Kerry Buckley

Latest key-related incompetence: at work on Tuesday I noticed that my car key was still in my pocket from the weekend (I cycle to work, and don’t usually leave keys in pockets). I needed to use the car on Tuesday night, but figured I’d remember where it was. Then, predictably, I left my jeans in my locker when I got changed to cycle home, so had to get a lift to Felixstowe instead. Pretty sure this is a more-or-less exact repeat of an earlier anecdote … yup.

My latest fox visitor was here again on Friday morning, sleeping on a car roof. I gave him some breakfast, but he had to compete for it with Badger cat.

The BBC show Threads is on iPlayer at the moment, 40 years after its original broadcast. I didn’t watch it in the 80s (we didn’t have a TV) … I knew it was famously bleak, but wasn’t entirely prepared for how it just kept getting relentlessly bleaker. Fortunately the geopolitical situation now is perfectly stable and there’s absolutely no risk of conflict in the middle east or the former Soviet Union spiralling out of control.

I seem to have picked up a cold (or Covid, bird flu etc). The sore throat hit me as I tried to get to sleep on Friday night, and now it’s in the coughing and runny nose stage. I expected that to presage a sub-par performance in the Capel 5 on Sunday, but to my surprise I managed my third-best five mile time. I think the sudden onset of wintry temperatures must have helped.

It took me ages to figure out who one of the team captains (Charles Dundas) on the latest episode of Only Connect reminded me of, but eventually realised it was John Hodgman playing the “I’m a PC” guy from those old Apple ads.

I finally got round to replacing the tyres on the so-called Mini. They’d been popping up intermittently on the MOT as advisories for a while (according to the MOT history, before I bought the car). I paid about a quarter of the cost of the car for the four tyres plus fitting, but fortunately the car was very cheap! I was surprised how much the ride seemed to be improved, but maybe that was my imagination. The old ones still seemed to grip very well, so I’m not sure that has changed much.

I had my flu jab on Monday. No random free blood pressure test this year, and naturally I haven’t followed last year’s advice and made a GP appointment to get it checked properly (also I still need to get round to booking that over-40 health check that I was supposed to have 14 years ago).

I’ve been hearing fox-type noises most nights recently, and spotted a young-looking fox in the garden a couple of times, so I put some food out for him (or her). Not sure whether this one will take food out of my hand like the one that used to frequent the place a few years ago, but it’s fairly bold.

I went down to Totton at the weekend for Phil’s 60th (!) birthday, and was relieved to avoid the traffic nightmares of last time. We went to the pub on Friday night, then dragged Phil out for his annual parkrun at Bartley Park. We were a bit tight for time to walk down there, then discovered that part of the normal route is now unavailable so they’d moved the start, so we had to jog the last bit and arrived with seconds to spare for the start. I managed a half-decent time, finishing in the same 10th place as last time I ran that course (well technically a different course, as it’s gone from two to four laps thanks to a damaged bridge, which also caused the change of start position).

Phil had a party on Saturday night, which was a good chance to catch up with a bunch of people I hadn’t seen for varying amounts of time. In one case we suspected we hadn’t seen each other since I moved away to University in 1988, which feels simultaneously a terrifyingly long time ago and also very recent. A couple of people mentioned that they enjoyed my tales of incompetence on Facebook, and in one case that they missed these weeknotes since leaving Twitter. I reassured him that they were still happening, so hi Gaz if you’ve found your way to the blog!

The weather’s definitely getting more autumnal this week, and wetter. I seem to have been very lucky though – the forecast for Wednesday evening’s Run for Beer was a 95% chance of rain, but we stayed dry, and I just missed showers cycling to work and back on Thursday, then waited for a massive downpour before heading out for a fairly dry run (apart from the puddles). Leaving the house on Saturday morning for parkrun felt the coldest it’s been for a while, but as usual it quickly warmed up.

I finally got round to getting new tyres for the car at the weekend. I wasn’t expecting to notice any difference, but it does feel weirdly smoother. No doubt they’ll outlast the car.

On Sunday I did a fifteen mile “Reservoir Jogs” charity trail run, with three pub stops (plus the one at the end). We may have made a tiny navigational error early on that added a mile or so and saw us going the wrong way round Alton Water, but other than that all went well! Oh, apart from arriving in the first pub at 11.40 when they weren’t licensed to sell alcohol until 12, and having to make do with a coke instead of a pint.

Oh, and I made a tiny dent in the gardening backlog by removing a wheelie-bin’s worth of brambles from what I still laughingly call the lawn. The biggest one was about 15 ft long, and nearly half an inch thick at the big end.

We returned to the pub quiz at Hanks on Wednesday, despite having reservations about the new quizmaster. Sadly it wasn’t any better this time, and we didn’t even win! In fact we were second-to-last, although there were only five teams and only a few points between second and fourth places. We’re going to try a different venue next time.

One of the podcasts I subscribe to is Jokes with Mark Simmons, where Mark talks to another comedian about jokes they can’t get to work, and try to fix them. This week’s guest was Mark Wallace, and after they’d given up on one of the jokes, I was chuffed that they liked my suggestion ?

I had a couple of days off work, but didn’t get anything particularly useful done, as usual. I did spend some time finishing off the small library I’d accidentally ended up writing while shaving a yak related to my stalled attempt to work through GOOS in Elixir. Most of that time was spent on something I ended up removing after deciding it didn’t really add any value, but never mind.

I didn’t really expect the library to interest anyone, but before I’d even told anyone it existed one person stumbled across it and found it useful (and sent a PR)! I got a bit more feedback after announcing it on the Elixir Forum.

I didn’t run the Ipswich Half on Sunday, but did a half-marathon distance easy run with my camera, timed so I could stop after a few miles to support and photograph people coming out of Holywells Park, then headed over the Orwell Bridge, where I stopped again to get some shots looking down on the runners passing underneath. The photos are all on Facebook, but here’s one of the aerial shots.

In what is apparently now a monthly thing, I went to the Fat Cat on Wednesday for a drink with Rupert (my current manager) and Mel (his former manager, now retired). Joe (my former manager) would have been there, but was busy. It was more fun than it sounds!

I discovered this week that I’d somehow managed to fat-finger a config file change back in May and disabled the minimum test coverage limit from our build. Fortunately coverage of new and changed code in that time hadn’t suffered too much, and it took less than a day to remove a few bits of dead code, add some missing test cases and reinstate/update one integrated test that I’d deleted, thinking it was duplicating stuff tested elsewhere (because the coverage didn’t fail when I removed it).

I ran for coffee twice this week, on Thursday and Friday. It was much colder than mornings have been for a while. We stopped for the traditional brief rest at the top of the hill on Friday, and looked over the railway bridge parapet to see a cat nonchalantly walking along one of the rails (fortunately that line’s not electrified, and we have overhead power up here anyway). A train did come past, but by then he’d already wandered off, and it was a goods train anyway so he’d have had plenty of time to hear it coming.

I entered the Dedham 10k at the last minute (well, the day before). I’ve not run it before, and it’s pretty hilly! Didn’t go too badly though.

Looks like Casper made a new friend (or possibly foe) on one of his rare trips into the garden (he still hasn’t figured out the cat flap):

I thought last week’s mouse had made good its escape, although Casper (who still hasn’t worked out the cat flap, so only goes out when I have the door or windows open) brought in a grasshopper, which I caught and returned to the garden. Then in came Ninja with a mouse in his mouth – once again unharmed and extremely energetic (too quick for a photo!), but I did eventually manage to catch it and let it run off outside.

On Saturday I heard a screaming noise from the garden, which turned out to be a frog. I suspect Casper had been tormenting it, but I don’t think they taste nice so they tend to get away relatively unmolested.

Sunday was the Felixstowe Coastal 10, another of our club’s home races. It wasn’t insanely hot like last year, but quite windy (with a headwind in the first and final quarters). I did better than last year, but not spectacularly. I did beat Holly this time though, after she annihilated me last time!

The Tour of Britain was finishing in Felixstowe on the same day, so some of us hung around to watch the cyclists come in. We spent a couple of hours in between sitting on the beach with a few beers, then suddenly the weather took a turn for the worse, and by the time the cycling had wrapped up it was cold and pouring with rain. We retired to the pub for a while before getting the train back to Ipswich. This plan entailed me giving some people a lift in, then leaving my car behind to pick up on Tuesday: in characteristic fashion I realised when I got home that I’d left my house keys in the car, but fortunately I have a spare hidden in the garden for just such an emergency!

Another bank holiday Monday. I’m convinced that at some point one of them will completely pass me by and I’ll wonder why no-one’s working, but I noticed this one coming with a few days to spare. I didn’t do a lot with it though, other than a (not very long) long slow run on my own in the countryside.

It turned out over the long weekend that the cache optimisation I mentioned last week wasn’t quite so premature after all, so I ended up rewriting it again. It’s still simpler than the one before last, but not quite as simplistic as the one I thought we could get away with. Although I also realised we hadn’t enabled pruning of old Oban jobs from the database, which can’t have helped.

I went out for a Bangla curry on Thursday, which ended up with Robin and I heading to the Cricketers afterwards to meet Dave, who was later than planned, leading to consumption of a few more pints than might have been originally planned. A good evening though.

Ninja cat was behaving oddly on Friday morning, hanging around in the lounge and apparently convinced something interesting was under the settee. Then in the evening I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye and looked up to see a mouse creep out from under the TV, then skitter back in again, so that probably explained it. I couldn’t catch it from there, but was woken in the night by sounds of commotion downstairs, and went down to find that Badger cat had caught it. He didn’t seem to have injured it, so I rescued it from him and put it out of the front door. Some time later I was woken again, and he’d obviously managed to find it and bring it back in, and was walking round with it in his mouth. Still apparently unharmed though, and this time I relocated it a bit further away and set the cat flap to in only, which gave it time to escape while I was kept awake by cats bashing at the flap until they remembered how to pull it open and go through anyway. There was no sign of the mouse by the morning, so either it got away or they ate it outside!

On Friday evening a bunch of us from work (and a couple of former colleagues who I hadn’t seen for a while) went to Avid again for some bouldering. Although I thought I hadn’t overdone it, I had all sorts of aches by Sunday. Fortunately (and unsurprisingly) the worst were in my arms, so they didn’t completely scupper the Framlingham 10k. They probably didn’t help though, and neither did the heat. I finished a couple of minutes slower than last year, and if I’m honest I’m not entirely looking forward to racing 60% further at the Coastal 10 next weekend. Nice to be back racing though – the August break seemed to last ages, although somehow I managed not to take advantage, with the fewest miles run of any month so far this year.

On Tuesday I went to Isaacs (which I tend to avoid as a rule) for Stu’s leaving drinks. Another good developer who will be missed from the team, but is no doubt heading on to better things. That meant missing the normal FRR training session, but that worked out OK because …

Wednesday was a club track session, and instead of the usual intervals or whatever it was a one mile time trial challenge, with three different starts for different pace ranges. I ended up somewhere in the back half of the sub-7 wave, finishing in 6:09. That’s 12 seconds slower than my PB, but that was a while ago and I’m happy enough with it considering how tired I was feeling. Then we retired to the local pub for a few recovery pints (or halves in Neil’s case).

To prove the old adage that “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things” (attributed my Martin Fowler to Phil Karlton), I spent all of Friday working on a module called Queue – which used to be a job queue but when we switched our home-grown solution to Oban became just a cache of aspects of job state – fixing bugs where the cached values got out of step with the actual queue. As well as renaming it to QueueState, I ended up reversing some premature optimisation and just rebuilding the data from scratch on queue events (with a bit of batching), rather than trying to change values incrementally forever, which was asking for trouble.

On Sunday we repeated last year’s bike ride out to the Lindsey Rose beer festival, but without the extra pub stops and with much less falling off. We were lucky with the weather, got there in time to get a table, and spent a pleasant afternoon sampling the beers on offer. Unfortunately there were no sumo suits this year, and they also had a Neil surcharge, pricing all the beer at £5 a pint or £3 a half! It ended up being 31 miles of cycling all in all.

At some point this week an old leather belt appeared in my driveway (dropped by a fox, maybe?). The next day it was joined by a dead rat. I disposed of the rat on my way out, but when I got back the belt had disappeared. Now I think about it, a mousetrap briefly appeared then disappeared in roughly the same spot a while ago. Maybe my drive is haunted.

A long-overdue week off work (finally used some of my 2024/5 leave allowance! I tried to use a dash there instead of a slash, and had to fire up the character viewer to find an en dash that didn’t look weird with the old-style numbers that this blog theme uses. I was glad to discover that U+2012 FIGURE DASH is a thing), but annoyed to find that for some reason WordPress mangles it, regardless of whether I paste in the character or insert it as an HTML entity.

Obviously there were a million jobs I needed to do, and obviously I did very few of them. I did manage to do a small amount of gardening (some of the clippings from the top of the front hedge were taller than me, as were some of the weeds from what I’ll optimistically call the lawn). I finally got fed up with my 20-year-old petrol tools, and bought a rechargeable strimmer, pole hedge trimmer and chainsaw from the Ryobi Max Power 36V range. So far I’m very happy with the first two (I’m yet to use the chainsaw).

I also spent quite a while washing washed seven or eight years’ worth of old running shoes (27 pairs), ready to send for reuse/recycling. Then I looked on the site and it said you don’t actually need to wash them. Oh well.

I’d been vaguely thinking about picking up my abandoned attempt to work through GOOS in Elixir. I was using Scenic for the UI, but that was hard to test, so I was wondering whether to backtrack and try using wxWidgets instead, as it has bindings in the Erlang stdlib. That led me into a couple of diversions to learn about Erlang macros and records, how to use the latter from Elixir, and why you can’t call the former, and I ended up porting the code from Arif Ishaq’s tutorial to Elixir. Still didn’t get round to looking at the GOOS stuff though.

On Saturday I went to a barbecue at Jen and Alec’s, with most of the coffee running crowd. I nearly forgot to go altogether, but I’m glad I didn’t because it was a pleasant afternoon/evening.

Nothing very exciting on the running front this week. I ended up cycling to Felixstowe (about 11 miles) for the Tuesday club session, which ended up involving a possibly unprecedented 8.5 miles of running, including some warm-up laps of the tennis courts, running to and from the session location, then a 2?4?6?8?6?4?2 minute pyramid session (there’s that figure dash again!). I’d hoped for a gentle ride home after that, but Dave had other ideas and I ended up being dragged along at an average speed of nearly 17mph.

Innovation days at work this week, which is where we take three days every six weeks to work on (or learn) something not necessarily directly related to normal day-to-day project work, then share it with the team afterwards. I started revisiting an early attempt to replace some graphs in our app with Grafana dashboards (the current graphs were rendered using Chartkick and Chart.js, reading historical data from Postgres, and could be very slow to load). We’ve been duplicating the data into Prometheus for long enough to have a full set of values for the maximum period users can go back, but every time I look into embedding Grafana dashboards into a web app without requiring people to authenticate separately it seems like an unrecommended/unsupported nightmare. This time it finally occurred to me to go for the middle ground, forget about Grafana, and just source the values for the existing graphs from Prometheus instead of Postgres. It wasn’t too hard and has barely changed the UI, but is at least an order of magnitude faster, which has made our users happy.

On Wednesday we had our annual club “Run Bike Run” event, which involves two short runs (totalling four miles) with a six-mile bike ride sandwiched in between. The twist is that there’s no set start time, but a cut-off for the finish, and the winner is the person who set off latest but still got back in time. I was never in any danger of winning (especially having already cycled 11 miles to get there), but did at least time it right to get back inside the cut-off, and finished slightly quicker than last year. Then after stopping for chilli and a beer I had to ride home again – it felt like a high-mileage day, but for a change most of it (38 miles or so, including the commute to work earlier) was on my bike.

I wasn’t expecting much from parkrun, but also didn’t have any excuse not to try, with no racing this weekend. I surprised myself with a 21:30 though, which turns out to be my joint second quickest ever on that course (probably the toughest and hilliest of the various ones Ipswich has had over the years). Then to Colchester Art Centre in the evening to see the Pet Needs Fractured Party People film, plus an acoustic set from the band. Weird to see them in a seated venue, and also to almost immediately spot myself in the crowd on the screen.

On Sunday Holly and I did a long(ish) run along the Gipping to Needham Market. We stopped at Bramford for a paddle, where a dog-walking lady told us we shouldn’t have gone in the river, because someone tested the water quality recently and it was 8. She wasn’t that clear about what the 8 represented though, other than that it should have been zero. There was another delay not far from the end when we realised we’d have to divert out to the road because of a closed “unsafe” bridge over the river, but opted instead to return to the bridge and cross it regardless (it was hardly Temple of Doom level stuff!)

The plan was to grab an ice cream once we reached Needham Lakes before getting the train back, but the queue was a bit long so we decided to pop into the pub for a quick drink instead. By a stroke of good fortune it turned out they had a beer festival going on in the garden, so we accidentally got stuck there for two and a half hours in the sunshine.