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

It feels a little more autumnal this week, but still plenty warm enough. The cats have certainly decided the weather’s turned – especially Ninja, who transformed overnight from feral outdoor cat who I occasionally see when he’s hungry back into a cuddly purring lap monster. Unexpected additional consequence of global warming: seeing less of your pets.

Wednesday should have been Run for Beer day, but it was cancelled because of an apocalyptic weather forecast. Having skipped Run for Coffee in the morning because my legs hadn’t recovered sufficiently from RNR for a double run day, I pigheadedly went out on my own anyway, and ended up suffering no more than some light drizzle. I did meet a toad on the pavement, who I relocated to the grass to hopefully avoid him being stepped on (or run over if he ventured further out).

On Thursday I very nearly got Wordle in one guess. My usual starter word had four of the five letters in the correct place, and I got the fifth one on the second try. So close! I could start varying the starter word, but then the one I’ve been using since day one might come up and that would be annoying … oh, no, have I (apart from never playing the lottery) turned into one of those people who always play the same lottery numbers?

Apparently I’ve been using Duolingo for ten years this week, but you’d never know it from my very shaky grasp of Spanish. To be fair, I’ve probably only been using it regularly for the last three of those years (which puts it firmly in the “lockdown hobbies” basket).

Sunday was the Langham 5k & 10k, and I decided to repeat last year’s decision to enter both (starting at 9 and 10am respectively). I was about half a minute slower than last year in the 5k, and a minute slower in the 10k, but happy enough with that a week after a tough 20 mile race.

I binged through all of Brooklyn Nine Nine during lockdown, when I temporarily had access to Netflix, but never saw the final se(ason|ries). By now my aged brain has pretty much also forgotten the ones I did see, so I found a cheap second-hand DVD box set and have restarted from the beginning (confirming that yes, most of it failed to make it to long-term memory). Still funny this time round, and in nice short 22-minute episodes that make handy watching while eating lunch etc.

On Monday morning I happened to see a Facebook ad (possibly the first useful one ever) from the New Wolsey theatre, saying that Mark Simmons was there that evening with his ‘Quip off the the Mark’ show (a fact I’d somehow completely missed). There were a few tickets left, and even a cheap one all on its own in row D, so I went along and had an enjoyable (if antisocial) evening. I’ve been listening to his podcast about jokes that don’t work for a while, so it was good to see the ones that do (and one that has clearly been fixed), and to finally hear the punchline to a bit he’s mentioned a few times!

On Tuesday I left work just too late to avoid cycling home through one of the heaviest rainstorms I can remember, with puddles several inches deep competing with the stuff continuing to drop from the sky to see which could get me wetter (a pointless contest, given that it was physically impossible for me to be any wetter than I already was). The next morning, working at home, I took my laptop out of my (rather damp) rucksack, and was mildly concerned when its screen kept flickering, then it began to emit an unfamiliar beep every few seconds. Fortunately those issues went away after a while, presumably as it warmed up, but the power supply was refusing to work and took longer to dry out, and annoyingly all the old ones I had lying around were either too low wattage or for older models, so once the battery was flat I had to cycle into the office again (fortunately in better weather) to pick up a spare.

This weekend was the Round Norfolk Relay, which is basically what it sounds like. There were 59 clubs taking part, with the circumference of the county split into 17 stages, ranging from around 5½ to just under 20 miles in length. I’d foolishly told the people organising our team to put me down for anything, which meant I was landed with the longest one – 19.67 miles from Scole to Thetford. This was stage 12, which made for an odd Saturday: by the time I woke up our first runner was already underway, but I still had the whole day to fill, before being picked up by Steve at around 11.45pm to head up to my changeover point. Because it was a night stage, we each had to have a support car behind us with a flashing orange light, which must have looked quite strange to anyone driving up the A1066 in the early hours.

I set off at a reasonable pace, and the first half dozen or so miles went past quite pleasantly, but then it started getting progressively tougher as various bits of my legs began to protest. By the end I was running about a minute a mile slower (there were some long hills too!), but managed to drag myself to Thetford in 2:42:40 (compared to my very optimistic estimate/target of 2:35). I handed the baton over to Steve, swapping it for his car keys so I could get myself to the end of his stage for him to drive us home. There was a bit of chaos happening at the end of stage 13, with the stage afterward being cancelled at the last minute because the police had closed the road after a ram raid – it all seemed to be handled smoothly, but must have been a big disappointment for everyone who’d driven a long way in the early hours of the morning only to find they couldn’t run. I eventually got home at 7am, but my befuddled body clock only let me sleep until around 11.

The medals for the event were excellent, and each one was literally unique, as they had the stage details on one side and the team number and club logo on the other.

Monday got off to a good start, with a message from my customer in EE while I was eating my breakfast letting me know that the /var partition on the production server was full, and the app was only partially working. It turned out that the logs for the past few days had been filling up with error messages about a failure to connect to the relay server to send emails. We initially thought it was a connectivity issue, but it also looked like the Bamboo email library (or almost certainly my use of it) was raising exceptions because of a failure to gracefully handle the inability to send emails. Normally this kind of exception would have triggered an email letting me know something was up, but those emails never arrived because … well, you know.

After clearing some disk space to allow everything (apart from emails, but fortunately they aren’t a huge part of the application – a few people will have failed to get alerts, and I had to send a couple of password reset links manually) to start working again, I decided to treat it as an opportunity to switch from Bamboo to Swoosh. I didn’t have any reason to think it would better, but the Phoenix framework switched to Swoosh as its default for new apps a while ago, and presumably they had their reasons. The migration was pretty painless – both libraries use gen_smtp under the covers, and the APIs are very similar – so it was mostly some changes to how tests worked, plus a bonus improvement of extracting the email bodies to separate template files using phoenix_swoosh. With that change deployed, everything started working again. I’m still not 100% sure what the root cause was, but I think it started failing when I upgraded to Erlang 26 and Elixir 1.15, so I suspect some incompatibility there (the tests, of course, don’t use the smtp adapter, allowing this kind of thing to fall through the cracks – I guess we should probably test actual emails as part of a post-deploy checklist).

Embarrassingly, it was several hours into the day before I twigged that the reason there were so many logs was that each exception triggered a notification email, which then failed, caused an exception, and triggered another notification email …

On Thursday stage five of the Tour of Britain started and finished in Felixstowe, coming within half a mile of my house en route, and I felt like a day off anyway so thought I’d go and watch them zip past. I decided to go slightly further afield, so incorporated my spectating in a trail run out to a narrow country road three or four miles away.

After getting home, showering and having some lunch, Robin let me know that a few people were cycling out to Felixstowe to watch the finish and have a couple of beers, so I ended up riding out to meet them there and watch the riders come flying down Sea Road at a ridiculous speed. Then after some refreshment in the Felsto Arms (and a quick stop at the Walton Half Moon on the way home) I tried – and mostly failed – to keep up with everyone at what felt like an only slightly less ridiculous speed back to Ipswich. Hot off the press, it turns out that the three second gap that we watched Wout van Aert open up with his sprint finish was the deciding factor in his victory in the overall event (about which I just accidentally sent a spoiler to Robin, not realising he was waiting to watch the highlights. Oops).

Saturday was Ipswich parkrun’s 500th event, which I ran very slowly because …

Sunday was FRR’s big race of the year, the Felixstowe Coastal 10. It seems that the weather always adds some kind of extra challenge to this one, whether it’s rain, wind or (this year) unseasonably roasting temperatures. Even before race day this made life a bit harder by attracting hordes of people to the seaside when we were trying to drive round putting up signage on the Saturday afternoon, but also meant the race itself was horribly tough (not sure whether it was warmer than the Newmarket 10k back in June, but it felt like it). My time was five minutes slower than last year, but at least there was some convenient sea to get in at the finish to cool off (possibly the only time I’ve swum at Felixstowe when it wasn’t new year’s eve!)

I did at least manage to pretend I was enjoying it when I spotted Liz with her camera, before reverting to the grimace that I suspect accompanied the rest of the ten miles.

Apparently it’s September now, which seems frankly unlikely.

Monday was of course a bank holiday (and a real one, not one of those Scotland or NI ones that pop up in the calendar to give false hope). Justin organised another of his handicap races from his house based on the parkrun substitutes he was doing during semi-lockdown, this time expanding the distance to seven miles. Having missed the chance of a Sunday long run thanks to the beer and bicycle shenanigans described last week, I decided to run there (four miles), potter gently round the seven, then after coffee and biscuits take a scenic route back through the countryside for a total of 17.

I got an email from my electricity and gas supplier, Ecotricity [side note: they do seem to be genuinely as environmentally-friendly as a power company can be, and their founder has an interesting back story, which I recently heard about on James OBrien’s podcast], plugging their mobile phone provider, Ecotalk. The prices seemed pretty good, and they use the same EE network that I’m already on, but I wasn’t sure whether it would be cheaper than the employee discount prices I was paying (EE of course being owned by BT, for complicated reasons involving deciding we didn’t want a mobile network, then oh wait, maybe we did). Turns out BT Mobile been ratcheting the price up over the years and (including a 15GB upgrade that I never use) I was now paying an outrageous £32/month. I’ve now foregone that “discount” and switched, and am now paying £12 a month. Go, as they say, figure.

Incidentally, I love the way sim cards are basically a history of shrinking phone sizes. Although annoyingly at some point phones all started getting bigger again, even if the sims didn’t.

Having reently put myself through rewatching the Star Wars prequels, I went to move on to the original trilogy, only to be unable to find the DVDs (I guess Jane took those and I hadn’t figured out which was the least bad version to repurchase). Having recently read about the “despecialised” versions, I did some digging and ended up downloading the Project 4k77 edition (plus 80 and 83 for Empire and Jedi). I wouldn’t steal a car or a handbag, but I reckon I’ve bought those movies enough times on various media over the years not to feel too bad about it. I’ve watched the first two so far, and it’s nice to finally get to see Han shooting first in HD at last (even if the odd scene is slightly grainy).

The racing season kicked off again on Sunday, with the Framlingham 10k. After a poor performance last year, and a worse one the year before, I managed to scrape a course PB of 44:13 today (my 2018, 2019 and 2023 times are all within five seconds of each other).