I left work at about 16:15 today, due to a crippling network outage which the sysadmins couldn't even provide an estimated fix time for. I decided that meant it was futile to hang about and hope it got fixed, so I came home. Hopefully it'll be sorted out by tomorrow.

(Of course I don't doubt it will actually turn out to have been sorted out five minutes after I left; that'd be just Murphy's style.)

Anyway, I put the time to good use. I came home and finished work on a ludicrously clever idea I'd had yesterday, to ensure that puzzles generated by my ‘Rectangles’ program have unique solutions. To my surprise and delight, it worked, and worked nearly first time, in spite of being a pretty outlandish blue-sky sort of idea.

(If that ‘ludicrously clever’ sounds rather self-congratulatory compared to my usual tone of ‘people might conceivably be interested in…’, then this is my diary so tough. It is pretty rare in computing – in fact, it's pretty rare at all – that I do something so impressive that it makes me want to bounce around the room shouting ‘WOOHOO’ and ‘HOW COOL IS THAT?’ and ‘DO I ****ING RULE OR WHAT?’, but this is such a thing. I am excessively pleased with myself for what I've just accomplished.)

In other news, twenty-four hours of watching my electricity meter has re-convinced me that I am right and British Gas is wrong. The reading marked ‘normal’, which I claimed was daytime and they claimed was night, moves only during the day. The reading marked ‘low’, which I claimed was night-time and they claimed was day, moves only during the night. Now all I need to do is convince them of this…