It’s been a long time, but I’m going to try to get back into running. Most of my old apps have died or no longer serve the original purpose they had.
Currently trying Runnah. Seems okay so far. It does also give strength workouts which helps since I have a barbell and dumbbell sets lying around.
I might trial them first then maybe do monthly subscription for a bit to see how it plays out before considering an annual subscription.
First run since I haven’t run seriously for a while was relatively simple, I’m going a “new to running” plan, even though I’m not exactly new to running, I’ve been out of running a lot so going to slowly get back into it via the plan proposed.
First run today was:
5 min walking warm-up
3 sets of 3 min running at a conversational pace, then 2 minutes of walking
5 min walking cooldown
Generally felt okay for this run. Got another run tomorrow, so we’ll see how that one goes.
GCP decided to have an off day and part of the London region decided to die on us. Part of our GKE cluster decided to die and terminate, degrading some of our services.
We also have a Mongo Atlas cluster which sits outside of our account, but also runs in GCP, and one of the nodes there also decided to die. Mongo Support are trying to recover it but are also pointing at Google’s outage as cause.
As of the time of writing, most things are back up, but the Mongo node (which, thankfully, is just an Analytics node, meaning it doesn’t serve live traffic) is the only node that is having trouble.
The issue is still running at this time and Atlas is showing
The Cloud Provider you’ve chosen is out of capacity for the selected database deployment configuration. We will continue to try and deploy on the chosen Cloud Provider. If you keep experiencing issues, we recommend choosing a different Cloud Provider, region or instance size, and deploying your database again.
So we can’t even do anything about it.
The Register has an article about the outage too, and GCP’s status didn’t show any issues until around 9am — 2 hours after we started seeing issues.
Pip: Blender Fox has moved the blog again — and honestly, the only constant in blogging is the platform you're leaving.
Mara: This episode covers the move back to WordPress and what prompted it. Let's start with the return itself.
Return
Pip: The question here is simple: why does a blogger pick up and move, and what does the destination say about what they actually need from a writing tool?
Mara: The post is brief and direct — here's what it says: "I've moved everything back to WordPress as micro.blog's writing interface was absolutely horrendous."
Pip: That word — horrendous — is doing a lot of work. When the interface itself becomes the obstacle, the writing stops, and at that point the platform has failed its one job.
Mara: The post is titled simply "Return," which frames this less as a technical migration and more as coming back to something familiar. WordPress isn't presented as a destination so much as a retreat to ground that already works.
Pip: There's something quietly telling about that framing. You don't title a post "Return" if you feel triumphant — you title it that when you've been away long enough to remember why you left, and then long enough again to remember why you came back.
Mara: The post also flags that this isn't necessarily permanent. The closing line is: "I'll keep it here while I look at other options." So WordPress is a stable base for now, not a final answer.
Pip: Which is a reasonable position. Settling on a platform while still keeping an eye open is how most long-term bloggers operate — you stop when something works well enough, not when something works perfectly.
Mara: What the post doesn't detail is what "other options" might look like, but the dissatisfaction with micro.blog's writing interface is the explicit driver here. The functionality may have been fine; the experience of actually sitting down and writing was the problem.
Pip: And that distinction matters more than it sounds. A platform can check every technical box and still make you not want to open it.
Mara: Right — usability at the moment of writing is the thing that either gets out of the way or doesn't.
Pip: A blog that moves platforms is still a blog that's running — and that counts for something.
Mara: The search for the right writing environment continues. Worth watching where it lands next.
I successfully went into, and passed my #KCNA exam. I actually bought the exam coupon last December and just hadn’t got round to doing the exam.
I ended up walking away with only 3 questions wrong. Two I wasn’t sure of anyway, so I’ll assume I got those wrong. The third however, I’m not sure which one I got wrong.
However there was one question in there which technically had no correct answers selectable. The question was this:
Which of the following is a valid Kubernetes pod restart policy?
on init
on update
on startup
on failure
None of the above are, strictly speaking, correct. It should be OnFailure and not on failure — see the Kubernetes docs.
I picked on failure as that is the closest to being correct.
I’ll be pretty pissed if they marked me wrong on this question.
I’ve now connected micro.blog to this domain and most of my content from WordPress is sitting here. I might post occasionally. Nowhere as often as I used to previously, but better than nothing, I guess.
I’ve now configured a redirector within Google Cloud to handle redirects from the old blog and point them to the WordPress-centric domain. Essentially doing what wordpress.com was doing while the domain was still with them.
I’ll leave this in place until I decide what to do with the blog.
