• Sunday, 9 Mar 2025 10:49 pm

  Now: 3 - 9 March 2025

  Thursday was maybe the second or third Nice Day of the Year—a pleasure. Doors were opened and washing was hung out on lines across the neighbourhood. The solar panels booted back up and charged up the battery downstairs to like full power. The grass and the trees and the hedgerows and thickets all across East Durham came alive and started booting pollen out into the hazy sky and pretty much disabled me from like 10am onwards.

  

  Then at the weekend we had a couple more nice days; on Sunday I even went for a run in just a t-shirt. The Boston Marathon (not that one) is looming and I want to make sure that I’m prepared, so I’ve been out pretty consistently as the weather has gotten better.

  A bit of sweat and fresh warm air feels like just about the only thing keeping me together, mentally, at the minute. I’ve gotten to the point in my career where I’m starting to butt up against the limits of my background: yes I can read Shakespeare (with annotations) but no I don’t have the muscle memory to keep track of Turing machine states in my head. I can understand—and handle—feeling out of my depth, but reading through historical computer science A-level exams, or trying to figure out logic puzzles, makes me feel like I’m in a whole nother body of water, in terms of out of my depth.

  -

  I’ve given up YouTube for Lent, which is one of those things that only 30ish-year-olds in 2025 do, because 30ish-year-olds in 2025 have impulse control problems related to YouTube Shorts. In February I spent probably more time than I want to know about watching 22-second clips of men laying concrete or traffic accidents on UK roads. I’ve lost that time for good, but the Lenten Spirit of Jesus Christ is going to help stop me from losing any more time in the future.

  As a result I’ve gotten back into books; that’s right I’m back baby, I’ve put Dhalgren behind me and I’m reading for pleasure again. I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell this week and I’ve moved on to Michael Schur’s How to be Perfect, which has been… middling. Maybe a bit less rigorous than I’d like it to be. Oh and Sam and I are reading Hamlet, which is a lot more dramatic and a little bit more funny than I remember it being. Anyway the point is that without the distraction of rapid-fire content about two-handed greatsword technique I’m back to staring at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly.

  

  Reading Running Bothies Books

• ---

  Wednesday, 5 Mar 2025 9:08 pm

  Alnwick XC

  Up at Alnwick Castle for the last (for me) cross-country running outing of the season. Good weather: not too much wind, dry course. A little bit chilly. Felt like a lot of people in the camp before the race, but on reviewing the results there were less than 400 runners in the men's race.

  

  Felt as well like clubs were fielding their stronger runners—had trouble keeping up after I chugged 250ml of Tailwind and then glugged and glogged around the course for 50 minutes. Still, beautiful course that I'm keen to get back to next year and smash a PB.

  Running

• ---

  Sunday, 23 Feb 2025 6:47 pm

  Now: 17 - 23 February 2025

  What do you use AI for? I’ve lately been using large language models for getting me over hurdles that a little bit of perspicacious search-engining would have done, in the past. “How many days ago was 11 January?” or “Given this JSON structure, how do I use jq to get only these keys?” I’ve put five quid into OpenAI and have been using their API access via Simon Willison’s llm command to generate alt text for pictures on my blog. A lot of the time I have to edit these down because gpt-4o-mini tends to be a little whimsical, describing things in terms of “dark and moody atmosphere” or “placid, becalmed setting” and I don’t think that’s much help to anyone. I know that alt text should be bespoke and artisanal but when I do it myself I just wind up writing things like, “A picture of me on a snowy hillside,” which is probably also not much help to anyone.

  I’ve lately been trying to use AI more to shore up the technical gaps in my own background. I famously didn’t study the thing that currently pays my bills at school, but as I try to move more towards a senior-level role at work this is starting to feel less like a point of pride and more like a Deficiency in Experience. When I looked up some old computer science A-level tests, I didn’t understand much of it at all, so basically fed the questions back into ChatGPT, along with the answers, and got it to explain why the answers were what they were. By the end of the night, well I wasn’t in any position to undertake a compsci A-level but at least my eyes had reverted from being the 🌀 emoji.

  Anyway there was a fun thread about the same on Hacker News, and now that I’m sharing Hacker News posts on my personal blog my transformation into tech DudeBro is complete.

  Saturday was officially the first Nice Day of the year (weatherwise), so Sam and I went on a big run+bike ride with Ghyll, going all the way up to Sunderland on the lines and then getting the train back to Horden. Ghyll was good overall and totally unfazed by running 30+ km, but I was pretty much shattered by the time we got back home. Then it was a quick turnaround to take the bus into Durham for a fancy dinner at Cellar Door and a couple of pints at the always-cheerful Swan and Three Cygnets and the actually-not-that-nice Market Tavern. Durham was bouncing and the vibe was good, but on the bus ride back home a couple of 12-year-olds heckled me for my accent and then tried to sell us cocaine, which was nightmarish.

  

  

  

  Quiet Sunday in recovery, pancakes for breakfast and then a walk on the beach with Ghyll. Wind has been blowing a gale all day but apparently not strong enough for the Met Office to declare an official storm or anything. Anyway all of the bins have been knocked over and rubbish is starting to collect at the end of the street. I expect we’ll be back to cold weather by morning.

  

  now Running Durham

• ---

  Monday, 17 Feb 2025 9:22 pm

  Now: 10 February - 16 February 2025

  The week started out slow but ramped up in a major way. Tuesday we were at Scouts for the second half of my lesson on space. I was pretty nervous about it but it went well.

  Thursday I was down in Leeds for an all-hands at work. I really like going down to the office and seeing folks face to face. I just know that if I lived within cycling distance I’d be down there multiple times per week. I think I’m going to have to come to terms with being an In-Person Work Guy.

  On the weekend Sam and I went out to the Pennines: she started walking the Teesdale Way and I did a big loop over Cross Fell.

  

  Spent Sunday recovering; I spent a while on the computer doing Administrative Tasks and then drank three beers and signed up for a 50k in the Lake District in May.

  Reading

  I liked this article on Dialectics of Decline, I feel it’s probably being shared around left-learning circles with nods and approval but there’s a lot of soul-searching that needs to be done on Our Side as well:

  On some level we are all too comfortable. We in the heart of the empire have grown so accustomed to our endless flow of treats that it feels almost impossible to imagine the steadfastness of belief in higher principles, risking life and limb for a greater cause, that led to the American Revolution, to the abolition of slavery, to the militancy of the Black Panthers with their rifles and shotguns.

  Still, a perverse voyeurism in “soy right” pictures shared by Max Read on the same topic.

  In other widely-shared news, Kevin Kelly’s list of 50 years of travel tips got me wanting to get back on a plane and go somewhere:

  Sketchy travel plans and travel to sketchy places are ok. Take a chance. If things fall apart, your vacation has just turned into an adventure. Perfection is for watches. Trips should be imperfect. There are no stories if nothing goes amiss.

  [...]

  Here in brief is the method I’ve honed to optimize a two-week vacation: When you arrive in a new country, immediately proceed to the farthest, most remote, most distant place you intend to reach during the trip. If there is a small village, remote spa, a friend’s farm, or a wild place you plan on seeing on the trip, go there immediately. Do not stop near the airport. Do not rest overnight in the arrival city. Do not pause to acclimate. If at all possible proceed by plane, bus, jeep, car directly to the furthest point without interruption. Make it an overnight journey if you have to. Then once you reach your furthest point, unpack, explore, and work your way slowly back to the big city, wherever your international departure airport is.

  Gina Trapani’s Life in Weeks is a terrific high-level visualisation of life (that doesn’t make you go “oh my god I’m basically dead already”). This, along with the question on the citizenship application about tell us every time you left the country in the past five years, makes me want to build something like this for myself. See also Buster Benson’s Life in Weeks.

  

  Running Outdoors Pennines Leeds Politics Web

• ---

  Monday, 10 Feb 2025 9:35 pm

  Now: 3 February - 9 February 2025

  

  Led a lesson on space at Scouts on Tuesday; was very nervous leading up to it but it turned swimmingly. With a little guidance kids will basically teach themselves, it feels like. Maybe it’s just the good kind of kids that go to Scouts.

  On Wednesday night I was feeling a little peckish so I made an entire bag of sugarfree cookie dough mix. The cookies tasted like chemicals and the sugar simulate made my insides roil. At least the mix is no longer in the cupboard, tempting me.

  I got a new pair of running shoes at the end of last week, and spent this week breaking them in. Road shoes! Not to be found on my Footwear Bingo card for 2025. I took them out for a long run at the weekend as a sort of dress rehearsal for an upcoming marathon and was pleasantly surprised. The Shoe Industry will make a conventional runner of me yet.

  

  

  Spent the rest of the weekend eating—first a Jamaican takeaway (from Easington of all places!) and then a homemade barbecue out of the 4 Rivers cookbook. I consider a ruined baking tin a small price to pay for better pork than most British people will eat in their entire lives.

  

  now Running Food

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