Ho hum. World of Computers has furnished me with a replacement hard disk, but were sadly unable to recover any of my data from the old one (not actually surprisingly), so now I get to start the CD-ripping process all over again. What joy, what fun, what an absolute pain in the wossnames.

After a weekend of generally bad sleep, I managed to outdo myself last night with what felt like an all-night-long extended dream which made no sense at all. It involved plots, intrigue, a murder mystery, a lot of driving the wrong way along traffic ramps, at least two parallel universes, and a whole section of the night sky that nobody but me could see (at least partly because it was kept in a cupboard, but even when I opened the cupboard other people denied seeing anything inside it). I was almost disappointed when I woke up, because I wanted to know what would have happened in the end! Silly subconscious.

I've just had my first ever PuTTY support call.

That is to say, a literal support call; someone followed the link to my personal web page, noticed that I worked for ARM, looked up the ARM reception phone number, rang it and asked to be put through to me, and after some very nervous attempts to triple-check she was talking to the right person, opened the batting with the traditional line ‘I use PuTTY, and it doesn't work’.

In retrospect that doesn't sound unlikely at all, come to think of it; it's not hard to get in touch with ARM employees, so anyone who really wants to contact me by phone during working hours shouldn't have trouble doing so. (In fact CERT managed it easily enough last year.) So actually I now feel quite surprised that this is the first time that's happened!

I probably need to think of a way to discourage more people from doing this without actually being rude to them. This one was easy enough because she was following up an email query, and in fact Owen had replied to her email half an hour before she rang (so it's sort of fair enough that she hadn't happened to see it yet).

I'm a bit scared, though. It seems PuTTY hasn't run out of ways to take over my life…