Add another to the stash:

The second of 2025’s ultra-distance running events - having finished the BTU Highland Ultra a few weeks previous.

This was an altogether different beast. 36 miles around the cliffs and coast of Guernsey. You basically smash together the (mostly road-based) Guernsey Marathon with the Dogbreaker (bathing pools to the Imperial on the cliffs.)

It’s an interesting event. I think if you were coming fresh to the island to take part then it would be an amazing experience, but having completed all of the various components individually (in some cases multiple times) already, it felt like a bit of a slog and a bit of a tickbox exercise.

This was last week:

When I completed 2024 Ironman Vittoria Gasteiz - my main takeaways were

(a) that before considering Ironman (or even Extreme Tri) any further I needed to get better at running, but also (b) that of the three disciplines in triathlon, I was at that time most drawn to the running.

So with that in mind, I set my sites for 2025’s challenges on some ultra-distance events. And quite by accident - listening to a podcast about something called the Jungle Ultra - the Beyond The Ultimate Highland Ultra landed on my radar. This seemed to tick all the boxes - I like running, I like mountains, and I like running in mountains. I’d heard great things about Knoydart, so this seemed like as good place to start as any.

Last year, I invited you (yes you) to begin.

I still remember hearing that poem for the first time, an inspiring poem by Sophie Diener called ‘The First Step’ which elegantly captures the reasons why so often ideas languish as mere items on a to-do list. It spoke to me then and it still speaks to me now.

I may have clumsily used it as an opportunity to post about how people should do hard things but really it was a message to me, to go and do hard things.

I am very much a macOS person but having just gone through the rigmarole of installing a new Windows 11 PC I wanted to document a couple of things.

The machine is not modern and is being repurposed as a first gaming PC for the house - i.e., Steam, hence needing Windows in place of macOS.

The components were fortunately just modern enough to allow Win11 to install by enabling TPM in the BIOS in the usual way. The Windows installer has come a long way since the last time I’ve had to do this and must say that other than the points noted below, it was relatively painless. Really just next next finish.

If you enjoyed the first exciting instalment of this series on Nintex workflows in SharePoint failing to run after security patching and were sad that that was seemingly the end of it, then DON’T WORRY! BECAUSE IT’S BACK.

That’s right, just when you thought all was fine and hunky-dory in the world, your friendly IT service providers once again went ahead and did some more server patching and once again went ahead and managed to knacker Nintex workflows. Specifically workflows using the state machine activity with the observed behaviour being that workflows simply would never reinflate after switching state.

I cancelled my Audible subscription for actual reasons. With a tangent via my eminent theory of rational materiality.

I’ve been reluctant to subscribe to streaming entertainment services for a long time. There’s something fleeting about the nature of them that makes me undervalue them.

We subscribe to Amazon Prime - but only because of the delivery service. We subscribe to Apple One - but only because of the wider stuff it gives in terms of kids content, storage and so on. So far the only thing we’ve watched on AppleTV+ is The Bear (which is excellent, for the record) but clearly not making the most of our subscription.

An enquiry into values

My magnum opus. For now, at least.

“What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. Although it’s not very factual on Zen Buddhism. Or Tiny Workshops either.”

Vid

It is inspired by the great 1974 work of philosophical examination by Robert Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Well the title is, anyway.

Explainer to follow.

I’ve just subscribed to YouTube Premium but for all the wrong reasons.

In some ways, I should have seen this coming. The enshittification of literally everything has gathered steam over the last 18 months with every last damn good thing about the internet slowly being turned in to complete shite. Nobody would be surprised that Google / Alphabet is nuts-deep in this movement but somehow, in amongst all the evil shit they get up to, they seemed to have somewhat left alone the one Google thing I really like - YouTube.

Following the success of building my home office, I doubled down and using about the only space remaining, built a workshop.

There is some backstory to it all - I used to have a workshop in the garage - the details of which I may cover in a later post.

The shed was far less sophisticated than the office, though - it is bascially a large shed, but it’s been done up to make it feel as un-shedlike as possible.

I recently helped a client with a lovely annual return to our friendly local regulator.

It required some numbers (from a SQL query) to be put in some boxes (yep, in Excel 🤐) against a list of 251 countries.

The row heights had been shrunken and the column widths strangely embiggened so that a manual cross-referencing-and-copying into the spreadsheet was a time-consuming and error-prone task.

You could copy & paste into the relevant column (indeed the guidance encouraged it!) but for this to work you would need the full precise list of countries in the correct order… except you couldn’t extract this list from the spreadsheet since the entire workbook was locked down - locked cells and then password protected. No dice.