Kerry Buckley What’s the simplest thing that could possibly go wrong?

On Tuesday we had a first aid demo/practice at work, organised by Oli and Leon, who’ve recently joined the on-site ambulance team. Good to get a refresher on CPR and how to use an AED, plus a few other bits and bobs. The best bit was when Faye managed to have a coughing fit just as they were talking about how to treat someone who was choking, although she was very insistent that she didn’t need to be Heimliched.

Lots of people were skipping Tuesday’s training session in favour of watching the football, and I ended up joining Rob, Jo and Neil for an easy local six miles straight after work, before cycling down to the Plough to watch Ipswich get beaten by Arsenal (although they did at least pull it back to 4-2).

On Wednesday I got to play at being an AA HomeStart man, by cycling over to Jane’s with my battery booster, to rescue her car that had suddenly developed a flat battery. Also a chance to get nearly knocked over by being leant on by Sky the greyhound.

On Saturday I got talked into joining Dave and family for a second breakfast in the Cricketers after parkrun. Gary and Maria had already started walking home, but we caught them up and they joined us too. Then in the afternoon I picked up Maria and we drove over to Felixstowe to help set up for Sunday’s Coastal 10 race. I think this is the fourth year I’ve put the signs out for the Landguard end of the route, and I’m getting quite good at remembering where they all go now.

Then on Sunday it was time for the actual race. As usual I wasn’t expecting to do particularly well, but in the end I was within half a minute of my PB time, and as that was four years ago it was my best age grade for the distance. I managed to keep up with Maria for the first few miles, then once she’d left me behind I slowly caught and eventually passed Dom and Robin. Ryan had a great day, finishing in second place, with team-mates Haydn and Neil (not that one) in third and fourth. Obviously that got us the men’s team prize, and Maria and two of the Sams also got us the ladies’, so a good day for the club on home soil. After an inordinate amount of faffing (and a bit of helping with clearing up) we stopped at the Falcon for a couple of post-race beers (the Half Moon was mysteriously shut), then most of us ended up in the Cricketers again later.

Is it maybe starting to almost feel like autumn? We’ve finally had a bit of rain, I’ve worn jeans instead of shorts a few times, and there was even one night when I closed my bedroom windows, although that soon proved premature and the indoor temperature even with them open again hasn’t really dropped below 20°C. Ninja cat has occasionally deigned to come and purr on my lap a couple of times, but is still spending 99% of his time hiding in the garden.

Much like rural buses, having had the first race for ages on Sunday, another one turned up a day later. This was the Bury St Edmunds leg of the A14 track challenge, which is where a few local clubs get together for 5000m on the track, with three races through the evening for people running different times. Once again I’d entered the middle (20–23 minute) one, so after cheering on some or our faster runners in the first one (Ryan came third, in about 16 minutes, having won the previous day’s 10k) I slogged my way round. I ended up only being 19s slower than last year, but more importantly after being out-sprinted for the line by Robin last year I turned the tables this time! A few of us had taken the train there, with our bikes, in order to facilitate an evening in the rather fancy Bury Spoons.

What with tired legs and the aforementioned weather changes I drove to Felixstowe instead of cycling for Tuesday’s training session for the first time in a while, although Neil put us to shame by cycling on his own. I also didn’t run very fast. We did cycle to Alton Water parkrun on Saturday though, to join Mark for his 500th parkrun (still another year and a bit before I get there).

I took Friday off work, and intended to hack down the overgrown bit of hedge at the side of the house. I made a start, but filled both brown bins with stuff I had to cut down just to reach the hedge. Oh well, they’re being collected on Wednesday, so I’ll do a bit more after that. Actually, now I think of it, that might have been Saturday, in which case I can’t remember how I frittered away my day off.

I went for a long (well, not that long) slow run on my own on Sunday, and a bee flew into my eye. It stung my eyelid, but I must have scraped it off quickly enough because it didn’t come up in a lump and stopped hurting quite quickly. Then later we had another of those Sunday “who fancies going to the Cricketers for some food and a couple of pints?” evenings that ends up with us leaving at about midnight.

Late again, mainly due to a busy weekend. I don’t remember much of interest happening during the actual week though.

On Saturday I was cutting it a bit fine leaving home for parkrun, then as I got to the bottom of the hill about a quarter of a mile away my rear wheel suddenly started rubbing (or so I thought), then stopped going round at all. I didn’t really have time to look at it, so quickly locked it to a handy nearby rack and ran the rest of the way, dropping my bag and reaching the start line with about a second to spare (not that it mattered, as I wasn’t planning to go quickly). Then I had to carry the bike about a mile and a half home.

Once I’d recovered enough to have a look at it, I realised that it wasn’t the wheel that was stuck, but the bottom bracket (easily confused with a fixed gear). It turned out that it had somehow unscrewed itself and locked against the crank, which should have been easily fixed, but when I tightened it up the chainring was fouling the chain stay. After a lot of faffing about I realised that the bottom bracket was fitted the wrong way round, with the longer taper on the left – I can only assume the previous owner put it together that way, then unscrewed it a bit to stop it hitting the frame. It all works OK again, but now I have to find some red and white paint to touch up where it scratched the stay.

Sunday racing returned this week, in the shape of the Framlingham 10k. It was its usual hilly self, and I dragged myself round in only five seconds longer than last year, which is an improvement if you squint through the lens of age grading.

Back to the subject of bike maintenance, I bought a bleed kit for the brakes on the Grinduro (see last week), and on Sunday afternoon I successfully bled the front brake. Unfortunately when it came to the rear, the bleed nipple on the caliper was seized solid, and defeated a variety of tools. I managed to get some pad clearance back anyway, by opening the filling screw on the brake lever reservoir and pushing the pistons back in, displacing some excess fluid. So that bike is now rideable again, taking the total up to five (six if you count the terrible but more-or-less working mountain bike).

I was just getting ready to take the bike out for a spin to check that it all worked when I was informed that various people were heading to the Cricketers for food and beer before they all went to the Corn Exchange to see an Iron Maiden tribute band. I didn’t join them for the gig, but it would have been rude to skip the drinking too, so I combined that with the test ride, heading straight there, but adding a few miles (some on unpaved tracks) on the way home. The wheels I built seem to work properly, and even got the Solomon seal of approval for appearance and trueness.

So, remember last week when I said “I managed to get that urgent bit of work on an old project done in plenty of time for Friday’s deadline. I haven’t checked whether it worked in anger (I’m not paid for out-of-hours support!) but I don’t see why it wouldn’t have”? Well it turns out it didn’t. I checked on Monday morning, and it had failed to do anything over the weekend. I never quite got to the bottom of why – I added some extra debug tracing to help figure out what was wrong, but after deploying those changes it mysteriously started working perfectly (no doubt there’s a somebody’s law that covers this kind of situation – the watched pot of the software development world).

I thought I might get an easy time at club training on Tuesday, because a lot of other (faster) people had gone to the football instead. It didn’t quite work out that way, because some even faster people had still turned up and I ended up in that group instead! I also had to cycle there and back on my own, thought I’d try to push the pace a bit and ended up with my fastest ever ten miles (according to Strava) on the ride home. There might have been a bit of a tailwind, to be fair, but I was only 1mph slower on the way there.

In other bike-related news I finally got the newly-built wheels on the purple bike, along with a new chainring and chain. It all looks good apart from the fact that with new rotors and pads the brake calipers don’t seem to want to release enough to let the wheels rotate freely. I tried grinding a little bit of material off the back of the pads, but that still wasn’t enough – next step will be to try bleeding them and hope that leaves the pistons sitting all the way back.

A minor brag I forgot to mention the other week – while watching episode two of the current series of Only Connect, I finally achieved the dream of shouting out the answers to every missing consonant question before either team hit their buzzer :-)

On Friday I got the train to Stowmarket (only just up the road) to see New Model Army at the John Peel Centre. Seemed crazy for them to be playing such a small venue – last time I saw them was for two sold-out nights at the Camden Roundhouse, which has 13 times the capacity. Apparently it was a combination of their bassist Ceri (wrong spelling!) Monger being a local and the band, like so many others, having been championed by Peel in their early days. Anyway, it was a great night.

After parkrun on Saturday a bunch of us cycled out to the beer festival at the Low House/King’s Head in Laxfield, which is a lovely unique old pub (notable for having a taproom and no bar). We got there just as it was starting to rain, were able to stay dry while we were there, then took advantage of a break in the rain to head back to Framlingham where the Railway Inn was also having a beer festival. We stayed there while it rained some more, then stopped off at the Chequers in Kettleburgh, where we sat out yet more rain before finally heading home pretty much all in the dry (although there were some massive puddles to negotiate as we were nearly home). Just under 50 miles all told (plus a few cycling to parkrun and back earlier), although a few people still had a bit further to go once we got back to Ipswich.

On Sunday, after going for long run with Holly, I got talked into joining Rob, Jo and Neil in the Plough to watch the football (Ipswich away to Manchester United, with a 4.30pm kickoff). It started well, with Ipswich going 1–0 up as I arrived, but ended up with a 5–2 loss. Afterwards we adjourned to the clubhouse (Cricketers) for some food, and accidentally kept drinking until nearly midnight.

In an annoying turn of events at work, I’ve suddenly been asked to make some changes to an app that I wrote about ten years ago, and which was last touched about five years ago (it’s been happily working away in the interim). The catch is that there’s an actual legal deadline for getting the changes live, and it’s about a fortnight after they asked me to start working on it.

In theory it ought to be an easy change, but as you might imagine it’s using ridiculously out of date dependencies, and just getting it to build was quite a struggle. Rather than trying to work my way through a tedious upgrade process, I ended up creating a new Phoenix project (LiveView! No more NPM!) with the latest versions of Erlang, Elixir and all the libraries. I copied the business logic code back in, got those tests passing again, and finally rewrote the small web front end from scratch using LiveView instead of controllers, templates and channels. I more or less got a working CI build going, so now I just need to sort out building and deploying it, plus making the actual enhancement.

On Wednesday we had the annual club Two Rivers handicap race (Landguard Point to Felixstowe Ferry). When we got there Landguard was heaving with Eclipse watchers (not sure why everyone felt the need to go somewhere special to see the sun, which is famously in the sky and pretty much visible from anywhere). Maria had brought some eclipse glasses, so we got to have a peek every now and then, and marvel at a temporary slight reduction in light levels (probably quite a big reduction in reality, but eyes are pretty good at compensating). After the race people fragmented a bit, but our little group ended up in the White Horse, which I think I’ve only been to briefly once or twice before, and always on Christmas pub crawls. Seemed like a friendly place, and they had some folky-type live music going on.

I went down to Totton for the weekend, for Tim’s annual birthday barbecue. 99% of the journey there on Friday went OK, then I spent about an hour queuing in the 1.5 miles between junctions 3 and 2 of the M27, because everyone was forced to leave at 2 because the A31 was closed after a big fire, and I dutifully sat in the left lane, which seemed to come of very much the worst when it came to merging. Anyway, I got to Phil’s eventually, and after getting some chips for dinner we cycled to the New Forest Inn to meet Neil and Jeremy (deliberately) and John and Erica (by coincidence) for a few beers.

On Saturday we walked down to Bartley Park parkrun. Normally I just jog round parkrun chatting these days, but I had a streak to maintain at this venue of having finished in under 22 minutes and in the top ten all three times. I managed to do so for a fourth time, although it was hard work in the heat. In the afternoon Phil got his Land Rover out for a potter through the forest – it’s always funny how friendly everyone is to people driving round in a 60-odd-year-old vehicle with no roof or seatbelts, and with the windscreen folded down!

Saturday evening was the actual barbecue, which as usual is a chance to see people I haven’t seen since the previous year, although a few of the usual suspects were on holiday and missed it. Normally part of the fun is trying to destroy Tim’s chimenea by stuffing as much wood in at once as possible, but this year we sensibly skipped that, what with it being plenty warm enough already, and having been warned by the completely inappropriate use of the government emergency alert system that things might be apt to go on fire.

The journey home on Sunday was a bit quicker (just some traffic around Heathrow), and I had time to go for a little easy run when I got home before cycling into town for Dave’s birthday curry at the Sonar Bangla (followed of course by a couple of extra pints at the Cricketers).

Not sure whether I’m coming down with something, or it’s just the lingering effects of the blood donation, but running has felt really tiring for the past week or so, and my heart rate has been through the roof at what ought to have been an easy pace. I did get a chance for a refreshing dip in the sea before cycling home after Tuesday’s training session though.

The front brake on my old yellow bike (not to be confused with my new yellow bike) had been making an annoying noise, and I wondered whether it was related to the wheel being a fraction out of true after I replaced the spoke as part of the process of getting it back on the road. I took the excuse to switch the wheels for the Shimano ones from the other bike, that I’d replaced with carbon ones. In the process of doing that, I found that the spring on the front caliper (a nearly new Ultegra unit) wasn’t working, and the arm that the cable pulls basically just flaps around. I’m not really sure what’s going on there, but for now I’ve put the Tektro calipers that originally came with the bike back on.

I rode the (new yellow) commuter to work for the first time on Wednesday, having received the cheap DI-2 charging cable I’d order from AliExpress and charged the shifter battery up. Everything seemed to work fine, but on the way home it stopped changing gear, leaving me to pedal the last couple of miles in a low gear. Fortunately there was a massive headwind, so I wouldn’t exactly have been zipping along anyway. I assumed it hadn’t charged properly, but after I got home it seemed to work fine, so maybe a loose cable or something. I can’t help thinking a normal gear cable would be less hassle.

The correct sized spokes for the wheels I’m building for the Grinduro arrived (second time lucky), and I’ve got the wheels loosely laced up now. Just the difficult bit of tensioning them all up and getting the wheels true and correctly dished to go!

Last week my bread machine paddle seized up. I had a dig around in the garage to find my previous machine in the hope of cannibalising the bearing assembly from the pan, but it turns out they’ve changed the design. I managed to find one online for a bit less than Panasonic were charging, and now it’s fitted and all working well again. In the interim I tried baking a loaf the traditional way, with a tin in the oven, but it sunk horribly and I ended up breaking it up and putting it on the garage roof for the gulls. I’m not sure quite why I can make pizza, baguettes, naans and bread rolls and they’re always fine, but whenever I try a loaf it’s a disaster. I did make the dough in the mixer instead of kneading it by hand, so maybe that’s the problem.

Having completed my latest Buffy rewatch, I’ve now started on Veronica Mars. I’ve never seen it before, but it keeps getting praised on all the Buffy podcasts I’ve listened to (SlayerFest ’98 this time), so I thought I’d give it a go. Really enjoying it so far, although it took me a while to be able to tell any of the rich white boys apart.

I gave blood on Tuesday afternoon (donation number 67). As usual, they warned me to avoid strenuous activity for 24 hours, and as usual I ignored them, by cycling another 25 miles and running five during the rest of the day. Although the official advice is actually a lot more measured and reasonable.

As I set off to ride to work I briefly wondered why my headphones started cutting out, then realised that I’d completely forgotten to pick up my rucksack.

Looks like some kind of solitary wasps (mud daubers?) have been nesting in my lounge window frame:

I thought I was ready to start rebuilding the wheels for my purple bike. Originally I was just planning to replace the hubs, but after taking the old wheels apart (which turned out to have been a waste of time) I realised that one of the spoke holes on one wheel had ripped through, so I ordered new rims too. I started lacing the front wheel up, then when I went to fit the third group of spokes I realised that the ones I’d bought were far too short (this is my first stab at wheel building, otherwise it would have been obvious from the get-go). This wasn’t entirely my fault – I’d based my spoke calculations on the effective rim diameter quoted on the product page from the retailer I bought the rims from, not noticing that they’d just included one set of specs for both the 650B and 700C versions. Naturally the figure was the one for the wrong variant. I’m now waiting for another bunch of – hopefully correct – spokes to arrive before I can try again. These basic wheels have already cost more than the fancy (but admittedly very cheap) carbon ones I got for the road bike.

Another post-parkrun Cricketers visit on Saturday for second breakfast, then Robin got wind of a beer festival at Ipswich Transport Museum, and he, Jo, Neil and I cycled over for the evening. I’d never got round to visiting the museum before – it’s quite interesting, and nice to be able to get in for less than the usual price and wander round with a beer. Apparently it raised a decent amount of money for them too, so hopefully it’ll become a regular event.

On Sunday evening we were all back out again, along with Dave and Sally, for dinner at the Cricketers again and to catch up with Dave’s tales of his trip over to San Francisco to run the marathon and drive around on a Harley-Davidson.

A long-overdue week off work, during which – as predicted – I barely made a scratch on the enormous heap of queued-up chores. I did have some nice lie-ins (lies-in? Definitely not “lay-ins”) though.

I took the new carbon wheels out for a spin on Tuesday morning, then rode that bike to Felixstowe for Tuesday night training. Not sure they give me much advantage other than psychological, but they’re definitely lighter and more aerodynamic, and look nice! The whole bike pretty much has a matt black vibe now, which is obviously perfect for road safety.

I took the latest bike out for a little test ride (incorporating a couple of shop stops) on Wednesday. Not quite as smooth this time, as I had to stop and return home almost immediately after realising I’d forgotten to tighten the rear wheel nuts, then it turned out that the fancy electronic gear change battery wasn’t as charged as I thought, so I ended up doing the whole ride in one gear (fortunately something I’m pretty used to!). Nothing actually wrong with the bike though. I’m waiting for the unofficial charging cable I ordered to arrive (obviously Shimano wouldn’t just stick a USB-C port on it) before it can start its job as my daily (well, Tuesday to Thursday) commuter.

Lots of running this week, but no racing. Monday’s (easy 8 trail miles in the Fynn Valley) and Saturday (parkrun, plus commute and course checks) both felt horrendous, with my heart racing despite a very slow pace. I guess some combination of humidity and dehydration to blame. The other runs felt OK, and my heart rate was much more in keeping with the pace, so I don’t think I’m dying.

One of the few jobs I did actually get round to was cutting back the vegetation (wisteria and some other kind of climber) on the back of the house. As usual I’d left it longer than I should have, which entailed a trip up onto the roof to disconnect the bits that had wound themselves round the chimney and TV aerial mounting.

I spent an hour or two removing the spokes from the wheels from the purple bike, with the intention of reusing the rims with the new hubs I’d bought. Unfortunately after doing that, and while taking all the various measurements to figure out what size spokes to buy, I noticed that a spoke hole on one of the rims was ripped through. I’ve ended up ordering new rims too now, which means that these wheels are going to end up costing more than the (admittedly incredibly cheap) carbon ones I got for the road bike. Also that I wasted my time carefully disassembling the old ones into pieces that I’m no longer going to reuse. Still, they might come in handy one day …

This week was Robin’s 666th parkrun, so (given that it’ll be a while before the next proper milestone at 1000) he decided to run it in cut-off jeans and an Iron Maiden shirt. A few people joined in, but I decided that acquiring appropriate attire just for this one event would be a bit of a waste.

I lost my Stryd foot pod a few weeks ago, during the Stowmarket Friday 5. I was going to just do without like a normal person, but ended up caving in and buying a second-hand (but a newer model than the one I lost) replacement from eBay. One of the selling points of the newer (not latest) model is a more secure fit, so hopefully I’ll keep hold of this one!

I took a small step towards disconnection from the big surveillance capitalism giants by switching the browser on my laptop and phone from Chrome to Vivaldi. So far it’s been a pretty seamless experience (and free of any AI nonsense), although I’m yet to see how well it will work on my work laptop with their various random network blockages.

Catching up … hopefully I’ll remember to get next week’s written in time!

On Tuesday we a team “away day” (although only as far as another building on site). People had voted for various categories of award, and I was given the “Keep it Simple” award (“most creative problem-solver who finds surprisingly simple fixes to complex problems”), in the form of a trophy that Brad had 3D-printed (and some Haribo).

Then on Wednesday we had the software engineering community unconference, where people from various teams on site got together to discuss a wide range of developery topics (including, unsurprisingly, a lot of AI stuff, but fortunately only one per session, and all in the same room so easy to avoid).

I bought another bike on eBay, which I drove to Colchester to collect on Thursday evening. It’s a Genesis Day One Alfina Di2, with an 8-speed hub gear with electronic shifting and lots of braze-ons for mudguards, racks etc, and the plan is to make it my year-round commuter, allowing me to revert the Grinduro to more like its original spec (again).

The cheap Chinese carbon wheels I ordered for my road bike a while ago arrived this week. I haven’t had time to try them out yet (well I have, but notional past me that’s pretending I’m writing these notes on time hadn’t), but they certainly look good on the bike.

The last of the Friday races this week (and the last race of any kind for a while), with the Ipswich Twilight 10k. They’ve tweaked the route a bit this year to remove some tight U-turns, which is a definite improvement (although the new start line was a bit chaotic). It felt tough pretty much all the way round, and I was just hoping to keep under 45 minutes, so I was very surprised to approach the finish line and see a 42 on the clock! I guess it felt tough because I was going quicker than I thought. I ended up with 42:33 – I’ve gone quicker a couple of times over the distance, but it’s my fastest Twilight, and my best 10k age grade, so happy with that.

After Twilight we naturally retired to the Cricketers for food and drink, then were back there about 12 hours later to celebrate Dave and Sally both completing their 500th parkrun. Then we somehow ended up back there again on Sunday evening because Robin and Jo had got back from holiday too late to go shopping. The plan was to eat and leave early so people (not me) could get home for the world cup final, but they put it on the TV in the pub (the first time I can remember a TV in a ’Spoons having the volume turned up) so we ended up staying much longer then planned.