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

So, remember last week when I said “I managed to get that urgent bit of work on an old project done in plenty of time for Friday’s deadline. I haven’t checked whether it worked in anger (I’m not paid for out-of-hours support!) but I don’t see why it wouldn’t have”? Well it turns out it didn’t. I checked on Monday morning, and it had failed to do anything over the weekend. I never quite got to the bottom of why – I added some extra debug tracing to help figure out what was wrong, but after deploying those changes it mysteriously started working perfectly (no doubt there’s a somebody’s law that covers this kind of situation – the watched pot of the software development world).

I thought I might get an easy time at club training on Tuesday, because a lot of other (faster) people had gone to the football instead. It didn’t quite work out that way, because some even faster people had still turned up and I ended up in that group instead! I also had to cycle there and back on my own, thought I’d try to push the pace a bit and ended up with my fastest ever ten miles (according to Strava) on the ride home. There might have been a bit of a tailwind, to be fair, but I was only 1mph slower on the way there.

In other bike-related news I finally got the newly-built wheels on the purple bike, along with a new chainring and chain. It all looks good apart from the fact that with new rotors and pads the brake calipers don’t seem to want to release enough to let the wheels rotate freely. I tried grinding a little bit of material off the back of the pads, but that still wasn’t enough – next step will be to try bleeding them and hope that leaves the pistons sitting all the way back.

A minor brag I forgot to mention the other week – while watching episode two of the current series of Only Connect, I finally achieved the dream of shouting out the answers to every missing consonant question before either team hit their buzzer :-)

On Friday I got the train to Stowmarket (only just up the road) to see New Model Army at the John Peel Centre. Seemed crazy for them to be playing such a small venue – last time I saw them was for two sold-out nights at the Camden Roundhouse, which has 13 times the capacity. Apparently it was a combination of their bassist Ceri (wrong spelling!) Monger being a local and the band, like so many others, having been championed by Peel in their early days. Anyway, it was a great night.

After parkrun on Saturday a bunch of us cycled out to the beer festival at the Low House/King’s Head in Laxfield, which is a lovely unique old pub (notable for having a taproom and no bar). We got there just as it was starting to rain, were able to stay dry while we were there, then took advantage of a break in the rain to head back to Framlingham where the Railway Inn was also having a beer festival. We stayed there while it rained some more, then stopped off at the Chequers in Kettleburgh, where we sat out yet more rain before finally heading home pretty much all in the dry (although there were some massive puddles to negotiate as we were nearly home). Just under 50 miles all told (plus a few cycling to parkrun and back earlier), although a few people still had a bit further to go once we got back to Ipswich.

On Sunday, after going for long run with Holly, I got talked into joining Rob, Jo and Neil in the Plough to watch the football (Ipswich away to Manchester United, with a 4.30pm kickoff). It started well, with Ipswich going 1–0 up as I arrived, but ended up with a 5–2 loss. Afterwards we adjourned to the clubhouse (Cricketers) for some food, and accidentally kept drinking until nearly midnight.

In an annoying turn of events at work, I’ve suddenly been asked to make some changes to an app that I wrote about ten years ago, and which was last touched about five years ago (it’s been happily working away in the interim). The catch is that there’s an actual legal deadline for getting the changes live, and it’s about a fortnight after they asked me to start working on it.

In theory it ought to be an easy change, but as you might imagine it’s using ridiculously out of date dependencies, and just getting it to build was quite a struggle. Rather than trying to work my way through a tedious upgrade process, I ended up creating a new Phoenix project (LiveView! No more NPM!) with the latest versions of Erlang, Elixir and all the libraries. I copied the business logic code back in, got those tests passing again, and finally rewrote the small web front end from scratch using LiveView instead of controllers, templates and channels. I more or less got a working CI build going, so now I just need to sort out building and deploying it, plus making the actual enhancement.

On Wednesday we had the annual club Two Rivers handicap race (Landguard Point to Felixstowe Ferry). When we got there Landguard was heaving with Eclipse watchers (not sure why everyone felt the need to go somewhere special to see the sun, which is famously in the sky and pretty much visible from anywhere). Maria had brought some eclipse glasses, so we got to have a peek every now and then, and marvel at a temporary slight reduction in light levels (probably quite a big reduction in reality, but eyes are pretty good at compensating). After the race people fragmented a bit, but our little group ended up in the White Horse, which I think I’ve only been to briefly once or twice before, and always on Christmas pub crawls. Seemed like a friendly place, and they had some folky-type live music going on.

I went down to Totton for the weekend, for Tim’s annual birthday barbecue. 99% of the journey there on Friday went OK, then I spent about an hour queuing in the 1.5 miles between junctions 3 and 2 of the M27, because everyone was forced to leave at 2 because the A31 was closed after a big fire, and I dutifully sat in the left lane, which seemed to come of very much the worst when it came to merging. Anyway, I got to Phil’s eventually, and after getting some chips for dinner we cycled to the New Forest Inn to meet Neil and Jeremy (deliberately) and John and Erica (by coincidence) for a few beers.

On Saturday we walked down to Bartley Park parkrun. Normally I just jog round parkrun chatting these days, but I had a streak to maintain at this venue of having finished in under 22 minutes and in the top ten all three times. I managed to do so for a fourth time, although it was hard work in the heat. In the afternoon Phil got his Land Rover out for a potter through the forest – it’s always funny how friendly everyone is to people driving round in a 60-odd-year-old vehicle with no roof or seatbelts, and with the windscreen folded down!

Saturday evening was the actual barbecue, which as usual is a chance to see people I haven’t seen since the previous year, although a few of the usual suspects were on holiday and missed it. Normally part of the fun is trying to destroy Tim’s chimenea by stuffing as much wood in at once as possible, but this year we sensibly skipped that, what with it being plenty warm enough already, and having been warned by the completely inappropriate use of the government emergency alert system that things might be apt to go on fire.

The journey home on Sunday was a bit quicker (just some traffic around Heathrow), and I had time to go for a little easy run when I got home before cycling into town for Dave’s birthday curry at the Sonar Bangla (followed of course by a couple of extra pints at the Cricketers).

Not sure whether I’m coming down with something, or it’s just the lingering effects of the blood donation, but running has felt really tiring for the past week or so, and my heart rate has been through the roof at what ought to have been an easy pace. I did get a chance for a refreshing dip in the sea before cycling home after Tuesday’s training session though.

The front brake on my old yellow bike (not to be confused with my new yellow bike) had been making an annoying noise, and I wondered whether it was related to the wheel being a fraction out of true after I replaced the spoke as part of the process of getting it back on the road. I took the excuse to switch the wheels for the Shimano ones from the other bike, that I’d replaced with carbon ones. In the process of doing that, I found that the spring on the front caliper (a nearly new Ultegra unit) wasn’t working, and the arm that the cable pulls basically just flaps around. I’m not really sure what’s going on there, but for now I’ve put the Tektro calipers that originally came with the bike back on.

I rode the (new yellow) commuter to work for the first time on Wednesday, having received the cheap DI-2 charging cable I’d order from AliExpress and charged the shifter battery up. Everything seemed to work fine, but on the way home it stopped changing gear, leaving me to pedal the last couple of miles in a low gear. Fortunately there was a massive headwind, so I wouldn’t exactly have been zipping along anyway. I assumed it hadn’t charged properly, but after I got home it seemed to work fine, so maybe a loose cable or something. I can’t help thinking a normal gear cable would be less hassle.

The correct sized spokes for the wheels I’m building for the Grinduro arrived (second time lucky), and I’ve got the wheels loosely laced up now. Just the difficult bit of tensioning them all up and getting the wheels true and correctly dished to go!

Last week my bread machine paddle seized up. I had a dig around in the garage to find my previous machine in the hope of cannibalising the bearing assembly from the pan, but it turns out they’ve changed the design. I managed to find one online for a bit less than Panasonic were charging, and now it’s fitted and all working well again. In the interim I tried baking a loaf the traditional way, with a tin in the oven, but it sunk horribly and I ended up breaking it up and putting it on the garage roof for the gulls. I’m not sure quite why I can make pizza, baguettes, naans and bread rolls and they’re always fine, but whenever I try a loaf it’s a disaster. I did make the dough in the mixer instead of kneading it by hand, so maybe that’s the problem.

Having completed my latest Buffy rewatch, I’ve now started on Veronica Mars. I’ve never seen it before, but it keeps getting praised on all the Buffy podcasts I’ve listened to (SlayerFest ’98 this time), so I thought I’d give it a go. Really enjoying it so far, although it took me a while to be able to tell any of the rich white boys apart.

I gave blood on Tuesday afternoon (donation number 67). As usual, they warned me to avoid strenuous activity for 24 hours, and as usual I ignored them, by cycling another 25 miles and running five during the rest of the day. Although the official advice is actually a lot more measured and reasonable.

As I set off to ride to work I briefly wondered why my headphones started cutting out, then realised that I’d completely forgotten to pick up my rucksack.

Looks like some kind of solitary wasps (mud daubers?) have been nesting in my lounge window frame:

I thought I was ready to start rebuilding the wheels for my purple bike. Originally I was just planning to replace the hubs, but after taking the old wheels apart (which turned out to have been a waste of time) I realised that one of the spoke holes on one wheel had ripped through, so I ordered new rims too. I started lacing the front wheel up, then when I went to fit the third group of spokes I realised that the ones I’d bought were far too short (this is my first stab at wheel building, otherwise it would have been obvious from the get-go). This wasn’t entirely my fault – I’d based my spoke calculations on the effective rim diameter quoted on the product page from the retailer I bought the rims from, not noticing that they’d just included one set of specs for both the 650B and 700C versions. Naturally the figure was the one for the wrong variant. I’m now waiting for another bunch of – hopefully correct – spokes to arrive before I can try again. These basic wheels have already cost more than the fancy (but admittedly very cheap) carbon ones I got for the road bike.

Another post-parkrun Cricketers visit on Saturday for second breakfast, then Robin got wind of a beer festival at Ipswich Transport Museum, and he, Jo, Neil and I cycled over for the evening. I’d never got round to visiting the museum before – it’s quite interesting, and nice to be able to get in for less than the usual price and wander round with a beer. Apparently it raised a decent amount of money for them too, so hopefully it’ll become a regular event.

On Sunday evening we were all back out again, along with Dave and Sally, for dinner at the Cricketers again and to catch up with Dave’s tales of his trip over to San Francisco to run the marathon and drive around on a Harley-Davidson.