That was a rather good weekend, all told :-) And it was just what I needed after a really excessively stressful week (largely but not exclusively due to difficult worky stuff).

On Saturday morning I managed to get one of my computers sensibly running an Amiga emulator, which meant I was able to resurrect the other set of computer games from my childhood which I had fond memories of. Well, most of them, anyway: some of them don't quite work, since UAE appears to have faithfully emulated the original Amiga's extreme flakiness when loading from floppy disks, which seems to me to be above and beyond the call of duty but there we go.

On Saturday afternoon I learned a new skill: lnr came round for a visit and to have her hair cut with my clippers. I'd let her talk me into this in the pub on Thursday, and the next morning I'd woken up, felt a beery feeling in my head and thought ‘oh gods, what did I promise last night?’. (Cutting my own hair with clippers is trivial since it's a same-length-all-over buzz cut; doing something complex to someone else's was a lot more scary.) But as it turned out it went very well; the instruction video that came with the clippers turned out to know what it was talking about, and the result was a haircut I could look at and feel reasonably proud of.

After that general day of accomplishment and achieving things I'd never done before, I was probably due some karma, and it duly turned up in the form of Owen and Gareth coming round to play board games and me losing spectacularly at Puerto Rico, Princes of Florence and Domaine in rapid succession. Still, it was a fun evening even if I did lose everything…

So, back to work this week, where my stressful task is almost over. Hopefully, therefore, my stress levels should drop steeply throughout the week.

It is a day of loud noises in the office.

There's a workman installing power and network points in an unused corner of the room, so that next week's new starter can have a desk there. This has caused some very loud drilling noises for several hours, although things have quietened down now.

Also, there's a rhythmic crashing sound coming from the kitchen. This is because a couple of guys from upstairs are moving desks tomorrow, and have somehow managed to accumulate between them two huge packing crates full of empty Coke cans, which they're now crushing and feeding into the can recycling bin, mostly by stamping on them since the can crusher is broken. I estimate that they have about a thousand cans and that it will take about an hour for them to deal with the whole lot. Quite where they were storing all these empty cans before they gathered them into two enormous packing crates, I have no idea.

Bah. Now the workman's power tools have started up again…

For several months I've been toying with the idea of writing a FAQ about myself. This is because people often ask me the same questions when they find out I have no sense of smell, and in any such situation my finely-honed netizen instincts cry out to me to write a FAQ.

Today I gave in to them, and did so: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/smell.html.

It was a bit pointless, really, because most people who find this out about me do so when talking to me in person, which makes it unlikely that they would naturally go and read the FAQ before asking me questions about it! So I don't actually expect this to cut down on the number of times I get asked the same thing. But it made a nice break from work, and the chances are that someone out there will find it vaguely interesting, and it's stopped my Internet conscience from pestering me about it, so there we go…