Kerry Buckley

I submitted the week’s worth of home blood pressure readings that they asked for after my health check, and once again they were hovering around a slightly elevated level. When I submitted the results, the form had one of those “I am not a robot” checkboxes – I suppose that’s important context. Anyway, I’ve now got another appointment in a couple of weeks for a blood test and ECG. I also finally got round to having an eye test on Friday (probably a couple of years late). No major issues, but they did spot a couple of tiny spots on the back of my eyes that (if I hadn’t already told them about the doctor’s appointment) would apparently have led them to recommend a blood pressure check.

Despite a far-from-hectic social life, I thought I’d ended up with three things I should have been at on Wednesday evening. It turned out though that the pub quiz I’d put in my diary was actually on the 11th of March (curse you February and your multiple-of-seven number of days!), and the Fat Cat meet up got punted to next week, so I ended up at the least interesting of the three: the running club AGM.

On Friday I got talked into joining various other friends at the Harpers’ to watch Ipswich play Wrexham in the FA Cup. Not sure the match was much more entertaining for the rest of them, who actually like football, and the general opinion seemed to be that Town hadn’t tried that hard, and were secretly quite keen to get knocked out so they could concentrate on the league. Did you see that ludicrous display? etc.

Six days in a row of running, for a total of 54 miles. I knew I’d be too tired for a long run with Holly and Maria on Saturday (glorious sunshine), so just did parkrun and ran with the boys on Sunday (sleet) instead. An easy week coming up though, at least until the Tarpley 20 next Sunday.

Apparently Gibraltar now has its own parkrun, so when I finally get round to visiting my sisters in Spain I won’t have to miss my Saturday morning ritual!

After filling my brown bins early before Christmas, then missing the day-early collection and realising I then had another month to wait for the next one, this week I was back to frantically shoving in more bits of dead apple tree detritus in a last-minute rush before leaving for work on Wednesday. But then I did remember to fill them again at the weekend, so one-all to the demons of procrastination.

The cat that lives on site at Adastral Park (who is rumoured to be called Scoop) obviously found the damp weather as tiresome as everyone else, and had sneaked into the office on Wednesday to sleep in the foyer. It’s not the first time he’s come in – someone had even provided a cat bed for him the other day – but it’s the first time I’ve seen him in there.

I’d decided I should probably just get a new rear wheel for my bike, as after over 13,000 miles the cones are worn, it still wobbles slightly after my attempts to clean and adjust the (non-sealed) bearings, and now a spoke seems to have broken too. Then once I started looking I realised that a single speed wheel with a disk brake fitting is what you send someone out to get once they’ve come back with the hen’s teeth you asked them for. I can see why in retrospect, and it explains why my bike has an eccentric bottom bracket to adjust the chain tension rather than horizontal dropouts. It turns out that it is possible to get an appropriate hub though, which I can see leading to the purchase of more workshop equipment and me attempting to get into wheel building, which may or may not end well.

Another 40 miles of running, with far too high a proportion of relatively hard efforts, with a club session on Tuesday, Thursday Tempo Ten, 13 miles on Sunday including a much quicker parkrun than I’d been intending, then the Pakenham cross country on Sunday, which was nowhere near as much of a quagmire as I’d been expecting. Must try to fit in some easy miles between the efforts next week!

February already! I just about managed to eke out my Christmas cake for all of January, and ate the last piece today.

I had the bright idea of routing all the read-only database queries in my work app to the replica database, in the hope that it would improve UI performance when there were a lot of background writes going on. Unfortunately, despite it looking promising locally and in the test environment, once I deployed it to the live instance a non insignificant number of queries were cancelled by Postgres because of potential conflicts with new data received from the primary. This is the kind of thing that it turns out is very easy to learn once you have the error message to search for, but less obvious beforehand. In the end I backed out the whole thing – it’s nice to be able to do this after a couple of days work, rather than in the old days when it would have gone into a massive release several months later and be an absolute nightmare to unpick.

I finally went for my first over-40 health check on Friday, a mere 16 years after I became eligible for one. I expected a repeat of the message from my flu jab appointment that my blood pressure was a bit high, but this time (measured the old-fashioned way with a manually-operated cuff, analogue manometer and stethoscope) it was merely borderline (or as the nurse amusingly called it “on the cuff”). They’ve asked me to take two readings a day for a week and submit them to decide whether it’s worth worrying about.

The road racing season kicked off on Sunday with the Great Bentley Half. I didn’t have Holly and Maria to keep me honest this year, and finished a couple of minutes slower, but still finished quicker than I expected to at the start.

Forgot to mention the Big Garden Bird Watch last week. It was a damp grey day, and I managed to see the sum total of one blackbird, one wood pigeon and one collared dove, which is a pretty poor showing. There were loads of gulls wheeling over the garden, but it doesn’t count if they don’t land. Also at one point a heron flew over, which I’ve never seen here before – I reckon it was just trolling me.

First pub quiz with the team of coffee-running people for a while on Wednesday. We tried the one at the Spread Eagle for the first time, and enjoyed it. It was at the “most questions are pretty easy so the winner is the one who gets least number wrong” end of the spectrum, but that made for a nice relaxing evening. We came third out of not very many, but it’s the taking part that counts!

On Saturday a group of us took the train out to Bury St Edmunds for a tour of the Greene King brewery. I’d been there before, but I think in about 2002, so I couldn’t remember much about it!

After drinking the pint that was included in the tour price we retired to the Corn Exchange for a few more, before catching the train home and finishing the day off with a takeaway curry.

Back to the Fat Cat on Sunday, to celebrate (a day early) Robin’s 50th.

Also lots of running (53 miles’ worth, in fact), which I won’t bore you with.

Workwise, on Tuesday we finally did the big switchover to the new platform for the main system I’m responsible for. It’s been running on a single VM for over five years, and that’s now been replaced by an OTP cluster of four nodes, a redundant pair of load balancers and a primary/standby database pair. The Mk2 servers have been running in parallel for over a year, while all the connectivity was sorted out to the 1500-odd nodes it monitors (fortunately by the customer rather than me – corporate firewall bureaucracy isn’t pleasant). The actual switchover took about an hour, which was mostly dumping and importing the database, and apart from a few minor glitches everything seems to still work afterwards.

Then on Thursday I got contacted because another system (which mostly ticks over without anyone having to touch anything) had suddenly stopped being able to download data from one of its sources because of an unknown CA error. My first thought was to blame ZScaler, but I think it was just a case of the external site switching to a cert that the ancient http library versions didn’t know about. I eventually managed to upgrade just enough things to fix it, and conjure up a working build, but it’s a reminder that we really need to take some time to upgrade all the things at some point. In a company where every system seems to have a huge team attached to it, I’m not sure how I’ve ended up as the sole developer/architect/support person for three entire applications, but at least we recently managed to get the other two shut down!

Another ex-colleague Fat Cat meet-up on Wednesday, featuring my current and previous two bosses. No Dave this time, or we could have made it four.

Running-wise, the first proper club session of the year on Tuesday, after last week’s was cancelled because of icy roads (though it seems most of us went out anyway and did our own thing). No ice this week, but plenty of rain, and a long drive home in damp clothes as the A14 was closed. Then a drizzly Thursday Tempo Ten, and a cobbled-together long run before and after parkrun on Saturday. The lads were doing their long run on Sunday, and I ran out to meet them on the way back, as an excuse to pop into the clubhouse for a second breakfast and, as it turned out, three pints of Exmoor Beast.

Oops, it’s Saturday and I just realised I completely forgot to post last week’s notes. Not that I imagine anyone will have missed them!

Back to work after the Christmas/New Year break, and so far it’s been a nice easy re-entry.

I got another invitation to book an over-40s health check, and finally got round to it this time (only 16 years late). If nothing else, it’s an excuse to postpone booking a GP appointment to discuss the elevated blood pressure that the pharmacist measured when I went for my flu jab, as I imagine the health check will pick up the same thing. I also got sent a bowel screening kit, which apparently is something they’re going to start doing every couple of years now.

We had a very small amount of snow at the start of the week, and some lingering cold weather. The snow wasn’t really enough to count, but did make for some nice photos when a couple of foxes popped into the garden. One of them was confident enough to take food out of my hand, and I saw him again when I got back from parkrun on Saturday to find him sitting on my front doorstep apparently waiting for me to get home!

The Seville oranges were in the shops, so I made my first batch of marmalade (14 jars, from 4lb of oranges) on Saturday.

Stowmarket cross country on Sunday, so didn’t manage to fit in a long run this week. It was a cold windy day, but fortunately most of the course is in the woods so was nicely sheltered.

Happy New Year, although it already feels like the Doomsday Clock hands are due another clockwise shift.

Bin news update: I discovered that the council had done a double whammy on me with the brown bin – not only did I miss the latest collection because it was a day early, but next time they’re only doing black bins, so it’ll be a whole month between me feeling pleased with myself for filling the bins up early and them actually getting emptied (assuming of course that I remember to put them out at the next opportunity).

I was a bit apprehensive when a dashboard warning came on last week to tell me that one of my sidelight bulbs had gone, having heard tales of light access on modern cars being a nightmare. As it turned out, I paid less than fiver for two bulbs, and it was a five-minute job with no tools required (would have been two minutes if I hadn’t misremembered which one was blown and replaced the working one first). I guess this is largely down to the fact that an 18-year-old car isn’t actually “modern”.

On New Year’s Eve, as usual, I joined a few fellow idiots to cycle to Felixstowe, run up and down the prom a bit, then go for a brief dip in the sea before returning home via a couple of pubs. It was a nice sunny day this year, albeit a bit chilly in the wind. I managed about a minute’s swimming this year, rather than the usual “shoulders underwater and one stroke” minimum – perhaps all those cold showers when I had no heating in the summer have toughened me up a bit!

I fired up the pizza oven in the garden for the first time in a few weeks, and almost immediately a friendly fox turned up (I always imagine it’s the same fox visiting, but it’s clearly not – for a start sometimes there are two). He (/she/they) didn’t hang around for pizza, but I did have some dog food to give him this time (last time I’d run out, and he followed me round looking disapproving).

Two parkruns again this week (New Year’s Day and the normal Saturday one). Both at Kesgrave because of ice on the paths at Christchurch Park, and I put a bit of actual effort into the second one, for a fair-to-mediocre time.

The cold snap continued through the weekend, but at least the wind had died down for my long run on Sunday, and there were lots of places where the trails would have been muddy if they weren’t frozen, so we avoided wet feet.

I did a bit more fiddling with my Neovim setup – it seems to be all sorted for Elixir development now, with very little custom config required. Not that I actually wrote any code during my fortnight off (or did pretty much anything else useful!), so we’ll see when I get back to work on Monday.

I finished playing Superliminal. It was OK, and original, but it’s no Portal.

I finished my Christmas pudding on Sunday, along with the last of the pot of cream that I opened on Christmas day, and which was labelled as use by 28 December, and eat within three days of opening. It was perfectly fine of course – there must be huge amounts of food getting chucked away for no reason because people are slaves to these dates (consider this ammunition for mocking me if next week it turns out I have food poisoning).

Finished the week with a curry at the Bangla, to celebrate Jo’s birthday.