Paul Bradley


Published: • Updated:

March 2023

midjourney ai - cloud computing, in pixel art style

The month started with dancing. My wife and I attended a Ceilidh at the local village hall, which was well attended. The band, Thrice Brewed was really good and the caller kept us all in check.


I took my youngest son to an epoxy resin session at the Emporium in Carlisle. The Emporium is a gift shop packed with gorgeous creations and artwork by people in and around Carlisle. They have a small workspace at the back of the shop, and this is where they run all sorts of courses.

We made a couple of book marks and pocket hugs and enjoyed a couple of relaxing hours being arty.

New Job

It’s not until you leave a job that you find out what people think about you. The feedback has been positive, with terms like humble, team player and trusted expert mentioned repeatedly.

As part of the handover package I’m preparing, I’m putting together a ZIP file containing all my project files. Over the years I’ve switched from using OSX to Linux and some of the project folders are littered with .DS_Store files. I wanted to find a quick and easy way to get rid of them, and came up with the following find command:

find ./code -iname '.DS_Store' -exec rm {} +

I also wanted to time stamp all the files with the date that I leave the position. To achieve this recursively through out the folder structure I used the following find and touch combination.

find /handover_files -exec touch -t '202305010900' {} +

As part of the documentation, I wanted to include the folder structure of the ZIP file. I used the Linux tree command to create the structure. I restricted the output to only show the directories, and to only go three levels deep.

tree -d -L 3

Sketching

If you have an RSS reader on your mobile you can subscribe to my art RSS feed to get updates of new pictures I draw.

Writing

I didn’t write any technical notes last month. However, this month I got to experiment with MySQL’s full-text indexes and wrote Using MySQL’s full-text search to find a document needle in an audit haystack.

Banding

We competed at the North West Brass Banding Area contests. While we played well we didn’t get the position we’d hoped for or thought we’d deserved. Maybe next year.

We started rehearsals for a concert on the 29th of March.

We’ve added a new march to the programme. It’s called Army of the Nile. It’s an upbeat march, and for the 2nd cornets we have the tune at the trio with the Euphonium’s, which makes a nice change from the usual um-chucks we have to play.

Links

Reading

Still reading Méridien book 3 in S.H. Jucha’s Silver Ships series.

Listening

Sill listening to Craig Alanson’s Expeditionary Force, book 9, Valkyrie

Watching

By writing down what I watch I can review how much TV I consume. It’s shocking, but here is the list for February: