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

End of the leave year, so I had this week off to use up the last of my allocation of days. Which was nice.

My new TV arrived on Monday. Fortunately the template I’d made to check for fit was accurate, and it just squeezes onto the corner wall (with about 10mm total clearance).
As is my wont, I ignored the safety instructions’ insistence that (a) the wall mount should be installed by a professional, and (b) the TV needed three people to lift it, and with a bit of ingenuity, planning and some minor jeopardy I managed to successfully get it up on the wall on my own. I’ll probably stick to one of the other instructions though, namely “do not throw anything at the TV set”. Which is why I don’t watch Question Time.

Once I’d removed the old (home-made by me) media tower, the (likewise) MDF projector screen, the projector shelf, the projector, the old TV, various bits of obsolete kit like a Sky box and a TiVo (!) and a phenomenal pile of now-unused cables, and filled and painted over some holes, the room now looks much tidier (or might once I sort out the piles of random stuff in the other corner!)

My new Mac arrived too. Apart from it being many times times faster than the old one, the switch was almost anticlimactic. A couple of hours for the migration assistant to do its thing, and everything from apps to preferences to command line tools was set up and running pretty much exactly as before, which isn’t bad considering the new one’s running a whole different processor architecture. The first Macs I used were 680×0-based, so over the years I’ve now migrated from there to PowerPC to Intel to Apple Silicon.

Another month’s Run for Beer has rolled round already (actually it should have been last week, but hardly anyone could make it then). Before we know it spring will be here and we’ll be out in beer gardens again. This week we headed to the Three Wise Monkeys. That made the route slightly shorter, which fitted in nicely with it being in a fairly short gap between last weekend’s 15 mile race and a five mile one this Friday.

Friday was the Sudbury “fun run”, which despite the name is very much a proper race. I did it last year too, but had completely forgotten that the second half is pretty much all uphill. They’d had to move the finish line at the last minute thanks to some emergency roadworks, so it was 4.75 miles instead of five, but the missing bit would have all been downhill! My pace was pretty much identical to last year, and it was nice to average under 7 minutes a mile again.

Saturday’s parkrun was another story altogether – just dragging myself round at 9 minute+ pace was a real struggle. The heart rate monitor on my watch backed this up, with the average value being weirdly almost as high as the maximum I’d hit on Friday. At least I’d taken along the batch of hot cross buns I’d made on Friday to hand round, so I got to refuel before cycling home.

On Sunday I headed back to the same park to run the parkrun course again, this time as part of the annual Beat the Bunny unofficial handicap race (start times are based on your fastest 5k so far this year, and the fastest runner is chasing you all down wearing a bunny suit). There seem to be fewer quick people at these events every year, to the extent that I was the last non-leporine runner to depart. Fortunately my best 2024 parkrun time was slow enough to give me a four minute head start, so the bunny didn’t catch me and I wasn’t quite last. In fact I even improved on my handicap time!

I took the day off on Thursday, and finally dismantled the chicken run (a mere eight years since I last had any chickens). It was surprisingly difficult to get apart, despite me having removed most of the screws last weekend. Still a lot of clearing to do before I can get the greenhouse up in its place though.

I tried to finally watch Everything Everywhere All At Once, but the Blu-Ray turned out not to be from whatever region the UK is in (it’s so long since I thought about region codes that I didn’t even realise they were still a thing). I braced myself for a complicated return/refund process, but they just issued an immediate refund and don’t even want me to bother sending the disc back, which feels like a strange way of doing business. Yay Amazon, I guess?

After what surprisingly turns out to be 17 years, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and ordered a massive TV to replace my projector (and the marginally less old small TV). I don’t think when I knocked up a 72″ screen out of MDF even longer ago, for the projector before that, that I expected to ever be able to replace it with an actual telly with an extra diagonal foot of picture. It’s supposed to arrive tomorrow, then we’ll find out whether the piece of board I cut to match the cross-section of the TV to confirm that it (barely) fits in the room was in fact the correct size (it’ll go on the wall that cuts across the corner at 45?, so the taper at the edges was a critical enough part of the measurement that a tape measure didn’t really cut it).

Incidentally, I assume everyone types the ? symbol by holding down option and mashing the keyboard until the right glyph appears, then deleting the rest?

I ordered a new laptop too, as my 2018 Air is struggling these days (eg right this minute, when the load average has mysteriously jumped into the 600s), so it’s been a tough week for my credit card.

I ran the Colchester 15 today (actually in Langham, which is even closer than Colchester). It was much hillier than I expected, but I survived and even technically got a PB, though there’s not much competition at that distance and the only other 15 I’ve done were Benfleet, which is largely off road and full of mud. Getting there in the first place was less straightforward than expected – I’d offered to drive, but minutes before Rob and Dave arrived I discovered that the long-standing slow puncture in my offside front tyre had turned overnight into a complete flat. Fortunately after pumping it up it retained its inflation for the day, but getting that replaced will be a task for this week (along with the battery, which also chose today to go from “only lasts a day or so after being charged” to “doesn’t retain any charge at all” (fortunately I have one of those amazing little jump-start booster battery things).

After spending all of Monday cobbling my second AgileFest talk together (by which I mostly mean scouring the web for CC-licensed images to put on slides, along with a few less generic ones from my photo history), I think I more or less got away with it. This one was an experience report of 20 years of doing agile development in (and often despite) a company that’s spent most of that time repeatedly attempting Agile Transformations™. I do seem to have a weird knack of being able to spend a few hours throwing slides together and ending up with them forming an outline of a talk of approximately the required length.

With the end of the leave year rapidly approaching, I finally got round to taking a couple of days off this week. I didn’t do a huge amount with them, although I did make a start on dismantling the old chicken run to give me space to put the greenhouse up. I’ve basically removed all the screws holding the sections of mesh panelling together (apart from a couple that were rounded off and seized in place), but it’s still doggedly retaining structural integrity.

Stowmarket half on Sunday. A new course this year, with a few hills and a second half into a headwind, but I managed more or less the same OK-but-not-great time as I did at Great Bentley.

Oh dear, nearly a week late.

A Bangla curry on Wednesday, with three of us retiring to the pub afterwards for another few pints, for my first “mid week half dozen” for a while. That didn’t bode well for the Thursday Tempo Ten (no racing this weekend, so no excuses) – especially as I was reminded when I said “see you tomorrow for TTT” as we parted ways that it was technically today. As predicted, TTT wasn’t a pleasant experience (is it ever?), but I more-or-less managed to hit my 75 minute target. I blame having to negotiate cars turning in and out of side roads for the extra three seconds.

It was Badger and Ninja cats’ fourth birthdays on Friday, but I forgot, so no cake for them. They’re more-or-less getting along with the new addition (who’s still going by Cosmo, the name he was given by his previous owners, as I haven’t had any inspiration for a better name). I wouldn’t say they’re exactly friends yet, but they’re happy to eat together without any growling.

I finally got round to registering my YTD app with the Strava developer programme, under vague threats that they might disable API access for unregistered apps, which would be annoying for the literally dozens of users.

In “will he ever learn?” news, I spent a reasonable proportion of the weekend preparing a demo for TDD talk I’m doing an agile event at work on Tuesday. Now I just need to put some slides together, then also write the second talk I’m doing at the same event.

I’ve been having an absolute nightmare with our slowest integration test at work. It basically runs a whole load of tasks against simulated remote nodes, which involves making lots of ssh connections to a fake external system running as a docker container. It recently started randomly failing to connect, or the connection would freeze partway through a command, and because I’d ignored my better judgement and changed too many things before getting back to green, I spent ages trying to narrow down the problem. The trouble is I don’t think it’s actually deterministic, so I kept going down blind alleys thinking I was getting somewhere. Despite trying everything I can think of, including reinstalling docker, it still doesn’t reliably work on my Mac. Fortunately it still seems to be OK on CI, so at least there’s that. Still, grr.

I was slightly dreading Tuesday night training after Tarpley, but my legs surprised me by mostly still working. There was a track session on Wednesday too, which might have been a bit much, but fortunately I had an excuse in the form of a clashing Run for Beer. We’re trying to mix up the destinations a bit this year, and for February we picked the Greyhound. It’s an excellent pub, and I should go there more often.

On Thursday we had one of our irregular developer events at work. Amazingly we’re now up to DevCon17 (I came up with the idea for the first one back in 2009), and apparently I’m now not just the only person to have presented at all 17, but no-one else has even attended them all! This time I talked about time, and a few of the ways it can bite programmers (seemed apt for February 29th).

I dropped a container full of sugar on the kitchen floor yesterday, and it somehow landed and remained upright, the base almost but not quite detached (that clear plastic bit is open at the bottom), and almost all the sugar stayed inside. I’ll take that as a win.

The long-delayed Framlingham cross country happened today – it should have been the first race of the season, but had to be postponed because of massive flooding last year. Some parts of the normal course were still underwater, but the Flyers did a sterling job of adapting the route and also coping with reduced car parking capacity. I don’t think most of the course was really much muddier than in previous years, but there were a few points where it was a bit deep (including in the iconic section through the [dry] castle moat.