Category: Weeknotes

Have we finally hit autumn proper? After another mild (even warm) week, there was a bit of a chill on Saturday morning, then Sunday was properly cold (good for racing, but less so for standing around afterwards). Still sunny though, and even on Friday when it poured for much of the day I still managed to cycle to work, to the pub, back to work then home again entirely in the dry, so definitely chalking that up as a win.

The prospect of colder and wetter weather also bumped up the priority of fixing my sunroof. I managed to source a complete second hand unit for £140 from a relatively local seller on eBay, and have scrounged a lift from someone with a larger car to pick it up next week. Then I just have to figure out how to swap them over, but how hard can it be. Speaking of which, helpful as YouTube is, I still miss Haynes manuals. Turns out they do publish one for the R56 so-called Mini, but it looks like replacing the sunroof is beyond its scope (which I’m sure isn’t in any way a bad omen). Not like in the old days when they’d describe a full nut-and-bolt engine rebuild (“refitting is the reverse sequence to removal”).

I found a mysterious lone trainer on my driveway. Not sure whether it was the result of a schoolboy prank or a mischievous fox.

A second consecutive five mile race this weekend, this time at Saxmundham. I improved my training regime compared to last week by neither (a) running eight miles on Friday – although obviously I still did parkrun – nor (b) eating a massive pizza on Saturday afternoon (I made one on Sunday instead). This clearly helped, as I was 13 seconds faster. Surprisingly, given that I don’t feel particularly quick at the moment, both were course PBs.

I had a phone call from Specsavers on Monday reminding me that they still had the reading/vdu glasses that came for free with my eye test for work. Rather than procrastinate further, I made an appointment and picked them up in the afternoon. I checked when the eye test had been, and it was in August.

2022.

They’re 1.75×, compared to the 1.5× of my old pair (and the collection of cheap Amazon ones that I keep scattered about the place). No hugely discernible difference, but having had pretty much perfect vision up to the age of around 45 I still find it frustrating that I can’t just read small close-up stuff unaided any more.

In exchange for me making her a Christmas cake, Nicola brought round some spare brandy to feed them with. There was an almost full half-bottle, and an inch or two in the bottom of another, and the majority of that is now in the two cakes.

Capel 5 this Sunday, which was ludicrously warm for the time of year. I guess we need to get used to it being warm enough to comfortably linger around in shorts and vest in October, and I’m sure it’s a small price to pay for the ever more rapidly approaching end of a human-habitable planet.

The sunroofs on the Mini are still stuck partially open. I tried taking the motor out, removing the glass and applying grease and various types of violence, but to no avail. At least I eventually managed to get them back to where they had been when I started rather than making things worse.

Well, it’s October. That was quick.

A fairly sociable running week, with the usual club session on Tuesday, then runs for both coffee and beer on Wednesday, and another run with the same crowd on Friday, finishing at The Railway for a meal to celebrate Kevin’s 60th birthday. Then parkrun (obviously) on Saturday and an easy loop out over the Orwell Bridge with Holly this morning.

Strava decided to show me a nice encouraging notification this afternoon …

… then when I clicked it, it hit me with its actual opinion of how that hard work was really “adding up”. ?

On Friday we had our first attempt at an unconference for developers at work. It seemed to go OK, with plenty of interesting discussions. Also, I ate far too many biscuits.

After buying a Rubik’s cube (well technically not an actual Rubik’s cube, but a cheap MoYu speedcube) on a whim a few months ago, I seem to have become quite addicted to it, and decided on another whim to upgrade to a Tornado v3 Pioneer. I saved about a third of the price by ordering it from a seller on AliExpress, and it arrived from China impressively quickly (under a week). I had thought the other one was pretty good compared to my memories of the original, but this one is a huge improvement – it spins really easily, and has magnets that help it gently snap into position as it rotates, rather than ending up misaligned and jamming. I’m still hardly an expert, but can now reliably solve it in around a minute most times, with a best effort of 33s thanks to a scramble that happened to work out nicely.

In a brief concession to the still far away festive season, I baked my cakes today (a massive one for me, and the smaller one I somehow got talked into making annually for Nicola). And now I shall brook no more talk of Christmas for at least another two months.

It feels a little more autumnal this week, but still plenty warm enough. The cats have certainly decided the weather’s turned – especially Ninja, who transformed overnight from feral outdoor cat who I occasionally see when he’s hungry back into a cuddly purring lap monster. Unexpected additional consequence of global warming: seeing less of your pets.

Wednesday should have been Run for Beer day, but it was cancelled because of an apocalyptic weather forecast. Having skipped Run for Coffee in the morning because my legs hadn’t recovered sufficiently from RNR for a double run day, I pigheadedly went out on my own anyway, and ended up suffering no more than some light drizzle. I did meet a toad on the pavement, who I relocated to the grass to hopefully avoid him being stepped on (or run over if he ventured further out).

On Thursday I very nearly got Wordle in one guess. My usual starter word had four of the five letters in the correct place, and I got the fifth one on the second try. So close! I could start varying the starter word, but then the one I’ve been using since day one might come up and that would be annoying … oh, no, have I (apart from never playing the lottery) turned into one of those people who always play the same lottery numbers?

Apparently I’ve been using Duolingo for ten years this week, but you’d never know it from my very shaky grasp of Spanish. To be fair, I’ve probably only been using it regularly for the last three of those years (which puts it firmly in the “lockdown hobbies” basket).

Sunday was the Langham 5k & 10k, and I decided to repeat last year’s decision to enter both (starting at 9 and 10am respectively). I was about half a minute slower than last year in the 5k, and a minute slower in the 10k, but happy enough with that a week after a tough 20 mile race.

I binged through all of Brooklyn Nine Nine during lockdown, when I temporarily had access to Netflix, but never saw the final se(ason|ries). By now my aged brain has pretty much also forgotten the ones I did see, so I found a cheap second-hand DVD box set and have restarted from the beginning (confirming that yes, most of it failed to make it to long-term memory). Still funny this time round, and in nice short 22-minute episodes that make handy watching while eating lunch etc.

On Monday morning I happened to see a Facebook ad (possibly the first useful one ever) from the New Wolsey theatre, saying that Mark Simmons was there that evening with his ‘Quip off the the Mark’ show (a fact I’d somehow completely missed). There were a few tickets left, and even a cheap one all on its own in row D, so I went along and had an enjoyable (if antisocial) evening. I’ve been listening to his podcast about jokes that don’t work for a while, so it was good to see the ones that do (and one that has clearly been fixed), and to finally hear the punchline to a bit he’s mentioned a few times!

On Tuesday I left work just too late to avoid cycling home through one of the heaviest rainstorms I can remember, with puddles several inches deep competing with the stuff continuing to drop from the sky to see which could get me wetter (a pointless contest, given that it was physically impossible for me to be any wetter than I already was). The next morning, working at home, I took my laptop out of my (rather damp) rucksack, and was mildly concerned when its screen kept flickering, then it began to emit an unfamiliar beep every few seconds. Fortunately those issues went away after a while, presumably as it warmed up, but the power supply was refusing to work and took longer to dry out, and annoyingly all the old ones I had lying around were either too low wattage or for older models, so once the battery was flat I had to cycle into the office again (fortunately in better weather) to pick up a spare.

This weekend was the Round Norfolk Relay, which is basically what it sounds like. There were 59 clubs taking part, with the circumference of the county split into 17 stages, ranging from around 5½ to just under 20 miles in length. I’d foolishly told the people organising our team to put me down for anything, which meant I was landed with the longest one – 19.67 miles from Scole to Thetford. This was stage 12, which made for an odd Saturday: by the time I woke up our first runner was already underway, but I still had the whole day to fill, before being picked up by Steve at around 11.45pm to head up to my changeover point. Because it was a night stage, we each had to have a support car behind us with a flashing orange light, which must have looked quite strange to anyone driving up the A1066 in the early hours.

I set off at a reasonable pace, and the first half dozen or so miles went past quite pleasantly, but then it started getting progressively tougher as various bits of my legs began to protest. By the end I was running about a minute a mile slower (there were some long hills too!), but managed to drag myself to Thetford in 2:42:40 (compared to my very optimistic estimate/target of 2:35). I handed the baton over to Steve, swapping it for his car keys so I could get myself to the end of his stage for him to drive us home. There was a bit of chaos happening at the end of stage 13, with the stage afterward being cancelled at the last minute because the police had closed the road after a ram raid – it all seemed to be handled smoothly, but must have been a big disappointment for everyone who’d driven a long way in the early hours of the morning only to find they couldn’t run. I eventually got home at 7am, but my befuddled body clock only let me sleep until around 11.

The medals for the event were excellent, and each one was literally unique, as they had the stage details on one side and the team number and club logo on the other.

Monday got off to a good start, with a message from my customer in EE while I was eating my breakfast letting me know that the /var partition on the production server was full, and the app was only partially working. It turned out that the logs for the past few days had been filling up with error messages about a failure to connect to the relay server to send emails. We initially thought it was a connectivity issue, but it also looked like the Bamboo email library (or almost certainly my use of it) was raising exceptions because of a failure to gracefully handle the inability to send emails. Normally this kind of exception would have triggered an email letting me know something was up, but those emails never arrived because … well, you know.

After clearing some disk space to allow everything (apart from emails, but fortunately they aren’t a huge part of the application – a few people will have failed to get alerts, and I had to send a couple of password reset links manually) to start working again, I decided to treat it as an opportunity to switch from Bamboo to Swoosh. I didn’t have any reason to think it would better, but the Phoenix framework switched to Swoosh as its default for new apps a while ago, and presumably they had their reasons. The migration was pretty painless – both libraries use gen_smtp under the covers, and the APIs are very similar – so it was mostly some changes to how tests worked, plus a bonus improvement of extracting the email bodies to separate template files using phoenix_swoosh. With that change deployed, everything started working again. I’m still not 100% sure what the root cause was, but I think it started failing when I upgraded to Erlang 26 and Elixir 1.15, so I suspect some incompatibility there (the tests, of course, don’t use the smtp adapter, allowing this kind of thing to fall through the cracks – I guess we should probably test actual emails as part of a post-deploy checklist).

Embarrassingly, it was several hours into the day before I twigged that the reason there were so many logs was that each exception triggered a notification email, which then failed, caused an exception, and triggered another notification email …

On Thursday stage five of the Tour of Britain started and finished in Felixstowe, coming within half a mile of my house en route, and I felt like a day off anyway so thought I’d go and watch them zip past. I decided to go slightly further afield, so incorporated my spectating in a trail run out to a narrow country road three or four miles away.

After getting home, showering and having some lunch, Robin let me know that a few people were cycling out to Felixstowe to watch the finish and have a couple of beers, so I ended up riding out to meet them there and watch the riders come flying down Sea Road at a ridiculous speed. Then after some refreshment in the Felsto Arms (and a quick stop at the Walton Half Moon on the way home) I tried – and mostly failed – to keep up with everyone at what felt like an only slightly less ridiculous speed back to Ipswich. Hot off the press, it turns out that the three second gap that we watched Wout van Aert open up with his sprint finish was the deciding factor in his victory in the overall event (about which I just accidentally sent a spoiler to Robin, not realising he was waiting to watch the highlights. Oops).

Saturday was Ipswich parkrun’s 500th event, which I ran very slowly because …

Sunday was FRR’s big race of the year, the Felixstowe Coastal 10. It seems that the weather always adds some kind of extra challenge to this one, whether it’s rain, wind or (this year) unseasonably roasting temperatures. Even before race day this made life a bit harder by attracting hordes of people to the seaside when we were trying to drive round putting up signage on the Saturday afternoon, but also meant the race itself was horribly tough (not sure whether it was warmer than the Newmarket 10k back in June, but it felt like it). My time was five minutes slower than last year, but at least there was some convenient sea to get in at the finish to cool off (possibly the only time I’ve swum at Felixstowe when it wasn’t new year’s eve!)

I did at least manage to pretend I was enjoying it when I spotted Liz with her camera, before reverting to the grimace that I suspect accompanied the rest of the ten miles.

Apparently it’s September now, which seems frankly unlikely.

Monday was of course a bank holiday (and a real one, not one of those Scotland or NI ones that pop up in the calendar to give false hope). Justin organised another of his handicap races from his house based on the parkrun substitutes he was doing during semi-lockdown, this time expanding the distance to seven miles. Having missed the chance of a Sunday long run thanks to the beer and bicycle shenanigans described last week, I decided to run there (four miles), potter gently round the seven, then after coffee and biscuits take a scenic route back through the countryside for a total of 17.

I got an email from my electricity and gas supplier, Ecotricity [side note: they do seem to be genuinely as environmentally-friendly as a power company can be, and their founder has an interesting back story, which I recently heard about on James OBrien’s podcast], plugging their mobile phone provider, Ecotalk. The prices seemed pretty good, and they use the same EE network that I’m already on, but I wasn’t sure whether it would be cheaper than the employee discount prices I was paying (EE of course being owned by BT, for complicated reasons involving deciding we didn’t want a mobile network, then oh wait, maybe we did). Turns out BT Mobile been ratcheting the price up over the years and (including a 15GB upgrade that I never use) I was now paying an outrageous £32/month. I’ve now foregone that “discount” and switched, and am now paying £12 a month. Go, as they say, figure.

Incidentally, I love the way sim cards are basically a history of shrinking phone sizes. Although annoyingly at some point phones all started getting bigger again, even if the sims didn’t.

Having reently put myself through rewatching the Star Wars prequels, I went to move on to the original trilogy, only to be unable to find the DVDs (I guess Jane took those and I hadn’t figured out which was the least bad version to repurchase). Having recently read about the “despecialised” versions, I did some digging and ended up downloading the Project 4k77 edition (plus 80 and 83 for Empire and Jedi). I wouldn’t steal a car or a handbag, but I reckon I’ve bought those movies enough times on various media over the years not to feel too bad about it. I’ve watched the first two so far, and it’s nice to finally get to see Han shooting first in HD at last (even if the odd scene is slightly grainy).

The racing season kicked off again on Sunday, with the Framlingham 10k. After a poor performance last year, and a worse one the year before, I managed to scrape a course PB of 44:13 today (my 2018, 2019 and 2023 times are all within five seconds of each other).

I’ve put my wildlife camera back out a few times after it started working again. No return of the badgers yet, but plenty of foxes, including this one who wandered onto the patio one morning after it had got light, apparently to investigate the camera.

Wednesday was another dual Run for Coffee/Run for Beer day, with the latter being in Holbrook for Alec’s birthday (and a slightly lazy four miles). We went to the Swan, which doesn’t do food but was happy for us to bring our own pizza.

On Friday I went to a bonfire party in Anders’s field. There were a few people from work there, plus loads of people I don’t know. In my usual style, I didn’t speak to many strangers, but made friends with the neighbours’ cat.

On Sunday I got dragged out for another long bike ride, this time to the beer festival at the Lindsey Rose (plus brief visits to smaller beer festivals at the White Horse in Edwardstone and the Duke of Marlborough in Somersham. Slightly shorter than last week, at 40 miles, and lots of fun including sumo wrestling and some impromptu racing round a cycle speedway track.

Along with a few friends I’d got tickets a few weeks ago for a double bill of Terminator and Robocop at the local independent cinema on Friday (despite having watched both of them at home quite recently). Unfortunately I’d failed to register that it was no longer a few weeks ago, or in fact any weeks ago, and only twigged that I’d forgotten to go at around the time the first film was finishing. I did at least manage to leap on my bike and get into town in time for the start of Robocop (actually in plenty of time for the interminable adverts for mobile phones, broadband and joining the army). It’s still an entertaining film, and I’m increasingly of the opinion that it should correctly be classified as a comedy.

After a slow parkrun on Saturday we had the return of the friendly FRR vs Framlingham Flyers track challenge. It was split into three races based on estimated time, and I opted for the sub-21-minute race, despite not having actually run 5k inside 21 minutes for a while. Sadly the expected benefit of a running track didn’t materialise, and I felt pretty awful for most of it, coming in at around 21:30 – barely any quicker than last week’s parkrun. Still, most of us decamped to the pub afterwards, which was much more enjoyable. It turned out that we’d tied on points, but they gave it to us on the basis of having won all three races.

On Sunday I’d somehow been talked into a 50 mile bike ride, starting with a large breakfast and a pint (!) at the Cricketers, then out to the pub in Laxfield that we’d been to on the Camra pub crawl, via the Railway in Framlingham. It was a nice day and actually didn’t feel too strenuous, despite me being on my fixed-gear gravel bike and everyone else on their fancy road machines.

Funnily enough, as I braked to a stop outside my garage I looked down at my watch and saw it tick over from 49.99 to 50.00 miles (although Strava decided to trim it back down to 49.99, which will at least annoy the rounder-uppers). That might be my longest ride since that time in 1990 when I decided to ride my mountain bike home from Birmingham to Totton (132 miles), straight down the A34.

I can’t remember much of interest happening in the early part of the week, but this weekend I actually went away for the first time in quite a while – back home to Totton (between Southampton and the New Forest) for Tim’s 50th birthday hog roast. The weekend itself was excellent, but the journey there not so much.

I’d decided to drive rather than getting the train, and set off after filling up with petrol at around 11am, hoping to miss the rush hour traffic. Things didn’t start too well, with a queue just to get off the A14 onto the A12 at Copdock, then there were a couple of sections of roadworks on the A12. Then more hold-ups on the M25 (no surprise there) and M3. That’s where it started to go seriously wrong though, with messages about part of the M27 being closed starting to appear on the matrix signs (it turned out later that there had been a serious accident). Google Maps offered to take me on a couple of alternative routes that it said would save three or four minutes, but for that small a difference it didn’t seem worth it, especially as there were big queues to turn off. Eventually I did leave the motorway somewhere around Eastleigh, and followed the satnav directions towards Romsey. This ended up with me sitting in completely gridlocked traffic for about an hour and a half to get into the town (the kind of jam where you switch your engine off, wait a few minutes, switch it back on and move a couple of car lengths, then repeat). I did vaguely consider parking and walking to the train station, but there were warnings of strike disruption and the train didn’t really go where I wanted to be anyway (the fact that I had time to look this stuff up during stationary periods says a lot). Eventually I made it out the other side, where things started moving again, but with about five miles to go, and for some reason best known to itself, Google told me to turn off onto a B road, which narrowed to almost single track just in time for me to encounter more stationary traffic. After waiting quite a while with no movement (and briefly abandoning the car to nip into a hedgerow as I hadn’t stopped at the services and at this point I’d been in the car for nearly seven hours!) someone who’d walked up the queue a bit said they’d spoken to a driver who’d been there for two hours. By then if there had been anywhere to leave the car I’d have happily abandoned it and run the last bit. By a stroke of luck I was stopped just in front of a field entrance, and was able to reverse in, turn round and squeeze past the queue, with two wheels bashing along on the verge, desperately trying to avoid them falling into the ditch. Once back on the main road again it turned out there was only a short delay at the roundabout, then I was pretty much there, arriving at Phil’s at around 6.30.

After a coffee and a walk to the chip shop for some tea, we cycled over to Tim & Michelle’s for a few Friday beers, then got up early on Saturday to walk to Bartley Park parkrun, which is handily only about a mile from Phil’s place. Phil had agreed to join me, despite only running about once a year (mostly when I’ve dragged him along to events when one of us has visited the other). Jeremy and another Phil, who are both more frequent runners, also came along, and we enjoyed a blast round quite a nice two lap route making good use of a fairly small park. The only downside was a couple of out-and-back hairpins round cones that you obviously have to do twice each, but while not exactly flat it’s definitely flatter than Ipswich, and I managed to finish in 10th place with 21:38.

The rest of the day was spent pottering around helping Simon collect some second-hand scaffold poles and Phil dismantle his Land Rover carb to confirm that it was flooding because of a leak in the float, then it was back to Tim & Michelle’s for an evening of Ringwood beer, roast hog and chatting with lots of people I’ve known for 30 or 40 years and see far too rarely. I successfully avoided crashing Phil’s fancy gravel bike as we wended our way back along the wiggly cycle path afterwards (through the same park we’d run round earlier)./

On Sunday I stopped off in Southampton to take my dad (who I also don’t see often enough) out for a pub lunch, before embarking on the journey home. That started poorly, taking two hours to cover the first 40 miles to Fleet services thanks to accidents on the M3. There were a few delays on the M25 too, plus on the A12 which was closed for roadworks at Marks Tey, and it ended up taking over five hours to get home (which didn’t seem so bad after Friday). It’s no wonder I never go anywhere!

At least the car mostly behaved itself on its longest journey yet. The only issue was that the fancy electric panoramic sunroof started making ominous stripped gear type noises, then refusing to fully close (it seems like it’s sensing imaginary obstructions and backing off for safety reasons). I’ve managed to get it as far as both panels being slightly ajar in tilt mode – I think if I can somehow cajole it the rest of the way I might have to just take the fuse out and put up with only opening the windows. They seem to be mildly notorious for failing, even in relatively new cars.