I finally managed to come up with a working solution to day three part two of Advent of Code, then got through four, five and six without too much trouble. On the second half of day seven, it was easy enough to get something that worked with the small example from the instructions, but when I fed it the real input it just sat there. I left it running, because it was time to head out to …
… the monthly random ex-colleague meet-up at the Fat Cat. Just me, Tony and Mel this time, with at least two people opting to be at Portman Road watching the football instead.
When I got home the Advent of Code thing was still silently churning away, and when it still hadn’t produced an answer by the morning I put it out of its misery. No idea how far through it had got, but I was surprised it hadn’t run out of memory. I started from scratch at lunchtime, replacing the recursive tree-walking nightmare with something that just worked through the list once with a fancy accumulator, in a tail-call-optimisable way. It promptly spat out the correct result in 0.02 seconds, which just goes to show that while premature optimisation may indeed be the root of all evil, when you need to consider performance sometimes you really need to consider performance.
On Friday we had the Felixstowe Road Runners Christmas run/quiz/pub crawl. We had more than the allowed number of people for a team, so decided to avoid the risk of disqualification by not actually getting any points – basically failing to visit any of the pubs on the list, or to answer any questions or do any bonus activities. We ran out to Walton to check out the newly-reopened Half Moon, ended up staying there for three pints, but missed hearing the folk band who were setting up as we left. Then we headed to the other side of town to the Dooley for one more. At that point Jason got a message saying we were late back (which we somehow always manage to be), and that the 9pm time on the instructions was wrong and should have been 8.15. This led to a pacier than expected couple of miles back to Broadway House for our bangers and mash.
Designated driver (for the six Ipswich-based folks) Neil was detouring through Chantry to drop Ryan off on his side of town, at which point Ryan insisted that we all had to stop at his local, the Kingfisher, where he’d buy us all a final round.
On Saturday I did a bit of routine maintenance on my “normal” bike, including replacing the chunky rubber with 28mm road tyres (I’m sure I ordered 32mm, but that’s the risk of buying stuff off AliExpress I guess), which allowed me to put the mudguards that I took off in 2021 back on. I’m looking forward to arriving at work with a dry bum next time it rains.
Now it seems I’ve finally recovered from my cold, and my dodgy knee (IT band?) isn’t too bad, I did my first long slow Sunday run for a while (only 17 weeks to the marathon!). I met Holly in Christchurch Park and we did a 10-ish mile loop out through Tuddenham, Culpho and Playford, making it about 13.5 altogether. The weather was sunny and milder than expected, but there were quite a few cars on the roads, which mostly don’t have pavements. Our fault for being too lazy to get out earlier I guess. I’d been organised and made a ball of pizza dough beforehand, so that had risen ready for lunch when I got back (after turning it into an actual pizza, obviously).