I've managed to lose two umbrellas in the past two weeks. The nice one appears to be lost for good, but fortunately I recovered the cheap backup umbrella this morning so at least I have some rain protection until I buy a new nice one this weekend.

(That'll be my third really nice umbrella this year. The first one underwent catastrophic twangy failure in May, and the second disappeared last week in mysterious circumstances. Perhaps this time I should see if the shop assistant can find me one without the curse.)

I slept very badly the night before last, so I was extremely sleepy yesterday evening and was careful to get a very early night. I slept like a log from 10:30 until about 4am, at which point I snapped wide awake and only managed to doze off again at 7, leaving me just enough time to become sleepy enough to resent my alarm. Whenever I have middle-of-the-night insomnia, this always seems to happen: I finally doze off again just at the moment I need to be getting back up. I suspect my body clock of doing it deliberately.

I'm clearly not all that sleepy now, though, because on the way to work this morning I spotted the number of a bus, remembered what its route was, and hence deduced that it was going to turn left (and therefore it was safe for me to pull out in front of it) some time before it bothered to indicate. That struck me as quite cunning and useful, although I probably couldn't have done it if I hadn't had the bus routes fresh in my mind from last week.

Every so often someone sends me, or the PuTTY team, an email whose gist is ‘I would like to discuss a [ business proposition | project | piece of work | half-baked idea | whatever ] with you’. No further information (but enough personalisation to be sure it isn't spam). We generally reply ‘go on then’, with varying degrees of sarcasm depending on mood, and then they send some details of their actual suggestion.

I've never quite understood why they bother with the initial zero-content opening email. It delays the useful part of the conversation by an entire round trip, and doesn't seem to serve any useful purpose. I suppose if the description of the idea was going to be very long, they might feel it was worth giving us a chance to say ‘don't bother’ before they went to the effort of typing it all up, but if they don't give any detail in the first message then there's no way we can make an intelligent judgment about whether we're interested! (Well, except that if the mail talks about a ‘business proposition’ then they tend to be to do with website advertising, so we're usually not. But occasionally they want to pay us to add a useful feature to PuTTY, so we can't even reject them on that basis until we know more.)