Kerry Buckley

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.

Christmas cakes made! I’m wondering whether to try making a pudding as well this year, but if so I won’t be following Delia Smith’s stupid recipe that took about 24 hours of cooking last time I tried it.

Thanks to a combination of tight customer finances and Oli the recently-graduated former apprentice wanting to try working in a variety of teams, I’m now back to being solo on the project at work. I feel like I might struggle to keep output up to 50% of where it was with the two of us, even though for the majority his time on the team he was only working three days a week and studying the other two!

Our head coach, Ian, had his 60th birthday on Tuesday, and various club members, including his wife, conspired to organise a surprise party after the training session. I think we all managed to keep him in the dark pretty much until we “happened” to regroup near the venue during the jog back to the sports centre after our efforts on the prom.

After last week’s pitiful running mileage, I managed to up it a bit this week, including running to (slightly quicker than I’d have liked, to make in time to shower before my 9am meeting) and from (much more slowly, but almost twice as far) work on Wednesday. Along with running for coffee on Friday, parkrun (slowly) on Saturday and the Capel 5 on Sunday, I managed to go from my lowest mileage since 2022 (13.6) by jumping up to the highest total since the end of my marathon training at the beginning of this year (42.4).

I arrived at work on Thursday pleased that, despite running in instead of cycling the previous day, I still had my pass card and the right keys with me. I got changed, and wandered across to the office (about a two-minute walk). On reaching my desk, I realised that I didn’t have my laptop in my bag, because I’d left it in my locker overnight and forgot to pick it up. I put my bag down and walked back to the changing room, only to realise that my locker keys were in the bag. Walked back to the office to get the keys, back to the changing room to get the laptop, and back to the office, where I finally managed to start work. And I’d been kind of late in the first place.

I had a visit the other day from a man from the council saying they’re going to resurface the pavement outside my house later in the year, and that I needed to clear any vegetation that encroached on the path. I spend a few hours on Saturday afternoon hacking, digging, pulling and strimming at the ivy that’s slowly taking over, and now you can actually see the retaining wall again. I do need to also tackle the even bigger ivy that’s colonising the mostly-out-of-sight north wall of the house at some point too (along with the actual garden, of course).

Two ’spoons visits at the weekend, for second breakfast after parkrun, then back for food and (a little too much) drink on Sunday evening.

So the big news is that, after 2½ months with no hot water, on Tuesday a man came and fitted a Worcester Bosch Greenstar 4000, and when I got home from the evening’s training session I was able to have a shower with warm water! It’s quite pleasant, as it turns out, and I suspect it might catch on.

Obviously it’s much better than the old one ever was, even at its best, and will no doubt cost much less to run, making a mockery of my attempts to drag every drop of life out of the old inefficient one. Also I can now control the heating from my phone, like one of those modern people.

Just for fun, I trawled back through my old Facebook posts to unearth the history of keeping the old 28CDi mostly working for about a decade after it should have been put out of its misery …

• February 2015 (I know because it’s the third-from last stub in my last-ever cheque book): had the boiler serviced, and was told it was pretty much on its last legs and I’d soon need to think about replacing it. Decided to stop having it serviced instead.

• April 2015: replaced the fan, which had seized up and no longer triggered the pressure switch that allowed the boiler to light.

• May 2016: “I think I’m going to have to get a new boiler soon.”

• April 2017: flushed out the heat exchanger. “Let’s hope that ekes another couple of years out of it before it finally needs replacing.”

• March 2018: replaced the diverter valve diaphragm, so I could have hot water without the heating being on too. Didn’t work (“Might be time to admit defeat and call a professional”). Fortunately replacing the entire valve, along with the heat exchanger, did the trick, and professional help was avoided.

• February 2022: replaced the heat exchanger O-rings to stop a leak, and dried out the PCB. “hopefully that’ll keep it going for a bit longer.”

• 11 July this year: realised I had a fairly major leak from the hot water pipe under the kitchen floor. Turned off the hot water, and left a dehumidifier running 24×7 in the kitchen for a few weeks to hopefully dry things out.

• 5 September: after my half-hearted efforts to find a non-busy plumber failed, replaced the pipe myself with one running artfully round the frame of the door to the utility room. Turned on the water to find that it was, if anything, too hot – the diverter valve seemed to have gone again, and this time the burner just kept running, regardless of whether a tap was turned on. Turned off the boiler.

Other than that, not a huge amount to report. Fat Cat pub night again on Wednesday, and the Saxons 5 mile race on Sunday (rounding off my lowest mileage week since I caught Covid in 2022 – this time purely due to laziness).