I once wrote that someone told me that "Brad, your journal entries are terrible but sometimes the last line is good."

That was ten years ago, and at some point in my thirties I decided to set a reminder to write a sequel to that entry using only the last lines from entries from August 2014 - August 2024.

Last Lines Only - Part 2

They say every day is a gift, but I'm notoriously tricky to buy for. Anyway, that’s the excuse I use when I laugh out loud at my own jokes from 2013. How quickly things change over eighteen years. I guess the moral is, enjoy what you've got while you've got it. Despite all the dark parts of life, I'm undeniably privileged to post photos of summer sunsets on my journal year after year, without fear of persecution, isolation, pterodactyls, etc. That's why I only eat fruit I grew on work nights. Other than finding and eating a bulk meal curry in my freezer from September, this was the most exciting thing that happened to me in the final week of October, 2019. Maybe that's going to be a theme.

I went for a walk around the neighbourhood, enjoying the golden, sunny light knowing nearly everyone I was passing had never deployed serverless to the cloud. We saw no ducklings and were rained on several times. Plumbing is not like IT. I've never measured myself diagonally. Yes, I did find a way to make World War One all about me. It had been a mentally intense elevator ride. Those are called Bradisms. In my facial hair's defence, I did have to set it back an hour last weekend. Note, you may need to become an emperor and execute a Duke for this to work. This was not exactly an inspirational tale, but it was more inspiring than the history of Ptolemy VIII. BAM, unlimited coat-hangers for the rest of your life.

So if I want to write a great novel I need to practice and write a terrible novel, or else I might end my life being very good at writing only the beginnings of novels. But I know the moment I do it some Sherpa is going to use my backpack like a step-ladder, clamber onto my shoulders and steal my glory, leaving me with little recourse and an awkward silence the whole way back home. I guess that being tall makes it harder to avoid small talk. I was like, hmm, this is what it's like being in senior management. Then I think, oooh, free banana!

This week has been so cold and miserable that I bought a turnip to eat just to cheer myself up. Tonight I went to a 60th birthday party at the zoo with canapes and birthday cake and I was served four different animals. The horse helped me burn off a lot of oats. I mean, there are definitely victims, but the trick is to not be one. After that it could get really interesting, culinarily and otherwise. Stay tuned for analysis and stats. Guess I'll have to stick with the Zooper Doopers a while longer. Don't even get me started on the desk ergonomics. I didn't take photos of any of this.

Life has not been boring recently. But sometimes, especially since I turned 30, I do find myself tipping half the frozen berries packet into the blender instead of only a third. The obvious moral is, no matter if you focus on multiple goals, or just try and get by, ultimately we're all going to die anyway. Also, I doubt LeBron is buying the week old cabbages and capsicums from the front of the fruit and veg shop, making bulk lentil vindaloo with them, then eating them after ten days in the fridge. And it was delicious. This went on for 300 seconds. I like to think I have an average-to-good understanding of the basics of economics, politics and marketing so this wasn't particularly amazing. If we ever get an annual public holiday to commemorate global peace, I wonder what cookie there'll be to celebrate it and how big Vanessa will bake it. Maybe I'm also feeling good because I intentionally avoided reading the news for two and a half days.

Anyway, this summary doesn't have a satisfying conclusion because it's just a transition to the next one of these in however many years. Honestly I have too many sunset cows for a single entry, so contact me directly if you need more. Whatever happens next, I’ll try to journal it. Works every time.

In a sea of sunshine, a tail appears above the light like the dorsal fin of a fluffy shark.

It's January first, and time to look back on 2023 before the New Year cynicism wears off…

The best thing I can say about the New Year is that I'm glad December 2023 is finally over. What a terrible month of sickness, injury, weather, isolation, and drabness. On the plus side, I'm alive and eating cereal on summits, have an awesome family, and I'm not getting bombed or shot at at any point of my daily life. So that's all definitely a plus. From a narcissistic perspective, though, 2023 feels like a bit of a let down. I mean what actually happened, from a narrative perspective? I went on an awesome holiday in June, which now only serves to make me melancholy that I'm not on a holiday galivanting around Europe every other day of my life. Everything else about life feels kind of the same. I still have injuries. I still feel creatively unfulfilled. Now that I'm a year older, do I have anything to show for it?

Some things from 2023 that made me feel alive…

Working 4 Jobs At Once

Maybe a slight exaggeration, but I have most definitely encountered other humans in the workforce that put in less effort at one organisation than I did times four in early parts of 2023. And I'm not a proponent of hustle culture or anything like that. All my efforts were under a single position and salary as a consultant. What made me feel alive about this situation was the insane processing power that my brain reached, beyond even what I thought was possible. I recall one morning I had four 30 minute meetings in a row across the four different assignments. Meetings I was running. And each meeting ran over, meaning zero seconds for context switching before I jumped onto the next Teams call. Over hours I spoke about electoral boundaries and nomination processes, then higher education research programs and publicity for publications, into hospital systems and business continuity patterns, into justice system principles such as the difference between court bail and police bail. People would ask me questions and my mouth was answering correctly while my brain was still trying to understand the problem. And I was right, four times in a row, I added value and advanced projects and I felt useful.

Finished a Short Story

At 9,400 words my latest short story - and only story of 2023 - took nearly a year to write and went through multiple phases of abandonment until I finished the first draft, then the second, then the third. And then I felt it, the endorphins, the satisfaction of weaving all these elements of a story together for a satisfying payoff with consistency, engageable characters, and rich storytelling. Those aren't my words, I read the story to my writers group and they all liked it. That made me feel creative and connected to the rest of the world.

32,000 Users in a Single Day

I've spent a lot of my nights programming on projects that have little traction with the wider world (such as this one) or never get deployed to Prod. Programming pursuits for me are direct competitors for creative writing. I have ideas for websites or utilities I want to make but often fail to fully deliver. I started FT last October and it went live without much fanfare back in May. Since then I have invested many hours adding new features, improving SEO, improving Analytics Integration, and adding Generative AI content.

This has always been an agile project, so it lives on as long as the product owner (me) has ideas for the engineers (also me). But if we are talking about measures of success, I think tracking dozens of people using it simultaneously at the same time as I heard fireworks outside my window was a good one. Waking up New Years Eve morning and seeing thousands of simultaneous users was an even bigger one. I had 31,900 users in a single day. That's more than bradism.com has probably had since 2005. Not only that, but the code itself all worked under load. There were no new errors in the logs, no slow response time. I felt proud and accomplished.

I am not using ad revenue as a measure of success, as the high traffic and click through rate actually caused the chocolate factory to suspend ad content around 5pm, dramatically limiting my earnings. However, having such a successful revenue spike - 3000% over my daily average for December - is kind of a measure of success in itself.

Venice

I mean, the whole month of Europe was almost peak human existence. There were a few occasions where I was disappointed by not being able to find a painting in a gallery or missing out on a ferry ride around a lake (and many short beds), but these moments were so minor, as fleeting as my own existence in this giant universe, that I have to think hard to recall them. What I mostly remember was feeling free and piqued. The scenery was gorgeous. The history and culture on display was fascinating. I was in control just enough such that every day felt like an adventure without ever being scary.

What I also enjoyed about this trip was that the longer it went on the better my body felt. My back and hamstring and especially my wrist all unclenched from their constant nagging and pain. Maybe it was the relaxation, maybe getting away from computer screens, who knows. Twelve months on from my SLB surgery in 2022 I was using my wrist for lugging suitcases and cameras up mountains and stairs and along cobbled streets. I felt rewarded for all the hours of rehab and stretching and strengthening I'd been so disciplined at performing each week.

Paying Someone To Upgrade My Shower

For over three years in my current house I tolerated the shitty showerhead in the cramped, falling apart shower cubicle we had in our bathroom. In early 2022 I bought a replacement shower head to install, but I lacked the confidence to drill holes in tiles to install it. Eventually when the screen door fell off enough times I finally went through a process of researching replacement options, getting quotes, negotiating a price and time, arranging installation and then having holes drilled for my new shower head as well. None of this was exceptional or special. It was just a normal, everyday process of interacting with traders in a modern society and the fact that I executed it made me feel like I was a valid member of said modern society. Also standing under that new showerhead in that new, roomy shower cubicle with hot water hitting not one but two shoulders at the same time felt luxurious.

Runner Ups

Walking up hills. Generating perfect content in bulk instantly with the right GPT prompt. The times my dog does something awesome. Sunset walks with my wife. Coffee of the right strength, heat and volume just when my body needs it most.

However

Through no fault of my own, of the four jobs I was working in May - one project was delayed indefinitely, one went nowhere, one took six months to go somewhere, one I was cut out of completely for commercial reasons. I invested a lot of time and energy into IT projects in 2023 and I feel like not a lot actually made it to production enough to leave me satisfied. Except FT, where an idea for a feature can be designed, built, tested and deployed in a matter of hours. Sadly, the suspension of my ads on New Years Eve did give me a sour taste about that whole thing. So much effort that finally hits a jackpot, and then the whim of some basic counting algorithm ruins it all.

I submitted my new story to my dream market and it was rejected within 12 hours. Did they even read it? Probably not. Did I receive a reminder of why creative pursuits are completely unrewarding? Probably yes.

As good as Summer number one in June was, by Summer number two in December my injuries had returned. Sickness ruined nearly every plan I had. Meanwhile, another year around the sun - and the books I read during it - were only making it clearer to me how inconsequential my existence is. As the universe continues to scale horizontally and vertically, I am a mere spec and it's becoming more apparent that I do not contribute anything unique and valuable to the world. I do not improve society. I do not create art or tools that really enrich the human canon. I can barely interact with my peers. After all that, I'm basically where I was twelve months ago.

At least it's still nice under the showerhead. That hasn't been ruined for me yet. And it was still better than 2022.

Bradismlocks was taking a walk through a winter and came upon a house in a wet, cold part of the space-time continuum. This was very tiring. In the house there were three months. Bradismlocks tried June, which was amazing - it was warm, and there was a lot of adventure and delicious foods and not much joint pain. "This month is too awesome," said Bradismlocks. Next month was July. July was cold, dark, filled with work and not much adventure. "This month is too not-awesome," said Bradismlocks.

Bradismlocks tried the third month - August. The bed was not just right. The porridge was not just right. The chairs were not just right. Bradismlocks realised with horror that June was actually just right and that it was not possible to go back. At least now August was over, along with this journal entry...

I added better image zoom and optimisation to Bradism today, after June 2023 cracked 100mb page load. Other than that, nights are essentially as above.

There was a study this week that showed a correlation between consumption of magnesium and brain size. I was pleased to read this because, as the Bradism archives will attest, I am a huge almond stan. Unfortunately, I cannot find the exact entry from my early life where I discovered the benefits of almonds (by trying to eat half a kilogram of them on a train ride home) because a lot of my older entries are removed due to my childhood ignorance and dumb opinions.

Of course, having consumed more reasonable volumes of almonds in the decades following, I instantly correlated that my dumb childhood Bradisms might actually have been because of my low almond consumption! It would explain a lot, like my terrible grammar back then. And driving a VK Commodore until 2007.

The passing of time can cloud a lot. I think I've been remembering myself as a smart kid, but now with context maybe I've only become smart since I started eating almonds?

I assume that a larger brain size results in higher intelligence. I only read the headline of the study.

At the start of the summer of 05/06 I successfully won a programming job as a sole contractor to develop a website for a guy who posted on my University IT's message group looking for programmers. As I had literally implemented bradism.com v1 a few months earlier I felt confident I had the experience with which to deliver a complete content management system with payment gateway integration and dynamic language selection among other features in eight weeks. This was not the first time a combination of ego, ignorance and she'llberight got me into trouble, and what I eventually delivered as "95% complete" (and therefore 5% underpaid) would undoubtedly be some of the worst PHP code that was every put into a live environment and exposed to the internet.

Over the years I sometimes thought about that site, which searches on Ask Jeeves confirmed did not seem to exist for very long. However, the experience was foundational in quickly teaching me a few critical lessons about using things like supported libraries and unit tests and source code management and a multitude of other IT concepts that are now part of my life as an IT Professional.

When I was signing the contract for my new job last month I did notice that the group which owns the company I was joining bore the same name as the guy who'd hired me seventeen years ago. I poked around quickly online to see if there was a connection, but it seemed like I was clear. Then today in the kitchenette I bumped into a seventeen years older version of that guy who definitely did remember me. He told me that the site was up for less than a month before high data bills triggered him to check the status of it and he found it had been completely hacked and was now serving copious amounts of pornography at his expense. Thus, it died. I would guess either an image upload exploit or maybe some SQL injection was its downfall.

So apparently he has, at least indirectly, hired me again. Maybe this is fate, or perhaps it is just Adelaide things. Perhaps the seeds of those lessons from 2006 will be the fruit that repays him in 2022. That would make me feel better about the fact that my adult life features a goddamn seventeen year story arc.

And yes, the original version of bradism.com also got completely hacked in 2006 and now utilises supported libraries and frameworks.