Kerry Buckley

The monster change I’ve been working on on and off at work has finally been merged, and apart from a couple of minor issues seems to be working OK. Basically the system runs about 2,500 different checks against a bunch of different bits of the mobile network (which are mostly just Linux virtual machines or Kubernetes clusters), and each of those checks used to be handled by a specific module, with functions to return the name, description, which type of node to run on, etc. This made sense initially, but as the number of node types we support and the number of tasks we run grew, there were an increasing number that were virtually the same, which led to a lot of delegation to common modules. The new version moves most of this metadata to configuration for each task, with a field pointing to the implementing module. Although initially the modules are the same (with a bunch of functions removed), we can now start collapsing the similar/identical ones, with multiple tasks pointing to the same implementation.

There are also quite a few other tools within the system that refer to tasks, and all those (and all the tests) needed changing to use the task reference instead of the module (although fortunately the way we were serialising the module name to the database meant that that could become the reference so there was no big data migration required). It ended up touching over 6,000 files, and changing in the order of 100,000 lines of code (in a 400,000-line codebase), and took a fair bit of ingenuity with shell scripts, vim macros, AST rewriting and random bits of grep/sed/awk magic to do as much of the donkey work as possible. I’m glad it’s done!

Another current/ex colleague Fat Cat meetup on Wednesday, this time adding Dave, another of my former bosses. We had a good rambling conversation covering all sorts of weird things, much like the old Friday Pub days.

I’d ordered a Pet Needs T-shirt on Bandcamp Friday (not because I need any more T-shirts, but because it’s a good way to support the band) and it arrived with a giant Post-It note on which front man Johnny had scrawled “Cheers Kerry!” with a signature, which was a nice touch.

On Saturday evening I rode out to Brantham again – fortunately not to run five miles again, but rather to have a few beers and congratulate/laugh at the mad fools finishing the SVP100 and 50.

My Sunday long run was short by comparison to that, and on my own this week, with a loop out through Witnesham and Grundisburgh. This took me through not one but two “bull in field” sections, but on the plus side while skirting round the edge of one of them to give the cattle a wide berth I spotted a kingfisher by the stream (I think this is only the second time I’ve ever seen one; the first being in the 1970s!).

The two young foxes are still visiting now and again, although it’s probably about the time when they’ll be heading out to find their own territories. Here’s one of them doing a big old yawn to show that he’s not bothered by the cats that were lounging around nearby.

Classic British summer weather now the schools have broken up, with a fair amount of rain spread across the week. Somehow it seems to have all fallen while I was at home, and it’s been dry whenever I was outside. This surely can’t last.

Tuesday night’s club session was what’s become the annual Slow Paul birthday party, with us all running cross-country-style hilly laps of a course marked out in his field, before recovering with beer, hog roast and cake.

On Wednesday the team from work had another volunteering day, this time at the Food Museum (formerly the Museum of East Anglian Life) at Stowmarket. The weather forecast was good, so I decided to give my new bike a proper debut and cycle there (15 miles) and back (16 miles, because there was a very strange road junction that funnelled me to the A14 roundabout so I ended up coming back a different, more scenic, but slightly hillier route). The bike behaved itself, and it took me just over an hour in each direction.

The morning’s volunteering involved clearing undergrowth from a patch of ground on the edge of the site ground and laying bark chips round hedging plants. Then we walked down to the Willow Tree for lunch, before returning to sand down the Settling House (a 19th century auctioneer’s hut from Bury St Edmunds) ready for it to be painted. We also got a chance to see some lambs, piglets, goats and Suffolk Punch horses being fed.

I got back just in time to hop back on my other bike and nip down to Kesgrave to give blood (I’d carefully picked a donation session halfway home from work at 5.30pm, which would have turned out better had I been in the office). That went smoothly (armful number 65), but by the time I’d got home and made dinner I was wiped out!

I’d recovered the use of my legs well enough to join Friday morning’s Run for Coffee, then surprised myself by taking another minute and a half off my time on the new Christchurch Park parkrun course. I even managed to do a small amount of gardening on Saturday afternoon, although I think things are still growing several times more quickly than I’m cutting them back.

Sunday was long run day again, with an 18 mile loop up the Gipping Path to Claydon, then back via Akenham and Westerfield. That stupid new giant footbridge over the railway at Westerfield is still closed, but Plotaroute has sudddenly started routing over it again and the footpath diversion sign that used to be on the approaching path has gone, so once again we got right up to it before realising we had to turn back. Someone had leant a pallet against the fence to climb over, but the prospect of piercing my foot on a spike didn’t appeal. At that point we were both feeling worn out, and pretty much out of water, so we were “forced” to stop at the Railway for a pint (although only of lime and soda in Holly’s case) to refresh ourselves for the final three miles.

Still no hot water. I’m getting used to it, to be honest – even attempting these cold showers that seem to be so trendy these days. Additional delay caused by a couple of days’ back-and-forth with the person who was recommended to do the plumbing, only to eventually discover that he’s a heating engineer and doesn’t really do that kind of stuff. He recommended someone who is a plumber, but who is yet to get back to my message. Obviously this could all have been accomplished much quicker with phone calls, but that’s only for dire emergencies.

I bought a mildly-damaged but working customer-returned dehumidifier from eBay, and have had it running continuously while trying to keep the kitchen as closed off as possible while still letting the cats get to the flap and their food. Unusually, it has the water tank on the top, fed via a pump that comes on when (I assume) a small internal tank is full. This means that by simply adding a length of aquarium air hose it sends the water straight into the sink so no need to keep emptying it. It’s keeping the kitchen at around 35% humidity (and warm), so hopefully the damp’s slowly being drawn out of the floor.

Wednesday was FRR’s Run Bike Run event, a club social in Felixstowe that involves running about 1.5 miles, riding 6, then running another 2.5 (with the catch that there’s a cutoff time, and the “winner” is the last person to start that gets in in time). Then we all sat around for a bit eating sine excellent veggie chilli courtesy of Nicola and Sally, and I drank the beers I’d brought with me. As usual, I made life difficult for myself by cycling there and back from Ipswich, so once you add in my commute to work I ended up riding nearly 40 miles by the end of the day.

With the long string of Friday races finally having come to an end, and in fact nothing really happening until September, I didn’t really have an excuse to take it easy at parkrun this week. The plan was to just go a bit quicker though, as we’re still only five weeks into the new Christchurch Park event, so I can keep getting course PBs for a while. Unfortunately I’d put the wrong numbers into my spreadsheet, and convinced myself I needed to beat an average pace of 7:54/mile. I succeeded, but it felt tougher than it seemed like it should, given that I’d basically jogged round the previous four times. It turned out I’d actually gone about 2½ minutes quicker. Oops.

On Sunday I went for a long slow run round a loop out to the imaginary local village of Culpho with Holly, then as it stayed dry I finally took my new bike out for a quick spin. Surprisingly to no-one, it turns out that a carbon bike with fancy gears is significantly quicker than the fixed gear gravel bike that I’ve been pretty much exclusively using for years! I rode about 8 miles, mostly on country lanes, in half an hour without incident.

According to the scramble/timer app on my phone, I’ve now solved my puzzle cube (not technically a Rubik’s Cube because that’s a trademark) over 5,000 times. I’m sure this is perfectly fine and normal. I’ve also discovered that I struggle to solve anything other than a speed cube (I got a comically tiny one for a couple of quid from AliExpress, and can’t do it at all), because I rely on muscle memory and my hands completely fail to have any idea what to do if they get slowed down.

Still no hot water. The “trace and access” people came round on Friday, and confirmed that it’s leaking from below where the pipe comes up out of the floor under the sink (every time I turn the water back on the leak gets stronger!). Also as suspected, the fix (not covered by insurance) will be to get a plumber to run a new pipe and cap off the one that goes under the concrete. Drying everything out fully and reinstating it would be covered by insurance, but would involve ripping up the floor tiles and removing half the kitchen units and worktop. I can’t face the disruption of going through all that, so I’m going to opt for just running a dehumidifier for a while then getting the plaster and skirting boards sorted later.

I still haven’t ridden my new bike yet either – my new shoes and road cleats arrived on Friday, just in time for the wet weather to set in.

Tuesday’s club session involved lots of short flat-out sprint efforts (probably good as I generally don’t do enough anaerobic training). Strava decided to troll me with this summary afterwards:

I didn’t cycle there this week, which was a relief because of both the wind and the state of my legs afterwards.

We ran another unconference at work on Wednesday, with some interesting conversations around stuff like monoliths vs microservices and “how much testing is too much?” (probably more than you’re doing).

A second consecutive training night on Wednesday, with the monthly track session returning after a hiatus during Friday 5 season. It was “broken kilometres”, with sets of 1×400m, 2×200m and 4×100m efforts, with 30s static recovery between each effort. During the final all-out 100m effort I just about managed, for a few seconds, to reach Kipchoge’s average marathon pace!

Last Friday race for a while, with the Twilight 10k. It’s not the greatest of courses (several 180° turns round cones), but it’s nice to race through the town centre. A record turnout this year too, with over 1300 finishers (a bit big for my taste). I guess that makes my 211th place reasonably respectable, even if I continue to get slower year by year!

I made the mistake of watching Fall, as it was on iPlayer. It does a reasonable job of building tension, but hardly anything that happens makes any sense. I can’t decide whether they just didn’t bother talking to anyone with a basic knowledge of how climbing equipment (or physics) works, or whether they knew it was nonsense but felt that injecting any degree of realism would spoil the plot in some way.

Speaking of iPlayer, I’ve also started watching the US version of Ghosts. So far it looks as though it might live up to the original, which is no mean feat.

I remembered something else that happened, then immediately forgot again. Clearly getting old.

I forgot to mention last week that just before I left Ekiden on Sunday I bit into one of my home-made ginger nuts, and felt a crown detach itself from one of my teeth (if I remember correctly, it’s the one from about 20 years ago). I got an appointment with the dentist on Tuesday, and he poked around for a few seconds before (unsurprisingly, after being told at my last checkup that both crowns had decay underneath them) telling me that it wasn’t really salvageable. The options were basically some kind of complicated procedure involve cutting down into the gum that might not work anyway, extracting it, or leaving it for now and extracting it if and when it became an issue. I went for the third option. That cost me £30, which is a pretty nice hourly rate if you can get it.

For some reason I kept getting adverts on Instagram for some fancy hydroponic herb garden thing. I didn’t buy one, but did order something similar, less fancy-looking and about a tenth of the price from AliExpress. I found some out-of-date seeds, and planted basil, coriander, a couple of types of chilli and tomato. Most of them have germinated, so fingers crossed. The main one I’m hoping works is the basil, because whenever I buy it from the supermarket (either cut or as a plant) it generally lasts about a day before going weird and inedible. For some reason while I had the kitchen door open in the heat a grasshopper decided to take up residence under the light.

On Friday I poured a drink of water and was shocked at how warm it was. I initially thought it was just from not running the tap enough, but I turned the tap on again, and for the first few seconds it was definitely *way* hotter than it had any right to be. I tried the hot tap, and it was instantly at full temperature, which isn’t right as I have a combi boiler and it takes a while to fire up on demand. I went to check the boiler, and sure enough, it was running even with the tap off. Then I realised that an area of the kitchen floor was unnaturally warm under my feet.

I’m assuming that the hot water pipe has sprung a leak, and it’s probably been slowly leaking for a while, until today the flow reached a high enough rate to trigger the boiler. This would also explain why the walls and skirting board recently started mysteriously showing signs of damp. The problem is that the pipes are in concrete, under travertine tiles.

For now I’ve turned off the boiler and the inlet feed (and briefly turning it back on for long enough to shower), and am waiting for the insurance people to get back to me, presumably on Monday.

Last time I broke a tooth and had to turn a water supply off in the same week was in mid March 2020, so if these things really do come in threes then we’re all in trouble

Friday evening was the Brantham 5 mile “fun run” (kind of an unofficial extra Friday 5). With the prospect of traffic nightmares from a combination of the Orwell Bridge roadworks and Ed Sheeran playing at Portman Road, I was talked into cycling there (13 miles or so each way). Considering that, the race didn’t go too badly, although the heat made the fairly hilly course even harder than usual.

With all this cycling I’d been thinking of getting a road bike as an alternative to my fixed-gear gravel bike. I was watching a few second hand ones on eBay, and put in a bid for one after getting a “finishing soon” notification while sitting outside the pub after Ekiden. Fortunately when it arrived everything seems to be in excellent condition, and it’s a pretty high spec for what I paid for it. I’m yet to ride it, because I wasn’t organised enough to sort myself out with road shoes before it turned up.

On Sunday Holly and I finally managed to run to Felixstowe, after last year’s nettle fiasco. We took a road route this time, to avoid a repeat of that trauma, and by the time we got there we both had tired, but unstung legs. The plan was to stop for chips, ice cream and/or beer before getting the train back, but Holly had to rush back for a parcel delivery so we only had time for a quick paddle and a rushed pint in the Grosvenor on the walk back up to the station. We even found an outlying hare (I think there are two in Felixstowe, but not sure where the other is).

And yes, we accidentally wore matching vests again.

When I got home I was sitting in the kitchen, and looked up to see a sparrow hawk (I think) sitting on the pile of logs in the back garden. It flew off before I could get a photo though.

Third week in a row that I’ve been talked into cycling to Felixstowe (about ten miles each way) for training night on Tuesday. Not sure whether it adds to or detracts from the running effort!

Another month must have passed, because it was time for ex-colleagues Fat Cat meet-up again. Rupert, Mel and Tony this time, and it was warm enough to sit outside in a T-shirt (although only just, by the time we left).

The final Friday 5 of the series this week, at Great Bentley. I ended up 5th in my age category (out of 18 who’d completed at least four races out of six – the best four score), which I guess isn’t bad. Well done to club-mates Steve, who took the gold in my category with a perfect set of age group first places, and Holly, who finished fourth in hers, missing out on the podium by a single point.

The local parkrun was off this week because of an event in the park, so a few of us cycled out to Alton Water to do that one instead (and still somehow managed to end up in the Ipswich ’Spoons for breakfast!).

We cycled out in the same direction again on Sunday, for the Ekiden Relay. I had the opening 7.2k leg for FRR (it’s an odd distance because 7.2+5+10+5+10+5=42.2, or a marathon), and managed a not-too-shabby 30:44. The “supervet” (50+) team I was in managed to come third in that category, although I’m not claiming much credit for that. Our vets (40+) beat us again. Then I ran a 5k leg for the Coffee Runners’ social team, which went a bit wrong when I saw the previous runner go past and everyone told me he still had a lap to go, but it turns out that wasn’t the case. When when I wasn’t there for the changeover they called out on the PA, but he decided to start another lap rather than waiting and I had to intercept him partway round, meaning I only did about 2.3 miles.

The weather held for most of the day, but like last year there was a downpour late on. We managed to time our ride home to avoid getting too soaked this time though. Well I say home, obviously it was actually to the Cricketers first.

Over a week late this week (last week?). Oops.

A long-overdue week off work, with nothing planned other than some balance of relaxation and tackling a small fraction of the ever-present list of jobs round the house. The first two of those were to chop up another two brown bins’ worth of garden waste ready for when they collected them on Wednesday, and cut my front hedge, which was starting to encroach on the pavement. Fortunately I did them in the opposite order, meaning that the hedge clippings filled the bins, providing the perfect excuse to shirk the other task. I also managed to clean the bathroom and a few other bits and bobs, and also do the chopping-up and bin-filling once the bins had been emptied.

On Thursday I managed to join a Run for Coffee for the first time in a while, then cycled out to the Red Lion at Martlesham for a colleague’s leaving do. The food was OK, but I wasn’t that impressed when I went to the bar to try to get a second pint, the pumps pretty much went off one by one, and someone was despatched to the cellar to “check the gas”. After waiting a while, I asked them to bring it over if they finally got things working again, but it never arrived, and no-one ever checked whether I might want something else instead.

Later that day I looked up to see not one but two foxes watching me. They looked quite young, so I guess there’s a family of them somewhere nearby.

Somehow I managed to get Thursday’s Wordle in two, despite not getting a single letter in my first guess.

Wordle 1,469 2/6*
?????
?????

Stowmarket Friday 5 this week, then Christchurch Park parkrun #2 (and a Wetherspoons breakfast for the second consecutive week), and the Newmarket 10k on Sunday. The latter was warm again, and no sausages as prizes this year. We stopped for some lunch at the Willow Tree in Stowmarket, and thanks to the late arrival of Dave and Gripper, who’d cycled to Newmarket for the race, ended up having four pints. It would almost have been rude not to, with Jaipur going for £2.29 a pint. Then barely time for a shower before heading over to Rob and Jo’s for a barbecue.

Nights are drawing in, etc. Also, a bit hot, innit?

Despite having already cycled to work and back, I got talked into also riding to Felixstowe for the club training night on Tuesday. A fairly gentle 13mph with Neil on the way there, but joined by Dave for the return journey after an hour of running, which entailed an increase to 16mph to keep up.

I thought at one point this week that Casper had finally learned to use the cat flap, but no, turns out I’d just left a window open all day.

Back on the Friday 5s this week, with a very warm one at Bury St Edmunds. Nowhere near as warm as it was there three years ago, mind. I ended up finishing one second slower than last year, which I’ll take as consistency.

Ipswich parkrun finally returned (kind of) this week, after five months’ absence. It’s now permanently in Christchurch Park, with a new name and starting at event #1. Inevitably the return saw a lot of interest, with 696 finishers. The course isn’t as good as the old one (and is tougher, with a long uphill slog and short steep downhill rather that the other way round), but will probably grow on us. Especially if the temperature drops a bit!

We celebrated the event’s return with a visit to the Cricketers for breakfast, and – because drinking at 10.30am is almost mandatory in a Wetherspoon’s – three pints. I’m blaming Dave for the third.

On Sunday (still hot) Holly and I decided to run round the “Hop to It” hare art trail that arrived in town this weekend. I think we got them all, despite thinking there was one missing in the Buttermarket, possibly related to a cordoned-off section under a broken pane of roof glass. We eventually decided to revisit on our way back towards Christchurch Park, and asked in the event’s pop-up shop, only to discover that the missing one was actually right in front of our eyes in the shop. In fairness, it was a different shape to the others, and we’d assumed it wasn’t one of the main ones. Oh yeah, and we also accidentally turned up in matching vests again.

I had a friend’s son doing work experience with me this week, which meant not only that I had to try to keep him occupied and not bored out of his mind, but also that I had to go into the office on all five days like it was 2019 or something. And get there before 9am to boot. I think it went OK though, or else he was too polite to say otherwise.

Friday was Neil the Vicar’s birthday, and a break in the Friday 5s, so a few of celebrated by running (slowly) round the route of the Ipswich race that used to be in the series but stopped just before my time. Then on to ’Spoons, naturally.

Kesgrave parkrun again this week, for what could theoretically be the last time, with Ipswich having announced a long-awaited return next Saturday, with a new name and permanent venue and starting again from event one. We used to use Christchurch Park before the pandemic for a few months every winter to let Chantry recover, but it remains to be seen how well a popular town centre park copes with hundreds of runners in the summer months, particularly as the new course has reversed direction and features a headlong dash down the big hill through the middle of the park.

We did another social run round the old Chantry course on Sunday (no reports this week of anyone being told they shouldn’t be there because “parkrun was banned”, but that might just be because Neil wasn’t there to aggressively wish people good morning!). I’ve been neglecting long runs since the marathon, so forced myself to run there instead of cycling, and joined Holly for a few extra miles before coming home. Thanks to our amazing navigation skills and sense of direction, we managed to accidentally add nearly a mile by looping back on ourselves and suddenly realising that the path we’d emerged on looked very familiar!

On Monday we had the “A14 Track Challenge” at Northgate. This is an inter-club 5k challenge which formerly included Ipswich Jaffa, Stowmarket Striders and Bury Pacers, and was extended to include Felixstowe Road Runners this year (the name derives from the fact that those four places are all on the path of the A14). I was in the middle (17–22 minute) race, with tired legs from the Framlingham Friday 5, and managed 21:10. Then Dave, Robin, Neil and I decamped to the Cricketers for a few beers, as is traditional.

On Wednesday I arrived at work in plenty of time for my 9am call, then the following thoughts went through my mind:

• Oh, I’ve brought the wrong keys again.
• I’ll just wrap the lock round the top tube so it looks locked.
• Wait, that means I don’t have my locker key either, and my jeans are in there.
• I guess I can just wear my bike shorts all day.
• Oh no, my laptop’s in there too.
• Looks like I’m cycling home again.

Sudbury Friday 5 this week – 45s quicker than Fram, but half a minute slower than Kirton.

On Sunday I went out on my own for a bit of trail running, and I thought I’d check the condition of some of the paths from last year’s horrendous nettle run. The first bit wasn’t too bad, then heading over to the bit that had been on the return journey that day (I didn’t cross the A14 this time) I bumped into a man out walking, who told me it was completely overgrown. He wasn’t wrong, but I managed to bash my way through with a stick, then hop a fence and follow the field edge again. Emerging at the other end I met him again, and he was impressed that I’d found a way through!

On Sunday Dave and Sally invited a few of us round for dinner, which made a nice change and was a lovely evening.