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.