For the past two nights I've found it actually difficult to get to sleep before 2:30 or 3 in the morning, which appears to be because my personal time zone has been slipping gradually over my two weeks of holiday. Yet tonight I was sitting in the pub and practically fell asleep, so I came home very early on the grounds that it's a better place to do so.

In other news, today's achievement was that I finally got round to printing up a sign to stick on my front door saying ‘NO FREE PAPERS PLEASE’. When I went to the pub I found a free paper on my doormat, which was annoying. I stepped over it, shut the front door from the outside, and discovered what appears to be the problem: the notice is barely even visible – let alone legible – when it's dark, which it is when the news distribution operative comes round.

Not sure what to do about this. Solutions include self-illuminating paper or getting the porch light fixed (it hasn't worked as long as I've lived here but never seemed very important before), although I'm uncertain that the latter would actually light up the sign owing to the wall casting a shadow. I wonder how other people solve this problem.

(What I really want is a semi-permeable letterbox which simply won't allow free newspapers or blatant direct-mailed adverts to be pushed through it, but will let through proper letters. I often think that being a programmer and an SF reader both contribute to my general impatience with the rather feeble limitations of real-world physical tech. I still want my stasis fridge and force-field saucepans, too.)