Drinking Problems

My name is Brad and today marks a month since my last beer. When people hear this I get smiles and words of encouragement but NO GODDAMN SYMPATHY.

Two more days of antibiotics and then if I can get through a day with all snot honks being below the maximum capacity of your average Kleenex I am going to revisit the Pacific Northwest by cracking the biggest IPA I can lay my hands on. (Yes, by those calculations it will be Tuesday morning.)

Big Data

It feels like my phone has more and more data on me than ever before. Maybe this is a bad thing, but as Tyrion Lannister once said, "Never forget what you are, the rest of the world will not. Wear it like armour and it can never be used to hurt you."

So, everyone can have my health data. Here's a comparison of my average sleep time and step counts between summer month, winter month, holiday month, and when I have a man flu.

Maybe next month I will get a trial MyFitnessPal premium account so I can share how many calories from yogurt I've consumed across the various locations Google Maps has recorded me at.

The End

When I hear about people dying in freak accidents like car crashes, or under fallen branches, I can't help wondering if that person had been secretly writing a novel.

It made me sad, thinking about of all those labours of love which would never be finished. An adventure that would never call; a relationship which would fail to ignite; a twisty mystery which would forever remain unsolved, frozen in the dusty notebooks and locked out hard drives of the dead.

But then I thought, perhaps it was a good thing. Maybe those secret worlds they created would be what they thought of as they left. Maybe they live on there now. Perhaps the nothingness that our imagination comes from is the same nothingness we return to when we go.

The Last Drop

It was finally time to drink my souvenir IPA from Oregon before the hops went bad. (Yes, this is a legitimate peril related to IPAs.)

It was good. I think this IPA was made for me. The Citra hops are amazing. It made me happy and sad at the same time. Farewell Pacific Northwest craft beer nirvana.

Breakside IPA on the Official Bradism Raised Cutting Board for Tall People

A Sense of Purpose

Every Monday morning millions of humans wake to alarms, wash, and then head to their offices where they mix together their perfume and cologne, coffee steam and carpet cleaner vapours.
The scent of a new work week cycles through the air conditioning.

Travel Pun

The view from Bradley's Head

Blue

The sun was out today. In Adelaide, of all places. And I'd been looking for some hope, and signs of Spring. I found a rare, spare hour in my calendar to visited the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, and it was nice.

Dusted and Done

I'd been contemplating buying a new PC. I wanted something powerful enough to render high resolution panoramas in Photoshop from RAW images. And with enough grunt to export short videos of the season movies in HD.

Before replacing my PC - which at some point in the past had not filled all levels of the townhouse with it's shrill High CPU Temperature warning when performing the above tasks - I thought I should try cleaning out the dust out of it. I couldn't remember the last time I gave it a good compressed-air blast to the heat-sink. I suspected it was before I got a golden retriever cross who sheds her winter coat for a summer coat every night in July that we put the heater on. I bought a can of compressed air from Office Works and with daylight as an ally on a Saturday morning I took my computer apart on the balcony and got to blasting.

I'm not sure what tolerance my CPU fan designers had for dog hair particles, but safe to say I'd exceeded them. While Nash watched from the comfort of the couch I got into every nook and cranny, sending puffs of dust and lint into the cool, August air. I was ruthless. I figured, if anything got dislodged or disrupted it would be a good excuse for upgrading to the new PC anyway.

Happily for Frugal Brad, the re-assembled PC ran fine, maybe a little quieter. And a test export of 89 high-resolution images from Lightroom did not breach any CPU monitoring metrics and in fact Chrome and Spotify ran along at the same time as well. My $3,000 PC budget was used to buy a $10 can of cleaning spray.

The Richest Man In The World

I've survived on this planet for 35 years now. My reward from Vanessa was a month of desserts, culminating in a jumbo mousse cake, totalling over 8,000 calories. It tasted as good as it looks. (As seen here on the Official Bradism Raised Cutting Board for Tall People.)

A Filament of my Imagination

Another one of the great things about the internet having more personal information about me than my own brain can hold is that I can look up what my most played song was on the week of my birthday for the past 15 years. I mean, it's not going to be completely accurate because I didn't have scrobbling on my phone before 2012, or my Samsung Pebble that year I played basketball in the rain in North Adelaide for hours, or that night at Shenanigans in 2006 when SexyBack must have been spun at least a dozen times. But it did well enough to make me a playlist for a sunny walk down memory lane and to the train station yesterday morning.

On my way home from the train station yesterday evening, when it definitely was not sunny, I did pass my favourite inedible plant in the world on this one house's fence, and noticed the first flower of spring had bloomed.

I love this jasmine plant, and the fragrance it gives the footpath for 0.00833% of my morning commute during Spring. I left for work thirty seconds earlier today so I could stop by again and appreciate it.

In Oregon a couple of months ago I drank a longneck of the Elysian Avatar Jasmine IPA and it reminded me of walking on that footpath. And this morning I was reminded of drinking that beer. And now that personal information is recorded on the internet.

A Level Up

At midnight yesterday I was warned by a chirp that another smoke alarm backup battery was going flat. Unlike last time, I was able to remove the cover, extract the battery and restore peace with only five to ten minutes of suppressed rage and a single, vitriolic paragraph of pure expletives. I did not need to use any hand tools to break my way in like a castaway with walnuts and no nutcracker.

Success!

I guess my recent birthday actually helped me develop as a person.

Nash did not provide any assistance.

Casually Blinded

I received my fourth submission rejection from a certain dream professional science fiction market today, but this time it ended with "I look forward to your next submission."

I'm not sure if this is a pinprick of light in the dark, hopelessness that is this writing game. Or if they've just recently updated their form rejection letter.