Author: Kerry Buckley

This is a weird one, but I seem to have found a miracle cure for the knee pain (IT band, I assume) that’s been plaguing me since One Lap to Ultra back in October. The pain had been coming and going, but it definitely still wasn’t right, despite getting some amount of rest while I was ill. I could hardly walk after the Turkey Trot the other week, and after last Sunday’s run it was pretty sore. Anyway, on Monday I spent about 40 minutes riding relatively hard on my new indoor bike trainer, and since then I haven’t felt even a tiny twinge of discomfort, despite running 9, 8 and 18 miles respectively on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. The fan I was using to try to keep myself cool with did self-destruct while I was riding though, which made me briefly panic and hit the brakes, which obviously wouldn’t have done anything even if the big bang and bits of flying plastic had been anything to do with the bike.

Thursday was the annual Christmas pub run with the TTT crowd. This year we ran into town, then used a wheel of fortune type app to randomly select five pubs to run to (out of a choice of seven, although one of them turned out to have closed down) and which order to run to them.

I finished work for two weeks on Friday, which will be nice, assuming I manage not to get ill this time.

On Sunday I actually remembered to chop up another load of the cut-down laurel from months ago and put it in the brown bins ready for them to be collected on Wednesday. Certainly more pleasant than doing it in the dark on Tuesday night or having to get up early to do it on Wednesday morning (although of course this week I’ve got all day Monday and Tuesday to do it). The laurel’s pretty much gone now, but there’s still a big pile of branches from the apple tree, and quite a jungle of brambles to clear. And I still haven’t started putting the greenhouse up in the space I cleared (the bit I dug out to lay the slabs in is now full of weeds).

I braved the supermarket on Sunday for Christmas food (but mainly because I needed normal food too). Despite leaving it until just before they closed it was still pretty rammed, but at least it was Waitrose so everyone was polite. That gives me a few days to figure out what I’ve forgotten. I’ve marzippanned the cakes too, and realised that one advantage of making marzipan instead of buying it is that it uses egg yolks, which handily leaves whites for the icing.

Some poor quality control from the Britannia app’s Revealed puzzle on Saturday. I guessed correctly with no hints, but the letter count didn’t fit so I assumed I must have got it wrong ?

I finally managed to come up with a working solution to day three part two of Advent of Code, then got through four, five and six without too much trouble. On the second half of day seven, it was easy enough to get something that worked with the small example from the instructions, but when I fed it the real input it just sat there. I left it running, because it was time to head out to …

… the monthly random ex-colleague meet-up at the Fat Cat. Just me, Tony and Mel this time, with at least two people opting to be at Portman Road watching the football instead.

When I got home the Advent of Code thing was still silently churning away, and when it still hadn’t produced an answer by the morning I put it out of its misery. No idea how far through it had got, but I was surprised it hadn’t run out of memory. I started from scratch at lunchtime, replacing the recursive tree-walking nightmare with something that just worked through the list once with a fancy accumulator, in a tail-call-optimisable way. It promptly spat out the correct result in 0.02 seconds, which just goes to show that while premature optimisation may indeed be the root of all evil, when you need to consider performance sometimes you really need to consider performance.

On Friday we had the Felixstowe Road Runners Christmas run/quiz/pub crawl. We had more than the allowed number of people for a team, so decided to avoid the risk of disqualification by not actually getting any points – basically failing to visit any of the pubs on the list, or to answer any questions or do any bonus activities. We ran out to Walton to check out the newly-reopened Half Moon, ended up staying there for three pints, but missed hearing the folk band who were setting up as we left. Then we headed to the other side of town to the Dooley for one more. At that point Jason got a message saying we were late back (which we somehow always manage to be), and that the 9pm time on the instructions was wrong and should have been 8.15. This led to a pacier than expected couple of miles back to Broadway House for our bangers and mash.

Designated driver (for the six Ipswich-based folks) Neil was detouring through Chantry to drop Ryan off on his side of town, at which point Ryan insisted that we all had to stop at his local, the Kingfisher, where he’d buy us all a final round.

On Saturday I did a bit of routine maintenance on my “normal” bike, including replacing the chunky rubber with 28mm road tyres (I’m sure I ordered 32mm, but that’s the risk of buying stuff off AliExpress I guess), which allowed me to put the mudguards that I took off in 2021 back on. I’m looking forward to arriving at work with a dry bum next time it rains.

Now it seems I’ve finally recovered from my cold, and my dodgy knee (IT band?) isn’t too bad, I did my first long slow Sunday run for a while (only 17 weeks to the marathon!). I met Holly in Christchurch Park and we did a 10-ish mile loop out through Tuddenham, Culpho and Playford, making it about 13.5 altogether. The weather was sunny and milder than expected, but there were quite a few cars on the roads, which mostly don’t have pavements. Our fault for being too lazy to get out earlier I guess. I’d been organised and made a ball of pizza dough beforehand, so that had risen ready for lunch when I got back (after turning it into an actual pizza, obviously).

I don’t want to speak too soon, but I think I might finally be coming out the other side of this never-ending cold.

Advent of Code started this week. There are only going to be 12 challenges this year, but after finishing the first two on the days they came out I stalled slightly on day three part two. It’s now the 7th, which doesn’t bode well.

Much consternation at work over the latest npm supply chain attack, but I’m not aware of any actual infections yet. I did discover in the process that npm install by default ignores versions in your package-lock.json for transitive dependencies, and just installs the latest acceptable version. To get what in a sane world would be the default behaviour you have to run npm ci.

In a bizarre “are we sure this isn’t a simulation” coincidence, I was walking back to my desk with a complicated train of thought including pondering different people’s preferences relating to hugging/being hugged. Back at my computer, I found a newly-arrived Now I Know newsletter describing Mensa’s red/green/yellow badge dot system for addressing exactly this issue at conferences.

On Thursday we had our work Christmas meal. An escape room (Christmas Catastrophe), followed by food at The Forge and a couple of pints at The Nelson.

Alice, who organised things this year, had provided some extra bits on the table along with the crackers, and I got a two-and-a-half-inch Christmas tree to assemble out of 147 miniature Lego-like bricks. I put it together on Friday evening – it was very fiddly and took a surprisingly long time. I even had to supplement my reading glasses with a loupe to be able to see the lines between pieces on the equally tiny instructions.

Sunday saw the return of the Beccles Turkey Trot. Despite the name, this is a proper 10 mile road race, which last took place in 2019. We’d all kind of assumed that it wasn’t coming back, but we were wrong! For the first time in about a month, I had a half-decent run, finishing quicker than six years ago, and about eight minutes faster than my dreadful showing at the Hadleigh 10 a couple of weeks ago. Nothing much has changed about the event, and as is traditional they still handed out Christmas puddings at the finish. Although that does mean that, along with the one I made a couple of days before learning that the race had returned, I now have about eight servings of the stuff to get through.

I’m still struggling to shake off this cold, although it feels like I might finally be nearing the end of it.

On Tuesday, my first day back in the office since a week off, it turned out I hadn’t quite reset my body clock. I woke up at about 5.30, decided that was far too early (which it was), then the next thing I knew it was 7.45. I made myself even later than I otherwise would have been by still making sandwiches and a coffee for lunch, then realised halfway in that I’d left them at home.

Wednesday was another monthly track night, which was an excuse to take it easy at the normal Tuesday night road session. And then having run on Tuesday was an excuse to take it easy on the track (in reality my cold was an excuse for both). After the track Neil, Dave and I headed for the traditional post-run ’Spoons visit (Dave having missed the actual running, but turned up in time for the important bit). They were doing Abbot Reserve (6.5% abv) for £2.25 a pint (cheaper than bottles in Waitrose), so it would have been rude not to hang around for a few.

On Thursday we had a work pub lunch at the Fox to celebrate Oli and Leon having graduated. I’d forgotten about it in the morning, so still made sandwiches (and naturally remembered to take them in this time), so ended up eating my lunch for tea for the second time this week.

The hills of parkrun put paid any idea that I might be returning to full health, with a very slow time still being a struggle when I was theoretically taking it easy. Then Woodbridge cross country on Sunday, where I abandoned any attempt at speed and plodded round five minutes slower than last year. No swimming this time, at least.

I recently watched all the episodes of Police Squad for the first time in decades, followed by the three Naked Gun films. The series was as excellent as ever, but the first film was mildly disappointing (I remembered a lot of the scenes but very little of the plot), and the two sequels were dreadful. I didn’t remember anything from them at all, although I would have sworn that I’d seen them at some point. Anyway, I rectified matters by buying the Columbo box set, which will keep me occupied for a while. It’s shocking how old-fashioned the world of the early episodes is, given that it’s (just) within my lifetime. It’s almost like I’m old or something.

As predicted, my cold (flu?) kept me pretty much wiped out for my entire week off, so I was even lazier than usual, barely left the house and didn’t run from Sunday to Friday.

Inspired by the lack of an anagram helper in the new Everyman crossword, and the fact that the Android app I wrote in 2012 is no longer supported, I wrote a very simple html/js/css app to fill the gap. With not a framework in sight, it weighs in at 152kB, works 100% offline and can be used or installed as a PWA from shuffle.kerryb.org.

I wasn’t too ill to drag myself slowly round parkrun on Saturday, and in the afternoon had a short and probably ill-advised first go on the indoor bike trainer that I’d bought last week, now all the various bits and pieces I needed to get it set up had also arrived. I connected it up to MyWhoosh (the cheapskate’s version of Zwift) and picked a random route, which ended up being 7.5km (I didn’t think to find out how to set it to miles before I started). I should probably clear some space to set it up in the garage with my old TV, because even that short session was extremely sweaty in the house!

The next “am I starting to beat this cold yet?” challenge was the Hadleigh 10 on Sunday. I started the race at what turned out to be a wildly optimistic pace, keeping up with Holly and Maria for the first mile, then the wheels progressively came off and for most of it I felt like I was just jogging along to make it to the finish. In my head it felt like the worst race I’ve ever done, but I reminded myself for perspective that ten years ago I ran it for the first time and was elated to finish nearly ten minutes slower than this year’s time. It was still pretty terrible though. The race organisers have clearly gone through all their old records, because this year they had pin badges for people who’d completed the event ten times or more. A few people got theirs beforehand, but I had to wait until afterwards because this was my tenth (eight 10s and two 5s) and they clearly weren’t going to assume I’d finish!

On Sunday evening a few of us headed to the Cricketers for a quiet drink, which somehow ended up with us being possibly the last to leave the pub, at around midnight.

My last week at work before a long-overdue week off, so naturally I’ve come down with some kind of lurgi. Probably not Covid (I did a test, which may have been out of date), but not sure whether it’s a mild flu or just a bad cold (probably the latter, but I did have a slight temperature and I’ve had my flu jab so I assume symptoms would be milder). It started with on Wednesday with that kind of mild sore throat that you barely notice other than in its capacity as a harbinger of worse to come. Then I snuffled my way through work on Thursday (if I hadn’t left my laptop at work I’d have stayed home), before making a poor decision to join in with the evening’s TTT (although very much intending to delete the “Tempo” aspect and just make it a Thursday Ten). With the Christmas pub crawl version coming up, I needed to run at least one in November to “qualify”, although it’s all just a bit of fun and no-one would actually stop me from going. The first half didn’t go too badly at a dialled-back pace, then it got progressively harder on the way back. Fortunately Robin was having an equally terrible time of it, and Jason was happy to pretend he couldn’t have gone faster, so at least we all had company for the slow slog back. It ended up being my slowest ever, by about four minutes.

On the very slow jog home afterwards, my Garmin popped up a performance condition notification of ?20. I checked, and yes, that’s the worst it’s possible to be! When I got home I made myself a curry, and not only made it too spicy (not a phrase you’ll often hear me say) but also picked up the wrong jar and tipped a load of mixed spice in. I’d made a bit much for one portion, but not enough for two, but I soldiered through, hoping the chillis would help attack the cold.

On Friday I half-heartedly worked from home, tying up loose ends ready to switch off and ignore the corporate world for a week. Then I had a ludicrously early night. I was in bed for nearly 12 hours, but my watch said I’d only had about seven hours’ sleep (and not good sleep, at that). Not being one to learn from my mistakes, I went and trundled round parkrun at a very pedestrian pace (coming down the hills slower than I’d go up them on one of the rare occasions when I actually attack the course). Then a quick trip home for a shower and back into town to catch the Camra Real Ale Runabout bus, with a much bigger group than last year or the one before. This time it took us out to Halesworth and back via the Grain brewery. As it’s my birthday on Monday, Jo surprised me with a Colin the Caterpillar cake. Nigel took another photo of us all in front of the bus, so there’s a chance we might make the magazine cover again!

Sunday was mostly spent sitting around trying not to cough, after another long night of poor-quality sleep. I’m hoping I’ll feel better tomorrow, so I can spend my holiday (and my birthday) still not doing anything, but only due to laziness!

I got dragged into doing interviews at work. We did the first two on Wednesday, and will do two more next week. It’s not something I particularly enjoy doing, and I suspect the worst bit will be trying to pick which two out of the four get the available positions (because of course it would be insane to reward or recognise people based on their actual value to the company, rather than forcing them to wait for available vacancies or just leave to be better-paid elsewhere). They’re all internal candidates who I know, which makes it easier in some ways but harder in others (and of course it’s critical that we only assess them based on a one-hour interview and a coding test, rather than, say, working with them for several years).

On Thursday we held DevCon19, our internal developer conference which has been going since I organised the first one in 2009. I continued my streak of speaking at all of them, this time with a talk entitled You Keep Using That Word …, about all the terms people bandy about (agile, TDD, CI, refactoring, technical debt, DevOps etc) but often use to describe something unrecognisable from the original definition. I also slipped in a rant against SAFe and a claim that when managers criticise agile development as anarchy then it’s not because they misunderstand agile, but because they misunderstand anarchism.

I got some more descaler, and ran it through the brew boiler of my espresso machine this time. It clearly did something, because the lever moves even more freely now and it’s easier to control the flow with the needle valve. I also (randomly while getting ready to go to work one morning) pulled the burrs out of my grinder for a quick brush down. Halfway through I heard something drop to the floor, and realised it was the tiny bit that sits on top and keys the burr onto the drive shaft. After searching the floor for a while, I eventually found it under the cooker.

I briefly broke the “thinking about Christmas” embargo on Saturday to feed the cakes, and also made a Christmas pudding. I haven’t tried to make one for over 20 years, after a bit of a disaster when I was daft enough to follow a Delia Smith recipe, which came out ridiculously wet and took over 24 hours of steaming, then boiling, then baking, to solidify. This time I used the far more reliable Dairy Book of Home Cookery, which produced a mixture of a much more likely-looking consistency. Obviously the proof will be, as they say, in the eating.

It was Remembrance Sunday, which can only mean one thing – the Stowmarket Scenic 7. I was struggling a bit, and finished over a minute slower than last year, but did at least beat Robin, who was struggling even more.

Fat Cat ex-colleague meet-up Wednesday again, this time with Tony, Mel, Dave F and Joe. The absence of Rupert (feeling under the weather) and Anders (signed off work for a month with an unfortunately-timed attack of RSI) meant that only 50% of the other attendees were previous bosses of mine. Normally I try a few of the beers there, as they always have an excellently-stocked taproom, but the Tumble Home was so good that I stuck with it.

My home parkrun was cancelled this week because of firework night setup in the park, so back to Kesgrave it was. What with the lack of both hills and Sunday racing excuses, I somehow managed to turn in my 12th-quickest parkrun time ever (and third-best age grade, which is an increasingly-attractive metric the more of an old man I become!)

I gave my coffee machine a bit of a going over on Saturday – backflushing the group and putting a bit of grease on the cam lever and flow valve shafts. I also ran some descaler through it, although it has a water softener fitted so hopefully isn’t getting too scaled-up. I realised afterwards that I’d only done the service (steam/hot water) boiler, not the brew boiler that does most of the work. That was my last sachet of descaler though, so I’ll have to do the other one later. Even so, a small job compared to the full rebuild that my old lever machine seemed to need every few years!

A long(ish) run with Holly on Sunday, for the first time in a while. The rain had stopped by the time we set off, so we risked trails out to Witnesham and back rather than roads (where we would probably have been splashed by cars). It was muddy in places, but we both managed to just about stay upright. Only two wrong turns too!

Clocks are back. I don’t particularly like changing them twice a year, but it’s better than the crackpot plan of sticking to UTC+1 all year round. I’m not prepared to accept the idea of it never being GMT in Greenwich – if we want to do everything an hour earlier that’s fine, but surely we can get used to a notional 8–4 working day instead of 9–5, without having to fool ourselves into it by setting all the clocks to the wrong time?

I realise I’m a stopped clock on this, but I’m right twice a year. And the rest of the year.

I was glad to be working at home on Monday after Sunday’s efforts. Weirdly, it was my back that gave me the most trouble – it had already been a bit dodgy, but every time I shifted slightly in bed it woke me up with an agonising spasm. My legs were also pretty sore, especially my right knee, but they (and to some extent my back) seemed to have sorted themselves out by Tuesday.

After Wednesday’s track session Dave, Neil and I headed to the Cricketers, as is traditional. I ordered food and a pint, and Dave two pints (just the usual Stella shandy for Neil!), and as is also traditional someone came over to tell us that the beer we’d both ordered was off. We upgraded to Jaipur for no extra cost, then for some reason they brought over five pints instead of three! That worked out at about £1.20 a pint, which was a bargain even by Wetherspoons standards.

Cross-country season kicked off on Sunday, with the opening round at Framlingham Castle. It seemed even busier than normal, with everyone packed like sardines on the start line, a washing-machine-like lap of the field before heading onto the course proper, and more-or-less single-file running for most of the course. That (and a false alarm untied shoelace that turned out to just be a bit of vegetation stuck to my foot) is my excuse for a slowish time, anyway.

Not a lot going on this week, as far as I can remember. Various bits of running, obviously, culminating in the annual club social One Lap to Ultra event on Sunday, This basically involves running round a 4.5 mile loop as many times as you can (or want to) in six hours, stopping each time for cake etc. I just about managed seven laps again, mostly with Holly and Maria (until they called it a day after lap five) and the odd other person joining us here and there. The last lap was solo, with me being the last to finish, behind Ryan who was a lap ahead of me. He took the glory of completing the most laps, which is doubly impressive given that he’d only ever run about half that distance previously.