Weeknote 2026-33

Talking about another rough work week, picking up an injury, and a weekend watching football. And Spaniels.

Work

Is depressing, I don't really want to write too much.

Still have far too much to do, far too little time to do it in, and cannot get on with delivering my strategic objectives while being drawn increasingly into the weeds - despite being instructed to get out of them. With what?

Projects

I've been working with Claude adding polish to a few personal projects that I've built.

Very much taking inspiration from Kev's Pure Blog project, all of these projects are designed to be very fast and light php/sqlite applications that can be installed easily on ordinary web hosting by uploading and configuring within the UI.

Last week I pretty much finished 1.0 of my own web analytics monitoring tool, which I'll introduce shortly. This week I've been finishing off my feed reader and web archiver. That is pretty much complete, I'm just training it to pick up more page variances for sources without feeds.

Exercise

I've trained really well this week, I ran well over the hilly Noyna course on Monday evening, running onto the back of the fast group and holding with them as they ran past.

Tuesday was my first ever Up The Tempo session at the Steven Burke centre in Barrowford. Great session now I know where to park 5 x 5 mins off 1 mins rest.

Thursday back to the track, with a very similar 5 x 1km off 1 min rest, with very similar intervals - there is just a second or two per km across the two evenings.

I'm injured now though so the weekend has been a write off, and maybe next week will be too. I knew that I felt a bit more leggy and tired this week, but put it down to a rough week at work and the heat. I should have eased off at the track though and now my hips are a mess, my abdomen is a mess, and my previous back injury has returned.

Given that I train to keep my mental health in check, this could be interesting.

Exploring

I thought the solar eclipse would be far more obvious, below being about the best shot I got of the mood crossing the path of the sun over Pendle Hill.

I went over to Accrington yesterday to watch Stanley give Colchester both goals in a 2-2 draw. I thought Stanley were much the better side, and they should have won it but for a freak looping equaliser. The goalkeeper was impeded, but he has to be stronger for me.

Then today I had the choice between watching Oldham get tubbed by Broncos, or Burnley by West Ham.

I opted for the latter and was regretting it as Oldham kept their nerve to come from behind and beat the Broncos at Boundary Park. I'll probably write about the Burnley game more in the next few days.

I expected West Ham to win and win well, they have the best squad in the division, and the most money to strengthen it - they will be promoted this season. Burnley started much more brightly though and should have been ahead long before gifting the lead to an unmarked Max Kilman at th back post.

West Ham thought they had won it in the second half with a second that should have been stopped at the byeline - not long after Zian Flemming had rattled Bothe the far post and the crossbar a couple of minutes apart. West Ham let Burnley back into the game, Flemming scoring from the spot after a really obvious and silly foul in the box. A riot nearly ensued when he ran into the net to collect the ball in the face of some pretty blatant time-wasting from the Irons.

Burnley threw everything forward, and Flemming scored the equaliser half way through injury time, firing into the roof of the net from an otherwise scrappy move.

We probably should have won, and were definitely good for the point. West Ham will go up this season, I'm just not sure they will go up playing Nunoball in a division where other teams will sit back and wait for their own chances. Though Burnley were good for the point West Ham should have been able to see this one out being 2-0 up with 5 minutes to go.

People

I wasn't going to talk about people this week, but how could I not mention Ruairidh's sister Flash who is staying with us for the week:

She really is lovely.