Subtitled: The North is my True North

Subtitled: Scot-ish, but not Scottish*

Subtitled: Where are you from?

A month after having moved I’m finally getting around to publishing this. It has been a busy month.

I should have realised when I moved southwards for the first time in my life a few years ago (only by 30km or so) that that was just the beginning and things weren’t going to stabilise there. It’s a shame: I always thought I’d end up even further north, but it’s not to be; North of England isn’t really north enough for me, but it’s better than nothing.

Having recently left Aberdeen I wanted to write something about it. I feel like Aberdeen unfairly gets a bad rap, but I am actually the only person I know that rates it - it is my “home” (my second after Huddersfield). So I’ll try not to focus on the negatives since I feel like that is the majority of opinion, but the one thing I will mention is the oil and gas legacy and the fact that what happened was the exact opposite of “Private sufficiency: Public luxury” was unfortunate - in my opinion the worse thing about Aberdeen is getting to or from there from literally anywhere else; Better transport links between the rest of Scotland should have been built decades ago instead of relying on air. Aberdeen really is miles away from everywhere else.

Most of our time up here was been spent in the country-side, but we’ve lived (in order) in the: city, suburbs, village, middle of nowhere, and finally back in the city. So we’ve been fortunate enough to experience a lot of different parts of Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire.

The best bits:

• Long summer nights. Summer is so tiring because you forget to go to bed and then it’s light again a few hours later. I absolutely love it though.
• Multi-cultural (Perhaps less so now?). But at one point you’d come across French, Nigerian, Spanish, Italian, Scottish, Polish, etc in just one walk through town. It’s a beautiful thing
• Stunning architecture if you look for it; The granite buildings genuinely do sparkle - unfortunately it does seem to take a certain angle of sunlight, etc so doesn’t happen very often.
• A city surrounded by beautiful countryside.
  • There is a lot of nature on your doorstep that seems to get overlooked by a lot of people in Aberdeen:
    • Tullos
    • Kincorth
    • Tollohill
    • Brimmond Hill (and Elrick!)
    • Cove Coastal path All of these are within running distance of the city centre.
  • Further afield are things like Bennachie (which you can bus + run to)
• Stunning beaches. There is obviously the huge stretch of beach front just minutes from the city centre, but my favourites have been Collieston and Cruden bay.
• Wildlife. Being able to see seals in Bridge of Don or Newburgh, seeing deer at Tullos and Tollohill, seeing otters in the river Dee.
• Butteries

All cities and towns have their issues and rundown parts of the high-street. Frustratingly all cities and towns also have those businesses and events that attracted you to that place (friggin’ Belmont Cinema) that then seem to close down or stop running a few weeks after you move. But at the time of writing these wonderful places are as good as anywhere else in the UK (or world?) for food and coffee (if you end up in a chain coffee-shop in Aberdeen you’ve gone wrong):

• Rosa’s Sicilian Pizzeria
• Craftsman
• Grounded
• Parx (the veggie breakfast burrito is better than the meat once since it has veggie square sausage instead of bacon)
• Cafe 52
• Cafe Boheme (the vegan items are insanely good)
• Cafe Harmony (completing the trifecta of Cafes)
• Cult of Coffee
• Third Circle
• Foodstory
• Hammerton

Those are my favourites, but there are more. Aberdeen has also treated me well for music venues. Being far away from everywhere it mostly seems to get smaller bands or huge bands, but I love:

• Music hall (Mostly older bands touring here, like Suede, Embrace, The Wombats)
• Lemontree (saw Shelf Lives and Lambrini Girls, amongst others)
• Cafe Drummonds (saw SPINN here, massively underated band from Liverpool)
• Tunnels (Lots of great things: Dead Pony, Plasticine, Gomez (that was a messy Sunday night))
• Krakatoa (saw Coach Party here)

I do have some regrets, but not from living there, just things I didn’t get to do that I thought I’d have time for “one day”, but that day never came. This is a definite downside to me patiently waiting and not demanding things:

• Only got the the Cairngorms for the Lonach Gathering, never to explore anywhere else or for running
• Never got over to the West coast
• Never got to Orkney or Shetland (and there is a ferry from Aberdeen!)
• Never got to Belladrum (gutted - in my head that was one of my must dos before leaving)
• Never got to Inverness

So much of my life (those winters cycling! Oh my), my daughters’ childhoods, our marriage, etc was made in Aberdeen that I was always going to have fond memories of it and be sad about leaving. Could Aberdeen have technically been anywhere else? Yeah, sure, but it wasn’t. My memories are rooted in the countryside, the city and the coastline. I’m just grateful that I realised it wasn’t an Aberdream, but beautiful reality.

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* Not because I don’t want to be, just because I can’t claim to be (my daughters on the other-hand just are Scottish). If there was a way I could officially give up my nationality and become Scottish I would do it in a heartbeat; I was holding out for a Scottish passport and re-joining the EU becoming a thing for a long time; Will forever be proud I voted for independence.

• Tags:
  • owtelse

Was going to edit the original post, but was easier to do a new one.

Went back to this again recently to make some better changes (did not mean to take two months… sigh) and it wouldn’t build! I’d either completely forgotten some of the steps I took last time or the build has changed a bit? Note that even though my changes are still on HammerDB 5.0 that doesn’t mean there haven’t been upstream changes - The HammerDB source code you obtain from Github is more like a “build system” as opposed to the actual source you are compiling. When you build from source you are actually running Tcl scripts that download source code from the TPC/HammerDB website and then it builds that.

Anyway, further to last time ended up doing this:

1. Turns out I did need to do this bit:

    sudo ln -s /usr/pkg/bin/python3.12-config /usr/pkg/bin/python3-config
   

2. Running a ./Build-Linux.sh x64 Setup/HammerDB-Linux.bawt update would fail because the Makefiles wanted to use -ldl which isn’t applicable for (Net)BSD. So instead I stepped through the process manually:
   1. ./Build-Linux.sh x64 Setup/HammerDB-Linux.bawt extract.
   2. ./Build-Linux.sh x64 Setup/HammerDB-Linux.bawt configure.
   3. ./Build-Linux.sh x64 Setup/HammerDB-Linux.bawt compile.
   4. Which would then fail, but I could edit the relevant Makefile and remove the -ldl and re-run the compile and repeat this until all components had built.
   5. ./Build-Linux.sh x64 Setup/HammerDB-Linux.bawt distribute.
   6. ./Build-Linux.sh x64 Setup/HammerDB-Linux.bawt finalize. Weirdly, even though I’m sure these are the same steps update does, this didn’t copy all the required libraries into the distributions so I had one final step of:
   7. ./Build-Linux.sh x64 Setup/HammerDB-Linux.bawt update.

3. That got me working Dev builds again. I also had a play about withstrace/dtrace/ktrace on the Prod builds and figured out they were actually fine, it was just looking for the libraries in an odd place; Say I had extracted at /home/me/temp/HammerDB-5.0, well, it was looking for /home/me/temp/lib. So I just copied the lib folder from a Dev build to that location and then the Prod builds would run fine; I started with strace just for ease of use, but the version on NetBSD is old and doesn’t print full filepaths which makes it useless. ktrace and kdump are pretty easy to use as well, but only if you know what you are looking for upfront and I didn’t, whereas dtrace is more complex, but I could get it to put all filepaths for HammerDB and eyeball a non-existent one:

    syscall::stat:entry, syscall::lstat:entry, syscall::access:entry
    /execname == "hammerdb"/
    {
        self->path = copyinstr(arg0);
        self->probe = probefunc;
    }
    syscall::stat:return, syscall::lstat:return, syscall::access:return
    /execname == "hammerdb" && self->path != NULL/
    {
        printf("%d %s %s errno=%d\n", pid, self->probe, self->path, errno);
        self->path = 0;
    }
   

Next for me on this: Figuring out a better Makefile fix so that’s less tedious to do. And it might not be impossible to do a Pkgsrc package for this since the separate steps (extract, configure, etc) would align with Pkgsrc.

• Tags:
  • program

A follow-up to 75+75.

I started trying to ramp things up over my base of 75 minutes of running a week at the end of 2023 - I just thought it was sad to let go all those years of work building up my distance. And on and off I’ve managed to do it. I managed nine Brimmond Hill (24km) runs last year, plus one Bennachie (21km, but totalling around 27km with the runs to and from the bus to get there). This year I’ve managed three Brimmond and Elrick (30km) runs. None of that is possible with a limit of just 75 minutes running.

I still struggle for time for running, especially now the dog is so old and can’t really be left alone for more than three hours at a time, but I do want to try to keep my distance up a bit so I’m trying a new weekly base of:

• 225 minutes running
• 75 minutes of strength/yoga

Roughly working out as:

• Mon: 75 minutes of running
• Tue: 25 minutes of strength
• Wed: 75 minutes of running
• Thu: 25 minutes of strength
• Fri: 75 minutes of running
• Sat:
• Sun: 25 minutes of yoga

Although I could do with squeezing in the yoga in the week so it doesn’t interfere with weekends.

If I am lucky enough to find the time to fit in a long run (two to three hours) then all the better. But if need be I can also split the 75 minutes between mornings and evenings.

This actually only works out as 3% of my time - 75+75 was 1.5% - which still feels very reasonable and non-selfish to me, but it’s not my opinion that matters. Maybe one day I can have 3% of my wage as well, but that’s staying at 1.5% for the next couple of years at least.

My dog walking has rapidly decreased due to the age of the dog. She just can’t walk very far any more :-(. Doing more walks a day, just very short.

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[EDIT: 2026-10-21] And then we moved house. I don’t know what it is about moving, but it always seems to change things permenantly for me, even after things have settled. I did manage a seven week streak of 225 minutes running a week, but I can’t see that happening anymore. Plus I really need to collapse everything down to weekdays only. Maybe I’ll be able to do 2% of my time, ~125 minutes of running?

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  • push

A brief review. I got this because, as I’ve said before, despite my best efforts to be restrained with my spending I’m not completely immune to consumerism and the pleasures of spending a (small) bit of my wage on myself: £26 on Vinted (although £30 with shipping and buyer protection).

• The top pocket is too small for a phone (very close to fitting my Pixel 7a), but I have got the older model which was released ten years ago so maybe there were smaller phones still knocking about then?
• There is a key clip in the top pocket which seems a bit pointless. I tried clipping my keys to it and they just rattled around. Maybe if your bag is full that wouldn’t happen? But I’ve just gone back to what I always do which is to take one key off my keyring and just take that single key with me when running.
• Fits one bag of Naturo 2kg dog food perfectly. Almost two, but not quite. It just (it was a squeeze, but I got it zipped up) fits 1x Harringtons 1.7kg dog food and 1x Purina Go-Cat 2kg cat food; So should fit 2x Harringtons dog food which is useful (to me)*.
• With a light load it really does lock into place, is comfortable and doesn’t move at all.
• With a heavier load (dog food) it did slide around slightly the first time I used it, but on a subsequent run I realised I could pull it tighter and lock it down (although it was then a little constrictive). Either way was better than trying to run with my none running bag though (also ten years old, but a 20L Case Logic not intended for running at all).
• I struggle to tighten the straps equally and this means one of the ladderlock buckles did start digging into my ribs once - they could do with a bit of padding under them - although it’s also easy to loosen and re-adjust.
• There is no way I can reach around to the side-pockets despite that being the intention - I think this is because it sits higher up on your back. I have to take it off to get to them.
• I should have probably got the 12L one for “running to the shops” runs, but that isn’t really why I got it - I got it for taking food and snacks for longer runs where my daily little 2L Kanken Hip Pack isn’t big enough (great for my phone and couple of butteries or my jacket, but not for a water bottle).
• I’ve used it on a 30k run for chucking my phone, jacket, water bottle and a little packed lunch in and there was plenty of room. Easily comfortable enough that you can forget you are wearing it.
• It comes in a nice bright pink!

* - Confirmed: Easily zips up with 2x 1.7kg bags.

• Tags:
  • push