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

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).

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.