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.

As I still have a "bulldogs" tag on this journal I figured I would jot down some thoughts.

At the end of the 2003 AFL season the Western Bulldogs and their rookie head coach Peter Rohde were in "Win Now" mode, a top 16 finish giving them the confidence that a few shrewd trades would allow them to compete with the likes of Brisbane, Essendon, Collingwood and Port Adelaide for the 2004 premiership. With this in mind they traded their second round draft pick (19) to Fremantle for versatile utility Steven Koops.

Koops played 11 games for the Western Bulldogs, averaging 10 disposals and contributing to two wins in a campaign that saw them finish 14th.

With the pick they received, Fremantle drafted David Mundy.

I've thought about this trade occasionally over the past nineteen years. Imagine if a more practical David Smorgon had chosen to continue the rebuild in 2003 and picked up Mundy. How would the 2008-2010 Bulldog's preliminary finals have gone with Mundy in the midfield going head to head with Lenny Hayes? Would the injury curse of 2006 have seen him as the sixth Bulldog to go down with an ACL that year? How would Mundy have celebrated in 2016 with Picken, Matthew Boyd and Dale Morris? How would Mundy's cool head have helped settle his team mates in 2022 after four straight goals leading into half time by the Dockers in an Elimination Final?

Perhaps this was one of those sliding door moments, where the bottom three finish in 2004 - giving the Bulldogs a priority pick (Ryan Griffen, ultimately traded to GWS for Tom Boyd's kicked a goal, Boyd's kicked a goal) - worked out in the end. The fact that Mundy spent all of 2004 in the WAFL, and assuming he devloped with Williamstown in the same way, means the Bulldog's drafting of Griffen would have occurred regardless, thus bringing little comfort.

There have been worse trades in AFL history, but a basement dwelling team trading the first pick of the second round for an AFL legend who would go on to 374+ games must surely be in the top ten at a position similar to where David Mundy will end up in the all time games list. And there is a certain sense of irony in the fact that, in 2022, Mundy's poise, experience, and contested possessions were precisely what Fremantle needed to inflict another failed season on the Bulldogs. The only solace for their fans now would be knowing that in 2023, nearly two decades later, the last traces of the Peter Rhode era are over.

Note - This entry is slightly unfair on Steven Koops, whose injuries forced him to retire before the 2005 season. (Although that was not before he joined the AFL Indigenous All-Stars for a final game in Darwin against the Bulldogs in February 2005, where he and his team mates beat the Dogs by 28 points, 12.19 (91) to 10.3 (63))

Rollover for last month.

Winter is over. Tomorrow will top out at springy 20 degrees and then there will be 20mm of springy rain. This is tolerable partly because the sun set at 6pm today and it won't be down earlier than that again until 2023.

All of this means it's time to finalise the Winter 2022 playlist.

Winter 2022 I will never forgive you. I mean, forget you. Three different employers. Six weeks in a cast. Countless hours trying to work out how to raise the temperature in my house. Zero football. Zero pumpkins. Constant covid paranoia. The occasional social occasion. Too many word puzzles. The bench. My feet aching from cold and my hands weak and desiccated. Everyone I know and love getting older. And then, right before it ended, two glorious weeks on the road to serve as a reminder that there's a whole world out there and a lot of it is sunny even in July.

At least there were some good tunes to discover.

I was pontificating to myself (mainly) about photography and more specifically what I hope to get out of it. You know, to self actualize more efficiently. These thoughts occurred in me because I successfully rekindled my hobby of photographing things by investing $4,000 into a new camera back in July. While on holiday for two weeks I took over 800 photos and in the two weeks since I returned I hadn’t turned it on.

A bird of paradise gets drained by a bird of domesticity.

I want to take photos, but I struggle to know what I should take photos of. There are lots of nice looking things and places in Adelaide and some of them I have photographed already.

I don’t really have a desire to find things that look good and simply take technically correct photos of them. I believe photography is a tool with which I enrich novelty and experiences in my life further. This occurs in the moment - as my brain is forced to notice details and angles about my surroundings in order to better capture them. And it occurs in the post processing where I get a relatively quick follow up of the experience I have just had, filling in the memories and giving me easy access to digital copies that I can review again when I want to ingrain the memories further.

The reward is seeing nice pictures that remind me of nice times.

So I guess the memories I chose to enrich from today were signs of spring.

And eating hot chips at the seaside while watching the sunset.

I like to leave the birds in.

On Friday the ninth of September, a mainstay of my life was suddenly gone. After more than four months my Wordle streak was over.

It feels important that I capture the tale of five letter word games that have somehow become such a prominent part of middle-covid times and which ideally in a few years or more will hopefully be equally as forgotten.

The first time I ever saw Wordle was at Market Street Cafe (on Market Street, near the Central Markets) in the summer of 21/22. I was waiting for an iced latte to be served and I saw a man distracting his toddler with banana bread while he typed in combinations of letters between sips of coffee. I thought to myself: hmmm, that seems like an pleasant way to enjoy a coffee. Minus the toddler part obviously.

I do like that Wordle has only one official word per day, so you can't sit there playing it over and over. That's undoubtedly a big part of its commercial success. Even escalations, like Quordle, and Sedecordle, have their one per 24 hours game modes up front ahead of their unlimited "practice" modes, and this has surely contributed to the daily impulse to play the game, keep a streak alive, make my adblocker work.

Alas, for me 2022 hasn't been all green squares or even yellow ones. And so there have been a lot of moments where I am broken or healing or isolated and in those times the mindless task of guessing five letter words brought distraction that was much nicer than sadness. I have played five letter word games when I really wished I wasn't. I have been tolerating this over winter, with the thought in the back of my mind that as soon as my Wordle streak was over I was going to go cold turkey on this game and find something more productive to do with my tram rides, coffees and shits. And then, after 143 correct guesses in a row, it happened. Now it's spring, I have a new ligament, a new king. It's time for a change. And that's the last Wordle.

Why is it called the Pacific North West when it's the north east part of the pacific?

Anyway I am working on a series called "Birds of the Australian Pacific North East? South West?" and because this panorama took nearly twenty minutes for my computer to process, only for me crop it by 70%, I am sharing it as some kind of preview.

It rained a lot today, and so I found myself reading things on the internet while keeping dry. A lot of things on the internet these days seem to be people dying when they're not expecting it. Like the case of Helios Airways Flight 522, which didn't pressurise after take off and flew in circles on computer guidance until it ran out of fuel and then crashed into south-eastern Greece, ending the lives of it's unconscious passengers who were just trying to go on a holiday.

This was very sobering, and a good reminder to live every day of your life while you can. It also gave me a craving for some roast lamb with lemon and rosemary, so I slow cooked some with herbs and other ingredients from the garden.

I didn't have a lamb in the garden so I had to buy that from the butcher. Not a whole lamb just part of a leg and some skeleton. Another reminder to live while you can.

Seems a little strange that a single 96 year old lady halfway across the earth dies and today I get a day off work. But in 2019 a single person got a little too close to a pangolin we all know how that turned out.

Like a few people in Adelaide I spent my morning in Belair National Park getting my feet dirty.

Here's some photos.

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.