Category: Weeknotes

Hmm, seems to be a bit of a shortage of things to write about this week.

I cancelled my Netflix subscription yesterday, as seems to be the fashion. To be fair, I only signed up a few months ago, and after binging my way through a couple of shows I found there wasn’t really anything new or old that I desperately wanted to start watching (I’m sure there’s loads of good stuff hidden away, plus the obvious “must see” programmes that I’ve never watched). I had been working through the US version of The Office, which was increasingly feeling like a chore, and the appearance of Catherine Tate was enough to tip the balance from soldiering on to giving up.

Still on the TV front, but mercifully Tate-free these days, I remembered to watch the latest Doctor Who (the news of its broadcast almost passed me by – I’m not sure whether it’s generally less hyped or whether the bubbles have just shifted around a bit). To be honest, it felt like missing it might have been the better option.

No racing this Sunday, so no excuse for not giving parkrun a decent effort on Saturday. Well not that excuse, anyway – by way of variety I tagged along with a few friends who were doing a 13-odd mile social run around Felixstowe, with the parkrun making up miles four to six or thereabouts. Ironically (is it? Ever since Alanis Morissette we’ve all been so paranoid) I ended up with my fastest time since before the pandemic (if you ignore a few virtual parkruns during lockdown). That’s largely down to Felixstowe prom being rather flatter than Chantry Park, but I’ll take it. Still a fair way to go to get back to where I was a few years ago, although I may have to just admit to getting old.

I seem to have spent a fair amount of time this week researching espresso machines and grinders, as I consider replacing the manual lever Europiccola that’s served me well (if not always consistently) for the past decade. As always with these things, the process of reading reviews and forums results in the budget creeping slowly upwards until the idea of spending roughly the same as I paid for my (admittedly very cheap old) car for a coffee maker seems almost rational.

I always feel like these posts just peter out, with no proper conclusion, so I’ll let this paragraph perform that function this week.

A day late this week, because today feels like a Sunday. Although to be fair so did yesterday, after two consecutive Saturdays. And I believe there’s another nonsense holiday coming up soon, on a Thursday and Friday of all things. Madness.

As usual, Easter pretty much passed me by, other than making my traditional bad hot cross bun joke. I took them along to parkrun on Saturday and they seemed to go down well. Better still, there were some left, so now I have a small stash in the freezer. I’d definitely recommend the recipe – much better than when I used to make the dough in my bread machine.

I thought I’d had another fairly low mileage running week, but turns out I actually did a reasonably acceptable 35.5 miles. That may explain why my legs felt tired for the second half of the Little Bromley 10k (I ended up finishing a few seconds slower than Bungay last week). It’s a shame that Covid precautions have changed the route and precluded the traditional finish into the churchyard for the past two years, but at least the tradition of getting a mug at the finish line instead of a medal is still alive.

It’s been a while since I made any progress on the weather station – I’d been procrastinating because the next step was connecting up the wind vane. I’ve already written the basic software to talk to it, but it’s the most complicated bit, hardware-wise, needing an external ADC to convert the resistance-based sensor output to something the Raspberry Pi can handle. Still pretty straightforward in the grand scheme of things, but anything involving a jumble of jumper wires on a breadboard ends up being a bit of a challenge for my clumsy fingers. I finally got round to it today, and it turned out my apprehension was justified. The value that comes out is sticking persistently to zero, even though I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve checked the wiring. It’s tempting to jump straight to getting a PCB made and soldering everything together permanently, but that would probably be asking for trouble.

Better news on the unicycle front – I wouldn’t claim to actually be able to ride it yet, but I can occasionally stay on for a few yards, which is definitely progress.

Is it really Sunday already?

Another uneventful week. Even more uneventful than last week, when at least we had a bit of snow for variety. I do, however, appear to have what UB40 would describe as a rat in mi kitchen. For ages I’ve noticed the cats occasionally taking a deep interest in the kitchen units where the sink and dishwasher live, then the other day when it happened I thought I heard a quiet scuffling noise too. When I pulled one of the kickboards out to look underneath I saw a whiskery face staring back at me, before he dived into the drain and disappeared, like some kind of miniature Buffyverse ne’er–do–well. There’s no sign that any members of the rodent community are actually living under there, and I’m not sure there’s even any way for them to get out into the kitchen – maybe they just pop up every now and again for a bit of warmth. I’m minded to leave them to it, to be honest.

Speaking of the Buffyverse, as predicted the (very short) Firefly rewatch has segued into another run through the Buffy DVDs. Currently nearing the end of season two, and this time I’m being especially sad and also listening to the director/writer commentaries for the episodes that have them. I’ve even started listening to Buffering the Vampire Slayer podcast from the beginning, although I haven’t caught up with that sufficiently to get the two in sync yet. I’m also watching old episodes of Taskmaster, and the two theme tunes have started to melt together in my head. I really ought to seek out more new stuff to watch, but to be honest the amount of choice seems a bit overwhelming these days.

This Sunday was the Bungay Festival of Running, and although various people’s attempts to persuade me to enter the marathon were as unsuccessful as you’d imagine, I did at least do the 10k. It felt like hard work (which I suppose is kind of the point), but I dragged myself round in my fastest time for a while. We hung around for the other races, and it was nice to see a friend win the half, and our club pick up the men’s team prize in the marathon.

Now with added SSL. Although I’d still prefer to dump WordPress and switch to a static site – I just need to summon up the enthusiasm for the migration.

It’s been a pretty uneventful week as far as I can remember. I had a couple of days off work but didn’t really do much with them other than lazing about. I made a bit more progress with the weather station, but most of it seemed to involve yak-shaving around trying to decide the best way to time and/or count the anemometer pulses to give a wind speed that’s real time but not too real time.

We had a bit of snow on Thursday and Friday mornings. It didn’t amount to much, but I was glad not to be out in it. Fortunately the weather was far more pleasant on Saturday (marshalling at parkrun) and Sunday (running the Harwich Half). Especially so for the latter, as there was no bag drop and the start line was a fair walk from the car park, which would have been horrendous if it had been freezing. I ended up with my fastest half marathon time for a few years, but nowhere near a PB (despite what Strava may claim – I assume the one in 2019 which was a couple of minutes quicker must have come up short on the GPS).

I still can’t ride my unicycle, but have graduated from following along the garage wall and using it for balance to pushing off, pedalling a few times (I think my record so far is about 2½ whole revolutions) then falling off. At least the falling bit now generally involves just stepping off and (usually) grabbing it before it hits the ground.

On Friday I dialled into (do we still say that? How many people these days even remember phones with dials? I do actually have a nice black bakelite one plugged in, but it no longer seems to work – not sure whether it’s the phone or my landline, but either way it stops people ringing me, which is nice. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes …) James Shore’s Art of Agile book club, with J. B. Rainsberger and Geepaw Hill, for a discussion on TDD. It was interesting overall, but the main specific tip I picked up was a simple one that seems like it might come in handy. The idea was that when you have a test that occasionally fails because of a race condition, it turns out that it is OK to add a sleep, but you should add it to the production code, not the test. That way you end up with a test that fails reliably, which makes it much easier to debug, and once you’ve fixed the synchronisation problem you obviously remove the sleep.

Another instalment in my long-running quest to keep my combi boiler running until there’s a decent economical green alternative this week (although I suspect just getting a new, more efficient gas one when the service guy suggested in 2014 that it didn’t have long to live would probably have paid for itself by now). This time it was a fairly prodigious drip that was easily cured by replacing the O rings and fibre washer on the heat exchanger, although it also took a bit of blowing with a fan heater to dry out the control board and make the flame sensor work again afterwards (longer and more boring version on Facebook).

Sunday saw my second attempt at the Tarpley 20 [mile] race, and once again I was seriously questioning my life choices beforehand, especially as there was a perfectly good ten mile option available. Around halfway through I was thinking “this isn’t too bad – maybe I should do a marathon after all”, but the last few miles were pretty tough and reminded me why I don’t intend to. Managed to knock 4½ minutes off my 2020 time though, to finish in 2:35:30.

Amongst other stuff at work this week, continuing an on-and-off struggle with a performance issue around some code that captures and stores some error events from network nodes. There are a fair number of them, and they each come with a large log that needs to be stored (but I don’t think it’s the size that’s the issue). I dumped the relevant bits of the live data, along with some of the files containing the events, and thought I’d identified the slow bit by running it locally. I changed some queries, it seemed faster and all the tests still passed, so I deployed the “fix” … and it got even slower. Reverted that and added some fine-grained logging, so now I know for sure exactly which bits are slow, so the next job is to delve into the query plans and try to spot what’s making it so horribly inefficient.

Meanwhile at home the performance problem is draining from the kitchen sink. As usual my approach (after ignoring it for as long as possible) has been to buy tools instead of doing the sensible thing and paying someone else to fix it. Unfortunately neither drain rods from outside, nor one of those rotating snake things from inside, have made any difference (there can’t be much pipe between the bits reached from each direction!). This is on top of the dripping hot tap that for the past couple of years I’ve only been turning on via the isolating valve under the sink when I need to wash up. The mystery of how to get into the taps to replace the inserts only deepened when I realised that the way the extra flexible rinsing hose thing works implies that the actual valves might be under the worktop, in an area that has no obvious means of access.

And now my boiler (which I was recommended to replace in around 2015, but have kept going with a new fan and heat exchanger) has started dripping again. Hopefully just something I can tighten, but it’s beginning to look like time to just get a plumber in to sort out the whole lot at once. Feels like a bad time to buy a boiler though, with gas clearly on the way out but the alternatives maybe not quite ready for prime time. Sigh.

At least I got off fairly lightly from Storm Eunice, with just a half-collapsed trellis (I’d noticed a rotten post a few days earlier), and a couple of small dead branches fallen off the apple tree.

I’ve found recently that when I’m not working, cooking or running I find it hard to motivate myself do do anything more useful than crosswords, TV or general noodling about on laptop or phone. I suspect this is a sign that I need some time off. In other news, I have nine days’ holiday to use up by April, so I guess that works out OK. I randomly decided to start watching Firefly again yesterday (which sadly won’t take long, but could also lead to another run through Buffy and Angel, which is a somewhat longer commitment. I know Whedon’s turned out to be problematic, but they’re still great shows.

On time this week! Although I type this having not written the actual post, so I may be tempting fate. Once again it turns out I haven’t done much, and am starting to doubt the wisdom of committing to writing these.

Work-wise, we did the planned coding dojo. Because I hadn’t got round to setting up or testing a shared editing environment to be able to rotate pairs, we did more of a mobbing approach (which I think probably worked better), with me as the dumb driver, trying desperately to write the code other people suggested rather than what I wanted. This proved surprisingly difficult, as it turns out that my preferences for writing unit tests have diverged from other people’s (annoyingly I suspect I’m now arguing against things I encouraged people to do in the first place). I was largely successful in doing what I was told, albeit with possibly a bit too much delay while I tried and failed to talk them round. I’m certainly not claiming that my way is the right way, but I feel like I need to put together a blog post or screencast at some point to attempt to justify my preferences.

There’s yet another professional community type initiative going on at the moment, and the successful applicants for “distinguished engineer” status (not a promotion or an actual role; more a vague acknowledgement of influence) were finally announced this week. Needless to say, I missed the cut.

I’ve been quite enjoying the zombie shenanigans All of Us are Dead on Netflix, who seem to be on a roll with their Korean dramas at the moment.

An uneventful week running-wise, although I was a bit quicker than I have been recently on both the “Thursday Tempo Ten” and parkrun. And I think I’ve got to the bottom of why Garmin has consistently shown my training load as above the recommended band recently – since I did a factory reset on my watch a while ago, apparently it’s assumed my maximum heart rate was about 20bpm too low (I’m pretty sure it must have measured rates well above that, so I don’t know why it didn’t update itself, or at least let me know).