This week seems to have flown by (maybe because I posted last week’s notes in Wednesday), but nothing very interesting to report.
My car’s malfunctioning seems to have settled into a rhythm now. Every Tuesday it briefly cuts out as I join the A14 at the Seven Hills roundabout, then seems to reset, bump start itself, have a quick think about which gear it wants to be in, then carry on its way. On the journey home it does something similar, but with the addition of showing a battery warning for a minute or two afterwards. It’s booked in for an MOT on Wednesday – I’m still vaguely intending to replace it soon, but if it passes it would hopefully mean I could get a bit more for it.
We seem to have got back into the habit of Friday Pub at work, after an accidental winter hiatus, which is nice. Obviously we’re eating indoors now, after mostly restricting ourselves to beer gardens for a couple of years.
I made my third (and final) batch of marmalade on Saturday, which came out the best (I now have three open jars so I could sample them all). That should last me through to next year’s Seville oranges (I get through a surprising amount of marmalade – Paddington is an amateur, to be honest).
I finally managed to upgrade my work app to Elixir 1.14. Every time I tried before I’d been hit with a race condition in some code which set up named pipes to talk to shell scripts (so as to stop sensitive arguments appearing in the ps output). I thought I’d “solved” it by putting a short sleep in the asynchronous task that read from the pipe so that it was always reading before the writer started writing, but to no-one’s great surprise the dirty feeling that gave me was justified, and it wasn’t 100% reliable. I finally solved it properly by scrapping the fifo nonsense and launching the scripts with Rambo.
On a roll, I also upgraded to Phoenix 1.7, even though it’s only at release candidate status at the moment. I decided to migrate everything to the new verified routes, which was a very tedious process (I couldn’t think of a way to automate any more than the simplest routes, or at least not one that would justify the time spent). Nice to be back on the cutting edge again though.
Fairly standard running stuff this week, including a run for coffee, a club session, a parkrun and cross country. The latter went better than expected, with another victory in my ongoing series battle against Robin (who I never come close to beating on the road). To be fair he’s deep into marathon training, although as usual I seem to be also doing a lot of the training, just without the intent to actually enter one.
We also did a club run to donate some food to the local Salvation Army food bank, as part of the runr Food Bank Run initiative. As well as the warm feeling of helping the community, the sensation of suddenly not having a rucksack full of tins on your back for the run back was a nice bonus.
