BOFHJournal - April 2019

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30/04/2019 [16:05] Rachel came home last night, and there was much rejoicing. I also managed to 'watch' the Game of Thrones episode from the weekend. I say 'watch' because it was so dark on screen I don't think I caught more than half of what went on. Still, never mind. This morning we headed out of the house together, and I ended up at work in time to do some server reconfiguration and rebooting before 08:00. The rest of the day has been spent doing the usual things I do every day, only seemingly more often than in the last few months. Everything is a whole lot busier these days. I did manage to finally try and get an Oracle Linux Server installation onto my Red Hat Satellite setup. Not all of it quite works, and there're two niggles I'm not pleased about. But generally I think everything works as well as it should. One of the niggles means I have to be aware of which kernel is set to run on next boot, but given patching is always done manually, I should be able to make sure everything's OK. Chances are I'll miss something one day, but I know what happens when I do, so I should be able to figure things out and put them right fairly sharply. I'm intending to try and run for 30 minutes tomorrow at some point. It'll be the decider as to whether or not I run again before next weekend. Counting from Monday last week it'll be 10 days since I last ran...

29/04/2019 [17:00] The being-with-Rachel parts of the weekend were absolutely great. As was everything I did on Saturday for Cormac's birthday celebrations. The rest of it was frustrating. Things started OK on Friday, when I got home from work and took my really good bike out for 26.2 miles along a cycle route and back where I didn't have to worry about cars (much) and just concentrated on getting a decent amount of leg/cardio work done. After that I had dinner, watched a bit of television and went to bed. I fully intended to do the same thing again on Saturday morning, but I slept in a little too long and the train I was going to be catching with other people ended up being an earlier one. So I just got on my bike and cycled to the station when the time was right. We all met up and I managed to wedge my bike onto a rather packed train. We arrived in London and I locked the bike up at the station before we all walked (or hobbled/limped in my case) to the Tube and thence to various places around London to have brunch, play on some (electric) karts, do an escape room, climb the outside of the O2 (I didn't do that bit) and then go somewhere for an excellent dinner. Rachel arrived just towards the end of the dinner and after everyone had included her in the day's events and generally made her feel welcome, we left (far too late) for our hotel. There, we got about two hours of very bad sleep before getting up and cycling (me) or jogging (her) to Trafalgar Square to meet other people doing the Notharam Nodnol (running the course of the London Marathon in reverse). Around 02:20 everyone started and I trailed along behind being support(ive) and generally getting colder and colder. To cut a long story short at around the half way point, disappointed that I wasn't running, and with very very cold feet, I cycled back to the hotel, got warm in the shower, got changed, and then made my way (via lots of walking to and from closed Tube stations) to Greenwich Town and the restaurant/pub where everyone who was doing the run was due to meet for breakfast. Food was duly had by all before I dragged Rachel back to the hotel so she could have a few hours off her feet before going out to marshal for the actual London Marathon for four hours or so. I elected to stay in the hotel room, had a few hours of sleep, and felt almost human by the time she got back. I took her for dinner in the hotel restaurant and then we went to bed as quickly as I could get her back to our room, which we'd had to change because the television in the first one was broken. The air-conditioning wouldn't go off cold, or turn off at all in the second one, but we couldn't be bothered to move again, so we just made sure we stayed beneath the duvet instead. This morning after a lazy start I cycled back to the station and got a train back in time to get to work before anything untoward happened (as they tend to on a Monday). I've spent the day dealing with the usual amounts of annoyances that make up a sysadmin's day. Now I'm off home to check the house is still, there, go to Tesco, watch Game of Thrones, and then wait for Rachel to arrive for the night, hurrah! Tomorrow morning's an early start, of course. What I really want, though, is for my foot to be healed enough that I can run on it without the significant discomfort and worry that it'll split open again or put back my healing so I can't do the SDW50 in a few weeks from now. That's what I really want, and why I didn't run on the weekend, and haven't in fact run since I was at my parents' two weekends ago.

26/04/2019 [17:20] I've had a semi-poo day, if I'm honest. Admittedly it started off nicely as I was in Croydon with Rachel. But even after a late night pizza last night after we got back from the exhibition, I wasn't feeling all that happy about having to get on a train back to work. I duly did, and was rewarded with a day full of annoyance. Immediately I got in there were a mass of things waiting for me (many of them from yesterday when I was at the meeting in London all afternoon). I triaged what I could, got a handle on the other stuff and worked through them as quickly as I could. I kept forlornly thinking about the fun work stuff I wanted to do, but the opportunity to do it slipped further and further away. It was gone 13:30 before I remembered to go and buy a sandwich and eat it, and only now as I write this that I've remembered the other bits of lunch Rachel lovingly made and packed for me (I'm eating it as I write this). I've had expense forms to fill out (repeatedly), dim users not asking with enough detail/clarity for the things they want, and then failing to understand what I've given them, hassle about things I haven't had a chance to do yet (mostly me hassling myself), my foot still isn't good enough to walk on without discomfort, let alone run on, and when I opened my payslip for April I found that the Tax Man had forgotten I'd paid the tax I owed last financial year and taken a good chunk out of this month's pay. That then required a few hours of waiting on the phone to get through to someone who - to their credit - fixed the issue in under 5 minutes, although they couldn't work out why they'd had to. A number of other stupid things have gone on today, including me letting the cat out of the bag somewhat due to mental fuzziness and perhaps me not being quite in the loop on everything that's going on socially around me these days. In any event, I just want to go home now and collapse, but seeing as how I still can't run, and I fear my expanding waistline given my sitting down all day and not really eating any less while not exercising as much as I normally do, I have to go and do some hard cycling when I get home before I can do so. This weekend I'm in London both days. On Saturday it's someone's birthday celebrations. Then I'm in a hotel with Rachel before we go to do the London Marathon route in reverse. I'll be on a bike as my foot just isn't healed enough to walk properly on, let alone run. That'll take about five hours. Then it's a nice big breakfast (which I won't really have earned), and then back to the hotel for a few hours before we head out to do some marshalling for the real thing. We'll go back to the hotel again after that and then I'll head back to work from there on Monday. And that'll be another weekend done.

25/04/2019 [10:00] OK, briefly. I had some weird dreams this morning, so woke not feeling all that happy. However, not having to make lunch, and cycling into work without rain was nice. This morning's patching went without a hitch as far as I can tell, and the moving and resizing and other stuff of a VM completed eventually (even if there were a few issues here and there). Now I'm off to London for a meeting, then heading to the South Bank after that to go to an exhibition with Rachel. I'll be back tomorrow for a full day's work.

24/04/2019 [18:45] I still can't walk normally on my foot. But if I had to say, I'd say it's healing. Just not as quickly as I'd like. I'm still not certain if I'll be able to run a marathon on it on Sunday morning at this point. I'll just have to wait and see. Otherwise today has been a moderately busy one. I got up later than usual, got in a few core exercises before I got bored, showered, did the usual morning stuff and cycled to work. Over the course of the day I've had a few meetings with my line manager about a number of different issues, seen a few get fixed by other people (which was nice), had a very long meeting with my team and our head of 'department' (or maybe 'group'?), and gone a long way to finally getting Oracle Linux served from my Satellite installation rather than a separate repository mirroring server. I'm not quite serving everything Oracle-related from Satellite as there's all the Oracle VM stuff which I've not got. However, I think the server I have left running that is on a version which isn't really supported any more anyway, so it'd never get any updates. So not tomorrow (as I've a busy day I'll try to detail tomorrow morning), but maybe Friday I'll try moving a server or two from my local mirror to my local Satellite and see what happens. I think it has rained, or maybe even is raining, but I've got a waterproof with me so that'll be fine. Definitely time to go home though. Especially as I'm in early tomorrow morning to patch and reboot 23 servers, two of them physical with firmware updates pending.

23/04/2019 [17:30] An extremely full and eventful Easter is what happened to me. It began on Thursday evening when I took the train to meet Rachel in London and then head to Croydon. That all went very well. On Friday morning we cycled to the station and got a train to Merstham. The weather was cool (thankfully) but clear, and had been for days, so the running was good. We had a lovely 3 hours or so to the end of the NDW50 course in Knockholt Pound and then a slightly disappointing lunch in a pub there. After a 2.5 mile walk to the nearest train station (Knockholt) we then got the train home again to Croydon. The remainder of the day was then spent relaxing and generally not doing very much at all. Although we did go for a longer-than-expected walk later on in the day. On Saturday (after Rachel got in a sneaky parkrun (I just thought she was going to do pre-parkrun setup)) we took various trains up to Manchester to see my family (my brother and his son had been there for a day or so and shared a meal with us and our parents before heading home themselves). The evening was then spent quietly before an early bed for everyone. That was because Rachel and I had decided to do our 2 hour run before breakfast and going to Manchester Cathedral for the Easter morning service. The run was great, if a little tiring due to Rachel wanting to do a pace pyramid. I kept up with her fairly well though, so that was good. The weather heated up again, so it was nice to have it out of the way. The service was nice, but a little long for me. Back home again we had a lovely lunch and then, after Rachel and I had been for a slightly longer than expected (again) walk, Rachel made dinner. As I hadn't had much opportunity to help out with anything I put the rice on and was responsible for getting the hot casserole dishes out of the oven to stir the Moroccan stew Rachel had made. This is where things went wrong as I managed to drop the pyrex lid of one of the dishes onto the floor in the kitchen. Obviously it shattered and I (in bare feet as it was a hot day) stood on a piece of it, cutting the ball of my left foot quite deeply. After dripping a bit, I managed to mostly stop the bleeding. As we assumed that a trip to out of hours/urgent care/etc. could take all night we all had some of the lovely dinner and then my dad drove Rachel and I to the nearest hospital. Amazing, for getting there at 19:51 (registation time) I was seen at 20:15, and was out of there after having two X-rays by 21:45. I haven't had any stitches, and I was told to take the iodide dressing off yesterday to let it breathe. Once home it was pretty much time for bed. Overall we had a lovely time with my parents. It's thanks to Rachel that we were there, but I really should make the time and effor to see them more. That brings us to yesterday, where Rachel and I got the train together as far as Sheffield, at which point she got off to head to her parents' for a party with friends and family and I headed home alone. Luckily I only had one change, and cycling was fine. Once home I headed out to Tesco, then settled in for the night, although I did go out to get myself a Chinese takeaway, where I managed to mislay £5 in the process, which was also disappointing. I went to bed feeling very slightly sorry for myself as there's no way I can even walk properly, let alone consider any kind of running until my foot has healed. It'll obviously be ready for the NDW50 in the middle of May, but I was very much planning on running the nohtaraM nodnoL this weekend (Sunday 02:00), as well as doing lots of fun things for Cormac's birthday celebrations the day before. There's no running training for me this week, and potentially next week. Basically until my foot won't split open when I repeatedly hammer it into the ground. My training was going so well. This is so very disappointing. I haven't really got much to say about today other than the fact I couldn't sleep past around 05:40, so got up and did a few desultory exercises before showering, breakfasting, making lunch, and cycling into work to patch and reboot a few servers (successfully). A few things have come up today that I haven't really been able to satisfactorily deal with, but hopefully with Chris' help tomorrow (if he has time) they should be workable-throughable. At the back of my mind though is the fact I've already missed one scheduled run this week (yesterday) and I'll be missing another tomorrow, never mind Thursday and potentially Saturday (and Sunday). I've got 25 days until the NDW50. I just hope I get some runs in before then to keep my running fitness up (and my weight down!).

18/04/2019 [15:50] Happily, today was another quiet day in terms of things going wrong, or being asked for stuff I didn't know how to do. There's one thing to do with the SAN and snapshotting I have almost no idea where to start with, so I'm going to leave it until a colleague comes back next week and then ask him to help me troubleshoot/diagnose it. I went for a run at lunchtime and it was hotter than I would have liked. We're getting to the part of the year when I just can't run as hard as I would like (or for as long as I would like) without getting more dehydrated than I would like. Them's the breaks, I guess. Must try and drink more and take more of my 'horse pills'. Other than that I slightly mis-packed for this Easter weekend's escapades as I think the weather's going to be hotter than I was expecting. I'm going to ditch a pair of tracksuit bottoms and hope that I have enough pairs of shorts with me and at Rachel's to be useful. I'm off to Croydon this evening, we're then running a chunk of the North Downs Way tomorrow morningish, on Saturday we're marshalling a parkrun and then getting trains to see my parents. Sunday we'll be running slightly less long than tomorrow, and then doing fun things with my parents until Monday when I'll be coming home and Rachel heading to see her parents and friends for a port and cheese evening. Then I'm back to work early on Tuesday morning to do patching and rebooting and things like that. I think that's everything, so I'm off to catch my train. See you after Easter.

17/04/2019 [17:20] Let's see... I got in this morning to find that our alerting system was almost entirely quiet, which was nice. Over the course of the day, and with people actually using things it has become somewhat more shouty, but I don't think there's anything particularly terrible being flagged up, which is nice. As a result there hasn't been all that much for me to do, except get a few ducks in a row for next week's various patchings, rebootings, VM resizings, and otherwise. I did a hill reps run at lunchtime consisting of backing off a bit on the ups and then hammering (at least my version of hammering) down while maintaining good form and not turning my ankles. I think I managed all of the above quite well (for me). I think that's it for today. Time to go home and download a few things.

16/04/2019 [17:20] Happily, despite getting in horribly early this morning to patch and reboot two servers (including firmware updates) today has been far quieter than yesterday. Not that I would have minded if it hadn't been as pretty much all of my colleagues were in today to help if there'd been a lot of things to do. So, I've been able to concentrate on some of the things I had to let slide yesterday (like building three new VMs for one group, and logging some support cases for some software). I even had time to walk over to one of the server rooms to replace a HDD, rather than dashing over and back by bike. Plenty of emails sent, including getting three servers' ports on a FEX put in the right port profiles (or at least asking for it to be done). Once that's done I should be able to start thinking about getting them kickstarted. Honestly though, I think I'm done for today. I might save my early doors for Thursday afternoon as I'll be heading to Rachel's that day and an earlier train would be nice.

15/04/2019 [17:40] I had a great long weekend, thanks for asking. Rachel came home on Thursday evening from London and we had a lovely evening together. On Friday morning we got up lateish and went for a run together, although Rachel had to turn back early due to a muscle issue. Once we were back we got ourselves together and cycled into town to have a remarkably filling afternoon tea/lunch at the hotel we'd be staying at for the night. We walked to the center of town and did some paying in of cheques and then spent some time in Rachel's favourite book shop getting some books with the voucher my parents gave her for Christmas. After that it was back to the hotel for a bit of relaxing and then out to a favourite restaurant for a nice filling dinner. We ambled back to the hotel and got a semi-early night. In the morning we made it to breakfast in time to have a slow and steady feed and then checked out and wandered into town to ensconce ourselves in Waterstones for a drink and a chance to read the papers and some books. Once we were done (and felt like we were just hogging a table someone else might want) we headed home and spent the rest of the day doing relaxing things at home. After we'd been to Tesco Rachel did some baking and cooking. On Sunday morning we set out at the same time to do longish runs and then headed off in different directions to do our own things. I got back long enough before Rachel to do some washing up and tidying. Once Rachel was back we had a tasty lunch and then did some more not-very-much for the rest of the day. This morning was the usual getting up, seeing Rachel off, and then heading to work after all of the morning routine. There was no-one else in the office until 10:30 or so, so I had a mountain of things to do (two of them very complicated and difficult) so I felt a bit stretched. Luckily nothing truly major or emergency-like reared its head, so I was more than able to cope... I think. There's plenty of things I've had to let go by the board today, but one thing I was hoping to do I managed to get someone else to do, so I might be able to make some progress tomorrow on the next phase of it. Lovely run in the sun at lunch time, even if I slightly over-egged the pace a bit. Still, it was nice to push a bit harder than usual. Rest day tomorrow, then hills on Wednesday when I have to dial back the ups and really run the downs, which should be interesting! Off home now, but I'm in early tomorrow morning for patching and rebooting. It'll be odd to go to bed without Rachel.

11/04/2019 [16:50] Got home last night, Rachel came home on an earlier train because it was my birthday, we had a lovely evening together doing very little except probably eating a bit too much. But that's OK. That's what you do on your birthday when you're old. We went to bed at a sensible time, too. And yet this morning I felt every year of my new age. The weather was cold but clear though, so the early cycle to work for patching made me feel a bit fresher. The patching went well other than a bit of a panic when one server decided to forget which device it was supposed to boot from and I had to go into the BIOS and remind it. Everything was still done by 08:00 though, so that was OK. The remainder of the day I've been prodding people to do what I need them to do, fighting the good fight with regard to decommissioning things that should have been gotten rid of well before now, and generally scheduling things for myself for the next few weeks. I even attended an almost-all-hands meeting this morning as Chris wasn't in today. I've left him plenty of emails to work through when he's in tomorrow and I'm not because Rachel has organised a day and a bit of fun birthday things to do together in town. She's so wonderful. I hope when her birthday comes along this year I can make it equally awesome.

10/04/2019 [17:00] I was hoping today would be a relatively quiet day, what with it being my birthday, but it hasn't really been. Again, let's start with the previous evening. Rachel arrived after a fairly annoying set of public transport journeys and that annoyance spilled over a bit into how we spent the remainder of the evening, sadly. I should have made more of an effort, but I didn't. That's something I'll try to do better about in the future. By morning all was much better and we got my morning 45 minute run done together as I ran with Rachel part-way to the local train station and then turned around at 22:30 and ran home again. It felt much better than the run on Monday evening, so that was reassuring that I'm on the mend/recovery. After that it was shower, breakfast, other morning stuff, and then cycle to work. At work today I spent all of the morning in various meetings, at least one of which was a complete waste of time me being in. There was another meeting where we learned more about how various structures within the institution are going to be altered, but for the most part the bottom line for me and my group is "more work, but potentially more money and maybe eventually more staff, but nothing but more work for the moment". Same old, same old, then. This afternoon I've been adding monitoring stuff to various servers to see if we can get more information the next time something odd happens on a set of them. I've also prepared the production servers I'm patching tomorrow morning for that, done some load balancer and SSL certificate work, accepted the fact I'm deputising at a set of change boards tomorrow morning, and decided on my birthday dinner with Rachel. All I need to do now is go home, and hope Rachel comes home soon too.

09/04/2019 [18:25] I've had a very long, but I think fairly productive, day today. Before I get into that let me tell you briefly about last night, which involved me getting home, going to Tesco, coming home, going for a veritable plod of a 30 minute jog, showering, and then having dinner. The jog was far harder than I was expecting, and despite a relatively low heart rate, I felt pretty winded and tired by the end of it. Unsurprising, really, but still disappointing. I've got a 45 minute run tomorrow at the same pace which I'll do at lunchtime, I think. Anyway, back to today. I got up early and headed into work to patch and reboot a dozen or so servers (a mix of physical and virtual). That all went without a hitch, thankfully. Then the day became one of trying to dissuade people from continuing to use OVM (Oracle's virtualisation technology), solving a lot of people's technical problems, creating one of my own which I've only just solved (but not the way I wanted to), and getting a couple of chunks of old kit removed from the network, which is always a good thing. I'm going to head home now and wait for Rachel to arrive quite late this evening. It'll be wonderful to see her. I just hope she arrives safely.

08/04/2019 [16:50] Well, I did it. I achieved both of my goals. Not only did I break the 9 hour target for running the SDW50, but I smashed it at the same time as keeping up with Rachel for the entire route. So, entirely awesome. Of course, we were both pretty shattered afterwards and didn't feel all that great for a day afterwards, but by now I'm pretty much on the mend and indeed have a 30 minute jog planned for this evening when I get home, on top of going to Tesco, and trying to get some relaxation in before tomorrow morning's early start for patching and stuff. The weather on the run was kind, mostly (there was a persistent headwind), with reasonable temperatures and no rain or overly strong sun. I ate almost everything I planned on eating, drank almost enough, and didn't ever really think about dropping out. Sunday was all about resting, although we did go for a long walk to collect the bikes from the train station (we got a bus home from it the night before) so we'd have them for this morning. Otherwise it was eating, drinking, watching television and doing a bit of washing. This week is (and has already been today) pretty rammed. Meetings abound, there's a ton of work to do, or is coming down the pipe for me to do, and I'm not even in on Friday. Hopefully everything'll work out OK in the end. Tomorrow and Thursday are early starts for patching, I've got three meetings on Wednesday, two of them back to back in the same room, Rachel's here on Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and finally Thursday night into Friday (for what reason I don't yet know...), I've got three gentle run/jogs this week, and a longer run on Sunday. Somewhere in all of that I'll get some sleep, I hope. Just not like last night when I had a really horrible nightmare about my mouth and teeth.

05/04/2019 [15:20] OK, just a quick one. I have everything packed for the race tomorrow, I've done a full day of work despite the fact I'm leaving early to get the train to Rachel and Worthing, and I'm stressed that I've forgotten something both with regards to work and the race packing. I have to dash off to the train now so if there is anything I'll mention it on Monday. Friday in Worthing, racing all of Saturday to Eastbourne, then back to Croydon, recovering on Sunday, back to work on Monday!

04/04/2019 [17:10] Couldn't sleep in past around 05:00, so dozed intermittently until 06:40, when I got up, got dressed, and headed out for a decidedly relaxed hour of running along the river and back. Not a total confidence-booster for Saturday, but it was good to make it home and not really feel like I'd been for much of a run. Headed into work and have had a day of doing things just a smidgen outside of my comfort zone. I think all of them have come off without a hitch, or making anything worse, so I'm counting them in aggregate as a win. I've sent a bunch of emails about various things, been to at least two meetings, fiddled with the firewall, the load balancer, and the DNS a bit, and generally tried to keep things from falling apart. I even had a smidgen of time to look into where Rachel and I will be eating dinner tomorrow evening as our last big meal before the race on Saturday morning. I'm going home now to stare at my race pack and wonder how it got so heavy, then pack it and everything else for the weekend into a rucksack for tomorrow as I leave for the station straight from work in the middle of the afternoon. Hopefully I'll have time to do a quick journal entry before I go.

03/04/2019 [17:20] Today I had meetings. Not until the afternoon though, so I got the morning to make some notes, get ready for them, and do a whole load of really useful small jobs that no-one will notice, but make things run just a little more smoothly for me and everyone else who interacts with the systems where I did stuff. After lunch the first meeting was about getting a whole load of servers replaced or otherwise moved from one virtual place to another. In the end there'll be a lot of work to do, but I'll only be doing about four fifths of it, rather than all of it, so that's a reasonable result. I had to write a fairly long email detailing everything that was discussed in the meeting so that final fifth will actually get done by other people, but that's OK because it's in people's inboxes now, so they can't pretend they didn't have anything to do. The other meeting was boring and was all about what's going to be happening in the wider institution in the next little and long while. Mostly it doesn't affect me as I'm a grunt at the bottom of the food chain (where I'm happy for the most part). However, it does mean one or two things might change for me eventually. I'll mention them as and when and if they do. Otherwise I got to turn off another physical server today, send an email asking for nine physical servers to be deracked and removed, and generally happily reduced my physical estate, which makes things easier for me in the future. Not that I don't like physical hardware. It's just that it takes more effort to get it up and running than virtual servers. I'm off home now. Tomorrow morning I intend to do my (last) 1 hour run (before the race this weekend) before breakfast and work, and potentially with my race pack race kit loaded. It'll also give me a chance to check the bottles I want to use work as I hope. Then I'll shower and head into work. I went to Tesco last night, so I don't have to go tonight, which is good as I really don't feel in the mood to do anything more than go home and flop on the sofa. I know what I should make for dinner tonight. It's the same thing I should have made last night but I couldn't be bothered then either and went with pizza instead.

02/04/2019 [17:20] A slightly busier day today. Mostly it was about trying to track down what a thrice-renamed server was in terms of asset tag and details such that it could be added into our asset tracking system. This involved sending someone to check a number of chassis' twice, and even sliding one out of the rack it was in slightly to find the asset tag. Couple that with having to work out how to extract the out-of-band management IP from VMWare ESXi so we could actually connect to it and confirm that it was alive and it took a fair chunk of the day to do so. In the middle of it I went for a very wet run in the rain. My second last run before this weekend's race, which I'm almost looking forward to at this point. I didn't go to Tesco last night, so I'm going to have to go this evening instead. I figure I don't need all that much, so I'm going to go on the way home rather than getting home and coming out again. Hopefully that should cover me for the (short) week given I'm away on Friday evening until Monday morning again.

01/04/2019 [17:10] Welcome to April. I spent the last of March mostly relaxing, but also doing outside things, too. On Saturday morning Rachel and I went for a nice gentle 2 hour run together. Nowhere special, but it was nice to have a confidence-boosting run where we both felt perfectly fine after 2 hours at slightly faster than race pace for the ultra. Once we were back and showered the shower room fitter guy came over and replaced the broken shower knob. Unfortunately he put one piece in upside down, so the directional flow (overhead head or pipe head) is now reversed. I'm going to have to ask him to come and switch it round when he comes back to do some waterproofing work as I don't have the right tool (or trust myself not to break something) myself. Once that was done and dusted we cycled into town and had lunch at a place where I'd been given vouchers for Christmas. And then after that we got trains to Croydon. We spent a little bit too much time fiddling around when we got there, but still had time to have a delicious evening meal courtesy of Rachel. On Sunday we got up and marshalled for the Croydon Half Marathon. This mainly involved standing on a street corner in the cold and cheering people on. I headed home after the tail runner had gone by while Rachel went for a sports massage. Then the rest of Sunday was relaxing and doing very little. We're well into our taper for the ultra next Saturday, so feeling like we should be up and about and doing things somewhat. I have a run tomorrow lunchtime, so that should help in that regard. This morning Rachel and I got the same train into London, and then I headed on back to work on train and then bike. Mostly my day has revolved around dealing with delinting a lot of Ansible stuff again as the tests have been upgraded and generally made more stringent. I'm pleased at how clean everything seems to be now. I've got a good few meetings and important things coming up in the next two weeks or so and I'm hoping I'm properly prepared for them all. I'm going to take a good long look at my inbox tomorrow and maybe spend the day looking at things and researching so that I don't have any significant gaps in my knowledge. In the meantime though, I'm off home.