Kerry Buckley

Something something fiddling with clocks. Also how is it nearly November, and why is it so mild?

My feet have been a bit sore after Sunday, but still functional: I survived a harder than intended club training session on Tuesday, and a much gentler run for beer (finishing with beer and pizza at the Holbrook Swan) on Wednesday.

I discovered this week that text fragment URLs are a thing – follow the “Sunday” link in the previous paragraph for an example.

I took Friday off work, and finally made my Christmas cake (and the extra small one I somehow agreed to make for Nicola for the past few years).

Having said I’d recovered, parkrun was horrendous. I was late leaving home, and probably tired myself out just cycling up the hill to get there, then started several minutes behind the tail walker. I made my way past some of the slower runners, but was struggling to even maintain a glacial pace, with my heart rate through the roof. Fortunately I felt a bit better on Sunday, and went for a long slow run in the Fynn Valley with Holly, on a gloriously sunny day. We managed to accidentally both turn up in the same T-shirt, which must have looked odd to the people we passed – maybe they thought we’d got really lost and were still running the 2022 (?) Framlingham 10k.

I enjoyed Ludwig on iPlayer (or the BBC, as we used to call it), once I’d managed to suspend my disbelief that someone could walk into their twin brother’s job and no-one would notice. I’ve also started watching The Cleaner, which I’d somehow missed (I think I may have watched one episode of the first series), which is entertainingly bonkers.

I’ve still got a cold, but it’s definitely on its way out. I even ordered some LFTs and used one during the week to tell me it’s probably not Covid. These ones specifically say to swab less than an inch into your nostrils, which was kind of disappointing because I never used to tire of the surprise of just how far back into your head you can poke something (and the accompanying realisation that that old “hammer a nail into your nose” trick isn’t really a trick as such). I still used it (the cold, not the nail thing) as an excuse to work from home all week instead of going into the office though.

Having decided that I should probably use my Steam Deck for more than just playing the arcade version of Tetris on an emulator, I had a look round the Steam Store and found Gris on sale for something like £1.79, with a claim that it was like other games I’ve played (specifically Portal – I can’t remember the other one). It’s nothing like Portal, but it reminds me a bit of Limbo. I don’t know how far through it I am, but I’m enjoying it – it’s a nice peaceful game with beautiful design, and low-stress puzzles of sorts that you just kind of meander through, without any possibility of dying.

The weather’s warmed up a lot after last weekend’s cold snap. I ran for coffee on Thursday morning, and got home dripping in sweat despite not having run fast and just wearing shorts and T-shirt.

I did a bit of greyhound sitting on Friday and Saturday, but apart from giving her her lunch that basically just entailed being in the house while she slept.

Sunday was out club’s annual One Lap to Ultra event – six hours to complete as many 4.5 mile laps as you can (or want to), with everyone bringing in food for the stops in between. I managed seven laps (32 miles) again, but as usual the last couple were something of a slog. A few people did eight, and one lunatic managed a very impressive nine. It was pretty windy in places, but at least the forecast rain never amounted to anything more than a bit of drizzle.

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.