Quite often these days, when I get home from work on a Thursday night, I find myself thinking it's been a long week and I could murder a pint or three of beer. So I go to the pub, and the first pint is bliss, and lots of lovely people turn up and I have a good evening; but increasingly I'm finding that by the end of the evening I'm wondering why I drink beer at all. I seem to stop enjoying it somewhere around the end of the second pint, which I'm sure never used to happen. Odd.

This morning my car key began to disintegrate: the loop that holds it on to my key ring has broken. I'm frankly staggered at this. Although my car engine remains extremely reliable, practically everything non-essential or vaguely peripheral has managed to fail in the past year (battery, thermostat, exhaust, horn, two of the doors, that sort of thing), and I had started to think that it might have run out of creative ways to inconvenience me while still claiming to be a basically reliable vehicle. But for the key to fall apart is an act of sheer malevolent genius which makes me worry that perhaps, after all, it's only just getting started. I need a new car.

And finally, I figured out the other day why I occasionally get confused mail about my port of Monochrome's puzzle game Enigma[1] which appears to be talking about a different game. It's because, two years after I wrote it, someone else wrote a puzzle game also called Enigma[2], and people are mailing the author of the wrong one. This is annoying; on the one hand I'll cheerfully admit that ‘Enigma’ is a very bad name for a puzzle game because everybody is going to think of it, but on the other hand Amf and I had our one out there on the web two years before this other upstart thing, so they could at least have checked first. Hmph.

(And the other game is awful, as well. I downloaded it the other day and had a go. No wonder one of the people who mistakenly mailed me about it was complaining about the mouse control: the mouse control is utterly dire and lets the entire game down.)

[1] http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/enigma/
[2] http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/apps/enigma/en/