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

I may have finally got to the bottom of some slow-running code at work. After trying a variety of things to speed it up, I decided to do what I should have done in the first place, and pasted a version of the troublesome module into a script, with all the functions made public so I could run it against the production cluster a bit at a time to narrow down exactly where the bottleneck was. Without a huge amount of work I pinpointed it to one function, then noticed that instead of pulling out just the failed results from a big list and creating a struct from each, it was creating structs for everything, then filtering the list of structs. Switching two lines of code into the order they should have been in the first place sped it up by a factor of about 30.

Fat Cat meet-up again on Wednesday, with Anders, Tony, Mel, Rupert, Joe and Dave.

My smart water meter was activated this week, and immediately triggered a warning that I seem to have a leak, so that’s another annoying thing to get fixed. There’s nothing obvious going on in the house, so my money’s on the pipe that goes under the garden (somewhere!) to the garage. Sigh.

The Tarpley 20 was on Sunday, and I managed a personal worst, coming in three or four minutes slower than last year, which itself was a six or seven slower than 2024. Ah well, still seven weeks until the marathon!

I submitted the week’s worth of home blood pressure readings that they asked for after my health check, and once again they were hovering around a slightly elevated level. When I submitted the results, the form had one of those “I am not a robot” checkboxes – I suppose that’s important context. Anyway, I’ve now got another appointment in a couple of weeks for a blood test and ECG. I also finally got round to having an eye test on Friday (probably a couple of years late). No major issues, but they did spot a couple of tiny spots on the back of my eyes that (if I hadn’t already told them about the doctor’s appointment) would apparently have led them to recommend a blood pressure check.

Despite a far-from-hectic social life, I thought I’d ended up with three things I should have been at on Wednesday evening. It turned out though that the pub quiz I’d put in my diary was actually on the 11th of March (curse you February and your multiple-of-seven number of days!), and the Fat Cat meet up got punted to next week, so I ended up at the least interesting of the three: the running club AGM.

On Friday I got talked into joining various other friends at the Harpers’ to watch Ipswich play Wrexham in the FA Cup. Not sure the match was much more entertaining for the rest of them, who actually like football, and the general opinion seemed to be that Town hadn’t tried that hard, and were secretly quite keen to get knocked out so they could concentrate on the league. Did you see that ludicrous display? etc.

Six days in a row of running, for a total of 54 miles. I knew I’d be too tired for a long run with Holly and Maria on Saturday (glorious sunshine), so just did parkrun and ran with the boys on Sunday (sleet) instead. An easy week coming up though, at least until the Tarpley 20 next Sunday.

Apparently Gibraltar now has its own parkrun, so when I finally get round to visiting my sisters in Spain I won’t have to miss my Saturday morning ritual!

After filling my brown bins early before Christmas, then missing the day-early collection and realising I then had another month to wait for the next one, this week I was back to frantically shoving in more bits of dead apple tree detritus in a last-minute rush before leaving for work on Wednesday. But then I did remember to fill them again at the weekend, so one-all to the demons of procrastination.

The cat that lives on site at Adastral Park (who is rumoured to be called Scoop) obviously found the damp weather as tiresome as everyone else, and had sneaked into the office on Wednesday to sleep in the foyer. It’s not the first time he’s come in – someone had even provided a cat bed for him the other day – but it’s the first time I’ve seen him in there.

I’d decided I should probably just get a new rear wheel for my bike, as after over 13,000 miles the cones are worn, it still wobbles slightly after my attempts to clean and adjust the (non-sealed) bearings, and now a spoke seems to have broken too. Then once I started looking I realised that a single speed wheel with a disk brake fitting is what you send someone out to get once they’ve come back with the hen’s teeth you asked them for. I can see why in retrospect, and it explains why my bike has an eccentric bottom bracket to adjust the chain tension rather than horizontal dropouts. It turns out that it is possible to get an appropriate hub though, which I can see leading to the purchase of more workshop equipment and me attempting to get into wheel building, which may or may not end well.

Another 40 miles of running, with far too high a proportion of relatively hard efforts, with a club session on Tuesday, Thursday Tempo Ten, 13 miles on Sunday including a much quicker parkrun than I’d been intending, then the Pakenham cross country on Sunday, which was nowhere near as much of a quagmire as I’d been expecting. Must try to fit in some easy miles between the efforts next week!

February already! I just about managed to eke out my Christmas cake for all of January, and ate the last piece today.

I had the bright idea of routing all the read-only database queries in my work app to the replica database, in the hope that it would improve UI performance when there were a lot of background writes going on. Unfortunately, despite it looking promising locally and in the test environment, once I deployed it to the live instance a non insignificant number of queries were cancelled by Postgres because of potential conflicts with new data received from the primary. This is the kind of thing that it turns out is very easy to learn once you have the error message to search for, but less obvious beforehand. In the end I backed out the whole thing – it’s nice to be able to do this after a couple of days work, rather than in the old days when it would have gone into a massive release several months later and be an absolute nightmare to unpick.

I finally went for my first over-40 health check on Friday, a mere 16 years after I became eligible for one. I expected a repeat of the message from my flu jab appointment that my blood pressure was a bit high, but this time (measured the old-fashioned way with a manually-operated cuff, analogue manometer and stethoscope) it was merely borderline (or as the nurse amusingly called it “on the cuff”). They’ve asked me to take two readings a day for a week and submit them to decide whether it’s worth worrying about.

The road racing season kicked off on Sunday with the Great Bentley Half. I didn’t have Holly and Maria to keep me honest this year, and finished a couple of minutes slower, but still finished quicker than I expected to at the start.

Forgot to mention the Big Garden Bird Watch last week. It was a damp grey day, and I managed to see the sum total of one blackbird, one wood pigeon and one collared dove, which is a pretty poor showing. There were loads of gulls wheeling over the garden, but it doesn’t count if they don’t land. Also at one point a heron flew over, which I’ve never seen here before – I reckon it was just trolling me.