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

Last week I mentioned some minor annoyances with my electronic drums. The main one is that the hi-hat controller often fails to register that it’s closed, meaning you have to lift your foot up and try again until it gets the message. It occurred to me that maybe the solution would be to just replace that controller (or possibly the whole hi-hat assembly) with a better one, then a web search took me immediately to the details of an upgraded controller that the manufacturer has released for the same kit. Then somehow researching that I ended up on their firmware updates page, and noticed that there’ve been a couple of new versions released since I bought the drums. I downloaded the latest files, upgraded and did a factory reset (after a short delay while I scoured the house for a USB drive – funny how they used to be indispensable but now I hardly ever see one), and to my delight the pedal finally behaves correctly! Now I’m only limited by my lack of actual playing talent.

I had a brief play with Bard, Google’s leap onto the large language model AI bandwagon, with mixed results. First I asked it to compare Ecto with ActiveRecord, and amongst some reasonable points it bizarrely suggested that the former could be faster because it uses PostgreSQL instead of MySQL (there are plenty of things that might make it quicker, but I’m not sure even if that were true – it’s not, of course, as either can use either – that’s one of them). Then I tried asking it a classic riddle, with a small alteration, and it amused me by happily giving the usual answer, apparently seeing no issue with replacing the guard who always lies with the former PM.

On Thursday I gave blood. It was my 60th donation, and went very smoothly, with only a short wait, a straightforwardly passing haemoglobin test (the previous few times they had to repeat the test with the proper measuring machine instead of the copper sulphate drop test) and a nice speedy extraction of the near-armful. Shockingly though they had neither bourbons nor ginger nuts, so I had to make do with a Kit Kat.

On Friday I finally pushed my last responsible moment getting up system for Run for Coffee a bit too far, and got to the rendezvous point just after they’d gone past. Of course by the time I realised I’d missed them they had a ten minute head start, so I tried to cut a few corners to catch up. This strategy was so successful that I arrived at Christchurch Park ahead of them. Just far enough ahead, in fact, that they were still out of sight (I only know all this from looking at the Strava flyby afterwards). I gave up at that point and came home to make my own coffee. As it turned out cutting a couple of miles off the normal route probably wasn’t a bad thing with a depleted blood supply – I was quite tired by the time I got back as it was.

I had another couple of days off work – the usual March rush to use up the remainder of my leave – but as usual didn’t make very productive use of them, although I did at least clean and service my bike. I’ve been powering through the Exercism #12in23 challenge too. I still haven’t gone back to Ballerina, but I persevered with Pharo (the main problems I was suffering with were down to not having read the instructions properly) to tick off the required five exercises, then added Rust, Go, Scheme, Lua, Zig and Crystal. Obviously I’m only scratching the surface of each, and not in the same kind of structured way that you get from something like 7LI7W, but it’s definitely confirming my bias towards dynamically typed high-level languages that support a functional style. The weird thing I’ve found with hopping between unfamiliar languages so quickly is sometimes it’s a struggle to remember whether some piece of syntax or library function is from the one I’m currently writing or a previous one.

On Saturday I finally hit the 250 parkruns milestone, earning an upgrade to a green shirt, although you have to buy them these days. Then I had to rush home for a quick shower before walking back into town to catch the Camra Real Ale Runabout bus, taking us out to various pubs in Framlingham and Laxfield.

Amazingly despite Saturday’s drinking, the missing hour and miserable weather, I still managed to be out at 8am on Sunday to join an intersecting group of people to go and run some laps of Portman Road football ground to support someone running a marathon distance round the half-and-a-bit-mile loop for charity. We left him to it after 12 miles or so before heading to the Cricketers, but just for coffee this time.

Had a weird debugging experience this week. I spent an hour or two on Monday afternoon scratching my head over what seemed like completely impossible behaviour (which, of course, it never is with software), before decided to call it quits for the day. Then I woke up at about 3am, lay awake thinking about random stuff for a while, before all of a sudden the explanation of the errant behaviour popped into my head. Better still, I still remembered it in the morning, and not only that but it was actually correct, and not just some figment of a half-asleep brain.

Implementing the fix took a bit longer than I expected, mostly scratching my head trying to figure out the exact database query I needed. I decided to try ChatGPT again, and had to grudgingly admit that it was very helpful. However, I think the key thing is that I was in the position to evaluate whether its answer was correct, and I had a failing test ready to prove it – I’m still not particularly worried that large language models are going to make developers redundant.

I’ve noticed a few ads lately for products designed to wean people off vaping. Given the fact that vapes were originally designed to do the same with cigarettes, I can’t help thinking this is all a bit “old lady who swallowed a fly”. Also there seems to be a big campaign at the moment to make smokers realise that their dog ends are litter, and aren’t biodegradable. Definitely a message I can get behind, although it’s a shame they haven’t adopted a friend’s slogan of “just because it’s on fire, doesn’t mean it’s not litter”.

Not done much drum practice this week. I’ve still been following the exercises in the book I bought [relatively] recently, and after a fairly painless experience with the basic quarter- and eighth-note patterns I suddenly hit a bit of a road block when trying to add accents to alternate notes. The accents themselves aren’t a problem, but it turns out a couple of years of not paying attention to limb independence means I’m really struggling to limit them to the hi-hat, rather than whacking the snare or kick extra-hard as well when they coincide. Not particularly related to that, but I’ve also been half-considering upgrading/switching an acoustic kit, as there are a few things with the e-drums that can be a bit annoying. However, I suspect I need to do a bit of thinking about noise levels first (despite being in a detached house).

I’ve made some progress with the Exercism #12in23 challenge this week. I’d done a couple of exercises from Ballerina, but wasn’t particularly enjoying it, so parked that and did the requisite five each from Go and Rust. I started looking at Pharo Smalltalk too, but so far have found the environment a bit hard to get started with. I feel like I should persevere to see what all the fuss is about, given how much love there seems to be for the language from people who used it back in the day.

A fairly light running week, in the lead up to the Stowmarket Half on Sunday, although it still included one “Run For” each of Coffee and Beer. The half itself went OK, but nothing special (a few seconds slower than last year, but half a minute slower than 2020). Always a good event though, and the annual opportunity for a team photo with farm machinery.

Some wacky weather this week, with snow on Friday, then double-digit [celsius] temperatures on Sunday.

Two consecutive nights out (apparently they’re like buses). On Wednesday I was dragged in as a last-minute replacement for a pub quiz team. It was a new-fangled affair with answers submitted individually on a tablet, with more points for quicker tapping. I’m generally pretty good at quick reactions on the buzzer, but also terrible at most general knowledge categories, so I was of limited help, but not entirely useless (and the point was a fun night out rather than winning, anyway). Then on Thursday we had a work meal at Mr Wing’s, which is an odd combination of a “normal” Chinese restaurant and a buffet, in that they bring you dishes to order but you only pay a single price. Naturally this resulted in me eating far too much, especially as I hate seeing food go to waste. The quality was very good though, even if the quantity was a bit much.

No racing this weekend, but once again I ended up tagging along with a marathon training 20 mile run on Sunday. I’m sure it must be good for me, although I did feel slightly broken by the time I got home.

That’s about it I think. Anyway, there’s clearly nothing much happening in the world when the main news story is an apparently free-speech-loving and cancel-culture-hating government getting an ex-footballer kicked off the telly for daring to express an opinion they didn’t like.

March already! I’d noticed that I hadn’t practiced the drums much recently, but when I finally got round to it was surprised to realise (I’m doing what I’m told by the book, and noting down which exercises I do when, and at what tempo) that the previous time had been in January. Oops.

Also published the first draft of this having subtracted one from the week number, rather than adding one. And I’m not even editing this in vim, so I can’t use the usual “I hit ctrl-a, but it interpreted the number as negative because of the hyphen before it, so incremented it the wrong way” excuse.

I had a day and a half off work this week, but the only vaguely useful thing I managed to do with it was some very belated and half-hearted vacuuming. I spent far too much of Friday adding an extra feature to my Strava YTD app, so you can see a list of activities as well as just the year and month summary info. Then half of Saturday figuring out how I’d broken the release/deployment when I switched from webpack to esbuild. Basically just like work, except on a different Phoenix LiveView app and I don’t get paid for it.

It’s still cold, but I’ve been trying to use the heating as little as possible (not because I can’t afford it, but because I begrudge it), and can mostly be found sitting around in two jumpers and a hat like a mad cat lady. I do have it come on for an hour first thing though, except for Wednesday when the boiler didn’t start and it was a struggle to leave the warmth of the duvet.

I dog sat for Sky again on Thursday, and took her for a walk on her standard route rather than trying to be original, which meant she didn’t stop halfway round and refuse to move like last time. She does seem to be a creature of habit, even down to changing which side she walked on at a predictable point.

Another cross country on Sunday, on a new course in Southwold. It had looked like it might be a bit dull, but was actually not bad, with a bit of mud (but not a ridiculous amount like Framlingham), and a nice steep downhill where it was possible to make up a few places with a lax attitude to self-preservation (photos by Phil Donlan).