Author: Kerry Buckley

A bit late this week. Good job I’m not one for New Year resolutions! I had a rare week off work from the day before Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day, but didn’t accomplish anything particularly useful (no surprise there). I did get a bit further with my Goos project though.

A quiet Christmas as usual. Back to Chantry Park first for my second parkrun in three days, then home to cook my traditional once a year excessive roast dinner, which barely even fitted on my Alan Partridge style 12″ plate (and kept me in leftovers for most of the week).

After last year’s hollow trees, I managed to complete this year’s challenge of running to, and getting a photo in front of, a different clock tower each month. I made it harder for myself by also insisting that the time on the clock matched the month (ie one o’clock for January, two for February etc), and wearing sequential T-shirt colours (the hardest bit was finding clocks that work and tell roughly the right time). I then wasted more time in Pixelmator putting the photos together.

In possibly the most first world problem ever recorded, the fan in my temperature-controlled butter dish has started making a noise.

Saturday was parkrun again, obviously – my 53rd one of 2023. It could have been 54, but I marshalled one week (as well as doing post-run barcode scanning a few times). Then on Sunday it was time for the annual New Year’s Eve “triathlon” that I got roped into a few years ago. This entails cycling to Felixstowe, running along the prom for a bit, then getting in the sea and swimming at least one stroke (Garmin recorded my swim at 24 yards, which is very generous and mostly comprised of walking into the sea and back). Then after drying off we retired to a nearbypub for lunch, then rode back in time for a few more pints back in Ipswich. We did get rained on a bit, but nothing like the soaking we had last year.

I finished a thing! I submitted a PR with my Elixir port of the Supermarket Checkout kata, although it hasn’t been merged yet. Also, I haven’t got round to actually doing the kata itself, which is an exercise in refactoring the convoluted code that I translated.

I made some small progress on GOOS-Elixir too, in that I now have it successfully both displaying a message in a GUI and sending an XMPP message from one process to another. Still a way to go before I have even a first passing (or even correctly failing) test.

A better turnout (and better weather) for the last Run for Beer of the year on Tuesday. I burnt my mouth on a very generous, but also very hot, portion of loaded chips, and got talked into stopping for a fourth pint before running home. I blame Merv for the latter – he may be a decade and a half my senior, but is still a bad influence.

The following night was the Christmas run with the TTT crowd, which fortunately didn’t involve the usual ten mile time trial, but a more leisurely jog round seven pubs in a similar number of miles.

Friday was mostly spent recovering from Thursday (thank goodness I’d decided to start my Christmas break on Thursday!), then Saturday featured the usual parkrun (not to be confused with the unusual one which will be happening on Monday), plus cake icing, mince pie making and late night food shopping to avoid the crowds. Sunday saw the annual Stutton & Holbrook Christmas Eve 6k(ish) charity fun run. It was a surprisingly mild day for that, but very windy, which I’ll blame for being marginally slower than the past few years.

My Brooklyn Nine-Nine rewatch has made it as far as season seven now, so almost up to the point where I get to see new episodes. I was saddened to learn of Andre Braugher’s death on Monday.

On Wednesday I was roped in again as a last-minute quiz team substitute, and we won again! I even felt like I contributed something this time, although not in any popular culture questions.

I was in the office on Friday, and a loud “tick tock” noise started coming from (as far as I could tell) above the ceiling tiles. It stopped eventually, then restarted and stopped again later, but nothing had exploded by the time I came home, so I assume it wasn’t a bomb.

After parkrun on Saturday I headed to Colchester to see Pet Needs for the fifth time this year (!) at their Fractured Party III at the University of Essex. I got there early for a secret acoustic gig in the afternoon, then killed a couple of hours by walking round an eight mile sub-loop of the Colchester Orbital route (which seemed apt as it pops up in one of their lyrics).

With the walk complete (and muddy trainers – oops), I popped into the campus fast food place to grab a burger. Once I’d finished I went to take my tray back, leading to the weird experience of having to politely ask at least two of the band and another two from the support act if they could move so I could get to the bin.

The main event was ably warmed up by Henshaw and The Lottery Winners, and the headliners were great as ever. I forgot my earplugs, but fortunately the sound was just on the right side of too loud (in fact during the encore Johnny’s vocals were pretty much drowned out by the crowd singing along). No guest appearance by Frank Turner this time, although I did spot him watching from the wings.

No progress on the GOOS-Elixir project, but I came across a refactoring kata I hadn’t seen before (Emily Bache’s Supermarket Receipt Refactoring Kata), and have started porting that to Elixir as it isn’t one of the currently implemented languages. I should probably get myself checked for ADD at some point …

The week got off to a good start when I woke up on Monday to find that I hadn’t plugged my phone in properly and it had gone flat and turned itself off. The real problem though was that once I put it on charge and switched it back on it refused to accept my pin. I eventually had to do a factory reset and reload everything from backup (which was fortunately pretty painless, if annoying). This time I didn’t enable “auto-confirm unlock” (where it unlocks when you enter the final digit, rather than having to press enter) – I’m don’t know for sure that was the root of the bug, but I have my suspicions.

Monday night I finally made it to another GoodGym session (most of them have been on Tuesdays lately), and got to wear my 100 shirt at last. Three of us ran up to the Blue Cross centre and helped them repot a bunch of plants in their reception area. I ignored the advice to bring a head torch, but somehow still ended up running in front and warning the better-prepared people of obstacles in the dark section of path.

Tuesday was our work Christmas meal. We did lazer [sic] tag again, and I was rubbish again, then went to The Forge to eat, and finished up in the Nelson. Fortunately, unlike four years to the day previously, we didn’t witness a fight in the latter. More people than usual made it to closing time, but a few of the younger team members seemed strangely unaware of how the last orders and time bells and drinking-up time work!

Having missed the normal club training night on Tuesday because of the meal, the monthly track session was handily scheduled for Wednesday. It was forecast to be cold, so I switched the spikes on my cross country shoes for short ones to avoid any risk of slipping over, which also provided an excuse to cycle there and back instead of running. Unfortunately the back bend was completely covered in frost, so we ended up running on the infield instead.

I felt like I’d run out of excuses for missing TTT (Thursday Tempo Ten), and turned up with two other hardly souls to run the ten miles in pretty miserable weather. Gripper had twisted his ankle and Neil the vicar had a cold, so for once I was able to keep up, at least for the outward leg. We drifted apart on the way back, with me ending up in the middle, and just under 75 minutes. As usual, I felt wiped out afterwards, and was hoping a rest day on Friday would be enough time to recover for parkrun and the ten pub run on Saturday.

Then I remembered it was also the club social “12 pubs of Christmas” run on Friday night, so no rest day after all. This involved using a slightly flaky app that gave us quiz questions once we reached each pub, and a puzzle to solve to reveal the next one. Our team were last to leave, adopted a three on, one off (nine halves) strategy, and were also the last back. Fortunately time wasn’t a factor in the scoring, and it turned out we’d won.

The weather for parkrun was possibly even worse than it had been on Thursday night, with attendance down by about 50% from the week before. After cycling home in the pouring rain I just about had time to get dry and warm before heading back out for the annual Christmas ten pub run (12.8 miles, three pints, seven halves and a sausage roll).

I got a £100 vehicle tax refund for the Roadster, after finally getting round to SORNing it. I’d put it off because I couldn’t find the V5, and begrudged paying £25 for a new one, but was spurred into action by the threat of a £100 fine for not insuring it, under the daft new (OK, 12 years old) rule where you still have to insure a car that you’re not using. At least now I can tell myself I’ve saved £75, though obviously in reality if I’d done it straight away the rebate would have been more and I still wouldn’t have had a fine.

Also, despite this being 2023, it came in the form of a cheque, which means I have to go into town at some point to pay it in.

We had a tiny bit of snow overnight on Thursday, and woke up to a wintry-looking world on Friday. I was nevertheless intending to cycle into work, having not been to the office for a few weeks thanks to a combination of time off and having a cold. Then I heard that the Orwell Bridge had been closed (nothing to do with the weather), which meant that anyone coming from north of town wouldn’t be coming in. I suspected I might be virtually the only person to turn up, which was plenty enough excuse to stay home (and get more work done).

Nothing had thawed out by Saturday, which made for a chilly but firmer underfoot parkrun, but it had warmed up a few degrees by Sunday for the delayed opening round of cross country. The forecast had been implying torrential rain, but it actually wasn’t too bad. Plenty of puddles and sand to run through/round though, but I managed a creditable (for me) 83rd place out of 400-odd.

I’ve had a cold all week, which has been an excuse for laziness. Not that I’m not normally lazy – I just don’t usually have an excuse.

A few of us at work were asked to record short video snippets with some facts about our projects, to be edited into a package for an all hands call. It turned out that the ten seconds or so I did in the office was too long, so I had to rerecord it at home the following day as a single sentence. Naturally this was an excuse to dig out not only the lights I bought when we all went onto Zoom in 2020, but also the green screen that came with them, so I could superimpose myself on a background of the app I was talking about. This all turned out to be a waste of time as they ended up using a short clip from the original version, and thanks to the vagaries of management chains whole thing was presented as “look at the cool stuff the team in Bangalore do”, so that was well worthwhile.

On Saturday I went to see The Meffs. Not seen them before, but they’re in vaguely the same extended universe as other bands I like, and they were playing at The Smokehouse, which is only ten minutes’ cycle away. They were entertaining, as were Noah and the Loners in support (the latter were also terrifyingly young), and I’m glad I remembered my earplugs. I approve of the kind of gig where the headline band are in the crowd for the support act, and vice versa.

I watched the new Doctor Who, despite the unwelcome return of the irritating “bovvered” woman. It seemed largely designed to troll the kind of person who whines about everything being “woke”, and also featured nods to both ET and Gremlins, conspicuous Disney money, and what sounded like an extended game of Space Team.

Progress on my GOOS/Elixir project is slow, but existent. I made some small strides towards interacting with the Scenic app, inasmuch as I can now assert that the displayed status text is as expected, and eventually found an XMPP library that works with the latest versions of Erlang and Elixir, although I did have to fork it to fix a few incompatibilities.

I had a week off work, which I ought to do more often. One day maybe I’ll even go on holiday somewhere.

I made a tentative start to my attempt to work through GOOS in Elixir. I picked Scenic as a GUI framework, then spent quite a while trying to figure out how to exercise it from acceptance tests. After being unable to find an approach which didn’t entail poking around in the internals of process state, I asked about it on the Elixir Forum. The project maintainer replied admitting that it was an area where the framework needs more attention, and indicating that they’d be open to any API suggestions, so it looks like I’ve already found my first yak.

I finally got round to fitting the new (second hand) sunroof that I picked up a few weeks ago. It was quite a faff, with the headlining needing to be removed (but not fitting through the tailgate, so having to be left resting on the seats). Getting the new frame lifted up to the roof and bolted in without a second pair of hands was also a bit tricky, but it’s all done now. I haven’t tested whether it actually opens yet, figuring it’s safer to get through winter first with it solidly shut!

A lightly-attended Run for Beer on Wednesday, with Alec’s work commitments also meaning we ended up with two separate groups converging on the pub from different directions. At least it wasn’t raining this month!

A few of us from work went to the local bouldering wall on Thursday evening. I didn’t take my chalk that’s older than most of the people there this time though.

On Friday (my birthday) I got the train up to Norwich to see Pet Needs (again) at the Waterfront, supported by Generation Feral and Glitchers.

Phil came up for his annual birthday weekend visit, and for the second year running I talked him into doing the Hadleigh 5 on Sunday. Not before we’d been out for the traditional beer and curry on Saturday night though (which may have somewhat impacted my performance in the race). Then home for the also traditional fry-up, albeit at about 1pm. It’s the only time I get to use all the rings on my cooker.

I’ve given up and turned the heating timer on, rather than just occasionally hitting the “+1 hour” button (although I still seem to be spending much of the time sitting round in two jumpers and a hat).

Having got to the point where I could reliably solve a Rubik’s Cube within a minute, the last couple of algorithms I learned seem to have suddenly evaporated from my brain, and I keep getting in a huge muddle and having to more or less start again mid-solve. An early insight into old age, I guess.

A mixed week of running: on Tuesday night at our club training session I managed to stick with a group who are generally much quicker than me, but at the Scenic 7 on Sunday I came in half a minute slower than last year (and even slower than the year before).

I randomly decided to start trying to work through the GOOS book in Elixir (despite the latter not really being an OO language). It may come to nothing.

15 years today since Obama was elected. Not exactly the first step on an upward path we all hoped it would be.

I finally caved in and set the heating to come on for a while a couple of times a day. Partly because Badger cat had taken to spending half the day sleeping under my duvet, which I assume was a hint.

On Wednesday afternoon I wandered into the kitchen and happened to spy the paddle from the bread machine (said machine being around ? through its programme). Fortunately it hadn’t actually reached the bake stage yet, so I shoved the paddle through the floury goop onto its spindle, reset the machine and it turned out fine. Worst. Anecdote. Ever.

We had another storm on Thursday. The barometer had dropped by about 30mb or 1″ Hg overnight, but I escaped unscathed again – possibly because I didn’t leave the house all day.

I got a new Chromecast, because it was almost free thanks to the store credit they gave me when I bought my phone, which was about to expire. This one comes with Google TV and a remote, but to be honest that’s not really much more convenient than just controlling it from my phone.

Speaking of my phone, it seems to have suddenly started refusing to work for contactless payments (possibly since upgrading to Android 14). Fortunately the first time it happened I had my wallet with me, which I hardly ever do these days. Annoyingly I don’t know any way to check whether it’s fixed itself other than by trying to buy stuff.

I thought my 17-year-old projector had finally given up the ghost, but it turned out I’d just disturbed a connection in the rats’ nest behind my AV unit. It is really noisy though, and its bulb is on about double its rated lifespan. I think the time has finally come to replace it and the small TV with just one massive TV, now it’s possible to get one bigger than the projector screen for a relatively reasonable sum. Like every purchase decision though, this inevitably leads to endless research and confusion.

I did finally make the decision to upgrade my Garmin from a 645 to an Epix (which I bought second hand from eBay so didn’t cost me quite as much as a new one). The screen is a massive step up from the old one – far more detailed than I can make out without my reading glasses on! It has all manner of probably useless new measurements and metrics too – it’s been generously keeping me on a training status of “productive”, but is balancing that today by telling me that my “training readiness” is in the toilet.

A pretty quiet week as far as I can remember.

I completely forgot about the clock change last night, but thanks to the fact that all the important clocks now set themselves by magic it didn’t cause any issues beyond wondering why I woke up early on Sunday feeling more rested than I expected, and I didn’t turn up anywhere an hour late.

I gave my 62nd unit of blood on Wednesday. For a change I ran there rather than cycling, and may have slightly glossed over my intention to run the two miles home during the health check. As usual though, I didn’t really feel any different afterwards than before.

When I had my flu jab the other week, they also checked my blood pressure, which was apparently borderline high (something like 140/90 I think). They must have passed that information on to my GP, because I got a letter asking me to make an appointment to have it checked again. I haven’t got round to it yet, partly due to laziness and phone-aversion, partly to avoid wasting the NHS’s time, and partly to avoid having to tick the “I’m waiting to see a medical professional” box on the blood donor form. I’ve measured it at home since, and it seems like it’s usually in the 80s, so I’m sure I’m fine (although my dad does have high blood pressure, so who knows?). I should probably just book my over-40 health check and kill two birds with one stone (I’ve only put that off for 13 years so far).

I happened to see one of the abnormal loads that are travelling from Ipswich docks to Eye. It apparently weighs around 500 tons, and took most of the day to get from one side of town to the other. Here’s a terrible photo.

Slugs keep coming into my kitchen at night (presumably through a tiny crack under the door). I think mainly in an attempt to steal cat food, although I’ve been known to find them on the ceiling so I’m not sure about their sense of direction.