Kerry Buckley – Page 14 – What’s the simplest thing that could possibly go wrong?

Weeknotes 2022-14

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.

Weeknotes

Weeknotes 2022-13

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.

Uncategorized Weeknotes

Weeknotes 2022-12

Well I still haven’t caught Covid, as far as I know. Despite spending time sitting next to someone in a pub last week who tested positive the next day, then spending ten minutes talking to someone before the Stowmarket Half on Sunday, who was moaning about his cold that “definitely wasn’t Covid”, which it turned out was just an opinion, which the test he belatedly took when he went home disagreed with.

I went to see New Model Army in Bury St Edmunds (an incongruous combination perhaps) on Tuesday, and wore a mask while I was there, partly just in case the LFT I took that day was a false negative, and partly because statistically there must have been a fair few infected people there. This seemed an unpopular point of view though, as I only saw a couple of other mask wearers there. It kind of feels like everyone’s decided to just give up and catch it anyway, but I’d rather avoid it as long as I can on the basis that even if it’s mild most people I know haven’t enjoyed it, and it would almost certainly mess up my running for a while (especially if I ended up with “long Covid”, which is my main worry).

Anyway, NMA were good, even if the crowd was slightly sparse and a bit less boisterous than usual (I started listening to them in the early 90s, but tales of insane mosh pits had put me off seeing them live until a few years ago, when it turned out to be fine, although possibly because we’ve all got old in the meantime).

On Wednesday morning one of the cats proudly came in through the cat flap with a mouse dangling from his mouth by its tail. He released it, and it immediately ran behind the fridge, where as far as I could tell it stayed until Thursday night, when I was woken up by the sounds of it being chased round the lounge. This time I managed to grab it and put it out of the front door, hoping they wouldn’t figure out where it had gone in time to track it down. I got woken again on Saturday night by one of the other cats growling in the bedroom, with either another mouse or the same very unlucky one. Either way, I caught it and put it outside again, and hopefully it’s either learned its lesson or been quietly finished off outside.

At work, the monitoring system I’ve built and supported pretty much solo over the past three years is apparently on the point of being considered one of EE’s core network management tools. I can’t help thinking they’re getting it pretty cheap for my salary compared to some of the other big ol’ enterprisey systems it’s sitting alongside. We went to the pub on Friday to celebrate yet another person leaving the company for a sizeable pay rise and a mostly-remote job, and amongst the people there from our long-standing Friday Pub crew, those of us still with BT were in the minority. Who knows, after 30 years maybe it’s not too late for me to look elsewhere! Or at least threaten to, and see if they offer me anything to stay.

I decided that the reason I still haven’t managed to ride my unicycle is that I stupidly bought one with a 24″ wheel, not realising that they’re harder to ride. Obviously the solution to that was to buy a cheap 20″ one too, and it arrived on Saturday.

So now I can’t ride two unicycles. Although it feels like I’m a bit closer to getting somewhere with this one.

I’ve got Monday and Tuesday off, so hopefully I’ll escape any of those annoying biannual failing tests after the clock change. Fingers crossed for a similar lack of production issues.

Uncategorized Weeknotes

Weeknotes 2022-11

With a slight sense of trepidation I went to fill up my car with petrol for the first time this year. It turned out it wasn’t actually much more expensive, but that might have been partly due to going to Sainsbury’s instead of my local BP. Anyway, on balance I’m all for higher fuel prices if they give the human race a few extra years before the seemingly inevitable climate apocalypse.

Another plumbing success story this week. Having tried seemingly everything to sort out the blocked drain from the kitchen sink, I finally twigged that the gunked-up bit of pipe was the short section between the plughole and the U-bend. Obviously having realised that, it was pretty trivial to clean it out, and now the water runs away at a more traditional speed. There’s a lesson in there about stopping to properly diagnose a problem before diving in headfirst to solve it.

The monthly Run for Beer came round again on Wednesday, and once again the weather was far nicer than everyone else’s dire predictions. We only stopped in the pub long enough for a bit of food and one pint, although I managed to fit in two (pints, not meals) after only realising after having one bought for me that they had a Burger-and-beer meal deal going. Well it would have been a shame not to take advantage to save money by … er … spending slightly more money.

It was also the Stowmarket Half on Sunday, which went OK-ish but not spectacularly. The weather was great – a bit warm if anything, but less wind than of late, but the last few miles were a struggle. Last time the event was held we were in that weird couple of weeks in 2020 where everything was still just about happening as normal but we all new it was about to come to a grinding halt for what we assumed would be a few weeks. It’s nice to feel like things are relatively normal again, albeit with infection levels some 5,000 times higher than they were two years ago. It was also nice to get a negative LFT result this morning, after the person I’d been sitting next to in the pub came down with Covid the following day.

The correct connectors for the weather sensors finally arrived, and although I haven’t made any actual progress as such I did at least confirm that the code I’d already written to interface with the anemometer works as expected. Just need to sort out the wind vane and rain sensor now, then come the no doubt long-running tasks of moving the electronics from a breadboard to a more permanent form, getting it all mounted outside (fortunately I have a handy bracket where the TV aerial used to be) and adding a web UI or whatever other kind of display I can come up with.

Somewhat against character, I actually washed the outside of the downstairs windows (well it’s a start) at the weekend. Partly triggered by the Sahara desert sand that was raining down recently, although to be honest it’s so long since I cleaned them that the sand didn’t make that much difference. A even gave the car a quick going over too, after I’d left it out overnight and one of the cats had left muddy paw prints all over it.

Uncategorized Weeknotes

Weeknotes 2022-10

Well, apparently I’ve made it to the tenth instalment of my weeknotes experiment. Today also marks two years since my last day working in the office, before everything went a bit weird. I’ve been back briefly a couple of times since, but – at least in theory – I should be starting to go in for three days a week soon. I was always a big fan of colocated teams, but if I’m honest I think now I’d prefer to stay here like a hermit, only going in when there’s a specific reason for it to make sense. On the plus side, at least it would start pushing my cycling mileage back up a bit: that’s dropped from around 2,600 miles a year down to about 600.

I’ve started playing around with building a weather station using a Raspberry Pi Zero W and Nerves (the Elixir embedded platform), after the sensors I ordered from AliExpress arrived (postage from China almost doubled the price, but was still cheaper than buying them from a UK supplier). I put together a first stab at reading the anemometer, but was thwarted by the so-called RJ11 sockets I ordered from Amazon turning out not to actually be RJ11, but actually some other standard that’s even narrower. I also ordered a humidity/pressure/temperature sensor, which I now have wired in and working.

Please excuse the horribly bodged double header on the Pi, which I did in a rush to prototype a previous project when I only had male–male jumper cables

PragProg do actually have a book specifically about building a weather station using Nerves, but I thought it would be more fun not to buy that (it sometimes feels like that’s one of the few books in their catalogue I don’t have) and muddle through on my own. Maybe when (if) I finish it I’ll get the book and compare our approaches.

My ankle/tendon still seems to be on the mend, fortunately. Sunday was the final event in the Suffolk Winter League cross country series, which was actually in Norfolk. A long way to go for a fairly unexceptional course round some fields (although there were some cool rare breed pigs on the farm). I managed to keep up with Robin, who’s generally much faster than me, and finished right behind him, but that was pretty much entirely down to him having a slow day rather than anything exceptional on my part. That also took me over the 400 mile mark for the year (much more than on the bike!), so I’m still on track to repeat my “run the number of miles in the year” challenge from two years ago. I might not be quite so pedantic about it this time as I was then, when I finished on New Year’s Eve with a total of exactly 2020.0 miles.

My fridge has decided to repay the effort I put into defrosting it last week by suddenly refusing to dispense chilled water (or any water – I suppose for a fridge, chilled is the easy part), which I realise is the very definition of a first world problem, especially with everything going on at the moment. It’s weird how much nicer fridge water tastes than it does from the tap, even unfiltered. In other domestic news I actually looked at my gas & electricity bill this month, which was a bit of a shock and prompted me to reduce the times the heating’s on (one disadvantage of working at home). It’s probably also a hint to think about replacing my boiler and improving the house insulation. Annoyingly, it doesn’t feel like there’s a feasible alternative to gas yet, but at the same time I suspect a new gas boiler now would become obsolete before serving out its natural life. I suppose once WW3 kicks off properly it won’t really matter either way.

Uncategorized

Weeknotes 2022-09

You know what would be nice? To have a year or two when it’s possible to visit a news site without a solid screenful or two at the top of the front page being devoted to the same depressing and/or terrifying story. Although I suppose that would probably just mean we’d gone back to ignoring the climate crisis and marching, eyes wide open, toward the likely near-extinction of our species.

Anyway.

Another minor DIY success this week, after realising that the lack of isolating valves in the pipes to the utility room sink wasn’t an issue as I could just turn the hot water off at the boiler outlet. Once I’d done that, it was the work of minutes to replace and reseat the washer in the hot tap that had been dripping for years (despite being turned off so hard that it was effectively put out of use). I now have working hot taps everywhere but the kitchen, where I still have to turn it on under the sink every time I want to wash up.

I also got round to the annualish mammoth freezer defrosting session. Annoyingly for an expensive and supposedly frost-free fridge-freezer, it’s always slowly filled itself with ice. Not in the food compartments, but starting with the elements behind the inner back panel, and slowly expanding until the drawers are frozen in place and the panel starts to bulge out. Clearing it basically requires a couple of hours blasting it with a steam jet from a wallpaper stripper, which is tedious to say the least. This time I also poked a pipe cleaner down the drain hole to make sure it was clear – if that fixes it permanently, I’ll be simultaneously pleased and livid (and very surprised, to be honest). It’s over ten years old now, so I suppose it wouldn’t be unreasonable to replace it, but it seems a shame when in other respects it still works perfectly well (the milk is cold, the food stays fresh, and even the light works when you open the door).

Reduced running mileage this week, in the aftermath of the Tarpley 20. I seem to have developed a minor case of tibialis anterior tendinopathy (a purely Google-based diagnosis, I should add), which I’m sure a bit of rest and some frozen peas will soon sort out. With nothing in the calendar for Sunday I did give parkrun a decent effort though, and despite a lot of mud I somehow managed a course PB and ninth place (my first ever single-digit finish token). That was mostly thanks to a lot of the usual speedy people not turning up of course, but I’ll take it.

Apparently Saturday was the 40th anniversary of John Belushi’s untimely death, so I took that as an excuse to rewatch The Blues Brothers. I think it’s probably the film I’ve seen the most times, starting with a late night showing at the Southampton Odeon in around 1988. The DVD I have came as a double bill with The Blues Brothers 2000, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to watch that. I guess I probably should, in case it turns out to be less terrible than I fear.

It’s finally starting to feel like Spring isn’t too far away, with the first flowers coming out on my Magnolia. I’m sure I’ll be complaining about the heat before we know it.

Weeknotes

Weeknotes 2022-08

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.

Pretending not to be half-dead going up a hill in the latter stages of the Tarpley 20

Weeknotes

Weeknotes 2022-07

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.

Weeknotes

Weeknotes 2022-06

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).

Weeknotes

Weeknotes 2022-05

Oops, nearly a week late. Not a very eventful week anyway.

I’ve started using Obsidian for random note-taking. I’ve got it synced between home and work Macs and my phone via DropBox, and so far it seems fine, although I’ve only really scratched the surface of its features so far. The vim mode is one of the better ones I’ve come across (not on the phone, obviously).

I got dragged into a call about the fact that the Ipswich GoodGym group has fizzled out, but I think I managed to avoid getting talked into taking on any responsibility for getting it going again. We’ll see what happens.

At work we’re trying to get more team-wide learning stuff going again, and started this week with a discussion about various design topics and quandaries that had been suggested. We didn’t reach any conclusions (or expect to), but I think the conversations were valuable. We’re planning to alternate this kind of thing with a coding dojo.

It was the Great Bentley Half on Sunday (ie “today”, if I were writing this on time). The weather threatened to be appalling, but it cleared up to sunshine just in time for the start. There was a bit of wind, and a downpour in the middle, but the sun came out with enough time that my shorts and vest had mostly dried out by the finish. Got round in 1:36:10, which is a lot slower than 2019, but also a lot faster than the nightmare race I had in 2020.