Kerry Buckley

Another bank holiday Monday. I’m convinced that at some point one of them will completely pass me by and I’ll wonder why no-one’s working, but I noticed this one coming with a few days to spare. I didn’t do a lot with it though, other than a (not very long) long slow run on my own in the countryside.

It turned out over the long weekend that the cache optimisation I mentioned last week wasn’t quite so premature after all, so I ended up rewriting it again. It’s still simpler than the one before last, but not quite as simplistic as the one I thought we could get away with. Although I also realised we hadn’t enabled pruning of old Oban jobs from the database, which can’t have helped.

I went out for a Bangla curry on Thursday, which ended up with Robin and I heading to the Cricketers afterwards to meet Dave, who was later than planned, leading to consumption of a few more pints than might have been originally planned. A good evening though.

Ninja cat was behaving oddly on Friday morning, hanging around in the lounge and apparently convinced something interesting was under the settee. Then in the evening I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye and looked up to see a mouse creep out from under the TV, then skitter back in again, so that probably explained it. I couldn’t catch it from there, but was woken in the night by sounds of commotion downstairs, and went down to find that Badger cat had caught it. He didn’t seem to have injured it, so I rescued it from him and put it out of the front door. Some time later I was woken again, and he’d obviously managed to find it and bring it back in, and was walking round with it in his mouth. Still apparently unharmed though, and this time I relocated it a bit further away and set the cat flap to in only, which gave it time to escape while I was kept awake by cats bashing at the flap until they remembered how to pull it open and go through anyway. There was no sign of the mouse by the morning, so either it got away or they ate it outside!

On Friday evening a bunch of us from work (and a couple of former colleagues who I hadn’t seen for a while) went to Avid again for some bouldering. Although I thought I hadn’t overdone it, I had all sorts of aches by Sunday. Fortunately (and unsurprisingly) the worst were in my arms, so they didn’t completely scupper the Framlingham 10k. They probably didn’t help though, and neither did the heat. I finished a couple of minutes slower than last year, and if I’m honest I’m not entirely looking forward to racing 60% further at the Coastal 10 next weekend. Nice to be back racing though – the August break seemed to last ages, although somehow I managed not to take advantage, with the fewest miles run of any month so far this year.

On Tuesday I went to Isaacs (which I tend to avoid as a rule) for Stu’s leaving drinks. Another good developer who will be missed from the team, but is no doubt heading on to better things. That meant missing the normal FRR training session, but that worked out OK because …

Wednesday was a club track session, and instead of the usual intervals or whatever it was a one mile time trial challenge, with three different starts for different pace ranges. I ended up somewhere in the back half of the sub-7 wave, finishing in 6:09. That’s 12 seconds slower than my PB, but that was a while ago and I’m happy enough with it considering how tired I was feeling. Then we retired to the local pub for a few recovery pints (or halves in Neil’s case).

To prove the old adage that “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things” (attributed my Martin Fowler to Phil Karlton), I spent all of Friday working on a module called Queue – which used to be a job queue but when we switched our home-grown solution to Oban became just a cache of aspects of job state – fixing bugs where the cached values got out of step with the actual queue. As well as renaming it to QueueState, I ended up reversing some premature optimisation and just rebuilding the data from scratch on queue events (with a bit of batching), rather than trying to change values incrementally forever, which was asking for trouble.

On Sunday we repeated last year’s bike ride out to the Lindsey Rose beer festival, but without the extra pub stops and with much less falling off. We were lucky with the weather, got there in time to get a table, and spent a pleasant afternoon sampling the beers on offer. Unfortunately there were no sumo suits this year, and they also had a Neil surcharge, pricing all the beer at £5 a pint or £3 a half! It ended up being 31 miles of cycling all in all.

At some point this week an old leather belt appeared in my driveway (dropped by a fox, maybe?). The next day it was joined by a dead rat. I disposed of the rat on my way out, but when I got back the belt had disappeared. Now I think about it, a mousetrap briefly appeared then disappeared in roughly the same spot a while ago. Maybe my drive is haunted.

A long-overdue week off work (finally used some of my 2024/5 leave allowance! I tried to use a dash there instead of a slash, and had to fire up the character viewer to find an en dash that didn’t look weird with the old-style numbers that this blog theme uses. I was glad to discover that U+2012 FIGURE DASH is a thing), but annoyed to find that for some reason WordPress mangles it, regardless of whether I paste in the character or insert it as an HTML entity.

Obviously there were a million jobs I needed to do, and obviously I did very few of them. I did manage to do a small amount of gardening (some of the clippings from the top of the front hedge were taller than me, as were some of the weeds from what I’ll optimistically call the lawn). I finally got fed up with my 20-year-old petrol tools, and bought a rechargeable strimmer, pole hedge trimmer and chainsaw from the Ryobi Max Power 36V range. So far I’m very happy with the first two (I’m yet to use the chainsaw).

I also spent quite a while washing washed seven or eight years’ worth of old running shoes (27 pairs), ready to send for reuse/recycling. Then I looked on the site and it said you don’t actually need to wash them. Oh well.

I’d been vaguely thinking about picking up my abandoned attempt to work through GOOS in Elixir. I was using Scenic for the UI, but that was hard to test, so I was wondering whether to backtrack and try using wxWidgets instead, as it has bindings in the Erlang stdlib. That led me into a couple of diversions to learn about Erlang macros and records, how to use the latter from Elixir, and why you can’t call the former, and I ended up porting the code from Arif Ishaq’s tutorial to Elixir. Still didn’t get round to looking at the GOOS stuff though.

On Saturday I went to a barbecue at Jen and Alec’s, with most of the coffee running crowd. I nearly forgot to go altogether, but I’m glad I didn’t because it was a pleasant afternoon/evening.

Nothing very exciting on the running front this week. I ended up cycling to Felixstowe (about 11 miles) for the Tuesday club session, which ended up involving a possibly unprecedented 8.5 miles of running, including some warm-up laps of the tennis courts, running to and from the session location, then a 2?4?6?8?6?4?2 minute pyramid session (there’s that figure dash again!). I’d hoped for a gentle ride home after that, but Dave had other ideas and I ended up being dragged along at an average speed of nearly 17mph.

Innovation days at work this week, which is where we take three days every six weeks to work on (or learn) something not necessarily directly related to normal day-to-day project work, then share it with the team afterwards. I started revisiting an early attempt to replace some graphs in our app with Grafana dashboards (the current graphs were rendered using Chartkick and Chart.js, reading historical data from Postgres, and could be very slow to load). We’ve been duplicating the data into Prometheus for long enough to have a full set of values for the maximum period users can go back, but every time I look into embedding Grafana dashboards into a web app without requiring people to authenticate separately it seems like an unrecommended/unsupported nightmare. This time it finally occurred to me to go for the middle ground, forget about Grafana, and just source the values for the existing graphs from Prometheus instead of Postgres. It wasn’t too hard and has barely changed the UI, but is at least an order of magnitude faster, which has made our users happy.

On Wednesday we had our annual club “Run Bike Run” event, which involves two short runs (totalling four miles) with a six-mile bike ride sandwiched in between. The twist is that there’s no set start time, but a cut-off for the finish, and the winner is the person who set off latest but still got back in time. I was never in any danger of winning (especially having already cycled 11 miles to get there), but did at least time it right to get back inside the cut-off, and finished slightly quicker than last year. Then after stopping for chilli and a beer I had to ride home again – it felt like a high-mileage day, but for a change most of it (38 miles or so, including the commute to work earlier) was on my bike.

I wasn’t expecting much from parkrun, but also didn’t have any excuse not to try, with no racing this weekend. I surprised myself with a 21:30 though, which turns out to be my joint second quickest ever on that course (probably the toughest and hilliest of the various ones Ipswich has had over the years). Then to Colchester Art Centre in the evening to see the Pet Needs Fractured Party People film, plus an acoustic set from the band. Weird to see them in a seated venue, and also to almost immediately spot myself in the crowd on the screen.

On Sunday Holly and I did a long(ish) run along the Gipping to Needham Market. We stopped at Bramford for a paddle, where a dog-walking lady told us we shouldn’t have gone in the river, because someone tested the water quality recently and it was 8. She wasn’t that clear about what the 8 represented though, other than that it should have been zero. There was another delay not far from the end when we realised we’d have to divert out to the road because of a closed “unsafe” bridge over the river, but opted instead to return to the bridge and cross it regardless (it was hardly Temple of Doom level stuff!)

The plan was to grab an ice cream once we reached Needham Lakes before getting the train back, but the queue was a bit long so we decided to pop into the pub for a quick drink instead. By a stroke of good fortune it turned out they had a beer festival going on in the garden, so we accidentally got stuck there for two and a half hours in the sunshine.

This month’s Run for Beer was in Felixstowe. It was still very warm, but I figured that although a vest would have been more comfortable to run in, it might get a bit chilly sitting outside afterwards. Of course what a sensible person would have done (and everyone else did) was take an extra layer and leave it in the car for afterwards. I found the run a real struggle (maybe I’m coming down with something – there seems to be a lot of it about), and the beer very welcome. Only five of us actually ran, but a few more joined us for a drink.

I re-downloaded and watched the 4k77 Star Wars films, having noticed that there was a new version of Empire since I last watched them (also that was on my old projector, which was only 720p and didn’t have great contrast). It’s nice to be able to see the trilogy in 4k (albeit sometimes fairly grainy 4k), without having to suffer Greedo shooting first, the CGI Jabba etc.

I finally got round to getting EmuDeck running on my Steam Deck, and have been really pushing the machine’s limits with the latest games …

With Friday racing having finally come to an end after nine straight weeks, I had no excuse for taking it easy at parkrun. Nonetheless I did take it easy – in fact it was my ninth slowest of all time! I did briefly put on an exaggerated sprint (and what turns out to be a ridiculous face) on seeing a photographer as we slogged up the evil hill.

Saturday was also the day of the SVP 50k/100k ultra, and while I was most definitely not running it again, I went along with Robin and Jo in the evening to cheer in the people who were, and to drink beer.

Shamed by having stood around drinking while watching other people finish running stupid distances, I felt I really had to drag myself out for something vaguely approaching a long run on Sunday. In tribute to the ultra runners, I also walked up a lot of the hills! For less than half marathon distance at an incredibly slow pace, it felt really tough – maybe the fact that I got home at 4.30pm not having had any lunch didn’t help. I did see some llamas though.

On Monday we held another developers’ unconference at work. It seemed to go down well, with a wide range of topics discussed, and lots of biscuits eaten (by me, at least).

It was another tough week of running, with the usual Tuesday evening session followed by the club’s annual social Two Rivers race on Wednesday. This involves everyone setting off from Landguard Fort at staggered times based on their best recent race times, and choosing our own routes to Felixstowe Ferry (just under five miles away). I was trying to back off slightly with Twilight (see below) coming on Friday, which meant I ended up finishing second from last (and only not last because I overtook someone running the last bit with his five-year-old son!). Thence to the pub for some refreshment, which ended up being only in liquid form because I failed to order any food before the kitchen shut.

After a brief respite (apart from cycling to work) on Thursday, Friday was the Ipswich Twilight 10k. Much dryer than last time, and I was slightly slower, but managed to pull away from Holly towards the end, to make up for her doing the same to me last year! A bunch of us retired to the Cricketers afterwards, where we ended up working round very slow service (the Wetherspoons app had apparently broken, so everyone had to go to the bar like in the before times) by lining up several pints at a time. We did manage to leave a little before 1am though, which is marginally earlier than last year, and they hadn’t quite reached chucking-out time.

Two conversations from Wetherspoons on Friday …

One, as we were going in (having been directed away from two of the entrances, presumably to funnel everyone past their crack security team):

“What’s in your bag?”

“Running stuff.”

“No knives or anything sharp?”

“No. Do you want to look?”

“No, that’s fine.”

Two, from a woman ordering at the bar:

“Can I have a treble [something]?”

“Sorry, we can’t serve trebles.”

“Why not?”

“It’s just policy.”

“OK, then I’ll have two doubles.”

“That’s fine.”

I managed to turn up early for parkrun on Saturday, and ran round very slowly, then popped over to JJ’s for a barbecue in the afternoon. Definitely didn’t feel up to a long run on Sunday, but did manage to get out for a very slow, very warm half-dozen miles.

I finally finished Portal: Revolution on the Steam Deck (with a couple of hints, and after reverting to an earlier save in the final level to give myself a bit more time to get to the last button before the death timer ran out). It’s extremely impressive for a free fan mod. I suppose I have to find something new to play now, although I might also sort out getting some old games on there under an emulator.

This Tuesday was what has become the annual summer club get-together at Paul’s field instead of the usual club session. Basically 40 minutes running round a fairly hilly circuit on grass, followed by some food, beer and chat.

No rest on Wednesday, with a track session in the evening. I’d intended to take it relatively easy, with a race coming up on Friday, but as usual ended up pushing a bit too hard and wearing myself out!

Friday was outrageously warm, and I ended up driving out to Thetford Forest on my own for the Wibbly Wobbly Log Jog after the people I’d been planning to car share with decided they couldn’t face it. Apart from being a bit of a trek to get to, it’s a good event that I haven’t done since 2019 – around five miles on tracks and windy paths through the forest, with the odd bomb hole thrown in. The temperature was still in the high 20s when we started, and I set off at an optimistic pace, given my tired legs. I felt like my speed was slowly reducing to a crawl as the miles passed, but not many people seemed to be passing me, so I think the heat was getting to us all. I ended up finishing 24th out of 300-odd runners, which was a pleasant surprise.

On Saturday I was absolutely convinced I was going to be early for parkrun, right up to the point when I looked at my watch as I cycled across the park and saw that it was 8.57. Then because of the warm weather more people had cycled, so I had to lock my bike a bit further away than usual, and as I got there I heard the dreaded “Are the timekeepers ready?”. I would have made it to the start line (barely) in time, but they accidentally started two minutes early!
My plan had been to run round gently with Holly as usual, but starting from behind the tail runner I picked the pace up a bit, aiming to catch her up. By the time I finished I’d made up 179 places, and also established that she wasn’t actually there.

I decided to give the long run a miss on Sunday, and did a very small amount of house and garden work, including trimming the face of the rather poorly-looking hedge along the driveway. I was going to do at least some of the top too, but my trimmer started misbehaving. I’d been thinking about getting some rechargeable garden tools to replace my increasingly temperamental (and noisy) petrol ones, but last time I started researching online I got sidetracked and accidentally bought a cheap scythe on eBay. I haven’t had much luck trying to use it so far – mainly because it’s not great quality and was extremely blunt. I spent a while trying to sharpen it today (and cut my finger, which I suppose is a mark of some kind of success), but it’s not quite there yet. If nothing else I suppose I can combine it with a black cloak for a somewhat hazardous hallowe’en costume.

I managed to put a small scratch on the lid of my Macbook by dropping my work Macbook on it, which is one to be filed very much in the category of “first world problems”.

My boss’s boss was over from India this week, which meant another work meal on expenses. We went to Takayama, which has changed location since I last ate there, but still appears to do excellent food.

I’m still semi-obsessively practicing with my (not Rubik’s brand*) cube when I’m waiting for things or don’t have the energy to do something more useful, and this week I managed my first sub-30 second solve. I also briefly had all my averages (latest 5, 12, 50 and 100) under 45s.

Run for Coffee on Wednesday was mainly notable for this incredibly sympathetic selfie from Calli after Nicola had fallen over (don’t worry, we’d all checked she was OK by this point!)

Wednesday evening was pub quiz night again (with our team featuring three of the people from the above photo), and we won again! It was very quiet, what with the England football-kicking contest happening at the same time, and most of the teams that usually give us a run for our money weren’t there. It’s a good job we only go every ten weeks though, or it might get embarrassing – I don’t think any of us are individually that knowledgable, but we seem to cover a wide range of subjects between us.

The Friday 5 series may have finished last week, but there was still a five mile race on Friday evening – the Brantham fun run, which is actually a pretty tough course, with an energy-sapping hill in mile 4. The weather felt more like March than July, which was OK for running in but a bit chilly for the standing around afterwards (the logistics mean cars can’t leave until the runners are all in, and I’d given Holly a lift and she was the second female finisher so we had to wait another quarter hour or so for the trophy presentations!).

No racing on Sunday this week though, so time for a gentle 14 mile(ish) plod in the Fynn Valley. Much warmer today, and the nettles were starting to invade some sections of the paths (but not anywhere close to the nightmare a few weeks ago).

I’m posting this before the final of the football thing, so by the time you read it it might have “come home” – I assume I’ll be clued in to how it’s going by the shouts emanating from the neighbours again.

A child just knocked on my door offering to sell me some kind of energy drink for £1.50 (apparently it’s £3 at the local corner shop). Very odd. Perhaps he was a burglar.

*it’s a “QiYi X-Man Tornado V3M Pioneer UV Magnetic Magic Speed Cube Flagship Version”, if anyone cares!

I realised that I hadn’t taken any time off since the beginning of the leave year in April, so I booked off the second half of this week – that uses up half of the five days I carried over from last year, which I suppose is a start. As usual I had a vague notion of getting all sorts of useful stuff done, but all I really ended up doing was cutting back the foliage on the back of the house (and the brambles on the patio that were in the way).

I thought about staying up to watch the election results come in (having gone to bed too early to see the iconic ‘Portillo moment’ in 1997), but realised that there would be a really boring stretch until around 3am, and also that there was no way I’d be able to put up with watching the coverage on any of the TV channels. I ended up just watching the exit poll announcement, and switching off when Laura Kuenssberg came on. I woke up at around 4am for long enough to check my phone and ensure I wasn’t in for a 2016-style shock. Nice to be rid of our embarrassment of a Tory MP at last, and a surprise to see Suffolk Coastal go red too.

The Friday 5 season came to an end with Great Bentley this week. It’s normally a warm one, but looked like it could feature heavy rain this year, with quite a downpour as we set off to drive down there. Fortunately it cleared to just a bit of drizzle for the race. It ended up being my quickest of the series, but still slower than last year. It occurred to me that the last time I competed under a Labour government (having been far too lazy during the Blair/Brown years) was probably a junior school sports day obstacle race, when Callaghan was in Downing Street!

After a gentle parkrun on Saturday, it was straight back to racing on Sunday, with the annual Ekiden relay event. This sees nearly 200 teams (we’d entered 11 from FRR), each running a marathon distance split into six legs of 7.2, 5, 10, 5, 10 and 5 km. It’s always a great social event, with loads of club gazebos lining the middle part of the 2.5km lap with everyone who’s not currently running supporting those that are. It looked like the weather was going to be wet, but as it turned out it was – apart from a couple of heavy showers – largely a warm sunny day as it seems to be every year. I ran leg B (5k) for the club’s male supervets (over 50) team, and we managed second place in our age category (with me being the slowest component of our overall time!). We were soundly beaten by our over 40 team this year though, having managed to go slightly quicker than them in 2023. After a bit of recovery I then did a 10k leg for one of the two social teams that we’d entered as the coffee runners, which unsurprisingly I ran even slower. We got completely soaked by another downpour while cycling home, and eschewed the traditional pub stop, but a few of us did head back into town for a curry after drying off and resting for a bit.

We had a temporary outage with some of our team’s local servers this week after scheduled overnight work on the building’s power – not because the servers failed to come back up, but because they were shut down in preparation, and the power cut caused the building access card system to fail and no-one could get into the server room to switch them back on again. Fortunately they weren’t running anything terribly important, as those things are on more resilient infrastructure (as you would hope!)

After being stuck for ages, I finally got past the last puzzle in chapter two of Portal Revolutions. I had a brief look at a walkthrough guide, but only really enough to convince myself that I hadn’t missed anything, rather than actually taking in the detailed steps. The last few moves did seem pretty straightforward when I went back to it though, so maybe I did remember a few of the instructions!

The beginning of the week was uncomfortably warm for running, but it was nice to be able to sit comfortably outside the pub without any extra layers after Wednesday’s evening’s Run for Beer though (and also after outside Costa after Run for Coffee the same morning).

This week’s Friday 5 (Stowmarket) was warm too, though not as bad as last week, but (in keeping with the never-ending run of summer false starts we seem to be getting this year) the temperature had dropped again in time for the Kesgrave 10k on Sunday.

The main piece of running news though is that I was slightly taken aback on opening my annual London Marathon ballot rejection email to see the words “You’re in!”. I think I’ve entered the ballot seven or eight times, but statistically I think I’ve still beat the odds (last time I heard an estimate of the chance of success it was about one in 15, but I imagine it’s only getting less likely each year). I guess that means I now have to drop my increasingly unconvincing protestations that I was never going to run a marathon.