Something I forgot to add to last week’s catch-up edition was that for some reason (I think it was being randomly recommended this video on YouTube) I recently decided to learn how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. I’m old enough that I had one when they first came out, but it was always beyond me. I remember eventually getting a set of instructions, but it was a very painstaking process, with what I remember as fairly complex algorithms to switch two pieces at a time. Things seem to have moved on now, with a variety of solving techniques that get more involved as they get quicker. It turns out to be quite addictive – the beginner’s method is quite east to pick up, but I’ve found myself slowly trying to learn fancier techniques, although I’m still not particularly quick. I did manage to get under a minute once, but that very much depends on the last layer ending up in a configuration that I remember the moves for.
I got round to installing Styler in my work project this week. It’s an Elixir linter that has one fixed set of rules and runs as part of the (equally opinionated) language formatter, which I have configured to run whenever I save a file. It replaces a lot of checks that were previously in the domain of Credo, but without the nuisance of having to fix them when they fail the build. It did break some stuff on the initial run, as predicted by the readme, but once those were sorted it’s been working well. The commit that added it was possibly my biggest ever though, weighing in at 3,973 files, 16,603 insertions and 13,129 deletions.
After a work meal on Thursday I finally found myself in a pub that had the local Camra magazine on display, and picked up a copy, with a cover photo featuring the bunch of us that went on the bus pub crawl a few months ago (despite none of us actually being a member).
The Friday 5s are all done now, but Friday evening racing isn’t quite over yet. This week it was the Ipswich Twilight 10k, which is held on closed roads round the town centre. After a bit of rain earlier in the day, we started in the dry, but the heavens opened halfway round and it was like standing in the shower in your running gear (but also running, obviously). I didn’t feel like I’d gone that well, but it turned out to have been my fastest at that event (if some way off my 10k PB). I had had the presence of mind to take a dry T-shirt and jumper with me, but that didn’t avoid having to sit in the pub in soaking wet shorts and trainers. Fortunately they had plenty of time to dry out, as thanks to Gary arriving just as the remaining two of us were finishing what would have been our last pints we ended up staying until chucking-out time, which I now know is 1.15am. I still managed to get up in plenty of time for parkrun though, although my level of wakefulness was revealed when I made my morning coffee, and forgot to put the cup under the grinder.
