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

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.

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.

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.

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.