This morning I looked at the BBC website's 24-hour forecast for Cambridge in order to judge how wet I was going to get walking out to Tesco at lunchtime; it said it was raining a bit at 11:00, would be raining a lot by 13:00, and would become an outright thunderstorm by 16:00.

Trouble was, it was already after 11:00 and there wasn't a drop of rain in sight. So, on the basis that it might just be late, I went to Tesco as early as reasonably possible, and it was still bone dry.

But it's now past 13:00 and still not raining, and the BBC website still thinks it's pouring down out there. It's very much like the motion-tracker scene in Aliens, where the guy with the detector keeps insisting that the aliens are already inside the room and the guy in the room keeps saying no they're not. Only it would be rather hard for the weather to turn out to be hidden where the aliens were…

Something that came up in conversation the other day: the English language is annoyingly badly designed for programmers.

The most obvious example of this is that almost any pair of words you can think of to represent boolean values have different numbers of letters, so that it's inconvenient to line them up in tabular layouts in a fixed-width font. TRUE/FALSE, YES/NO, ON/OFF. All of them out by one. Even if you look further afield to things like YEP/NOPE and YEAH/NAH, you don't find a matching pair. AYE/NAY works, but it's a bit specialist in its connotations (it suggests there's a vote taking place) as well as archaic. This is just useless. French can find OUI/NON with no difficulty at all (although I have no idea whether French programmers actually use those for booleans), so why can't we manage one pair of suitable words that are the same length?

(Some years ago, lark_ascending and I gave some thought to this, and the best we could come up with was VERILY/NOWISE, which is even more archaic than AYE/NAY. However, it does have the advantage of allowing MAYHAP to be inserted in the middle if the application demands it.)

Another annoying thing is that one of ‘width’ and ‘height’ shares an initial letter with one of ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ – and it's the wrong one. So if you're looking through some code which has dimensions in it, and you encounter a variable called h, you can't be sure which dimension it contains until you find out whether it's accompanied by v or by w. I suppose we can at least count ourselves lucky that ‘width’ isn't spelled ‘vidth’, in which case we'd be even worse off.

It feels particularly unfair because these sort of accidents of language happen to work better in less programming-specific contexts. For example, the fact that ‘his’ and ‘her’ both begin with the same letter is very convenient for acronyms such as HMRC and HMG.

Also annoying is that I've been planning to post this rant for months, and have been delaying because I had a strong feeling that there were several other examples which I couldn't quite bring to mind. But they still haven't come to me, so I'm just going to have to post it like this and kick myself when I realise what they were moments afterwards…

It seems traditional for me to have a morbid mortality moping moment every five years or so; and since my last one was around my 25th birthday, I'm now about due. I had vaguely expected to have one last month when I turned thirty.

But actually, I don't seem to feel it coming on at all. Human mortality keeps striking me as a basically reassuring thing at the moment.

Partly this is because it relieves me of the responsibility to do various things absolutely perfectly. If I were theoretically capable of living forever, then it would be greatly in my interest to keep my body in perfect shape, keep my brain properly organised, and generally never do anything to myself or my possessions whose effects I couldn't somehow repair – and also to actually get round to repairing everything I did do. Instead, the fact that it's all going to run out in a finite time anyway means that a certain rate of mental and physical entropy can be tolerated: although it's worth making some effort not to be a total wreck by the time I'm 75, I at least don't have to take the quantity of care that would be required not to be a total wreck by 175, or 1750, or 175000000. And a good job too, since I imagine that diminishing returns would set in, and the amount of maintenance effort required would rapidly become unmanageable.

Also, since I seem to gradually accumulate traumatic experiences and bad memories as I go through life, it's occasionally reassuring to think that at some point that slate gets wiped clean and someone else gets to start afresh, that the effects of any given betrayal or unintentionally hurtful action are limited in their extent. Just imagine if someone did you the kind of wrong you never really forget, and you immediately knew you were doomed to live with that in your memory for an entire unimaginable eternity. And just imagine if you knew that any such blow you inadvertently dealt someone else through (say) not paying attention would stay with them for eternity.

It's not that I want to die. Far from it. I want to carry on for a good while yet. It's just that, well, given that we all have to go anyway, I keep seeing silver linings in that.