Hmm, I seem not to have written anything in here for ten days.

I think I'm currently going through a boring phase. I'm finding it hard to think of topics of conversation, because every time I look back through recent things that have happened to me, they all seem like non-starters; and I suspect it's for much the same reason that nothing much has seemed worth writing about in here either. It's not that I'm not doing things, just that all the things I've been doing are – for one reason or another – unsuitable for random conversation. Either they're so technically specialist that even other geeks wouldn't be particularly interested, or they're things that only make sense inside my own head, or they're things I actively don't want to talk to people about.

The Dension is still broken. I mailed the shop I bought it from, and they talked to Dension themselves, who claim to have managed to figure out which part was faulty simply from my detailed description of the symptoms; so they said they'd just send me a new part. Incredibly convenient if it works, since I wasn't looking forward to the hassle of sending the entire thing off for diagnosis and repair. I just hope they've correctly identified the fault … Anyway, the shop mailed me back this week to say that they'd received the replacement part from Dension, but it had been damaged in transit so they'd sent it back again. While on the one hand it's nice that they're actually paying some attention, and it's certainly better than them sending the part all the way on to me just so that I could find it was broken, it's still somewhat annoying.

Also this week I did a good deed and saved someone some money. Prue, my Scrabble-addicted colleague and friend, had recently seen someone playing ‘Upwords’ (Scrabble-like game with the gimmick that the tiles can be stacked so you can overlay new letters on existing words) on a train and was considering buying it; now I'd actually played it before and didn't think it was nearly as good as Scrabble proper, so I tracked down the copy I'd played, borrowed it from (as it turned out) drswirly, and invited her round so she could have a go before spending money. She was as unconvinced as I'd been, so probably won't be wasting her disposable income on it.

Upwords is strange. The first time I played it, I was left with the strong impression that the scoring system didn't encourage the right kinds of play; most of the strategies that scored serious points didn't feel like worthy exercises of ingenuity, but more like cynical exploitations of loopholes, while really clever moves went largely unrewarded. Playing it for the second time this week, I still felt that, but in addition it got very hard to make any moves by the end of the game. It's all very well being able to lay a whole new word on top of an existing one, but when you have to preserve the wordhood of any words you intersect on the way, you end up rather depending on the first half of the game having involved lots of words that could be turned into other words by changing only one letter. If it didn't, all players are scuppered equally and the game becomes frustrating.

Still, on the plus side it made a good excuse to practice my new mushroom risotto recipe again, so it wasn't all bad :-)