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

Hmm, seems to be a bit of a shortage of things to write about this week.

I cancelled my Netflix subscription yesterday, as seems to be the fashion. To be fair, I only signed up a few months ago, and after binging my way through a couple of shows I found there wasn’t really anything new or old that I desperately wanted to start watching (I’m sure there’s loads of good stuff hidden away, plus the obvious “must see” programmes that I’ve never watched). I had been working through the US version of The Office, which was increasingly feeling like a chore, and the appearance of Catherine Tate was enough to tip the balance from soldiering on to giving up.

Still on the TV front, but mercifully Tate-free these days, I remembered to watch the latest Doctor Who (the news of its broadcast almost passed me by – I’m not sure whether it’s generally less hyped or whether the bubbles have just shifted around a bit). To be honest, it felt like missing it might have been the better option.

No racing this Sunday, so no excuse for not giving parkrun a decent effort on Saturday. Well not that excuse, anyway – by way of variety I tagged along with a few friends who were doing a 13-odd mile social run around Felixstowe, with the parkrun making up miles four to six or thereabouts. Ironically (is it? Ever since Alanis Morissette we’ve all been so paranoid) I ended up with my fastest time since before the pandemic (if you ignore a few virtual parkruns during lockdown). That’s largely down to Felixstowe prom being rather flatter than Chantry Park, but I’ll take it. Still a fair way to go to get back to where I was a few years ago, although I may have to just admit to getting old.

I seem to have spent a fair amount of time this week researching espresso machines and grinders, as I consider replacing the manual lever Europiccola that’s served me well (if not always consistently) for the past decade. As always with these things, the process of reading reviews and forums results in the budget creeping slowly upwards until the idea of spending roughly the same as I paid for my (admittedly very cheap old) car for a coffee maker seems almost rational.

I always feel like these posts just peter out, with no proper conclusion, so I’ll let this paragraph perform that function this week.

A day late this week, because today feels like a Sunday. Although to be fair so did yesterday, after two consecutive Saturdays. And I believe there’s another nonsense holiday coming up soon, on a Thursday and Friday of all things. Madness.

As usual, Easter pretty much passed me by, other than making my traditional bad hot cross bun joke. I took them along to parkrun on Saturday and they seemed to go down well. Better still, there were some left, so now I have a small stash in the freezer. I’d definitely recommend the recipe – much better than when I used to make the dough in my bread machine.

I thought I’d had another fairly low mileage running week, but turns out I actually did a reasonably acceptable 35.5 miles. That may explain why my legs felt tired for the second half of the Little Bromley 10k (I ended up finishing a few seconds slower than Bungay last week). It’s a shame that Covid precautions have changed the route and precluded the traditional finish into the churchyard for the past two years, but at least the tradition of getting a mug at the finish line instead of a medal is still alive.

It’s been a while since I made any progress on the weather station – I’d been procrastinating because the next step was connecting up the wind vane. I’ve already written the basic software to talk to it, but it’s the most complicated bit, hardware-wise, needing an external ADC to convert the resistance-based sensor output to something the Raspberry Pi can handle. Still pretty straightforward in the grand scheme of things, but anything involving a jumble of jumper wires on a breadboard ends up being a bit of a challenge for my clumsy fingers. I finally got round to it today, and it turned out my apprehension was justified. The value that comes out is sticking persistently to zero, even though I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve checked the wiring. It’s tempting to jump straight to getting a PCB made and soldering everything together permanently, but that would probably be asking for trouble.

Better news on the unicycle front – I wouldn’t claim to actually be able to ride it yet, but I can occasionally stay on for a few yards, which is definitely progress.

Is it really Sunday already?

Another uneventful week. Even more uneventful than last week, when at least we had a bit of snow for variety. I do, however, appear to have what UB40 would describe as a rat in mi kitchen. For ages I’ve noticed the cats occasionally taking a deep interest in the kitchen units where the sink and dishwasher live, then the other day when it happened I thought I heard a quiet scuffling noise too. When I pulled one of the kickboards out to look underneath I saw a whiskery face staring back at me, before he dived into the drain and disappeared, like some kind of miniature Buffyverse ne’er–do–well. There’s no sign that any members of the rodent community are actually living under there, and I’m not sure there’s even any way for them to get out into the kitchen – maybe they just pop up every now and again for a bit of warmth. I’m minded to leave them to it, to be honest.

Speaking of the Buffyverse, as predicted the (very short) Firefly rewatch has segued into another run through the Buffy DVDs. Currently nearing the end of season two, and this time I’m being especially sad and also listening to the director/writer commentaries for the episodes that have them. I’ve even started listening to Buffering the Vampire Slayer podcast from the beginning, although I haven’t caught up with that sufficiently to get the two in sync yet. I’m also watching old episodes of Taskmaster, and the two theme tunes have started to melt together in my head. I really ought to seek out more new stuff to watch, but to be honest the amount of choice seems a bit overwhelming these days.

This Sunday was the Bungay Festival of Running, and although various people’s attempts to persuade me to enter the marathon were as unsuccessful as you’d imagine, I did at least do the 10k. It felt like hard work (which I suppose is kind of the point), but I dragged myself round in my fastest time for a while. We hung around for the other races, and it was nice to see a friend win the half, and our club pick up the men’s team prize in the marathon.

Now with added SSL. Although I’d still prefer to dump WordPress and switch to a static site – I just need to summon up the enthusiasm for the migration.

It’s been a pretty uneventful week as far as I can remember. I had a couple of days off work but didn’t really do much with them other than lazing about. I made a bit more progress with the weather station, but most of it seemed to involve yak-shaving around trying to decide the best way to time and/or count the anemometer pulses to give a wind speed that’s real time but not too real time.

We had a bit of snow on Thursday and Friday mornings. It didn’t amount to much, but I was glad not to be out in it. Fortunately the weather was far more pleasant on Saturday (marshalling at parkrun) and Sunday (running the Harwich Half). Especially so for the latter, as there was no bag drop and the start line was a fair walk from the car park, which would have been horrendous if it had been freezing. I ended up with my fastest half marathon time for a few years, but nowhere near a PB (despite what Strava may claim – I assume the one in 2019 which was a couple of minutes quicker must have come up short on the GPS).

I still can’t ride my unicycle, but have graduated from following along the garage wall and using it for balance to pushing off, pedalling a few times (I think my record so far is about 2½ whole revolutions) then falling off. At least the falling bit now generally involves just stepping off and (usually) grabbing it before it hits the ground.

On Friday I dialled into (do we still say that? How many people these days even remember phones with dials? I do actually have a nice black bakelite one plugged in, but it no longer seems to work – not sure whether it’s the phone or my landline, but either way it stops people ringing me, which is nice. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes …) James Shore’s Art of Agile book club, with J. B. Rainsberger and Geepaw Hill, for a discussion on TDD. It was interesting overall, but the main specific tip I picked up was a simple one that seems like it might come in handy. The idea was that when you have a test that occasionally fails because of a race condition, it turns out that it is OK to add a sleep, but you should add it to the production code, not the test. That way you end up with a test that fails reliably, which makes it much easier to debug, and once you’ve fixed the synchronisation problem you obviously remove the sleep.