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Whit Friday Brass Band Competition | May 2023
May 2023
Started off by playing with the band at Penrith’s 40th Anniversary Mayday Carnival. It was great to be part of this historic event. In past years we’ve been unlucky with the weather. One year we had a hail storm, in May. However, this year we were blessed with a nice sunny afternoon, and the event was well attended by the public.
I wasn’t particularly interested in the kings coronation. I didn’t watch it and tried to avoid all coverage of it on the radio. It wasn’t easy as most channels we’re flooded with it.
The band played two sets at the Langwathby Mayday Event which was well attended as the weather was glorious.
The last week of May was intense as I started my new job. Met lots of amazing people and was made to feel welcome. I have a lot to learn. I need to get my head around the large portfolio of work in the backlog. I need to think how I can best mentor the junior developers to take on some of the backlog. Exciting times.
On the last bank holiday Monday of the month we visited Acorn Bank. We used to go here a lot when the children were younger, so it was nice to revisit the woodland walks to the hidden gypsum mine and working watermill.
After we visited Abbott Lodge to see the Jersey cattle and part take in a high quality homemade Jersey ice cream.
Writing
I wrote up some notes on the comparison of Go data compression implementations including gzip, zstandard, brotli to see which performed the best on Security Audit and Access Accountability Message XML Data Definitions for Healthcare Applications.
I migrated two older articles back to my development blog. These were onscan.js, build a barcode web scanning application and developing a Windows Service in Go.
Banding
We’re continuing to rehearse the march we’ll be playing at the Saddleworth and Oldham Whit Friday Band Contests which takes place on the 2nd of June. We’re playing Caractacus and here is a video of us playing it in the 2019 contest.
Links
- Back/forward cache
- CSS Text balancing with text-wrap:balance
- Core Web Vitals recommendations for 2023
- How (not) to spend $15000 per month with AWS Athena
- SQLite Extensions - providing AES-256 encryption & decryption functions
- Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90%
Reading
Still reading The Immune: A Post Apocalyptic Survival Thriller by David Kazzie.
Getting through War and Peace and It: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age written by Mark Schwartz and making lots of notes.
Listening
Still listening to book 10, Critical Mass of Craig Alanson’s Expeditionary Force series.
Started listening to Season 2 of the Uncanny Podcast. From ghostly phantoms to UFOs, The Battersea Poltergeist’s Danny Robins investigates real-life stories of paranormal encounters.
Watching
By writing down what I watch I can review how much TV I consume. It’s shocking, but here is the list for May: