there are a couple of big ranges where the differences from one roast level to the next are very subtle. I'm leaning toward something right on the edge before dark roast characteristics start to be detectable where the overall balance of flavors is excellent.

The coffee arrived before the Out for Delivery email did.

Coffee was delivered on the earlier side of delivery window and staff has rearranged themselves so I'll be able to get more done today than I was expecting. Today's delivery has new coffees from East Timor, Panama, and a decaf Colombia.

Production test batches of the new decafs went well. I still need to produce new labels and finalize the pricing on those today. More coffee is scheduled to be delivered tomorrow.