Dusty

Living in 2022 and attending technology conventions makes it all the more clear that the future has not turned out the way Philip K Dick imagined it back in the sixties.


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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?


The Basketball Dream

I had the basketball dream again this week. Somehow I doubt it will ever go away completely.

Today I had a scheduled meeting which would involve being introduced to at least six new people in a semi-formal situation. Perhaps because of the dream I decided to wear my basketball socks so that if any of them were to see me and immediately say: "Wow. Do you play basketball?" I could say "Yes, did you ask this because of my socks?" And then I could have hitched up my pant leg an inch and shown them the socks. I figured this would have been a good mood lifter and acceptable out of the structured confines of a Big Four.

Alas, despite travelling quite a distance to meet them at their office, five of the six of them were working from home and we conducted the meeting on Teams. This is 2022, continued. The one person who was in the room did not ask me if I played basketball.

Version Two

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.


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Photogenic

Sit there, face my knees to the left, look at the camera, lift my head a little higher and to the right. Click.

One more? Perhaps the last one wasn't very good. Smile a bit more, keep eyes open. Click.

Another one? Eyes wider? Smile broader? Click.

Maybe they just like taking a whole set for some variety? This time perhaps a cooler, more relaxed expression. Burning eyes, like a male model. Click.

A fifth? Sure. This time ultra relaxed, confident. Feel sharp. Look sharp. Click.

Reviewing the identical series of photos. Man, I was consistent.

Things Which Make Me Hate Myself

Despite having a rudimentary understanding of business strategy and predatory corporate practices, buying tools at Bunnings.

Reading supermarket catalogues while I'm eating.

Trying to use tools that I bought at Bunnings.

Over editing work emails for no return in value.

Realising I forgot to buy something at Bunnings and having to go back there for a second time in the same weekend.

The Longest Day of the Longest Year

I've been rather social since my last update, tripled-down pandemic considered.

Last month was a good time to buy a new mask.

I spent two hours tonight floating in a pool. That was good. If the number of friends I have with pools is an inverse parabola function of age then I hope I am now on the upswing.

I've walked on the sand a lot too.

I discovered an amazing toilet at my latest office.

I ate some ribs.

I wore the shirt from my LinkedIn photo to work for the first time ever.

I haven't exercised for about a month and my body feels as good as it has in years.

I've seen family.

I've eaten some raspberries.

I built some APIs and made some diagrams, and drank some coffee.

I'm using my fingernails to try and keep the days from blurring together.

The sunset tonight was amazing.

Album Radio Based On

Grey clouds hung low over Adelaide nearly the entire day today, distorting the sense of time. After a bike ride in the morning, I spent the rest of the day fiddling with technical documents. Before I started I chose something from my Release Radar list on Spotify and I don't remember what song it was, but it triggered one of those automatic radios that played a lot of downtempo, instrumental electronic music. Maybe the AI is getting better, but this was the perfect focus music for dealing with 1000 tracked changes and drawing little lines between boxes on a sequence diagram. I was productive to the music of Rival Consoles, Ulrich Schnauss, Catching Flies, Era C, Little People (I'm just listing these obscure band names here so that I don't have to go poking around in my Last.FM history five years from now when I'm re-reading this entry).

At the end of the day, which might have been before sunset, or maybe after, I went back to Spotify to check the name of the radio it had created, it turned out perhaps the Spotify engineers had missed one little typo in their API specification, because the title of the playlist was "Radio based on" and nothing more.

This felt apt.

Persistence

Today was my last day in the office after a long time... Unlike this fucking almond which is clearly hanging on for long service leave.

image 2153 from bradism.com