A good topic for a show I thought. I enjoyed following your thinking and your solution. The audio was good and the background noise was not distracting at all.

I never use full paths to commands, though I can see cases where perhaps I should. Have you been bitten by not doing this in the past? If so I'd like to hear about it.

I wondered why the date program used in the crontab entry was /bin/date whereas it was /usr/bin/date in the main script. Are you working across different OSes or architectures?

Looking forward to more!