Neal Wilson ✅

@fribbledom@mastodon.social My code might be trash, but it's trash that I wrote/am writing myself.

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".

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.

New coffee arrived today so while I'm scheduled to work from home tomorrow I'll probably stop in at some point to continue product development work on that. Also spent some time continuing to port Typica's reports to the new code base. While I knew that the new code was more efficient, I was honestly surprised by just how fast the one I was working on today really is. I think users will be impressed if they edit report parameters.

Spent some time bug hunting. Identified which variable was causing an observed problem in one very specific situation, failed to find where that was getting set to the obviously wrong value (based on the code there should only be 2 possibilities here and it doesn't seem to be either of them), so I put in a thing to check for the wrongness and when that exists it tries to get at the correct value in a slightly more expensive way. I hate that "solution" and left myself a note to try harder later.

Downgraded some software because I hate the UI changes in the new version. Nice thing about locally installed open source software: I can always revert to an older thing I like if the devs go crazy. (But seriously, thanks for your earlier work in making the good thing I like.)

Yeah, transfer speeds in/out of the NAS are a lot more stable now that it's on the wired part of the network even when the other things it's communicating with are on the wireless side. Moving this was a good decision.

Tonight I'm going to move the home NAS so it can be on a wired connection instead of a hanging off a janky Ethernet to WiFi thing.

@mhoye@mastodon.social I still remember the Hypercard stack that came with my first Mac that goes through things like point, click, drag, feed the fish. Big paper manuals full of screenshots were also a thing and they assumed far less familiarity with operational concepts. These days I feel like I could use one of those just to know what capabilities have been hidden behind invisible gestures.

@mhoye I've heard that one measurement per second is "big data." It's not. (I don't think they appreciated hearing from me that I had previously done a usability study on exactly what they were talking about, that their users would be happier with a few times more data than they were collecting, and the size of the data would still be tiny.)