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

I forgot to mention last week that, after about 18 months, Casper has finally figured out how to use the cat flap! Just in time to get a bit more use out of the garden before autumn arrives and the house seems more appealing – even Ninja has come in and purred on my lap a couple of times in the past couple of days, after spending almost every minute of the summer hiding outside as usual.

It was the last bank holiday for a while on Monday, but I did very little other than recover from the cycling and drinking on Sunday. Onwards to Christmas.

I still felt worn out by Tuesday evening, so drove to Felixstowe for training for a change, rather than cycling. Even without the extra miles on the bike the running wore me out even more, but after another couple of rest days (apart from riding to work) I managed to drag myself out of bed for Friday’s Run for Coffee. Only two of us running this week for some reason, although a few others joined us at the coffee shop. Then a slowish parkrun on Saturday on what’s still a horrible course (I heard someone describe the uphill bit as “barbaric”, which seems about right). And yet another ’Spoons breakfast.

On Saturday my neighbour popped round to say that the lady whose garden backs onto both of ours was concerned about a plant that’s growing in my hedge. Apparently it’s called a black locust tree, and grows quite aggressively and quite large. He offered to cut it down and put it in his brown bin, but I felt guilty so did it myself on Sunday (as well as also removing another smaller one I found a bit further along). I’ve got next week off, and cutting the hedge is on my notional to-do list, so we’ll see whether I actually get round to it.

After however many weeks it’s been with no hot water, and no success with my half-hearted efforts to find a plumber who wasn’t booked up for months, I’d decided to fit a new pipe myself. I think I’ve now assembled all the bits and pieces I need, and made a start this weekend. I need to cut the old pipe off in the utility room, then run a new one through the wall, over the door and under the sink (completely bypassing the leaky one under the floor), and it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to put an isolator valve before my new pipework in case anything sprung a leak. Then (very belatedly) I realised that with basically half an hour’s work cutting the pipe and putting the isolator on I could now turn the water back on at the boiler and have hot water everywhere except the kitchen. A shame I didn’t think of that earlier, but on the plus side I’ve got quite used to cold showers, which I hear are quite trendy.

I always forget just how much better SDS+ drills are than normal ones. The only 15mm bit I had that I thought was long enough to go through the wall was one with a normal round shank, so I spent ages with a hammer drill making about a quarter-inch dent in the breeze block wall. I eventually decided to save some time by drilling as far as I could with the SDS+ and a short bit, then reverting to the normal one for the remainder. It turned out it was just about long enough after all, and flew through the wall in about two seconds, almost literally like a hot knife through butter.

I’ve now got as far as cutting and dry-fitting the pipes on the utility room side (behind the washing machine), so just the actual kitchen bit and all the soldering to go.

I noticed that Point Break (the original one, not the 2015 remake) was on iPlayer. I missed it at the cinema when a bunch of friends went without me 30-odd years ago, but on balance I think I’m probably with Bill, who said at the time that it was rubbish, even though everyone else had enjoyed it.

Another track session on Wednesday. This time it was split between 100m all-out efforts with 100m recoveries (which I walked), and the same but 200m. I’d remembered to take the lights off my other bike from Tuesday’s ride to Felixstowe and put them in my bag, but had inexplicably (well, explained only by my usual incompetence) forgotten to also take their brackets, so I had to nip home via cycle paths and quiet roads to grab them before heading to the pub. It was one of those “just gone off” days, with Dave and I between us having I think four different beers that we’d ordered on the app but turned out to no longer be available.

On Sunday it was time for what’s become the annual ride out to the Lindsey Rose for their beer festival, with ten of us this year – double the number from two years ago. It was a nice day for it, and would have been uneventful other than for a few people deciding that the lack of the sumo suits that were there the first year was no obstacle to doing some wrestling anyway. This somehow ended up with Peter getting carted off to A&E with a broken ankle.

Lots of people seem to be leaving Github lately, after some management changes or something (I seem to remember similar rumblings when Microsoft bought them, but I don’t think they ever came to much). I have loads of random repos on there, but hardly use any of the site’s features, and I’d be reluctant to leave, as I was almost one of the first thousand people to sign up (user ID 1194), which puts me in the earliest 0.001% of users.

Wednesday was FRR’s annual Two Rivers handicap race/social – starting off at Landguard Fort in reverse order of speed, picking our own routes (not that there are a huge number of sane options) and converging at Felixstowe Ferry about five miles later. It was hot and hard work, and I fell behind the people that started around the same time as me, and got overtaken by most of the faster ones. I still managed to pick off a few of the runners who started before me though. Then to the pub, naturally.

I heard a noise outside on Thursday night that sounded exactly like one of those squeaky toys for dogs. On investigation it turned out to be a frog, which was a source of fascination for the cats. After failing several times when it hopped out of my grasp, I finally managed to catch it and put it over in the corner of the garden where there may or may not be the remains of a water feature.

A rare weekend away, heading back to Totton for Tim’s birthday barbecue. It was good to see lots of old friends, and to stop off and take my dad out for lunch on the way home on Sunday (although we ended up being subjected to the Saints–Ipswich game on the pub TV!). I did Bartley Park parkrun while I was down there, and managed my highest-ever finishing position of 7th (albeit only out of 124).

After adding my parkrun result to my spreadsheet (what, don’t you all have a parkrun results spreadsheet?) I spent altogether too long trying to work out why conditional formatting in a column was colouring rows that it shouldn’t have. After I deleted the rule and the colour didn’t go away, I eventually realised that some previous copying and pasting had somehow brought the colour with it. In my defence, that feels like a bug, and at best another example of why “paste as plain text” should be the default everywhere.

The monster change I’ve been working on on and off at work has finally been merged, and apart from a couple of minor issues seems to be working OK. Basically the system runs about 2,500 different checks against a bunch of different bits of the mobile network (which are mostly just Linux virtual machines or Kubernetes clusters), and each of those checks used to be handled by a specific module, with functions to return the name, description, which type of node to run on, etc. This made sense initially, but as the number of node types we support and the number of tasks we run grew, there were an increasing number that were virtually the same, which led to a lot of delegation to common modules. The new version moves most of this metadata to configuration for each task, with a field pointing to the implementing module. Although initially the modules are the same (with a bunch of functions removed), we can now start collapsing the similar/identical ones, with multiple tasks pointing to the same implementation.

There are also quite a few other tools within the system that refer to tasks, and all those (and all the tests) needed changing to use the task reference instead of the module (although fortunately the way we were serialising the module name to the database meant that that could become the reference so there was no big data migration required). It ended up touching over 6,000 files, and changing in the order of 100,000 lines of code (in a 400,000-line codebase), and took a fair bit of ingenuity with shell scripts, vim macros, AST rewriting and random bits of grep/sed/awk magic to do as much of the donkey work as possible. I’m glad it’s done!

Another current/ex colleague Fat Cat meetup on Wednesday, this time adding Dave, another of my former bosses. We had a good rambling conversation covering all sorts of weird things, much like the old Friday Pub days.

I’d ordered a Pet Needs T-shirt on Bandcamp Friday (not because I need any more T-shirts, but because it’s a good way to support the band) and it arrived with a giant Post-It note on which front man Johnny had scrawled “Cheers Kerry!” with a signature, which was a nice touch.

On Saturday evening I rode out to Brantham again – fortunately not to run five miles again, but rather to have a few beers and congratulate/laugh at the mad fools finishing the SVP100 and 50.

My Sunday long run was short by comparison to that, and on my own this week, with a loop out through Witnesham and Grundisburgh. This took me through not one but two “bull in field” sections, but on the plus side while skirting round the edge of one of them to give the cattle a wide berth I spotted a kingfisher by the stream (I think this is only the second time I’ve ever seen one; the first being in the 1970s!).

The two young foxes are still visiting now and again, although it’s probably about the time when they’ll be heading out to find their own territories. Here’s one of them doing a big old yawn to show that he’s not bothered by the cats that were lounging around nearby.

Classic British summer weather now the schools have broken up, with a fair amount of rain spread across the week. Somehow it seems to have all fallen while I was at home, and it’s been dry whenever I was outside. This surely can’t last.

Tuesday night’s club session was what’s become the annual Slow Paul birthday party, with us all running cross-country-style hilly laps of a course marked out in his field, before recovering with beer, hog roast and cake.

On Wednesday the team from work had another volunteering day, this time at the Food Museum (formerly the Museum of East Anglian Life) at Stowmarket. The weather forecast was good, so I decided to give my new bike a proper debut and cycle there (15 miles) and back (16 miles, because there was a very strange road junction that funnelled me to the A14 roundabout so I ended up coming back a different, more scenic, but slightly hillier route). The bike behaved itself, and it took me just over an hour in each direction.

The morning’s volunteering involved clearing undergrowth from a patch of ground on the edge of the site ground and laying bark chips round hedging plants. Then we walked down to the Willow Tree for lunch, before returning to sand down the Settling House (a 19th century auctioneer’s hut from Bury St Edmunds) ready for it to be painted. We also got a chance to see some lambs, piglets, goats and Suffolk Punch horses being fed.

I got back just in time to hop back on my other bike and nip down to Kesgrave to give blood (I’d carefully picked a donation session halfway home from work at 5.30pm, which would have turned out better had I been in the office). That went smoothly (armful number 65), but by the time I’d got home and made dinner I was wiped out!

I’d recovered the use of my legs well enough to join Friday morning’s Run for Coffee, then surprised myself by taking another minute and a half off my time on the new Christchurch Park parkrun course. I even managed to do a small amount of gardening on Saturday afternoon, although I think things are still growing several times more quickly than I’m cutting them back.

Sunday was long run day again, with an 18 mile loop up the Gipping Path to Claydon, then back via Akenham and Westerfield. That stupid new giant footbridge over the railway at Westerfield is still closed, but Plotaroute has sudddenly started routing over it again and the footpath diversion sign that used to be on the approaching path has gone, so once again we got right up to it before realising we had to turn back. Someone had leant a pallet against the fence to climb over, but the prospect of piercing my foot on a spike didn’t appeal. At that point we were both feeling worn out, and pretty much out of water, so we were “forced” to stop at the Railway for a pint (although only of lime and soda in Holly’s case) to refresh ourselves for the final three miles.