Developing News

Life as an IT Professional has had its contrasts lately.

Some days I feel really fulfilled as a I contribute meaningfully as both an architect and engineer, delivering software which improves education outcomes for children, or maintains the pillars of justice within our society.

Other days I spend literally hours writing PHP code so that I can use a background image in entries and have it fade into the background in whatever position I want it to. This is so I can create entries on my phone with photo backgrounds without having to open Photopea and creating a gradient.

Is this a good use of my time?

image 2322 from bradism.com

You tell me.
image 2323 from bradism.com

It's not like I spent my whole weekend programming in a dark room. On Saturday morning I rode my bike to the Central Markets, had an iced latte and stocked up on salad. In the evening we drove to Moana for a picnic and a walk along the sand. On Sunday morning we strolled along the river and I watched Nash eat the cream out of a mini chocolate éclair.

I didn't take photos of any of this...


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If you met yourself from the future, what would you ask your future self?
What if they wont tell you anything?


What's It All For point Three?

I've spent a lot of the free time I have when I'm not being an IT Professional being an IT amateur and upgrading my website to a new version of PHP and my underlying web framework. I didn't expect this to take me a weekend, but I also didn't expect it to take me over a month. Things would have gone a lot faster if I upgraded it regularly as new versions came out - like I do when I'm being an IT Professional - and not waiting four years to upgrade. I don't know why I did this.

Things would also have gone a lot faster if windows clipboard didn't capture a space and put that into a filename on Sunday that took me three hours of debugging bootstraps and autoloading to realise why I had a missing Event class.

The end, at least, is in sight. I think I've come to the point that I can stop refactoring code so that things work exactly the same (but without deprecation warnings). And then I can start creating fun, new features. Like... Friendlier URLs. Automatic image upload resizing? Being able to see all entries across the years for a specific day/month on a single page? Auto loading new entries? Who knows. Surely there are some blog features that don't exist out there that justify me not just using WordPress... I have some ideas!

Based on the progress so far, there are some features I need to add to justify the extra effort I spent refactoring them. That includes: Building an API now that I have images, articles and even weathers associated with journal entries. Uploading more images. I need to post way more rollover images after I overhauled the backend to make it easier to post and maintain those.

Technically I also think my code is telling me to write more books.

What I did on my Summer Holidays 2021 Edition

It's semi-often that I get eleven consecutive days without work. That's like an Easter, an Adelaide Cup long weekend, plus Anzac Day, and plain old regular Sunday all wrapped up.

Given this is my journal I thought it might be pertinent to repeat my previous summer break traditions of preserving an essence of those long summer days for posterity, unlike the other 354 days of the year which are abandoned in the mists of time, distance, and as usual the damaging effects of alcohol on the brain.

December 25th
Christmas morning started with a beach walk with Nash on the sands of Grange. Lunch was at Dad's with many extended family members. It was a nice time.

image 2299 from bradism.com

December 26th
First thing on Boxing Day was a hike up Mount Lofty where for the first time ever I got a car park at Waterfall Gully. After we reached the summit we sat down for some choc-raspberry-oats and yoghurt. I saw black cockatoos and sulphur crested cockatoos.

image 2300 from bradism.com

After that was a trip to the homemaker centre and big box hardware, and following a salad I set about knocking off half my break's todo list with the things I brought home. Alas, these were all the easy things like attaching sticky hooks to the shelf by the front door, and attaching a new hose head.

Finally, before the sun got too low, I rode to Alex's to meet up with Wilhem and throw a lot of tennis balls.

image 2301 from bradism.com

December 27th
The ten person household limit kicked in, and I attended a small BBQ with Josh, Claire and Timmy.

In the evening I drank a beer and started reading From Russia With Love.

December 28th
After breakfast I rode my bike to St Clair for an Albanian coffee, some more reading time next to some birds, and then I bought heavily discounted custard and rode home.

image 2302 from bradism.com

That evening I ate a sticky date pudding and played Borderlands 2 with Josh and Sam.

December 29th
It was very hot, and so we stayed inside in the dark and watched Matrix Resurrections and had a smoothie.

Later in the afternoon we drove to Aldinga for dinner and another walk on the beach. Nash tried to hunt and kill a partially submerged rock, and got bopped on her bottom by an unexpected wave. Much mirth was shared.

December 30th
Another stinking hot day where we tried to get a long walk in before breakfast, again along the Torrens.

image 2303 from bradism.com

It was around this point that another item on my todo list - Upgrade bradism.com to newer version of PHP and framework - began. I expected it to take me most of the day.

At some point I got sick of holiday software development and drank a beer while making pizzas.

image 2304 from bradism.com

December 31st
Omicron hysteria was everywhere. We went on another Torrens walk, then after breakfast to Costco to buy bulk strawberries and salad.

image 2305 from bradism.com

I did more Bradism upgrading.
In the evening I made Afghan chicken kebabs and then we rode to Semaphore, swam in the ocean, drank champagne in the dark and then rode home.

image 2306 from bradism.com

January 1st
I fixed my flat tyre. The Bradism Upgrade efforts continued. Vanessa made me a mousse cake.

image 2307 from bradism.com

January 2nd
We went walking on the beach in the morning. I forget which beach.

image 2308 from bradism.com

Later in the afternoon I strapped a Bluetooth speaker to my handlebars, told Spotify to play radio based on Don't Stop Believin' and Boston's More than a Feeling. I rode to Glenelg for another ocean beer, and watching the sunset at the Unit with Gus and Timmy.

image 2309 from bradism.com

January 3rd
Invigorated, I slow cooked a pork leg for eight hours and set about trying to finish as much of the second half of my todo list. I ate pulled pork for dinner. The Bradism upgrade continued...

It was a nice break.


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Two Decades Documented

Twenty years ago today I began my habit of writing my thoughts on the internet on a daily basis. Not all of it is online still, because today is not the twentieth anniversary of filtering my thoughts before I put them on the internet.

I like to think that having a journal to record life in makes me do things that I otherwise wouldn't have done, like quitting my job, overseas holidays, eating every flavour of Uncle Toby's Plus in a single bowl, and planting coriander in a giant wok.

Years before people started "Doing it for the 'gram" I was doing it for the 'ism.

In 2011, on the ten year anniversary of starting to recording my life online, I reflected on the meaning of journaling and I shared some quotes from the previous decade that provided insights to my growth as a person and how journaling had influenced my development. The following ten years have been even more significant. I became a husband, writer, dog owner, home owner, and an IT professional. I didn't really journal about any of those things. When I bought a house, got Nash, and changed jobs in the same month I posted a single entry in three months.

For my 20 year anniversary I'm going to point out some of the great puns from the past 10 years that you probably missed.

Round
Iron
Finances
Upstairs Bathroom
Four
Too many to count...

Full Circle

The moonrise was glorious this evening. The glowing orb brought in the start of the weekend and darkness just after 5pm. As much as I yearned to, I didn't do anything exciting with my Friday night. It was cold, dark and damp. Injuries and injury recoveries limited movement. There was a pandemic. This was like an onion of enveloping external factors that made me sad. The fact that this same time last year I felt the same way just added another iteration to the layers.

When I think back to June 2019 - holidays, hiking, craft beers and so much surplus sunshine - it really hits me that on those days I feel like I'm living life to 200 percent. I'm getting in return twice what I'm putting in; each day feels like two in one.

The only place I went tonight was the supermarket for an ice-cream run. By that point the moon had shrunk in its ascent to its usual perspective.

Winter in covid feels like I'm living life 50 percent. Each day feels worthless. The point of a week seems only to be to reach the end. And I can't do anything to rectify it because I'm trapped in this stupid onion. It makes me want to cry.
I was musing on this as I returned from the shops. My brain tried to console me with some bullshit like, "sometimes in summer it's too hot." It distracted me long enough to try and find some joy in the world: The haunted, misty outlook over the arterial road. The cheap price of pumpkin that I'll try to turn into soup. Then I thought, what if I developed an Android app that sent a notification at random intervals to prompt you for your current mood, observations, weather conditions, a photo, maybe a miscellaneous topic like what you felt about what you ate for breakfast that day.
Over time these prompts would accumulate into a little journal that you could then use to compare if you really did live a better life in summer than winter.
This app probably already exists. If not, I might or might not name this app "Bradism". It depends if I'd be willing to give up my domain name.
Then I thought, I wonder if Android has a system API that apps can use to detect if a user is driving/flying or not - so journal prompts could be delivered more safely. Not just based on an accelerometer, but like if the maps app had been used recently for navigation. And if speed changes were stop/start, and GPS coordinates of the pauses matched known public transport stops the API would be logical enough to report the user was on public transport rather than driving. I doubted any system API was that sophisticated, as it would need a lot of permissions, but perhaps I could develop it even if I knew next to nothing about Android application development.

That mental journey was enough to occupy my mind until I got me, the pumpkin and the ice-cream to the half-arse heating in my house. I immediately set about not developing an app with only one arm, and instead had two bowls of ice-cream while watching Jaws under a blanket, then I went to bed. Another half a day of my life in the books. Tomorrow, Vanessa is making me breakfast.

There's No I in Funeral

I went to someone's funeral today and as usual I mainly reflected upon my own life:

I don't think it would be too much effort to add chapter and verse numbers to my journal entries in PHP. This would allow any bible reading to be easily replaced with a Bradism reading, as well as potentially enabling the easier sharing of my wisdom post my life.

I don't want my eulogy to sound like someone is reading my résumé and throwing in thoughtful pauses and looks at the audience. If any of the following get mentioned during the celebration of my life I will be disappointed:


  • He was an IT professional
  • He wrote music reviews for the Adelaide Street press from 2008-2010.
  • He achieved his TOGAF certification in 2019
  • He loved working with computers and digging through application logs for hours to identify the right Java Exception stack trace to report back to the developer who'd written the deployment steps.

I would be fine with "you had to watch out him outside, because he was good in the key, but would also hit threes." (Bradism 1063, verse 2).
I would be more than fine with everyone who attends having to go through my journal and find their favourite Bradism to share.
Failing that, just pick something vaguely truthful that I did and embellish it until it becomes entertaining.

The funeral itself needs to be done as cheaply as possible.
I don't mean simply saying no to all the upselling options given by the funeral home director.
I want whoever plans my funeral to treat it like a game of golf and aim for the lowest amount next to the dollar sign possible.
Get on OzBargain and Cash Rewards and stack discount codes with cashback to turn my body into ash and give people a platform from which to read Bradism from where everyone else can hear them.
There's a few friends and family I would probably pick out as whatever the groomsmen equivalent of deaths are, to directly assign them this tight-arsing responsibility. But as much as I love them I am hoping to outlive them all.
I mean, truth be told I am hoping to outlive everybody on the planet, including those that haven't been born yet. But I suspect it will fall to Alex's kids.

It's worth noting that I don't want the catering included as part of the cost cutting. Please let there be an open bar and a wide variety of good things to eat. There's no joke here.

The soundtrack is a tricky one.
At the moment there are two songs competing for speaker space as people catch a last glimpse of my cardboard coffin before it's fed into some guys pizza oven someone found through future Facebook marketplace.

The most likely choice is Talking Heads' (Nothing But) Flowers because I just love how it flips the idea of eternal, natural paradise into an inconvenience. That will make people think I'm deep and intelligent. There's also a good instrumental jam near the start which will give people time to reflect on some of the Bradisms they have just heard.

The runner up song is the Rennie Pilgrem remix of Zero's Emit/Collect, a 2003 breakbeat banger that no one will recognise unless Josh, Craig and Cowan are still alive. If they are - and they don't suffer from dementia - they will be the only ones moved in the room.

No one ever reads the Music entries on this site, so I doubt the DJ selection will be of much importance.

I want to be cremated.

I doubt they make standard sized coffins big enough for people my height. If I don't fit in the first class beds on the Caledonian Sleeper from Edinburgh to Euston Station I'm definitely not going to fit in a grave plot.

My ashes, which will inevitably have at least one Nash hair in them, can be discarded wherever convenient.

I don't have a problem with composting the soil beneath a passionfruit vine, although the council might.

2020

When I submit this entry it will be the 2020th one I’ve posted on bradism.com. Unless I am hit by a (let’s face it, extremely debilitating) case of writer’s block for the next two months it will also likely be the only time in my life the entry number and year are a snap.

In olden times I liked to use milestone entries to reflect on where I was a mile earlier, but given that the universe is treating 2020 as a chance to mix it up I figured I would use my 2020th entry as a snapshot of life in 2020 for me, Brad.

It’ll be something we can all look back on in the coming years and decades to remember what my specific life was like.

Starting with the most important thing...

image 2128 from bradism.com

This is my Fridge in 2020. I’ve had this fridge for about five years after I got taken by a commercial saying it used different coloured LEDs to keep fruit and vegetables fresher, longer. (Note - actually seems to work). Here it is in our kitchen. Featured magnets are mainly of Nash and calendars from the vet which Vanessa wants to keep for some reason.

There’s also a photo of me, my brother and my Dad on the day we carried this fridge up two flights of stairs in my old house. I got that photo turned into a magnet for all of us. A “fridge fridge magnet” if you will. I could turn this photo into a magnet and that would be a “fridge fridge magnet fridge magnet.” Well, that’s Christmas sorted.

image 2129 from bradism.com

I’ve only taken a couple of photos of the inside of my fridge over the years, and in hindsight it’s something I wish I’d done more because it’s fascinating to reminisce and reflect on how your diet changes over time.

Well, if you’re the kind of person with 6% of 2019 entries that are tagged “Breakfast” you will find this fascinating.

The 2020 fridge census is extremely Vanessa & Bradism. Bulk meals, including one pre-bagged for transportation to work to minimise backpack leaks. Low fat, low sugar yogurt (for breakfasts). A kilogram of hummus. A shitload of protein bars. And some very fresh looking fruits and vegetables.

Okay, this was really the most important thing...

image 2130 from bradism.com

My 2020 couch. It has motorised recliners and headrests. And that's Nash, looking particularly unstressed by the events of this year.

Fun fact: this photo completely confused Lightroom's new auto-geometry feature.

image 2131 from bradism.com

This is Vanessa in 2020, with a giant coffee. Yes, that is a protein bar she’s eating.

image 2132 from bradism.com

This is my house in 2020. The roses are in bloom right now. I don't want to add anything else incase I dox myself.

image 2133 from bradism.com

This is my car in 2020. It’s a comfortable drive, with nice quality of life features, and it was relatively affordable.

It’s a very Brad car: bigger than average, but does its best to blend in. Here it is at the lookout above the Barossa Sculpture Park on a crisp winter morning in 2020.

image 2134 from bradism.com

This is the backyard in spring 2020. The mulberry tree is fruiting and somewhere in there the slugs are eating the strawberries before Nash can get to them.

I recently paid for the water feature to get fixed and that bubbles all day which is very pleasant.

image 2135 from bradism.com

My bike and my backpack, 2020. These are ranked number 1 and 2 on the list of “my things most likely to topple over after I put them down”. This picture illustrates the only way to guarantee they'll both stay upright - lean them into each other, like when you tape a buttered piece of toast to the back of a cat.

image 2136 from bradism.com

My office view, 2020. Also featuring my office view from 2014. On my desk is my coffee cup from 2019, and my coffee cup from 2006.

If you take a step back from where this picture was taken you’ll crunch a very, very mouldy almond.

image 2137 from bradism.com

My home office view, which I spent an unexpected amount of time at in 2020. It’s kind of crazy how I sit in the same seat during the day making “important business decisions” involving people's time and an organisation's money, and then at night get beaten by teenagers at Age of Empires II or write journal entries like this one.

Lots of classic callbacks here on the 2020 desk, including my HD 515s, Uniball 207s and my 2019 coffee cup from above photo.

The Top 10 Bradism Posts of the Decade

Everyone else was posting end of decade top tens back in December and I wanted in. Then I decided the only way no one would ever read it properly is if there was a way to embed cross links to other journal entries that I could add with BCode.

Many hours over many days of debugging PHP code later and here we are.

10. Plus Plus cereal

Breakfast gets mentioned a lot on this blog, but if you're looking for peak cereal insanity this is where you should start.
Casual Friday Breakfast III - Plus Plus Plus

Winter was when I decided I would create the ultimate bowl of Plus. Winter, or me saying to the Woolworth’s catalogue “Oh, Weet Bix Crunch is three dollars this week.” And Vanessa reminding there were seven boxes of Uncle Toby’s Plus in the cupboard which I’d convinced her to buy a few months ago and then never opened.

9. Man Journal Short Cuts

The tale of my first lawn mower.
"He mentioned that I should buy the oil removal next time I was in, because you need to change the oil every year, just like a car. And then he paused and stared at me to make sure the expression on my face indicated I understood this very simple concept. Which I didn't, but I recognised the conversation checkpoint and I faked a nod. Then I considered whether or not I should just take my lawnmower with me to the mechanic when I take my car there."

An insightful chapter on my journey to being the worst home handyman

Man Journal Short Cuts

This was not only my first lawn mower, but my first attempt at mowing a lawn. And also the first time I've felt solely responsible for the state of a petrol engine.

8. Diamonds and Guns

A succinct summary of the disconnect that existed between my soul and the universe in 2018.
Diamonds and Guns

Yeah, I carry a butt-pillow with me most places. I never know how to correctly answer the question, “How's it going?” I wear sunglasses on cloudy days.

7. The White Suburban

Life starts outside your comfort zone. Or in a comfort zone. A story of how I learnt that fitting in is not about how you look, but about following the dreams that were printed on the badge attached to you in the factory.
The White Suburban

"We'll upgrade you to something more comfortable," the car-wrangler told me. This was the first sign something was wrong.

6. Easy Beer Bread Pizza Bases

Another chapter in home ownership, a quality execution of internet recipe observational humour, plus a useful pizza bases recipe I still refer back to regularly.
Easy Beer Bread Pizza Bases

I was searching the internet today for a recipe for apple-cinnamon hot cross buns and I viewed enough cooking blogs to be reminded of the hatred I have for recipe posts that start with a gigantic boring story.

5. Life, Man

I’m quite proud of this solid, three paragraphs double-entendre that I posted to celebrate the addition of Nash to my family slash Journal.
Life, Man

I was caught off guard by just how easy it is to buy a living thing and take it back to your house. No questions asked.

4. Breadism

This is a throwback to a bread story I wrote in 2003, back in the days of Brad’s Summer Journal 2. Maybe that’s why I like it, because it’s tinged with the nostalgia of updating a HTML file in notepad at 4:25am on warm summer nights, my lumbar spine firm and supple. It’s also the prequel to another tale of breadism in 2017. It’s a running joke that’s been going for over fourteen years. That’s longer than some of my wheatstagram followers have been alive.

It’s also a real insight into the mind of someone who has been working from home in a city he knows no one for several consecutive months.

Breadism

I was thinking about Baker's Delight's Twisted Delights. This made me search my journal for references to Twisted Delights and led to... places I want to forget.

3. Reject Shop Hacker

Who would have known in 2011 when I wrote this entry about how much I loved my HD515s that, in 2020, I’d still be using those same headphones. And in 2020 they would still be padded with those same sponges I got in a three pack for $2 from the Reject Shop in Engadine. Those very sponges are on my ears right now as I type this. And the third sponge? Well, I did actually get rid of that one after some amount of dishes.
Reject Shop Hacker

I want to foreshadow the amount of distress I felt earlier this week when I discovered my Sennheiser's were dying.

2. How To Replace a Smoke Alarm Battery

Potentially the dramatic end to the second act of my story of home ownership. The most wilful damage I’ve ever done to a building for the sake of a journal entry.
Learn from my mistakes.
How To Replace a Smoke Alarm Battery

It's very simple to open the smoke alarm and replace the battery.

1. Quiet Achiever

Short and sweet. I reveal my pride in my two year old facade in the office. My decade-long, lifelong, screen of Green Pig smiling politely, keeping my true thoughts in words on the internet.
Based on a true story.