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

No more sightings of my under-sink rat lately, but I did end up blocking the hole he was coming up through (incidentally, I’m not sure why I tend to assume any animals I encounter are male). Not because I’ve got anything against the rat – I quite like the rat – but because it turns out having an open gap under your sink that leads out to the drains means that sometimes unpleasant smells find their way into the kitchen. Who knew? I need to get a replacement for the rubber pipe coupling that’s been chewed through, but for now I’ve just stuffed it up with an old tea towel.

I finally took the plunge this week and ordered the fancy new espresso machine I’d been drooling over on the internet for ages, along with a couple of extra accoutrements. I’m also upgrading my grinder, but there’s a bit of a waiting list for that so I’m stuck with the old one for now. Still, after a bit of practice I feel like I’m reliably turning out decent coffee. Which I sometimes did with the old lever machine, but it was always a bit of a lottery with so many variables. I was expecting to take a while to learn to froth milk with the more powerful steam wand, but surprised myself by making a pretty decent flat white the first time I tried it. To be honest it felt a bit odd spending so much money on a luxury item when half the country is struggling to make ends meet, but I don’t treat myself often, and I sent some money to the Trussel Trust to assuage a bit of my middle class guilt. Plus there’s the fact that I didn’t vote for the Tories, of course.

Thursday got off to a good start when I dropped my phone in the loo. I’d put it on the cistern, and as I flushed it slid off. It would probably have been fine because the toilet lid was in the process of closing, but I instinctively tried to catch it to avoid it hitting the tiled floor, and after a brief amount of half-awake fumbling heard a splash as it bounced through the now-tiny gap between the almost fully-down seat and the bowl. Soft-close seats have their drawbacks, I guess. Fortunately it didn’t immediately die, and after leaving it in a 40° oven for a few hours the only remaining issue was condensation in the camera lens. Since then I’ve been leaving it in a zip-lock bag with some silica gel when I got a chance, and it seems more or less back to normal. I’m glad I’m not going to have to put up with all my photos from now on having a cheesy soft-focus dream effect.

Running-wise, the Week of Doom is finally over, having completed the Ipswich Summer 5k Series opener (Tuesday) and Sudbury Friday 5 (Friday, duh, but miles not km) hot on the heels of last week’s Kirton Friday 5 and the Stephen Williams 10k on Sunday. I even managed a half-decent parkrun yesterday, but I’m finally having a proper rest day today (also it’s raining). Somewhat amusingly, thanks to a lot of speedy old people not being there on Tuesday (turnout was sparse in general – I think they may be charging a bit much this year for what’s basically a parkrun with chip timing and jaffa cakes), I ended up winning my age category!

I finally finished reading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It’s an interesting view of the kind of low-wage, zero contract, high wealth gap, corruptly governed economy that was keeping working people in poverty a century ago (but which they kept voting to perpetuate). Or it might have been Jacob Rees-Mogg’s manifesto, I’m not sure. It’s an extremely long book though, which is less obvious when you start reading something on a Kindle rather than in physical form.

Still suffering the lingering dregs of a cold/novid, but mostly limited to my trademark annoying cough now. Annoying to me, but probably more annoying to others, although I’m in people’s earshot much less often than in the olden times.

I was on a call at work this week with a group of people who’d volunteered to take part in an agile mentoring programme. A good initiative (particularly as it seems to be a grass-roots thing, rather than something pushed by TPTB), but I was a bit sad to find myself the sole practicing software developer among a sea of scrum masters, product owners and agile coaches. It remains to be seen whether anyone will pick me as a mentor (I claimed the Manifesto for Half-Arsed Agile Software Development as one of my achievements in my profile).

A busier week of running this week, with club training on Tuesday, a 10k social trail run to the pub (but starting and finishing a seven mile cycle away) on Wednesday, then the long-awaited return of the Friday 5 [mile] series (you can tell how keen I was to enter by my bib number!), then parkrun, and finally the Stephen Williams 10k on Sunday (which wasn’t quite as hot as last year, but still pretty toasty). Now a whole day off before the first Summer Series 5k race on Tuesday, then the second Friday 5 is on … well, you can probably guess which day it’s on.

I still seem to be getting ratty visitors under my kitchen units. The other day the cats were getting excited so I pulled the kick board off to see one dive down the pipe, then pop back up and end up sitting there with his head down and his tail sticking out. I shut it up again and shortly afterwards heard a loud squeaking and some kind of murine contretemps, so I assume he encountered a colleague on its way up. I should probably block the gap up, but I kind of want to get a photo first and they haven’t done any actual damage yet.

Jane had contacted a few potential buyers for her Mini, and today Redwood Classics came to take a look, offered her a better price than the previous two people, and ended up taking it away and leaving a pile of actual cash (remember that?) in its place. They actually seemed more interested in my 1275GT, and offered me nearly twice what I paid for it, but I’m still minded to hang onto it for now, and at some point get it back on the road – maybe eventually with an electric conversion. They did give me £150 for an old engine I had lying around though, which was an unexpected bonus. They also know someone who might want the Spitfire, which I’m happy to sell if I get a reasonable offer.

Hmm, another week, you say? Not sure where they’re all disappearing so fast, to be honest.

I went to a friend’s 60th birthday party on Saturday. I’m not really a party person – I hate the idea of trying to make small talk with strangers – but there were enough people there that I knew to allow me to mostly lurk in corners talking to them, and had a generally OK time. I was slightly surprised that out of what must have been a hundred-odd people there, it seemed like only four of us had cycled there, but I guess a lot of them had come from further afield (or close enough to walk).

Fortunately we were all kicked out of the venue at 10.30 (that was the plan – there wasn’t a riot or anything), so I wasn’t completely wrecked for the Woodbridge 10k today. I hadn’t run it since 2016, and had forgotten quite how hilly it is, and it also felt boiling hot, although I’m pretty sure the actual temperature was only in the mid-teens. A great atmosphere as always, with half the town apparently turning out to watch (I suspect the fact that the route passes multiple decent pubs helps).

My Buffy rewatch has now reached season four, which is where (a) they go to college, (b) they started filming in what at the time we called “widescreen”, but I guess now we just call “normal”, and (c) the DVD producers got me again with their horrible UX trick of switching from a menu where four episodes are laid out like this:

1	2
3	4

… to one where they’re laid out like this:

1	3
2	4

I’ve also almost caught up with the Buffering podcast to the point where it matches the episode I just watched. Those are from a few years ago (coincidentally I think in real time they’re about to finally reach the show finale), and I’m mainly interested in what happens when Joss Whedon’s me too fall from grace hits their timeline.

I had another go at getting the ADC for my weather station working after abandoning it for a while, and despite swapping in a different IC it still resolutely failed to read anything other than zero. I suspect it might be a software error (no doubt on my part), so I think I might have to temporarily switch from Nerves to a more traditional python image just to check that the hardware’s all wired up right.

That’s about it I think. Maybe I’ll do something interesting next week, but I’d advise against holding your breath (assuming anyone’s still reading at this point!)

Another lazy/uneventful week, I’m afraid. Part of the reason I started writing these was to encourage me to occasionally do something worthy of writing about, which appears to have only been partially successful. Also I forgot that yesterday was Sunday, so it’s actually been slightly over a week.

I thought I was going to get a hole-in-one on Wordle this morning, but sadly only the first four letters were correct, and it took me two more goes to get the fifth.

That does finally move my stats back to a mode of three though, which is nice, if slightly spoiled by that one time it defeated me after a streak of just over a hundred.

We had DevCon14 at work on Friday – the latest incarnation of a one-day informal developer conference that I set up in 2009, and which we’ve run irregularly ever since. The last few have been remote, which is better in some ways (not restricted to people based at Adastral Park; easy recording of talks) but does lose the random inter-session chatting and precludes heading to the pub afterwards. I had very little involvement in the actual organisation this time, but did keep up my record of talking at all of them. This time I did 15 minutes (mostly a live-coding demo) on Kent Beck’s TCR (test && commit || revert), which I’d prepared almost entirely the night before, but seemed to go OK.

Earlier in the week I’d had a chance to earn a few extra brownie points from my internal customers/users after a customer migration to a new cloud platform had had to be postponed because some component was failing in a way that wasn’t causing any alarms. Fortunately “my” monitoring platform can talk to the kit in question, and I managed to add the extra monitoring they needed in a few hours – I suspect it might have taken somewhat longer to get a change deployed by a vendor, or even by most of our more “strategic” systems.

The long weekend seemed to be all about 5ks for some reason – parkrun as usual on Saturday, then the Kesgrave Fun Run (actually more like 4.85k) on Saturday, which I made less fun by pushing pretty hard as a trial run for the Twilight 5k in a couple of weeks, then a bank holiday special return for the own-brand parkrun which a friend used to organise for a small group during the lockdown-easing period before the real events came back.

I watched Back to the Future the other night. It’s hard to believe that it’s now seven years since we couldn’t believe that we’d reached the future that they head back to at the end. Or that I have friends who weren’t even born when the film came out.