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 noever seen here before – I reckon it was just trolling me.