After multiple duckling sightings today, it is clear that Spring is over and I'm both warmer overnight and closer to death. In the latest Above and Beyond mix he also shouted out that an amazing summer was coming to an end... This seems like a good moment for finalising my latest seasonal playlist and reminiscing about it. I was in Italy like twelve weeks ago. It feels like it was another lifetime. How does that make me feel about my trip to Europe in 2016? That was someone else's existential crisis in someone else's lifetime.

Hopefully writing about some of the music I listened to a lot over the last twelve weeks will help with keeping every moment of my life compressed like a pancake inside my own mind (except the embarrassing parts obviously).

The title of this mix is Estate Winter 23, a name I chose because "Estate" is the Italian word for "summer", and "Winter" is the Australian word for "suck shit we don't believe in double glazing or insulating houses".

Here's to you, Winter 2023. Whether it was hearing a reggae remix of Metallica on a warm morning in Parco Sempione, or listening to the original version on shitty headphones on my ride home from Wayville on a sunless day in August, such a specific stretch of months has never made me feel so free and helpless at the same time.

Johnny Jane, your voice carried over the streets of Paris the night before I flew home. Gorje and Manchester Orchestra, you were lullabies for afternoon naps. Spoon, the soundtrack to trains across France. Milky Chance, summer vibes regardless of the weather. Various trance and progressive house tunes, you are like the Vaseline over the camera lens to make work feel more beautiful. The rest of you, well, I just know I listened multiple times during the mundane walks around my neighbourhood, or while shivering through rehab in the gym, or while frolicking in the glorious parallel universe that is the tourist destinations of Europe - or just remembering that.

I've been wanting to journal lately. There is a lot happening in life, but nothing that fits neatly into a few paragraphs with some narrative structure plus a pun.

The last two times I have ordered a flat white at a café I've received a cappuccino. This kind of made sense on a sunny Sunday after our walk around St Clair and viewing of moorhen ducklings (henlings?) among the mosquitos. I phrased Vanessa's cappuccino order as size, then variety combo, whereas when I ordered the flat white I started with variety and ended with size. This could have caused confusion. Whatever. I'm not afraid of a little chocolate sprinkled on top of my frothed milk.

Today there was no Vanessa or second order. I handed over my keep cup like it was 2019 and I paid $4.50 for a flat white like it was 2019. There was no size specified because they just give you whatever amount of coffee fits in your keep cup. Again I received a cappuccino. Also I'm not sure, but I think they called my order out as "Brett" rather than "Brad". But what are the chances that someone with a similar name to me and the exact same recycled aluminium keep cup ordered a coffee at the same café as me? And no Bretts yelled out "Hey, that's my keep cup!" as I walked out, screwing the lid on to cover the thick layer of chocolate powder sprinkled across the top.

Am I subconsciously sabotaging my own coffee orders, and requesting chocolate on top without even any memory of it? Or does my deep voice in a noisy café saying "flat white" sound like - when half-drowned out by the milk frother - I'm saying "cappuccino"?

Well, powered by caffeine and cocoa, I picked up where I left off yesterday in trying to improve the performance of a flow that needs to generate a 700MB file with 96MB of java heap. And I did make a lot of progress. I had to pause mid afternoon for my follow up with the rheumatologist, who confirmed that I don't currently have rheumatoid arthritis. I worked this out during our initial consultation when he was poking around at my bones. My finger still swells up when it's cold, and despite no almonds since autumn I am now entering my seventeenth spring of chronic back pain. Neither of these things are caused by an autoimmune condition or lupus. That's good. He did say I have a remarkably straight thoracic spine. He said people would "kill for it". I hope not, it would be worse than back pain.

I googled it later today, and maybe it is not a good thing. There's something called flat back syndrome (not cappuccino back syndrome) that can cause lower back pain and/or heart conditions. Am I going to need to spend another $400 on specialists to get told there's nothing to worry about again? Maybe.

I returned to an office in glorious sunlight. I was walking fast so I could get back to benchmarking, and also because I forgot my headphones when I left. I realised when I was in the elevator down at 2:20pm and I didn't go back up because my appointment was at 2:40pm. I arrived at 2:39pm, and the doctor called my name (not Brett's) at 3pm. So I could have gone back to get the headphones. If I'd done this my ears would have been a lot warmer though by the time I got back.

I spent the rest of the afternoon testing and tweaking acknowledgement timeout settings, before a call at 5pm which delayed my bike ride home until 5:30pm. This made me a little uneasy, as the sun felt a lot darker than it actually was - especially in the canyons of Adelaide's central business district, and I didn't want to get hit by a car. I felt my usual sense of relief when I reached the Torrens path where I would be out of reach for most cars for the rest of the way home. Every time I had a view to the north I felt a nice, warm breeze. The sky, in the golden hour, was all sorts of vibrant shades of orange, pink and yellow. Fluffy clouds lined the horizon, which looked beautiful. But I was wearing my sunglasses the whole way because I don't want any more bugs in my eyes. However the polarised lenses muted the colours quite a bit and made the clouds look like the plain, frothed milk on the top of a flat white.

The last week of September has been the kind of unrealistic spring weather you dream about in winter. Sunny, warm enough to wear shorts, but not so hot you can't go outside. Basically perfect, if you don't suffer from allergies. I've been riding my bike into town when I'm not working from home. Drinking coffees in the sun. I can't help being fascinated by flowers and the lifecycle of plants.

On the weekend we went to the Barossa to dog sit, and took Nash along for the ride. This presented more opportunities for enjoying the weather. We did the full Kaiserstuhl walk after having to cut it short last time due to injuries. I ate cereal, fruit and yogurt on a log in the morning light watching the birds before striding on up the hill and it felt like this was what my body was made for.

While in the area I also tried award winning bacon (it tasted like bacon smells like) and visited Greenock Brewery for a tasting paddle. I also walked around a lake and took in the golden canola fields.

The second brown snake spotting made us to decide on cutting the trip short, and we packed the second dog into the car for two more nights of dog sitting back in Adelaide.

I feel like I will finally sleep well tonight.

The other day I walked by some blooming Spanish lavender in someone's front yard in Croydon. The entire garden was overgrown with the purple flowers with huge springtime bracts erupting from each flowerhead like the botched lip injections on a sea of Instagram superstar wannabes. I've seen bracts on a lavender before, and these were something special.

Well, a couple days of fucking flowers everywhere later (and a sideways rain storm that thrashed the house with water and petals to boot) I kind of figured I'd imagined those gigantic lavenders in Croydon. I was walking that way again today, and so I double checked and lo and behold there was the tiny field of jumbo bracts in vibrant, pale purple.

I wanted to take a photo, but from every perspective other than my own it would have looked like I was photographing some strangers' living room window, so I didn't. I just enjoyed the view as I walked by. And because my hamstring tendinopathy was making me miserable I pondered the fact that in my mortal life I will never contribute anything meaningful to society, not even something as simple as a field of lavender, or even a picture of one. 2,375 journal entries all combined felt less valuable than one flower.

But then I thought, maybe the world needs me just to observe the bracts. Maybe among those hundreds of purple blooms there is one flower that no other set of eyes came to rest on but mine. I can offer that for free. That's something.

I ate a duck, mushroom and cherry calzone for dinner tonight. Sharing this because I don't think I'm ever likely to write that again.

After last weekend where my only social excursion was a routine of visual beer puns from the owner of a craft brewery, this weekend has been packed with seeing people and also a lot of eating. Vietnamese for lunch Friday, beers with an old colleague that evening, picnic in the park Saturday. Mother over for dinner. Pizza parties and then Italian dinners.

The New York Times, host of Wordle, have a new game called Connections that has added some variety to my life once a day. The premise is that you find groups of four related words, but some words are ambiguously in two categories to throw you off. My social interactions are similar to this premise. Alumni from university, former colleagues, current colleagues, family, ex-teammates, wedding partied, high school friends. Many across multiple of the above.

It is nice to have connections.

I watched a video the other night about new co-pilot features coming in November for the Office suite. The demonstration included summarising the unread contents of an Outlook inbox to find pertinent information about a specific topic, scanning Teams meeting recordings to extract actions and key information, and turning raw data in Excel into reports with visualisations based on a prerogative.

As someone with access to multiple O365 enterprise licences, and working on many, many projects I saw a lot of potential being demonstrated and I figured I should aim to be on the bleeding edge when it came to AI augmentation of my workload.

Edge has a built in Bing AI query these days, which is available already, so I decided to hone my skills by asking it a question about the client credentials plugin for the HTTP Request component in Mule to see if it could solve a configuration problem I'd spent the past day trying to resolve.

Well, blow me down, it came back in thirty seconds with a solution that sounded exactly right, and it included some source code that quite simply added the missing custom JWT claim I was trying and failing to find a place for through the wizard.

I was not surprised when I added this code and received a compilation error. This is not the first time an AI LLM has blatantly lied to me when it comes to code. Earlier I was experimenting with possibly building a Svelte app and I didn't want to learn the Wikipedia API, but after Chat GPT kept inventing new query params I realised I would probably have to.

It was a sunny afternoon today so I decided to make a coffee smoothie after lunch. Normally I prepare this in the blender by starting it on power level 3 for 30 seconds, then increasing the level by 1 every 45 seconds or so. About four minutes later this typically results in two litres of thick, creamy and consistent smoothie. For some reason today I was compelled to press the pre-programmed "Smoothie" button and I watched in horror as the blender separated the ice from the liquid, and created a half glacier half ice-melt half-filled jug. Again, AI had let me down. I guess I'll have to keep using my brain and wrists for another few months yet.