Category: Weeknotes

Into August now, but no-one seems to have told the weather, although to be fair today’s been OK. I’m happy with the cooler temperatures, but could do without the torrential rain. Even Ninja cat, who normally lives in the garden in the summer, has taken to staying indoors for extended periods.

On Wednesday we had the annual-ish club “Run-Bike-Run” event, which thanks to a combination of bad timing and a pandemic break I’ve never actually done before. It basically involves a 6.2 mile bike ride sandwiched between two runs of around 1.5 and 2.4 miles, followed by some food and drink. The twist is that there’s a set finish time, and the “winner” is the last person to set off and still make it back before the cut-off. I decided to ride to Felixstowe, which added 11 or so miles beforehand, and arrived soaked to the skin. Fortunately the rain eased off for the event itself, and despite thinking I’d started a bit too late I was a couple of minutes inside the cutoff (but so were plenty of people who’d started later!)

At some point I managed to pick up a slow puncture, and after finishing the run realised that my back tyre was flat. I couldn’t locate either the puncture or anything sticking through the tyre, so fitted a spare tube and attempted to pump it up, only to realise that the brand new tube had a hole in it ?. Fortunately I managed to scrounge a lift home with my bike in the back of Nicola’s car.

On Friday night a few of us went to see Band of Mold, a local covers band, based on Robin and Jo vaguely knowing the guitarist. They were entertaining enough, although there was hardly anyone there, and we had enough beer to make getting up for parkrun more of a chore than usual.

No racing this weekend, so a chance for a proper long slow run (well, not that long) on Sunday. This time I met up with Holly, which made it much less boring than running alone for a couple of hours. I ended up giving myself the short straw by planning a route that came back into her side of town, leaving me around three miles to plod home on my own, for a total of 15 miles.

I had this week off work, with no particular plans other than various bits of long-overdue gardening, tidying etc (most of which remain undone). I did do a small amount of work in the garden on Monday, namely cutting back the wisteria that was making its annual bid for dominion over the back of the house and the chimney. This entailed the use of three of my five ladders (step, extension and roof), and I survived another year without a Rod Hull/Tony Hayers incident, and I now have light entering my bedroom again. I was, however, bitten on the foot by a grasshopper, which fell into my shoe. It was surprisingly (but briefly) painful. It also seems that the ivy which has established itself in various bits of the garden is now making a play for control of the south wall of the house.

Then on Sunday, feeling slightly guilty for not having ticked off more chores, I thought I’d have a go at dismantling the chicken run that’s been sitting empty for about five years. As it turned out, that was optimistic, but after an hour I had at least cleared enough brambles and other weeds to be able to get close enough to think about the actual dismantling.

On Monday I went to give my 61st “nearly armful” of blood, having timed the appointment to coincide with the beginning of a gap in the racing season. I was pleasantly amused, in this age of stranger danger paranoia, by a woman who was there with a small toddler in tow, and when summoned to the cubicles at the back of the hall for the interrogation and Hb test just said “I’ll leave her here. She’ll be fine – she’s got her colouring to do”.

I got a car insurance reminder for the Roadster, which I still haven’t got rid of, and discovered that OneCall (do not recommend) automatically set up a recurring payment, and don’t allow you to cancel via their website once they’ve sent the reminder. After about 45 minutes queuing for a web chat, I finally got through and persuaded them to cancel the policy.

On Wednesday evening we had our annual club “Two Rivers” race/social, which involves starting at handicapped intervals from Landguard Fort (at the edge of the Stour/Orwell estuary), and choosing our own route to run to Felixstowe Ferry (near the mouth of the Deben), before retiring to the pub. Still tired and a bit short of red blood cells, I was definitely overtaken by more people than I passed, but at least I didn’t come last.

On Thursday afternoon we had a work trip to Avid climbing wall for some bouldering. I used to do a fair bit of climbing in my youth, but got out of the habit after moving to East Anglia, apart from a couple of pre-lockdown visits to the same place. I don’t seem to be much more incompetent than I used to be, but it quickly took its toll on my arms! Then home for a quick shower before heading to the beer festival, in St Clement’s church, which is in the process of being converted into an arts venue. They had a decent range of beers, and the ones I tried were all good, although annoyingly I dropped my glass while transporting it home on my bike.

I finally got round to raising an issue against a dependency that was failing to compile under Elixir 1.15 on OEL7, then realised that the error was actually when compiling a dependency of that dependency, then finally worked out that it was just that the 1.15 compiler fails on that OS (it tries to hash source file contents using an algorithm that isn’t available), and it just happened that I was seeing errors based on the first file it decided to compile when building the dependency tree. After asking on a forum, someone pointed out that this should be fixed in the next release, so if I’d just kept up the “wait for an upgrade and see whether it goes away” approach for a little longer I could have saved myself some effort.

I bought some bifocal running glasses, so next time I go orienteering or on a trail run where I need to read directions I’ll only have myself to blame for getting lost.

Badger cat brought a mouse into the house on Saturday. I tried to get it off him, but he hid behind the settee and it looked dead, so I decided to finish my breakfast before sorting it out. When I went back to see what was left he (the cat, not the mouse) was pawing at a box of bits, and it turned out the mouse was very much alive and had taken refuge in there. I managed to catch it and release it outside, apparently unharmed. I don’t think the cats spotted me, because they were still sniffing around in the lounge.

On Saturday I did parkrun as usual (staggering round in a mediocre 22:19 with no racing excuses this week), then quickly back out again for a 10k to the pub for Merv’s 70th birthday (it was a half marathon for his 65th, so I’m looking forward to a 5k in five years’ time).

I finally got round to ordering a new wildlife camera after my old one stopped working a while ago. Then, in a classic case of “things a sensible person would have done in the opposite order”, I tried taking the old one apart to see if I could fix it. The most likely culprit was the cable from the battery box to the main board, and predictably there was no voltage on the circuit board side. More surprisingly, there was no voltage on the battery side either. I popped some new batteries in (which I 100% definitely tried when it first stopped working), and hey presto, it fired up perfectly. Fortunately I was able to cancel the order for the new camera in in time!

I finished the weekend with a somewhat damp run to get my July “clock tower of the month” photo. This was entirely my fault for: (a) deciding to set myself this pointless task, rather than just calling it a day after last year’s hollow trees; (b) leaving it until nearly the end of the month; and (c) having added the complication of requiring the clocks to be showing the time corresponding to thee month number (ie 7, and unsurprisingly I wasn’t up in time to catch 7am). I also ran over the new, not yet officially open, and seemingly over-engineered foot/cycle bridge that replaces the pedestrian level crossing where they’re busy ruining the Fonnereau Way with hundreds of new houses.

On Wednesday I went to the Three Wise Monkeys in Colchester again, this time to see recent number-one-album-having Lottery Winners, who I’ve previously seen supporting Frank Turner. They were supported by Ben Brown (who I’ve previously seen supporting Pet Needs) and Wilswood Buoys (who were on the same Frank Turner bill with Lottery Winners). Johnny and George from Pet Needs were in the crowd, and Frank Turner made a surprise guest appearance on stage. A lot of entertainment for £20! Fortunately I checked the train times and realised I needed to drive or get stuck in Colchester, and it seems I missed a lot of rain while I was in there.

Friday was DevCon16, the 16th (obviously) incarnation of the internal developer conference I kicked off at work in 2009. I maintained my streak of speaking at all of them, with a rambling look behind the scenes of the app I made for a recent community event, covering the actor pattern in Elixir, why you probably don’t need separate front- and back-end apps when you could use something like LiveView, and the importance of not leaving things to the last minute (a point I added to a slide while writing the talk on Thursday).

Also on Friday, but in the evening, was the Brantham 5. Nominally a “fun run”, and not part of the Friday 5 series, it’s always a good event, despite having some significant hills which make it hard work. I struggled home in 35:18, which surprisingly earned me 22nd place. Weirdly there was a whole minute between 21st and 23rd.

After a short rest, punctuated with a gentle parkrun (and a pub quiz, where I was very little use) on Saturday, Sunday saw the Ekiden Relay in its new venue at Woolverstone school. For unknown reasons this is the only Ekiden in the UK (apparently it’s big in Japan), and it’s basically a relay marathon, split into legs of 7.2, 5, 10, 5, 10 and 5km. It’s always a big social event, with loads of clubs cheering their runners on from gazebos pitched round the circuit (we entered ten teams). I was in the “supervets” (50+) team, and we managed to take second place in that category, as well as beating our vets (40+) team. I say “we”, but I was the slowest in the team, managing to just about break under 21 minutes for my 5k leg. A glutton for punishment, I then ran another 5k leg for the coffee runners’ social team, with increasingly tired legs somehow still managing to get round in around 22 minutes.

Something I forgot to add to last week’s catch-up edition was that for some reason (I think it was being randomly recommended this video on YouTube) I recently decided to learn how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. I’m old enough that I had one when they first came out, but it was always beyond me. I remember eventually getting a set of instructions, but it was a very painstaking process, with what I remember as fairly complex algorithms to switch two pieces at a time. Things seem to have moved on now, with a variety of solving techniques that get more involved as they get quicker. It turns out to be quite addictive – the beginner’s method is quite east to pick up, but I’ve found myself slowly trying to learn fancier techniques, although I’m still not particularly quick. I did manage to get under a minute once, but that very much depends on the last layer ending up in a configuration that I remember the moves for.

I got round to installing Styler in my work project this week. It’s an Elixir linter that has one fixed set of rules and runs as part of the (equally opinionated) language formatter, which I have configured to run whenever I save a file. It replaces a lot of checks that were previously in the domain of Credo, but without the nuisance of having to fix them when they fail the build. It did break some stuff on the initial run, as predicted by the readme, but once those were sorted it’s been working well. The commit that added it was possibly my biggest ever though, weighing in at 3,973 files, 16,603 insertions and 13,129 deletions.

After a work meal on Thursday I finally found myself in a pub that had the local Camra magazine on display, and picked up a copy, with a cover photo featuring the bunch of us that went on the bus pub crawl a few months ago (despite none of us actually being a member).

The Friday 5s are all done now, but Friday evening racing isn’t quite over yet. This week it was the Ipswich Twilight 10k, which is held on closed roads round the town centre. After a bit of rain earlier in the day, we started in the dry, but the heavens opened halfway round and it was like standing in the shower in your running gear (but also running, obviously). I didn’t feel like I’d gone that well, but it turned out to have been my fastest at that event (if some way off my 10k PB). I had had the presence of mind to take a dry T-shirt and jumper with me, but that didn’t avoid having to sit in the pub in soaking wet shorts and trainers. Fortunately they had plenty of time to dry out, as thanks to Gary arriving just as the remaining two of us were finishing what would have been our last pints we ended up staying until chucking-out time, which I now know is 1.15am. I still managed to get up in plenty of time for parkrun though, although my level of wakefulness was revealed when I made my morning coffee, and forgot to put the cup under the grinder.

Firstly, apologies for the hiatus to the two or three people who might have noticed. Most of this was thanks to a PHP upgrade breaking my blog for a while (I really ought to migrate to a static site). I’ll include the past couple of months in this update, although that’s straying slightly from the weeknotes format.

The end of May was a sad time for the local running community, after my friend Ben was tragically killed in a cycling accident. He was extremely well-liked and, to quote the words that were read out at the start line of the Kirton 5, “a great runner and an even greater man”. There were tributes at parkrun and at the Woodbridge 10k, and the funeral saw around 100 runners and 20 cyclists escorting Ben on his final journey, with a celebration of his life featuring dozens of stories of the lives he’d touched.

OK, that’s the emotional bit; now on to the trivial.

Happy to report that my bargain car is still working, and I also finally got the Roadster recovered from Felixstowe (although I haven’t yet got round to selling it). I sorted the Mini’s broken stereo by sourcing a second-hand CD/radio/speedometer combo (yes, it does seem weird that they’re basically an integrated unit) from eBay for £50, and while I had the dash panels off continued the eBay spree to upgrade to the optional “secret compartment” (not secret any more) above the glove box (£19), and a leather steering wheel (£14). It’s nice to be able to drive people to races now I have four seats instead of two, instead of always being the lift scrounger.

I lost my 138-day streak on Wordle.

Running-wise, in the eight weeks since the previous note I’ve fitted in the Friday 5 series and the Woodbridge, Newmarket and Kesgrave 10ks, as well as a “proper” (ie harder than the taster ones I did earlier in the year) orienteering event today. As you would imagine, I got lost a few times, and managed to stretch the “long” route (4.4km) to more like 8.5 (5¼ miles). One of the controls I struggled to find was in a really hilly bit of the woods too, so I got a bit of unplanned hill practice going up and down steps looking for it. I finished in a solid last place, but then I did have to convince them at the start that I had enough experience to do the long/hard course. I was also sternly warned that my legs would get stung and scratched in shorts, but as it turned out the only notable injury – a lightly grazed knee and hand – resulted from taking a turn too quickly on wet pavement.

As usual, my running mileage dropped through Friday 5 season, but I did just barely scrape through 1000 for the first half of the year.

Faye from work got married on Thursday, and looked very happy about it, as you’d expect. Congratulations to her and Jared!

Speaking of colleagues, a weird coincidence finally spurred me to get this blog back up last week. I got a message from one of the apprentices in our team asking whether I used to own kerrybuckley.com (I did, and it was this site’s original home, but lost it thanks to forgetting to update my email address with the registry and not getting a renewal reminder). It turns out she was putting together references for her dissertation, and came across a paper which cited some random nonsense I’d posted back in 2007. Small world.

That’s about all I can remember. Normal service will resume next week.

I finally bought a car! I went for the “that one will do for now” approach, and took a chance on a 2007 R56 so-called-Mini Cooper on eBay for the laughably low winning bid of £1020 (the least amount of money I’ve paid for a car since some time around 1993). I took the train to Great Yarmouth on bank holiday Monday afternoon to pick it up, and after some minor snags with not being able to find the address, then having to jump-start it because it had been sitting for a while and had a flat battery (we tried pushing, but couldn’t figure out how to get the steering lock off with no power, and there wasn’t enough space in a straight line), got it home without further incident. The fuel light came on somewhere around Beccles, warning me that there was only enough left for 32 miles, but I wasn’t keen to stop too soon in case the battery hadn’t built up enough charge. I was probably closer to 40 miles from home at that point, but I made it back with it claiming to have two miles’ worth remaining. I finally stopped for fuel on the way to Felixstowe on Tuesday evening, with the display having reached zero en route, then given up.

It seems to be generally in acceptable nick, with some service history and a year’s MOT. There are some areas of peeling lacquer on the paintwork, the wheels are a bit battered and the stereo controls don’t seem to work, but I’m sure they can be sorted one way or another.

I also finally got round to getting some quotes to recover the Smart from Felixstowe, so hopefully I can get that done early next week. Someone pointed me to a “Felixstowe News” facebook group post asking if anyone knew about a “mystery car” that had been parked in a road for some time, and against my better judgement I replied, prompting a message from someone asking me to “contact them urgently” about it “causing issues”. Apparently they’d been in touch with the police and Environmental Health (?), who I imagine had told them it was legally parked. I’m sure they’ll be happy when it goes, anyway.

As mentioned last week, we’ve got a two day developer event at work either side of this weekend, and like an idiot I’ve spent most of my free time this week building and deploying a massively over-engineered framework to run a Connect 4 tournament between bots that people are going to spend an hour and a half writing as a (hopefully) fun programming challenge. It’s pretty much finished now, so fingers crossed it works as planned tomorrow.

I had another go at orienteering today (Sunday), this time in Chantry Park, where some of the controls were a bit trickier to find. At least I remembered to start my Garmin this time!

Much excitement in certain segments of the populace this week at the prospect of a rich old bloke being given a shiny new hat by a man in a dress on behalf of his imaginary friend. Not my cup of tea.

We’ve got a developer event at work at the end of next week, and I’ve ended up volunteering to run a coding challenge by way of a bit of friendly competition to break up the day. I’m basing it on something someone else ran years ago, involving writing a script/program to play a simple game against other people, but decided it would be “simpler” to have people play moves using a simple HTTP interface, rather than everyone uploading code and having it run on a server (with all the nightmares of supporting multiple versions of multiple languages that that would entail). As usual this has snowballed into a bigger project than intended, and I’ve already broken my “the company has long since used up any goodwill that might justify me working on it in my free time” rule. Ah well.

On Friday we were discussing Friday pub lunch plans on WhatsApp, and it turned out I’d be cycling there from the office as the other people going this week were all working at home. Convinced I was running late, I rushed to leave, then was confused to find the car park virtually empty when I arrived and worried that they were shut. Then the truth finally dawned on me, and was confirmed when I got my phone out and found a confused reply to my “leaving now, be there around 12.40” message asking whether I was aware that it was currently only 11.26. Fortunately I persuaded them to meet at 12, so didn’t have to wait around for too long. It was finally warm enough to sit outside, although we’d barely finished eating when a massive (but fortunately brief) thunderstorm started.

This weekend was the Stephen Williams 10k, near Bury St Edmunds. This is only the third year it’s been going, and the other two were held on insanely hot days. This time the temperature was much more reasonable, and it’s hard to fathom how we managed to run it when it was 10–15° warmer. All I could remember was that the first 5k was mostly downhill, obviously meaning you pay for it on the second half, but I’d forgotten about the big hill near the end. I finished with a nasty stitch, and an OK but not great time (albeit much better than last year, which was in turn much better than the year before).

After a few false starts, could it be that spring weather is properly here at last? It seems to have crept up to the extent that I got in the shower after running on Sunday and was slightly taken aback to discover that the back of my neck had slightly burned.

It feels like it’s been a very uneventful week, followed by a packed weekend. Saturday kicked off with parkrun as usual, then after cycling back from Chantry Park and having a short rest I ran down to Christchurch Park, where Suffolk Orienteering Club were holding another of their basic events for newbies. I’ve tried it a couple of times before (despite my famed navigational limitations), but I’m definitely still a beginner. I picked the “long” (3km) course, and after a few mistakes found all 19 controls and got back in a mid-table 26:21. For context, the winner was a 16-year-old girl in 20:12, and the other people ahead of me ranged in age from 12 to 70+. While I was there, and as they were all covered by the fiver I’d paid to enter, I thought I might as well do the 2km and 1km routes too. The medium was clearly not a popular option, as I finished in almost half the time of the person who came second, but on the short I only managed third place. I was also very much the only adult tackling the latter distance – approximately 20 years older, in fact, than all five of the other competitors put together! It’s a good job people were running individually, or I would have looked very odd lining up to compete against a bunch of small children.

On Saturday evening I got the train (which I nearly missed thanks to it leaving from an unexpected platform) to Colchester to see Dingus Khan (with support from My Fat Pony and, of all things, sea shanty outfit Motley Crew) at Colchester Arts Centre. I didn’t know much about them other than having seen frontman Ben Brown supporting Pet Needs a couple of times, and having randomly spoken to the bassist at a HMHB gig. I got the impression that they might be a bit mad, and was not disappointed. An entertaining evening despite not knowing any of the songs in advance. There was a general undercurrent of drunken celebration in Ipswich and on the trains, thanks to ITFC winning promotion back up to the Championship, but I managed to avoid most of it.

After that relaxing Saturday, Sunday morning saw me dragging myself out to the Kesgrave Fun Run, a generally enjoyable local tin pot classic charity 5k(ish) race. Despite tired legs, I managed to get round in 20:36 (which sounds better than it is, with the course coming in 100m or so short of 5k). Then in the evening it was back to Colchester, this time to the Three Wise Monkeys to see Pet Needs again. They were excellent as usual, with great support from Bridget and Hannah Rose Platt. A good venue too, with the distinction of serving beer in actual glasses rather than plastic.

Looking forward to bank holiday Monday to recover (although in reality it’s already nearly Monday lunchtime as I type this).

The long-awaited return of local GoodGym group runs happened on Monday. Various things, including but not limited to a pandemic, conspired to there not having been any in Ipswich since early 2020 (although there have been a couple of bonus tasks in the meantime), but we finally have a newly qualified run leader/coordinator who seems very keen. This also marked my 100th task (a few years later than expected), which means I get a new T-shirt. Unfortunately it looks very similar to the basic red version unless you’re paying attention, as opposed to the black one I got for 50.

Wednesday saw another Run for Coffee/Run for Beer double-header. I can’t help noticing that attendance at the latter skews more male than the former!

On Sunday a few of us from work met up at Bin 93 for a board games afternoon. We ended up playing Zombicide, which took about three hours but was good fun. I enjoyed playing an entirely cooperative game for a change, rather than trying to work out who were secretly werewolves, minions of Mordred or whatever. The mechanics of the game worked really well to keep us teetering between “we’re going to win easily” and “we’re doomed” right up to the final round (we did win in the end).

I had half an eye on the London Marathon tracker while we were playing, with a fair few people I know running, and some good results. We were also rudely interrupted at 3pm by the daft emergency siren thing, which somehow came as a surprise to us all even though I’d remembered and warned everyone ten minutes earlier.

It feels like Spring is finally arriving. The branches that fell off my apple tree last year, but are still sitting there semi-attached, have buds on them, but all the branches that are still in their traditional elevated positions seem to be dead.

My baby niece turned 18 this week, which hardly seems possible. Does this mean I’m … old?

Now up to 19/12 (or 19/67) languages on #12in23. Some of them have been more pleasant experiences than others, based largely on the availability, quality and helpfulness of language documentation.

I went to see Half Man Half Biscuit again on Saturday, with Rupert from work. Support were Model Village, who I think I saw supporting the same band in the same venue ten years ago. I wore the Pet Needs T-shirt that I bought at the gig the other week, and while we were waiting for HMHB to come on the bloke standing behind me tapped me on the shoulder to comment on the shirt. Turns out he’s a mate of Johnny from Pet Needs, and is also in Dingus Khan with Ben Brown (who was supporting Pet Needs as a solo act). Small world.

While most of the people I’ve been semi-marathon training with were off running at Boston (UK) or Manchester today I was in Essex for the far more sensible distance of 10k at Little Bromley. It went pretty much to plan, and I shaved 40s off last year’s time, coming in at 42:35. Still a minute or so outside my PB though (am I getting old?). Someone collapsed in front of me just short of the finish line, but there was a paramedic within feet of him so hopefully he was OK. He must have been furious that no-one helped him cover the last few yards to the mat before putting him in the ambulance though.