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Weeknotes 2023-04

Nearly a month in already.

I took Thursday and Friday off, in an attempt to start chipping away at the four weeks I still have left to take by 1 April (I’m also relying on the usual arrangements of being able to carry one week over, and stretch another into April). I didn’t really get a lot done, as is my wont, although I did make the first batch of this year’s marmalade. It got a bit burnt (sorry, “caramelised”) on the bottom of the pan and over-set a bit, so it’s sticky and dark, but still tastes fine.

Double double toil and trouble
Marmalade, batch 1

I also got a bit carried away with my lunch on Friday, and instead of just throwing together a sandwich as usual I assembled a couple of eggs, two sausages, a bit of bread, and an ounce each of flour and butter, and turned them into a surprisingly effective impression of a scotch egg and a sausage roll.

Over-complicated lunch

I rewatched season one of The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I say rewatched, as I’m sure I’ve seen it before, but I literally couldn’t remember a single scene of it. I definitely haven’t seen season two yet, so that’ll be a genuinely new experience when the Blu-Rays arrive (yes, I’m an old person), rather than just one rendered new by my apparently poor memory.

I hadn’t really been enjoying my decision to start my #12in23 challenge with Cobol (most of the documentation and tutorials online seem annoyingly unhelpful by modern standards), but I persevered and completed the requisite five exercises. Then I did another five in vimscript to put myself a month ahead. I’d never really looked at the latter any more than necessary to configure stuff in my .vimrc, and I was surprised to find it much less unpleasant than I’d been led to believe.

vimscript, looking surprisingly readable

Sceptical as I am of all the ChatGPT hype, I reluctantly asked it for help writing a complex SQL query to replace some “n + 1” code that had been sitting under a todo tag on my work project for a while, and after a bit of back and forth it provided a much simpler approach than the one I’d been taking, which was mildly disconcerting. It was even happy to convert the SQL into an Ecto query for me when I asked, although I’d already done that bit myself before it occurred to me to ask, and I preferred my version.

Plenty (nearly 55 miles) of running again this week, and having done reasonably quick stuff four days out of five (club interval training, TTT, a track session and parkrun) I opted to avoid the speedy group I did last week’s long run with, and tagged along with some of the Run for Coffee/Beer crowd instead, at a much more leisurely pace and with more walking up hills and stopping (but still covering 20 miles).

Six miles in

I finally got round to fitting some half-hearted mudguards (Ass Saver and Speed Mullet) to my bike after getting road spray up my back one too many times, so we can presumably rely on a drought from now on.

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