It's 2026 and I have officially spent $8.60 on a single coffee. It was jumbo sized at least. And served by the seaside.

Shortly afterwards I was donating some blood and I suppose some caffeine at the blood donation place. As can be expected, everyone at the blood donation clinic is very interested to take your blood. "Would you like to make a future appointment?", "You have such good veins."

I got a keyring and a cookie although I handed back the cookie. The keyring will help me remember my blood type.

The blood people also recommended something salty to help recovery. Probably because they want to take more blood. So for dinner we got take away fish and chips with lots of salt and then we walked in the shallows along the beach which is also salty.

I have owned my baseball cap for six seven different years now, so it felt like it was time to wear it somewhere appropriate like an actual baseball game.

Adelaide won a very long game against the Sydney Blue Sox thanks to a 5 run seventh innings. It allowed plenty of time to catch up with friends.

I also experienced the most connection to Australia that I have felt for quite some time, standing to listen to an instrumental of the national anthem with a thousand other people, not one of us singing.

If tonight’s baseball game was a metaphor for 2026, it will start slowly, pick up quite drastically in Spring, and then drag out to a successful but slow conclusion. The last part of the year might get skipped.

I don’t think 2026 will be a microcosm of a baseball game. At least I hope it won't.

It's the days between Christmas and New Year's. There could be no better time to reflect on the year that has passed. And also to study for a tech certification to add to my portfolio / meet my KPI during customer downtime.

If we felt like it, we could unify data across multiple, disparate Brad source systems and harmonise them into a common data model. Surely this would be a way to discover insights.
Could that data be normalised? Of course. Would it be normal?

Let's say we used some of the many connectors available out of the box - or from packages - to ingest this data. Perhaps for certain sources we'd need to vibe-code our own integration and push data via the ingestion API.

What Data Lake Objects would those streams provide?

Norway bookings for rooms by lakes.
Health data recording steps walked around lakes.
Purchase history and ATV at the supermarkets at West Lakes.

We could pull Spotify plays, Hevy workout logs, physio case notes, backup physio case notes, Cursor tab completions, licorice deposits, investment profits and losses, X-ray reports, Scandinavian geolocations, dog hairs swallowed, JaVale McGee dunks witnessed. Quiz night questions answered—and botched. Calf raises. Kombucha consumed (free and paid). Solar kilowatts generated. pH and chlorine measurements. Journal entries posted. Board games played (against others, between Brads).

With enough data, we would be getting a comprehensive view of our customers. Music Brad, Gym Brad, Family Brad, Work Brad, House Brad. And then we could unify them. Match them all by fuzzy name and email address, plus a custom rule on an identifier or two. We could get 100% consolidation, but I suspect that would be an overgrouping.

From there, we could create a segment with a filter, limiting our audience to engagements where YEAR(date) = 2025. We could include some calculated insights, though we'd probably need our data-aware specialist for that, and I'd need to check Profile Explorer tomorrow to work out *which* Brad he got consolidated into.

With our segment complete, we can activate it and send it to an activation target. I suppose that target should be "2026".

What 2026 is going to do with all those Brads is hard to say.

And that's why it's important to invest time in the design phase and understand your use cases before you start clicking and ingesting. It takes less time to avoid problems than it does to fix them. In theory.

That was a very long spring. Perhaps it’s because this week’s weather - cool, wet and windy, a lot of showers about, bouts of pleasant sunshine - mapped closely to the first week of September’s weather. And in fact nearly every week of the past three months has been cool, wet and windy with lots of showers, and bouts of pleasant sunshine. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a spring with quite so much consistency. I put my jacket away and then got it back out again multiple times. Yet there is no doubt that the sun sets after 8pm now and there was even a test match - briefly- last weekend, so spring did happen.

But what did happen in spring? A lot and not much. Personally that is. Globally and domestically there was a lot going on, but for me the last few months have been one of pleasant routine, general health (ignoring the cold from the end of October that I nearly had to write a memoir about surviving) and mundanity.

I had the same customer all season, the same personal project for the evenings, the same gym routines, a lot of chicken breast salads. A lot of berries, cereal and yogurt. A lot of walking around the same lake, canal and seaside. Some good audio books. Pub Quiz. Walks with Vanessa and Nash - often to the bakery. Lots of good music.

I did go to Sydney. And for some hikes in the hills. And I saw friends and family. One night I saw the southern lights. It was very chill. I could probably have lived in that spring forever.

I clearly had a lot of time for reflection in spring 25 because my spring playlist reached 101 minutes and 26 songs. That’s two new songs a week on average that I considered worth engraving on my psyche to remember this time of my life by.

Songs that remind me of walking while wearing a jacket. Lunchtime exercise. Walking by the lake. Cooking BBQs. Driving around the suburbs. Writing XML by hand. Walking by the lake (again). Going off to get motor oil for my chainsaw. Walking by the lake (a third time). Walking by the lake (wow).

Another baby in my life has reached the age at which they cry any time they see me. There have been too many babies for this to be a coincidence. The first six months seem to be okay because those babies just cry indiscriminately. But once they reach the point of mental development where they really know what they want to cry about, Brad instantly appears near the top of that list.

I feel like babies shouldn't dislike me so naturally. I'm really just a very large baby myself. I'm toilet trained, but other than that I approach every day with an open minded sense of wonder, I have trouble communicating in some situations, and I like naps.

But the way these babies cry, year after year, baby after baby, tells me that I am not a very large baby in their eyes. The looks on their face as they sob and bury themselves into the comfort of other, more acceptable adults is one of pure fear. They look at me like… They know. They know the truth about me.

Now I don't actually know what truth this infant collective sense in me. They can't tell me. I can only guess. Maybe I shouldn't let it unnerve me, but it's hard to ignore. I think I've always known there was something wrong with me. I think I've known this since I was a baby.

Recently I've been working on designing a board game. The efforts towards this can be broken down into:
- Thinking about gameplay and game elements
- Researching and watching videos about my game's subject
- Building a webapp to help me store and manage my game data

I feel like the area I have focused on the most is predictable. After a few days with the spreadsheet I soon had a fully featured CMS to store all my elements, scrape information from the web to fill in stats, calculate rankings and points. I built it using Svelte 5 and Pocketbase. When I say I built it, what I mean is I architected it and Cursor built it. This technology is so amazing I am still dumbfounded occasionally by how effective it is.

Last week, I felt like I had my game conceptually ready to go. All the data I needed was in my database, I'd chosen the elements. Now I wanted to create a whole lot of cards. So I requested a quick MVP: I would upload a blank template and draw boxes on it where I wanted bits of data inserted, and then with the click of a button a image would be generated that I could print out and slip into a card sleeve and use to prototype my game. I hit generate and went to clean my teeth. When I came back, it was ready.

It took me less than an hour to add a whole image editing, zone drawing template editor to map the rest of the data onto card templates, and then a template cloner, and adding icons dynamically based on data. Every feature required about 3-4 sentences for me to describe the requirements and parameters, I would hit Go and a few minutes later it was ready to test.

Would I run this code in production? No. But does it do a nearly 100% perfect job of obeying instructions, implementing requirements, and just working when it's done. Yes.

Tonight I had an hour before bed to try and add a "Print" function to the app. I wanted to press a single button and for the app to generate all the cards based on the data in the database, put them all on a grid across as many pages as needed for printing at 600 dpi and then spit out a PDF. The AI did it in less than five minutes. I barely had time to watch some NBA highlights. This kind of functionality would have probably taken me a week to get right on my own. It did it in one shot. I didn't spend all night programming, I spent most of it taking a long walk along the beach with Vanessa as the sun slowly set.

Is there an AI bubble? It's a very hot question right now. I'm sure I'll come back to this one way or another, and this anecdote is not an answer to that. But the power of this technology is so potent it's impossible not to be impressed.

I downloaded the PDF and my game dream had come to life on my screen.

Now the question is, do I have any friends to play this game with? Or do I need to add a new feature to get the AI to play it as well...